In the afternoon of Wednesday, Aug. 26, about 75 keffiyah-clad and banner-bearing people gathered at a rally outside the Hampshire County Superior Court, their chatter interrupted periodically by the enthusiastic honks of supportive motorists.
The crowd had gathered there to support a resolution Northampton’s City Council passed last year calling on City Hall to begin divesting from “entities complicit in human rights violations in Israel and Palestine.” Earlier this year, 10 plaintiffs sued to block that divestment effort, together with legal representation from the National Jewish Advocacy Center.
The case’s first hearing followed the rally. The city argued to dismiss the lawsuit and the plaintiffs asked for a preliminary injunction that would nullify the resolution while the legal proceedings played out.
On Tuesday, however, Judge Charles Groce sided with the city, dismissing the case on a technicality: that the plaintiffs didn’t have standing to bring the case in the first place.
The ruling is likely to have implications for other communities across the region that are considering similar measures. Just last week, the Easthampton City Council took up an identical proposal. Activists there say they have identified nearly half a million dollars in city investments tied to companies involved in the genocide in Gaza. During debate on the issue, both city councilors and members of the public opposed to the measure cautiously referenced the then-pending lawsuit against Northampton.
Though the ruling is a defeat for the Northampton residents who were opposed to the divestment resolution, they weren’t the only party affected.
On June 11, 30 other Northampton residents — 20 of whom are Jewish — filed a motion to intervene in the case, which would have made them a party to the lawsuit. Their motivation, they said, was to draw attention to what they saw as the real controversy raised by the case: suppression of criticism of Israel.
The dismissal has rendered the intervention null. However, its details will likely remain relevant not only for municipalities considering similar resolutions, like Easthampton, but also others facing similar lawsuits, such as Medford, which the National Jewish Advocacy Center sued earlier this year in federal court over a “values-based investment ordinance” meant to restrict city investments in entities tied to fossil fuels, for example, or human rights violations.
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While the city was trying to get the lawsuit tossed out mostly on procedural and technical matters, supporters of the resolution chose to intervene “because we want to address the merits of the case,” as intervenor and Northampton Apartheid Divest organizer Eve Glazier put it in an interview with The Shoestring.
“Today we’re here to show the court that we stand up for democracy, that we support the City Council, that we support the city’s efforts to dismiss this lawsuit,” the intervenors’ attorney, Rachel Weber, said at the rally last month. “We just also have more things to say, because we don’t just want to just defend the city; we also want to defend the resolution.”
What’s the difference, then, between defending the city and the City Council’s resolution?
One of the city’s lawyers, Jason Talerman, told The Shoestring by email that “we are vehemently defending the City Council’s free speech rights” while also trying to get the case thrown out on less substantive grounds. During the hearing, Talerman noted that the City Council is “barred in the [city] charter from directing those officials that might have authority to make decisions with respect to the city’s investments.”
Put simply: the resolution wasn’t binding, can’t be binding, and therefore the lawsuit wasn’t addressing anything.
“Now, underlying this is an important matter of public policy,” Talerman acknowledged during the hearing. “I just don’t think we have to reach that.”
The intervenors, however, thought that the matter of public policy was of utmost importance, since it concerns the resolution itself.
“We don’t want the only reason that the lawsuit doesn’t stand to be because [the resolution] is not actually being implemented,” Glazier said. “We want it to be implemented. Therefore, we need to challenge the actual arguments that the initial lawsuit makes about why it’s not lawful, because it absolutely is lawful.”
The lawsuit seeking to block divestment essentially claimed that the resolution violated the constitution by attempting to supersede U.S. foreign policy, and that it conflicted with state law by directing public investment based on moral considerations rather than solely fiduciary ones.
The intervenors’ concern, Weber told The Shoestring, was that, if the lawsuit were dismissed solely on matters of standing as opposed to merits, it could chill the mayor from actually implementing divestment if she chose to, “knowing that as soon as she takes any steps to actually move forward with the investment policies that are recommended by the resolution, she’s just going to face a different lawsuit.”
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The intervenors also worried that, without getting into the merits of the lawsuit, the case likely wouldn’t address what they see as its true underlying motivation: suppressing criticism of Israel.
