...Members of the Somerville Divestment Project, which has attempted twice in the past two years to get the city to rid its pension fund of any investments in Israel bonds, have submitted two public policy questions to the city’s elections commission for this November’s state poll.

One question would direct the state representative for 27th Middlesex District to vote for any resolution calling for the selling of “investments [the state holds] either in Israel bonds or in companies that supply military equipment to Israel.”
The other would instruct the representative “to vote in favor of a nonbinding resolution calling on the federal government to support the right of all refugees, including Palestinian refugees, to return to their land of origin.”

The number of signatures required to get the question on the state ballot, 200, represents a much lower barrier than the roughly 4,000 petitions required to get a referendum on the municipal ballot. The SDP’s effort to do so last fall failed after a judge ruled that the petition forms it had used were invalid. To get on the state ballot, the SDP must submit the 200 signatures for each question by July 5.

Of nine proposed public policy questions for the November ballot, the SDP’s are the only two that address foreign policy, according to Election Commissioner Nicholas Salerno...

...Ken Brociner, a member of the Somerville Coalition for Middle East Peace, which took to the streets last year to counter the SDP’s anti-Israel message, said that he wasn’t surprised that the SDP was making another go of it.

“Due to SDP’s ideological fanaticism, it was entirely predictable that they would, once again, do everything they can to delegitimize Israel’s very right to exist,” he said, adding that the group “will have a very hard time fooling people into believing their rhetoric about being concerned about universal human rights.”...