Ceasefire and Divest, or Cease and Desist? Lawsuit seeks to undo Northampton’s Israel-divestment resolution

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Last September, Northampton residents and organizers packed the city’s already cramped City Council chambers hoping to get a chance to express their support for a resolution that urges the city to divest public funds “from entities complicit in human rights violations in Israel and Palestine.” While most never got to speak, the resolution passed unanimously, to the cheers and applause of the room. 

Now, however, a lawsuit filed in late March by two pro-Israel legal advocacy groups — the National Jewish Advocacy Center and the Gevura Fund — on behalf of 10 Northampton residents threatens to undo those efforts. Their broad argument: that the resolution violates the constitution by interfering with U.S. foreign policy and violates state law by directing public investment based on moral considerations rather than solely fiduciary ones. 

Organizers of the divestment push in Northampton see it differently. 

“We know that these lawsuits are really an attempt to try and chill the movement, to make us afraid of doing the organizing work we’re doing, and to make the city afraid of taking the courageous, principled action that it has and should continue to do,” said Jewish Voice for Peace Western Mass member Eve Glazier, who was one of the organizers of the Northampton divestment campaign, also known as Northampton Apartheid Divest.

The suit, if it moves forwards, is likely to have large implications given the precedent it could set. It’s also not the only lawsuit of its kind: Medford, Massachusetts, which passed a similar divestment ordinance in November, is facing its own lawsuit from the National Jewish Advocacy Center, raising questions about a broader pushback against city divestment campaigns. 

“We see this case as really important for the divestment movement as a whole,” Glazier said. 

The Northampton divestment movement sprang up among other pro-Palestine actions at the municipal level, primarily in response to the genocide in Gaza and increased Israeli violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. In 2024, several western Massachusetts cities passed resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, including Northampton, Amherst, Greenfield, and Easthampton. And in 2025, Montague passed a resolution declaring the city an “apartheid-free community.”

The policy is certainly not the first of its kind — in Northampton or statewide. 

The Northampton City Council passed a resolution to divest from fossil fuel companies in 2013, and then-mayor David Narkewicz issued an executive policy order directing the city not to contract with companies involved in the manufacture of nuclear weapons in 2018. During the 1980s, four Massachusetts cities, including Amherst, passed legislation divesting municipal funds from apartheid South Africa. Northampton and Medford also follow the more recent trend of cities cutting economic ties with companies directly implicated in Israeli human rights abuses or the occupation of Palestinian land, including Portland, Maine, New Orleans, and Hayward, California. (A non-binding divestment ballot initiative also passed in Somerville, Massachusetts, in 2025.)

According to Glazier, the lawsuit threatens these powerful strategies. 

“The argument [the plaintiffs] are trying to make that cities do not have the right or ability to align our investments with our ethical principles is undermining a very important tactic that has been used by social movements throughout history,” she said.  

The plaintiffs argue, however, that the Northampton resolution is exceptional because, as National Jewish Advocacy Center Associate Director Ben Schlager told The Shoestring, it “explicitly involves political judgments about international affairs” and “foreign relations and international trade are solely within the purview of the federal government.” Schlager, who is also the center’s senior counsel, argued that Northampton’s resolution is therefore substantively different from the nuclear weapons and fossil fuels policies. 

“As for South Africa, the courts are clear that municipal and state boycotts of South Africa were permitted because the U.S. federal government was also actively boycotting the apartheid regime in South Africa,” Schlager said.

One of the courts Schlager refers to is the Supreme Court, which in its 2000 decision in Crosby v. National Foreign Trade Council unanimously struck down a Massachusetts law “barring state entities from buying goods or services from companies doing business with Burma” essentially because it interfered with the federal government’s ability and authority to make foreign policy. The Northampton lawsuit cites this case, arguing that “the absence of federal sanctions” — in this case against Israel — “reflects a deliberate federal policy choice that local governments may not countermand.” 

Legal scholar and author of a paper on the Crosby case Robert Stumberg casts some doubt on that argument and the use of Crosby as precedent. 

“You have a broad argument that [the resolution] is outside the orbit of Crosby because it’s not procurement,” he told The Shoestring. “It’s purchasing versus investing.” 

