Anti-Israel wording cut from bill in Cambridge

Jewish groups team up in defense of ADL trips

March 10, 2011 - The city of Cambridge will investigate the value of its law enforcement officials going on Anti-Defamation League-sponsored trips to Israel. The City Council ordered the inquiry Monday night by a 9-0 vote.

Local Jewish leaders consider the decision a victory, considering how the language proposing the inquiry was originally worded. A last-minute rush of lobbying by major Jewish and pro-Israel groups persuaded councilors to reject wording harshly critical of Israel and the ADL.

This story is about how those groups so swiftly banded together, galvanized into action by a man in New Hampshire who was interrupted while milking a goat. But first, some background.

In November, a group of 16 law enforcement officials from the Northeast – including two from Cambridge and one from Brookline – visited Israel to learn counterterrorism and security tactics. The weeklong trip, at least the third of its kind involving Cambridge officials, was organized by the Anti-Defamation League. All of the trip’s expenses were covered by private donors, according to Derrek Shulman, director of the New England ADL. Local businessman Carl Barron footed the bill for the Cambridge delegation.

The trip apparently caught the Cambridge City Council off guard. After an account of the trip was published in The Cambridge Chronicle, City Councilor Marjorie Decker proposed what is called a policy order asking City Manager Robert Healy to find out more about the trip, its funding and its purposes and report back to the council.

The proposed order described Israeli security tactics as being “associated with indefinite detention, illegal occupation, torture, lacking any constitutional guidance.” It also contained critical comments from an official who had gone on a previous ADL trip that police later said were taken out of context. The order was to go before the City Council Feb. 28. It was posted online as part of the agenda the Friday before the Monday meeting.

On Saturday, the day after the posting, a local ADL activist saw the proposal and called Shulman, who at the time was milking a goat with his son at the East Hill Farm resort in New Hampshire. Shulman was floored.

“This motion would have been nothing short of a referendum on Israel and a referendum on the ADL,” said Shulman.

“We didn’t take exception to the conclusion of the resolution, which calls for the city manager to ask the questions that are perfectly legitimate,” he continued. “But the language used to reach that conclusion came down to if it’s adopted without being altered … Israel would have been on the city record as being a pariah state.” So Shulman put down the milk pail, stepped away from the goat and went to work with his Blackberry.

He alerted officials at Combined Jewish Philanthropies, the Jewish Community Relations Council, the American Jewish Committee and the David Project. Each group then contacted its members in Cambridge, filling them in on the proposal and urging them to get in touch with their city councilors.

“This was an issue for the entire Jewish community,” said David Bernstein, director of the David Project. “It would be a disastrous precedent if Cambridge had passed that resolution. We understood that when we all battle for Israel’s legitimacy, we are standing together.” Shulman, who is not a Cambridge resident, found a partner in Councilor Timothy Toomey.

“The original council order was very provocative and very divisive,” Toomey said. “It’s one thing to look for information, and it’s another to condemn the nature of the trip and the Israeli government.”

At that first meeting on Feb. 28, with about a dozen people speaking in support of the order and seven of the nine councilors backing it, Toomey used a procedural motion called a charter right to delay the vote. “We needed to have at least a more level and balanced discussion about the issue,” Toomey said. “Everyone has different opinions. We would do ourselves a disservice by not looking into it further.”

During that Feb. 28 meeting, Decker did agree to take out the most inflammatory language regarding Israel’s security tactics, although the original order remained on the city’s Web site. Over the next week, Israel activists flooded the councilors with emails and voicemails.

Shulman and others also raised questions about whether the order had accurately quoted Cambridge Police Commissioner Robert Haas, who went on a previous trip to Israel. Haas was reported to have told a committee hearing in 2009 that the trip was “interesting, but in the end, not particularly useful.” The motion went on to indicate that Haas had said, “The Israel government does a number of things that he would never do in this country.”

At the March 7 City Council meeting, Decker maintained that her proposed order did accurately reflect Haas’ opinions. However, a Cambridge police spokesman told the Advocate that the quote was taken out of context.

The spokesman, Dan Riviello, said the quote was not taken directly from the police commissioner, but rather from the meeting’s minutes, which were not verbatim. Haas actually said that Israeli police employ some tactics that would unlikely be applicable in Cambridge, according to Riviello. Haas could not be reached for comment.

Meanwhile a number of Jewish leaders pointed to the benefits of the ADL trips, including Shulman, Barron and Earl Grollman, former rabbi of Temple Beth El in Belmont. “I have spent significant time with Cambridge participants of these missions,” Barron, the donor, wrote in a letter submitted to the council, “and the officers all have told me emphatically and repeatedly how incredibly important tools they are to help keep all of us in Cambridge safe.”

More than a dozen people addressed the matter during the public comment period at the beginning of the March 7 council meeting. Opinions were mixed, but more spoke out against the controversial language than for it.

Neil Levitan, who said he had lived in Cambridge for 27 years and was a longtime ADL board member, was among the first people Shulman contacted and the first person who spoke at the meeting. “The problem with the resolution is that it sets a hostile and accusatory tone that the Cambridge Police Department and ADL colluded to do something wrong,” Levitan said, adding that the order as written was “incendiary and factually incorrect”

Marshall Shapiro, another resident, said: “Looking into the travel of public officials on third-party expense would be an appropriate and commendable activity of the council, but that shouldn’t be done in a way that appears biased toward a political agenda.”

In support of the measure, one resident said, “I’ve seen and experienced the counterterrorism strategies and tactics of the Israel regime … and I want nothing resembling such viciousness, such violation of human rights and war crimes here in the people’s republic of Cambridge. I don’t care to go through four checkpoints between here and Harvard Square.” After the comment period, Decker introduced the measure for council discussion. She agreed to remove all of the disputed language in order to “delete all the distractions.”

Decker said her main concern was not the trip itself, but the fact that it had been funded by a private individual. “I’m really floored at what the emails and comments and the phone calls say that this is about and what it’s not about,” Decker said at the meeting. “It is not the practice of the city of Cambridge to ask private organizations or individuals to pay for professional development. It’s inappropriate.” Most of the councilors agreed that the central issue was the question of private funding, not Israeli tactics to thwart terrorists.

They then approved an amended order. It says “the City Manager… is requested to seek information and to report to the City Council as to the nature of this and the previous delegation, including the funding for the delegation, the authorization and the relationship of the delegates and city officials to the funding agencies, the rationale for the trip and the substance of it, the role of private business in public policy, and whether any part of this trip was undertaken on public time.” Decker could not be reached for an interview. In response to an emailed question, she said she did not work with any activist organizations to craft her initial proposal.

The day after the vote Shulman called the change in the order a “shared victory” for Boston’s Jewish organizations.