On Town Meeting Day this year, Brattleboro, along with six other Vermont towns, will have the opportunity to vote to declare itself an Apartheid-Free Community. That pledge, which originated with a campaign by the American Friends Service Committee (Quakers) in 2022, reads:
WE AFFIRM our commitment to freedom, justice, and equality for the Palestinian people and all people; and
WE OPPOSE all forms of racism, bigotry, discrimination, and oppression; and
WE DECLARE ourselves an apartheid-free community, and to that end,
WE PLEDGE to join others in working to end all support to Israel’s apartheid regime, settler colonialism, and military occupation.
Apartheid is the segregation and separation of people based on race, and was the legal system of racial separation in South Africa from 1948 to 1994.
Some may object to the application of the term “apartheid” to Israel, but the International Court of Justice was asked to rule on this question, and last year found definitively that Israel is indeed responsible for apartheid, and even went one further and ordered Israel to make reparations to the Palestinian victims of that crime.
South African president Nelson Mandela was also explicit in drawing the connection, saying, “The United Nations took a strong stand against apartheid; and over the years, an international consensus was built, which helped to bring an end to this iniquitous system…but we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”
In an interview that just aired Tuesday, Ebrahim Rasool, South Africa’s Ambassador to the US, said, “the growing consensus in South Africa is that whatever we’ve experienced in South Africa is on steroids in Palestine.”
Others may object to the characterization of Israeli occupation (itself a legally established fact) as “settler colonialism”. Books can and have been filled with ample reason to apply this term, but the fact that Trump is now openly calling for the US to “own” Gaza, ethnically cleanse it of all Palestinians, and turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East”—while Israeli leadership and media nods in agreement—should put that debate to rest. Settler colonialism isn’t simply a regrettable side effect of the creation of a “national home” for the Jews, but is in fact baked into the entire enterprise, and was from the beginning, decades before the Holocaust.
The most salient question about this pledge, however, is “what does this have to do with Brattleboro?” In a year when the Town’s budget, and hence our property taxes, are set to increase by 12%, is this really the issue to be debating? However, it bears noting that in 2024, the US sent $17.9 billion in arms to Israel to support its apartheid practices and military aggression. On a per-household basis, that comes out to $953,562 that Brattleboro taxpayers collectively sent to Israel, about 31% of the total increase in the FY 2026 budget, and more than double what is being proposed for the total Human Services budget. That military aid to Israel may be outside of our local control, but that is why Article 2 directs the Town Clerk to convey the pledge to our Congressional delegation, as well as local and State officials.
But, perhaps more significantly, an unfortunate consequence of the very partial victory against apartheid in South Africa, as with the one against segregation in the US, is that we have cast these terms in stone, codifying them into the rarefied language of the law, and we have lost touch with the the common sense of those words, and the evil that is attached to them. Apartheid means simply “apart-ness” in Afrikaans. “Segregation” is a plain English word that means “separation”, which is more or less the same thing. Apartheid is not a phenomenon limited to South Africa. Nor is segregation peculiar to the Jim Crow South.
The terms can just as easily be applied to a situation where, for instance, ordinances are crafted and law enforcement directed with the explicit aim of physically excluding a certain class of people from certain areas of otherwise public space. I’m speaking, of course, of the Selectboard’s attempt through Articles 4 and 5 to force through its “acceptable conduct” ordinance—after its rejection at a special Representative Town Meeting—by appealing to a venue it hopes will be more amenable, one where there is no opportunity for reasoned deliberation of the question, no opportunity for voters to be exposed to experiences or perspectives that might challenge their existing biases.
“But the law applies to everyone!” cries the defender of “separate but equal”. It’s true, the law, in the words of Anatole France, in its “majestic equality…forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.” In this case however, the law forbids the housed and the homeless alike to make love, relieve themselves, and self-medicate in public. We are asked to deem those activities unacceptable, but withholding access to housing is somehow beyond reproach.
Also on the March ballot we see Article 3, asking whether voters would prefer to have veto power over the placement of a public health facility in Brattleboro. Hospitals, “pregnancy resource centers”, even methadone and suboxone clinics are all apparently kosher, but overdose prevention centers (OPCs)—facilities that have been proven to save lives and result in streets cleared of needles—should be subject to the whims of a stigmatizing public. Nevermind that a very-theoretical OPC would almost certainly be funded by settlement funds won by the State of Vermont from pharmaceutical companies that created the opioid crisis in the first place.
And finally, we have Article 6, asking how much of the budget Brattleboro voters would like to see allocated to Human Services funding. On the face of it, there’s nothing particularly offensive about this, until one remembers that the Selecboard’s original intent was to ask if the allocation should be reduced or cut altogether. They apparently were unable to see the irony of persisting with their pet ordinance project, which they claimed would gently direct suffering people to already-underfunded human services, while on the same ballot proposing to cut that funding even further, potentially to zero. In the end, the Selectboard was only convinced to include options for level funding or an increase because they were advised that the survey would otherwise be inconclusive from a policy-making perspective, not because it would be immoral from a humanitarian perspective.
The theme that ties all of the Town Meeting Day Articles together is “apart-ness” and separation. Article 2, placed on the ballot because it received the signatures of over 5% of registered voters, asks us to reject apartheid and separation in favor of solidarity and connection. The remainder of the articles, placed on the ballot by the Selectboard (with one of them having originally begun as a citizen initiative that failed to get the required number of signatures), ask us to embrace policies of separation, exclusion, stigma, and dehumanization.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that these Articles, if passed, would be tantamount to apartheid, certainly not in the legal sense. However, the difference is one of scale and degree, not one of kind. Reflecting back on Ambassador Rasool’s words, if Israel’s is “apartheid on steroids”, we find on the March ballot “apartheid on a juice fast”, giving voice to the demand to “cleanse” and “purge” Brattleboro of “unwanted elements”. That the cleansing is not ethnic, but rather based on economic class and medical condition (substance use disorder is a medical condition), is of little comfort.
In addressing Israel, Ambassador Rasool continued later on in the interview, “the template of apartheid has been completely magnified… That is the kind of DNA [of apartheid] that we recognized as South Africans.” Those strands of DNA didn’t begin in Apartheid South Africa, nor did they end there. They went back at least as far as the American Indian reservations, snaked through the Middle Passage, wound through the Pale of Settlement, tightened around the Warsaw Ghetto, looped through the Japanese Internment Camps, cropped up in Jim Crow, multiplied and spread in South Africa and Palestine in the same year, resurfaced in American inner cities and French banlieues, to name just a few historical landmarks.
In truth, that DNA runs through our entire culture. There remain those in our community who would prefer not to think about the Native Americans that still remain here, those whose hatred of Jews is masked by their admiration for Israel’s atrocities (and its apparent ability to get away with them), those—including a certain well-known personage who has animated many of the candidates appearing on the ballot under Article 1—who continue to maintain that Black lives don’t matter.
Given the genetic code of our culture, it will take an affirmative act of collective will to transform ourselves into a culture of connection and solidarity from a culture of separation and exclusion. I urge you to vote YES on Article 2, NO on Articles 3, 4, and 5, and “2%” or “More than 2%” on Article 6.
