As a supporter of the anti-apartheid resolution on the Brattleboro ballot last month, I volunteered to hold a sign at our polling place urging others to support the measure. When I turned up for my 6:00 pm shift, the designated area was bustling with people waving Israeli flags and signs featuring FCK HMS stickers.
As I stepped into the cordoned area and hoisted my anti-apartheid sign, a woman behind me said, “Oh, here comes Hamas.”
“Hamas is here!” announced another.
“Maybe she isn’t Hamas, maybe she’s just confused,” a third woman condescended.
I don’t know who these women were – I had never seen them before, and I didn’t ask – but their words and tone echo the derogatory, baseless and patently false charges that have swirled as part of a coordinated campaign by the Burlington-based Shalom Alliance to muzzle Vermonters’ grassroots efforts to speak out against horrific human rights abuse.
In what is acknowledged by human rights groups and UN experts as genocide and ethnic cleansing, Israel has slaughtered 50,000 people — most of them women and children — in Gaza since October 2023 and is now exporting its tactics to the West Bank, where military-backed settlers are destroying more homes and stealing land every day. These atrocities spurred Vermonters in a handful of communities to gather enough signatures to place articles on their town meeting ballots advocating for the rights of Palestinian people – and all people – and opposing Israel’s apartheid, settler colonialism and military occupation of Palestine.
To beat back these grassroots efforts, the Shalom Alliance launched an all-out bid not only to defeat the measures but also to bully Israel’s critics into silence. They flooded social media with misinformation and blasted mostly unsigned messages to Vermonters through mass mailings, and built a website with pre-written letters to send to elected officials and local papers warning that advocates’ calls for Palestinian human rights would spark a rise in antisemitism. They called and emailed overburdened town clerks, who were so barraged with emails that they had to set up stronger spam filters. They sent letters to school principals and superintendents claiming the articles are “creating hostility.”
One selectboard member said he received 5,000 emails – more than three times the population of his town – including one from Shalom Alliance consultant Rachel Feldman, a seasoned politico who has served in multiple state communications roles including as Phil Scott’s chief of staff, smearing the resolutions as part of “Hamas’ global PR campaign to cover up their double war crimes against Israelis and Palestinians.”
“Make no mistake about it,” wrote Feldman, “any participation in Hamas’ PR campaign emboldens them to commit further atrocities against our only democratic ally in the Middle East, Palestinians, and increased violence against Jewish people in the world, and in U.S. cities.”
Ultimately, the articles passed in Brattleboro, Winooski, Plainfield, Thetford, and Newfane. Montpelier, Ferrisburgh, Bristol, Vergennes, and Weybridge voted them down. In two towns, Shelburne and Marshfield, articles were introduced from the floor but didn’t advance. Notably, for the second consecutive year, the Burlington City Council thwarted the will of the people and refused to put the article on that city’s ballot in spite of the required number of signatures collected – twice – by supporters.
But as long as Israel continues to carry out genocide and ethnic cleansing — and more Americans question these practices — we can expect the Shalom Alliance to continue to try to intimidate and bully Vermonters with lies and scare tactics that harken to the McCarthyism of the 1950s, with the potential for equally damaging results.
Their references to Hamas and antisemitism are dog whistles targeting Vermonters’ free speech and jeopardizing the safety of those who seek to oppose Israel’s U.S. taxpayer-funded apartheid and genocide. It’s part of a nationwide juggernaut aimed at suppressing any criticism of Israel not only in communities like ours, but also in elementary schools, college campuses, and state legislatures, not to mention on Capitol Hill. Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University student with a green card kidnapped by ICE on March 8, remains behind bars as the Trump administration tries to deport him for his activism. Many additional international students have been targeted since Khalil’s detention. Columbia itself, despite its brutal and violent crackdown on student protesters last year, agreed to unprecedented interference by the White House to make the university even more hostile to Palestinians and their allies, part of a wider assault on academic freedom across all of higher ed.
All this fits with Project Esther, a national strategy of the Heritage Foundation (of Project 2025 infamy) that lays out specific plans to thwart free speech on U.S. campuses. It targets the fictitious “Hamas Support Network” (HSN)” and claims that “decidedly antisemitic, anti-Israel, and anti-American” groups are “involved in furthering Hamas’s cause in contravention of American values and to the detriment of American citizens and America’s national security interests.”
This is classic hasbara – the term for Israel’s global PR efforts to control, shape, justify and distort the narrative of its actions. Hallmarks of hasbara include conflating criticism of Israel with “antisemitism,” gaslighting those who criticize Israel’s ethnic cleansing and genocide and claiming that they are naive and have no actual stake in the situation. Accusations of Hamas affiliation are now regularly thrown into the mix, as are faux concerns for the well-being of the Palestinians being starved, shot, imprisoned and killed daily by Israel.
Sidestepping the fact that U.S. taxpayers are Israel’s biggest benefactors, defenders like the Shalom Alliance also like to assert that Israel’s conduct has no place in local politics — all the while waving Israeli flags in front of Brattleboro’s polls.
Without taking a position on the article itself, Brattleboro resident Spoon Agave wrote on the town’s Front Porch Forum that national and international issues have always been part of town meeting as far back as the Civil War and slavery, and that they do have local relevance. “… [O]ur country and by extension all of our citizens, through taxes and often their very persons (soldiers, diplomats, legislators, economic and commercial dealers, traders, shippers, tourists, students, aid workers et al) are deeply engaged with foreign and national problems. All of us are inextricably entwined in these major actions,” he wrote.
The Shalom Alliance disregards the dangerous implications of their rhetoric and accusations. Vermont was the site of the racist November 2023 shooting of three students who were attacked for wearing keffiyehs and speaking Arabic — an outrageous hate crime that occurred after our public officials, including Vermont Governor Phil Scott and then-mayor of Burlington Miro Weinberger, expressed unequivocal support for Israel’s violence. The shooting passed relatively quietly, sparking no statewide reckoning or meaningful political or social introspection.
Just days before Town Meeting Day, supporters of Shalom Alliance in the Vermont state legislature, mostly Republicans, introduced a bill that would criminalize “negative references” to “the right to self-determination in the Jewish people’s ancestral and indigenous homeland.” Such a bill would enshrine Zionism as the only political doctrine defended by Vermont’s anti-harassment statute.
Our successful Brattleboro resolution was a small step toward building public awareness of the atrocities taking place in Palestine and building the political will to halt them. There is much more to be done, and Vermonters must be free to think, speak and act in accordance with our values without baseless and dangerous threats to our First Amendment rights and our well-being.
Kate Casa is a resident of Brattleboro.
