hacking the township

I talked about this issue on Brian Barnhart’s show on 10.31.24, starting at 1:14:00.


The Election Day is approaching fast, with the portentous choice between Harris and Trump on everyone’s mind. But the ballots are long here, with votes on state senators, county auditors, and city council members filling them. Urbana, Illinois ballot has also a couple of referendum questions to answer: about having some new taxes or eliminating some county positions. And this one, too:

“Shall the United States federal government and subordinate divisions stop giving military funding to Israel, which currently costs taxpayers 3.8 billion dollars a year, given Israel’s global recognition as an apartheid regime with a tract record of human rights violations?”

CUNNINGHAM TOWNSHIP QUESTION 1,
part of the OFFICIAL BALLOT, GENERAL ELECTION, NOVEMBER 5, 2024 CHAMPAIGN COUNTY, ILLINOIS

This question is pure poison: whether you answer Yes or No, your vote serves to support the idea that Israel is an apartheid regime. This a textbook example of a loaded question, a fallacy type known to at least Aristotle.1Everyone knows the Did you stop beating your wife, Yes or No version of it.

This question landed on the ballot in a our quaint Midwestern town as a result of a clever hack. 2One can hack a screwdriver to open a bottle, an MySQL query to steal a database, and one can hack a boring meeting in a city-run charity. The honest route to place an advisory question on a ballot requires thousands of signatures in a town of our size, or a decision by a governing body, like school board. Going either route seems to be hard (few elected officials suffer of anti-Zionist fever high enough). But for our city charity, Cunningham Township (an element of the government), the governing body is, once a year, whoever showed up at the meeting.

It took fifty or so enthusiasts to pack the room, and here we are.3If you wonder how this kind of ochlocracy is possible, welcome to small town America: this is the e pluribus part for you.

This surprising coup was well organized. Some groups attempted to place the same question (word for word, comma for comma), in the same way on the ballots in a couple of neighboring Central Illinois towns; they failed there however.

We do not know who is behind all these efforts. What is clear, however, is that they do not aspire to influence the US government and “subordinate divisions”. 4To wit, this is not the first missive the town is sending to the big guys; earlier efforts, like a 2003 City Council resolution to remove UN sanctions on Saddam Hussein’s regime, didn’t effect any reaction at all.

The real target of this question is not some powers without the city limits, – it’s the people within them. Seeing the officially looking question, unaware of the manner it was placed on the ballot, an unsuspected voter without much exposure to the depth and intricacy of the country’s history and politics, will take the insidious message, – Israel is an apartheid regime, – at its face value. This is the key goal of this little exercise: propaganda, making sure that the lie finds its way into the minds of the voters.

The goal of this brazen political stunt is to obscure the plain truth: that Israel is a liberal democracy. Flawed, like all of them, true, but striving to become a better state for its people, again, like other democracies. Unlike most democracies, however, Israel is doing that while fighting a war she neither started nor wanted.

The organizers of this stunt are innovative in their tool, but not in their message: the campaign to label Israel as a racist state would feel tired already to Brezhnev’s Politburo. There is something especially galling about branding Israel an apartheid state coming from the crowd that spends their working hours pretending to worry about minorities here, in the US.

Not that they shouldn’t. Take one metric, minority access to higher education. It is important to us: Urbana is home to one of the best public universities in the country, with many departments confidently occupying the top five-ten positions in the world rankings. Yet, in a state where African-Americans account for around 16% of the population, they constitute mere 6% of the students on our campus. Hispanics, about 21% of the state population, make just 13% on campus. And this gap is systemic, stubbornly refusing to react to the numerous administrative efforts to remedy it.

I was in Haifa a month ago, visiting some friends and colleagues at Technion after a long pause caused by the pandemics and other unpleasant reasons, – and it struck me, once again, how many Muslim women, – students, – I saw on campus. I checked the statistics: indeed, there is no ethnic or religious gap. The fraction of Arab students in Technion matches (perhaps, even exceeds a bit) the fraction of Arab Israeli citizens.

It wasn’t always the case, – twenty years ago, the situation at the Technion was similar to that at the UIUC. But Arab and Jewish communities got together, aligned their forces with Technion leaders, philanthropists, civil society, and solved it.

What kind of apartheid is this?

Wouldn’t it make sense for the anti-Zionist crowd of Urbana to visit Haifa, and to learn, finally, how to do equity, something they so much love talking about but so unable to realize?

Or, if they insist that Israel is an apartheid society, shouldn’t they ask the US government (and its “subordinate divisions”) to stop sending any money to our campus?

Perhaps this should be the referendum question to force Urbana to vote on next year…

Notes
  • 1
    Everyone knows the Did you stop beating your wife, Yes or No version of it.
  • 2
    One can hack a screwdriver to open a bottle, an MySQL query to steal a database, and one can hack a boring meeting in a city-run charity.
  • 3
    If you wonder how this kind of ochlocracy is possible, welcome to small town America: this is the e pluribus part for you.
  • 4
    To wit, this is not the first missive the town is sending to the big guys; earlier efforts, like a 2003 City Council resolution to remove UN sanctions on Saddam Hussein’s regime, didn’t effect any reaction at all.

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