And even if the procurement question is put aside, Stumberg was skeptical that the lack of a federal sanctions in this case counts as a policy in itself, given the long history of international boycott movements and policies targeting Israel. 

“You could imagine how the negative space of not having a U.S. policy against something like that is not very persuasive,” Stumberg said, “just because the United States government has chosen not to participate in these boycotts and its choice not to participate, you could argue, is actually a positive policy.”

While he mentioned other possible arguments for the city — noting that states are often treated by courts as “individual private investors” with “sovereignty over their own money” and “have been recognized by federal courts as having their own First Amendment rights” — he also admitted, “it’s tricky ground.” 

Stumberg, who hadn’t read the resolution at the time he spoke with The Shoestring, also emphasized that the resolution would be most defensible with a “specific list of evildoers.”

“If it were … narrowly tailored to specific companies that are doing the wrong things, that are committing the violations of human rights, I think you’d have a pretty strong argument,” he said. 

The plaintiffs themselves seize on that argument, claiming in their lawsuit that “the Resolution’s criteria … are vague and subjective,” nor does it “define its terms, including ‘complicity’ and ‘violations of … human rights.’” 

Glazier pointed out that the resolution cites the American Friends Service Committee’s “investigative human rights rating system” for a list of companies from which to divest, which includes documentation of alleged human rights abuses by those companies. 

“The AFSC does extensive research to identify companies that have these very clear and direct links. These are companies that are very clearly involved in atrocities and human rights abuses,” she said.

While Schlager expressed concerns about “how exactly evidence is weighed or verified for individual company assessments” in the American Friends Service Committee data, he didn’t comment on the veracity of those data, instead emphasizing that “it’s not a neutral or academically standardized screening tool.” 

“[R]eferring to the Israeli conflict as apartheid and lumping it with mass incarceration and detention pretty much undermines any notion of neutrality or fairness,” Schlager wrote in an email to The Shoestring. 

Schlager also said that the lawsuit “is not presented as an antisemitism issue.” The pro-Israel Jewish Federation of Western Massachusetts has expressed support for the lawsuit publicly, focusing more so on “antisemitism,” however.

“[W]e have seen consistently that when a municipality singles out the world’s only Jewish state for unique scrutiny, it often serves as a catalyst for antisemitic rhetoric and the ‘othering’ of Jewish residents,” Adam Solender, the interim executive director of the federation, said. 

This isn’t the only municipal pro-Palestine policy that the federation has opposed. Solender has also been engaged in debate over the Montague apartheid-free resolution in local papers, such as the Greenfield Recorder, referring to the resolution as “moral sorting.” 

In response to the apartheid-free resolution, the Jewish Federation of Western Massachusetts managed to convince the town Selectboard to formally adopt the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism as well as a policy rejecting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which seeks to hold Israel accountable for human rights violations and occupation of Palestinian land. 

However, the Selectboard later rescinded those policies after pushback from residents and members of the apartheid-free movement, and after Selectboard members learned more about the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition, which hadn’t actually been included in the federation’s letter to the board. The definition has been widely criticized — including by one of its authors — for its use in conflating pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist speech with antisemitism. 

While awaiting the city’s response to the lawsuit, Glazier told The Shoestring that Northampton Apartheid Divest’s work will continue. 

“We see our work as ensuring that the movement is not quelled by this baseless lawfare attempt,” she said. “We also see our role as ensuring that groups like the NJAC are not allowed to get away with claiming that they represent the Jewish community.”

Environmental activist and organizer with Medford for Palestine Josh Eckart-Lee also confirmed that the Medford and Northampton divestment campaigns are coordinating strategies in response to the lawsuit. 

“We’ve worked with our lawyers to try to connect them with Northampton’s people to share that resource, especially among folks who don’t have money to pay lawyers, so that’s been a really useful relationship,” Eckart-Lee said. 

City officials told The Shoestring they couldn’t comment on the pending litigation. 

Eckart-Lee expressed concern that in Medford, the city’s mayor, who had opposed the resolution originally, might try to not defend their resolution against the lawsuit, “so that it could act as a second veto.” 

Although Northampton activists remain in the dark about their city’s exact strategy, Glazier remains “hopeful they will defend [the resolution] because, unlike Medford, our mayor has been supportive of the initiative.” 

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