After battle, Sacramento okays sisterhood with Ashkelon
Pro-Palestinian activists had launched campaign against move; 250 pack city hall for debate
Joshua Davidovich is The Times of Israel's Deputy Editor
After a long, sometime raucous debate in and out of city hall, Sacramento, California, city leaders green lighted a plan to make Ashkelon a sister city Tuesday night.
Pro-Palestinian activists had opposed such a move, saying it was not right for California’s capital to have an official association with Israel.
On Tuesday night some 250 people from pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian camps packed city hall as the forum, normally home to debates over garbage pick-up and zoning variances became the latest battleground in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“The criteria of sister city is inclusive and promotes friendship. Where is the friendship if I want to go on a delegation and I can’t even go there?” said Adeeb Alzanoon of the Palestinian American Congress.
The debate over the issue had inflamed passions in both camps and thrust the inland city into an uneasy spotlight.
The city council had promised to team up with an Israeli city after deciding in 2009 to add Bethlehem, in the Palestinian Authority, as a sister city, to the dismay of Jewish groups.
Ahead of the Tuesday night vote, pro-Palestinian activists, including those from the Boycott Divestment Sanctions camp, launched a campaign to pressure council members over the move.
“We’re concerned about Sacramento as a city establishing a relationship that might be in agreement with discrimination,” said Adeeb Alzanoon, a local representative for the Palestinian American Congress, one of a half dozen local groups that sent a letter to all nine city council members opposing the measure.
Among other things, the letter cites the presence of the Shikma prison, which holds West Bank and Gazan prisoners, and claims that Ashkelon was “built on the thriving town of Majdal Asqualan…home to generations of Palestinian families until 1948 when the army of the newly-declared state of Israel began its ethnic cleansing campaign, terrorizing the native Palestinian population and forcing them to leave.”
Pro-Israel groups launched a counteroffensive, accusing BDS supporters of “rewriting history” and “continuing to wage a war of delegitimization against the Jewish state at every opportunity and in every possible venue.”
According to KTXL TV in Sacramento, the Sister City Program is meant to “promote peace through mutual respect, understanding and cooperation.”
Sacramento isn’t the only city to enter a minefield with its sister city program recently. In February, Montgomery County, Maryland, outside Washington DC, pushed off a vote to partner up with Beit Shemesh, not over Palestinian rights, but rather religious coercion.
Officials told the Washington Post that Montgomery County in that case wanted to avoid teaming up with a place where women were segregated or worse by ultra-Orthodox men who disagreed with their lifestyle.
Ari Ben Goldberg contributed to this report.
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