A majority of the hundreds of people who showed up Tuesday night for Oak Park Township’s Annual Town Meeting rejected a proposal to place a question on November ballots asking if residents “support the right of individuals and organizations including state contractors, to boycott, divest, and sanction Israel?”
Over 500 people came to the meeting, which had been moved to the cafeteria at Julian Middle School in order to accommodate the expected large crowds. Of the 486 votes cast, 352 opposed placing the proposed non-binding referendum on the ballot while 134 wanted the question put to voters in the township.
The meeting had originally been slated for April 14 but was rescheduled after the expected crowds became too large for the Oak Park Public Library’s Dole Branch, which holds around 60 people. On Tuesday, the cafeteria’s seats all were filled and standing people lined the walls, though the cafeteria was said to hold more than 200 people, according to Evan Michel, Oak Park Township manager.
Part of a larger initiative to place the question in several townships around the state, the measure had already passed in several Illinois townships including Champaign, Cunningham, Peoria, Kickapoo, Medina, DuPage and Normal. It failed in Capital and Wheatland townships, according to advocates.
In Oak Park, placing the measure on the township board’s agenda came down to numbers, Michel said.
“Any elector can submit a petition with a certain number of signatures based on a percentage of the votes cast in the last election, and then that item processes directly to the township board to be included on the agenda,” Michel said. “The township board makes sure all these signatures are valid, like any other election, and that is their role in the process, to make sure the process happens.”
On Tuesday in Oak Park, voters placed their petitions in ballot boxes, then people weighed in on both sides of the issue, and strong emotions were expressed by those for and against placing the advisory measure on the ballot in a session where each comment was limited to two minutes.
“I am so, so ashamed, ashamed of Oak Park,” Linda Vasquez, of Oak Park, said after the vote. “Ashamed of the racists in Oak Park coming out and voting to take away the rights of people in Oak Park.”
Another Oak Park resident said they spent 10 years working on Middle East peace initiatives which depended on engagement and coordination between local municipalities, he said. They advocated for people to vote no on the ballot.
“The referendum item presented today is rooted in the BDS movement, which preaches a doctrine of anti-normalization, where Jewish Israelis, of all political positions and social spheres, must be excluded from engagement,” they said.
Other Oak Park Township agenda items were shelved at the meeting.
The advisory referendum effort at the township level is part of a larger issue as lawmakers seek to reverse an Illinois law signed by Gov. Bruce Rauner in 2015 that divested public pension funds from foreign companies that boycott Israel.
That law made Illinois the first state to divest its public pension funds from companies that participate in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement targeting Israel, according to a news release issued at the time by the state.