“There’s this elephant in the room, which is, what is motivating the plaintiffs?” Weber said. “What is motivating the plaintiffs is really support for the Israeli government and not wanting municipalities in this country to take stances against Israel and Israel’s illegal actions against Palestinians.”
Though it’s only mentioned once and briefly, the lawsuit does allege that “measures that single out Israel in this manner risk stigmatizing Jewish constituents.”
The National Jewish Advocacy Center’s mission statement describes the organization as one that “leverages the legal system to combat antisemitism,” and makes no mention of Israel, Palestine, or Zionism. Since its inception in 2020, however, most of the organization’s lawsuits that The Shoestring was able to find have targeted pro-Palestinian speech and criticism of Israel.
Advertised on the group’s website is a lawsuit brought against Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, for describing certain pro-Israel lobbying groups as supporting “gross human rights violations” against Palestinians.
Another brought in 2025 against the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East claimed the agency had aided and abetted terrorism by supporting Hamas in its Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. The agency exists to provide relief to Palestinian refugees displaced by Israeli settlement and occupation.
“[The] NJAC’s lawsuits are brought to crush support for Palestinians,” Deputy Legal Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights Maria LaHood, who represented the agency during the lawsuit, wrote in an email to The Shoestring, “whether it’s humanitarian aid to Gaza, BDS, or protests against Israel’s genocide or illegal Jewish-only settlements.”
The Shoestring has identified eight federal lawsuits the National Jewish Advocacy Center had filed since 2022. All but one of those cases hinged in some way on the Oct. 7 attacks or criticism of Israel, court records show. The organization filed its lawsuit against Northampton in a state-level court.
“The canard that we engage in lawfare and that this constitutes the purpose of our practice is a meritless statement by those who otherwise want to violate the law for their own political ends,” Ben Schlager, the National Jewish Advocacy Center’s associate director and senior counsel, wrote in an email to The Shoestring. “Let them address the merits of the case.”
Speaking to their motivations to intervene, the Northampton residents who spoke at the rally also said the case had much more to do with suppressing support for Palestine and conflating it with antisemitism than the plaintiffs or the city were letting on.
Former Northampton City Councilor Alisa Klein said she chose to intervene not only because she supported the resolution itself, but because she “was also outraged by the lawsuit’s claim that it was an antisemitic resolution and action.”
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The attempted intervention was not just a legal maneuver, but also an organizing strategy continuing the efforts that brought the resolution into existence in the first place in 2025, organizers said. It presents an example for those in the Palestine solidarity movement of how organizing and legal action can intertwine as “an effective strategy for social movements,” as Glazier put it.
“From the organizing perspective, anytime you decide to pursue a legal action, you can use that as an organizing platform,” Weber said. “You can hold a press conference outside the courthouse; you can organize amongst the folks who are participating in the lawsuit; you can write letters to the editor.”
“It helps bring these court cases — often shrouded behind closed doors, with a lot of complex procedures and lingo — back into the public sphere,” Glazier said.
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The suit’s dismissal rendered the intervention moot by default, meaning the intervenors wouldn’t get their day in the courtroom to argue the case on its merits. But they said they support the ruling nonetheless, and not only because it saves the resolution.
“While the judge’s decision is certainly a legal victory, it’s also a big organizing win,” Weber wrote in an email. “The Resolution, the lawsuit, and the organizing around it really highlight the importance of specificity and research in divestment campaigns.”
Nevertheless, National Jewish Advocacy Center CEO Mark Goldfeder told The Shoestring by email that he sees the dismissal as “just the first step in this process, not the last.”
“We are moving forward, and we are quite confident that we can answer every question the court raised,” Goldfeder said. “No city council has the power to turn the public treasury into an instrument of foreign policy, and the merits of that claim remain entirely open.”
Meanwhile, in Easthampton, the City Council’s Finance Committee met Wednesday to discuss its own the divestment resolution, including feedback from the city’s lawyer, according to City Councilor Tom Peake. Discussion is set to continue at the committee’s next meeting in two weeks time.
Correction: This article has been updated to correct the venue in which the National Jewish Advocacy Center has sued the city of Medford. That lawsuit was filed in federal court.
Colin Weinstein is a trash hauler, writer, and organizer living in Western Mass. He can be reached at cweinstein1@proton.me.
- Colin Weinstein
- Colin Weinstein
