After court challenge, BDS referendum fails to reach ballot
“We’re not going to prolong the process,” Chuck Pascal, an attorney for Not On Our Dime, told McVay in court.
For the second time in consecutive election cycles a referendum that could have prohibited the City of Pittsburgh from doing business with the state of Israel, or companies that do business with Israel, has been defeated.
During a March 7 Allegheny County Court hearing before Judge John T. McVay, Not On Our Dime and its fiscal sponsor, The Project for Responsive Democracy, stipulated that they did not collect enough valid signatures to get the referendum on the May primary election ballot.
In order to qualify for the ballot, Not On Our Dime needed to submit 12,459 signatures of registered Pittsburgh voters in favor of the referendum. The anti-Israel organization submitted 21,300 signatures but more than half of those signatures were invalid.
During a review process initiated by the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh with its partners StandWithUs and the Beacon Coalition, 12,530 signatures were identified as defective.
The decision to stipulate to the petition’s deficiencies came late in the evening on March 6, as it became apparent that the signature challenge was going to carry the day.
“We’re not going to prolong the process,” Chuck Pascal, an attorney for Not On Our Dime, told McVay in court.
Not On Our Dime’s stipulation came at a hearing scheduled to consider legal challenges to the referendum filed by City Controller Rachael Heisler, as well as separate challenges filed by Federation, its partners and several Jewish community leaders.
Those challenges became moot when Not On Our Dime and The Project for Responsive Democracy acknowledged they didn’t have the signatures required.
The Federation, StandWithUs and Beacon Coalition worked together to assemble more than 200 volunteers to review every signature.
“The invalid signatures included 1,076 duplicates (including circulators who signed their own pages multiple times), 3,305 signers residing outside of Pittsburgh, and more than 2,800 signers not registered as voters in the region (if at all),” Beacon Coalition officials said. “Notably, Beacon Coalition also discovered that more than 6,000 signatures were gathered by canvassers who are not residents of Pittsburgh.”
In a press conference following the hearing, Heisler said that the since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack in Israel the Jewish community has faced “consistent attacks and threats to their physical safety and well-being.”
“I will always stand with my Jewish neighbors,” Heisler said.
The controller noted that the referendum, if passed, would have potentially “severely restricted and/or limited entirely the city’s ability to effectively operate.”
Heisler noted that the referendum would have amended the Home Rule Charter in ways that would have impacted procurement practices, city spending, city investments, city finances and the benefits guaranteed to city retirees.
“I firmly believe this is not the forum to determine complex matters of international law,” Heisler said.
Jeff Finkelstein, Federation president and CEO, said that, if passed, the referendum would have made it more difficult for the city to care for its residents.
“I don’t understand why a group of people who live in the city of Pittsburgh would do things that would deliberately hurt the residents of Pittsburgh,” he said. “That’s what this referendum was going to do.”
Responding to a question about whether the referendum was antisemitic, Finkelstein said it met the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism because it would have held Israel to a different standard than any other country.
“That’s why we, as a Jewish community, will always fight back against things that demonize the state of Israel,” he said.
“This is yet another decisive victory for our Jewish community, for local voters and for the City of Pittsburgh,” Federation posted on its website following the stipulation.
Julie Paris, StandWithUs’ Mid-Atlantic regional director, said attacks against the Jewish community “are often seen as the canaries in the coal mine.”
“When the Jewish community is attacked, the rest of the community comes next,” she said. “Those who are proponents of this anti-Israel referendum make life more difficult for those of us looking to live here, to function in our daily lives and have access to live-saving technology.”
Jeremy Kazzaz, Beacon Coalition’s executive director, said Not On Our Dime’s repeated legal defeats underscore “the lack of genuine public support for these divisive tactics.”
Kazzaz put some of the blame squarely on the back of Pittsburgh May Ed Gainey, whose inaction, he said, “allowed this destructive initiative to persist, despite clear evidence that it threatens the well-being of all Pittsburgh residents.”
“Moreover, the Mayor refused to sign City Council Ordinance 1426, a measure passed overwhelmingly (6-2) by City Council to protect Pittsburgh from being harmed by this effort and similar abuses of the Home Rule Charter amendment process. By twice refusing to take action against discriminatory measures, Mayor Gainey empowers this extremist group to continue to target our city and its residents,” Kazzaz said in an emailed statement.
Ben Case, a leader of Not On Our Dime, said that the fact that his organization was able to gather thousands of signatures demonstrated “Pittsburghers want to vote on this issue.”
“That doesn’t go away just because the lawyers of the Jewish Federation were able to use legal technicalities to invalidate enough signatures from registered Pittsburgh voters to push us off the ballot — doesn’t make this issue go away,” he said.
Not On Our Dime, he said, is attempting to find a democratic avenue for “an issue a lot of people care deeply about.”
Federation, he said, denied citizens that opportunity.
Case said he found Federation’s claim of a “victory” for the Jewish community “deeply offensive.”
“It’s specifically offensive to members of the Pittsburgh Jewish community who organized for this referendum and who signed this petition like myself,” he said. “Federation likes to say it speaks for the entire Jewish community. It does not, especially on this issue.”
Following the hearing, several anti-Israel organizations, including Students for Justice in Palestine at the University of Pittsburgh and Pitt Divest From Apartheid, reposted an antifa group’s Instagram screed against Heisler, calling her a “Zionist who has used her position as City Controller to promote pro-Israel policy and crush pro-Palestine initiatives.”
“Rachel Heisler is unfit for her position as a City Controller,” Steel City Antifascist League wrote. “She is clearly incapable of separating her personal belief in Zionism from her work.”
Federation has reserved its right to seek legal fees from Not On Our Dime and the Project For Responsive Democracy. PJC
David Rullo can be reached at drullo@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.
Toby Tabachnick can be reached at ttabachnick@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.
comments