In the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, the college town of Boulder, Colo., has long been known as a laid-back, hippie haven. Its residents cherish the outdoors, and its leaders are often elected on reliably liberal promises to expand affordable housing, address climate change and increase racial equity.
In recent months, however, the City Council has been pulled apart over an entirely different matter: the war in Gaza.
Pro-Palestinian protesters have regularly interrupted meetings with shouting and other unruly behavior, even prompting the council to temporarily move its meetings online to avoid further disruption and later adding rules to more easily bar people from City Hall.
It was against that backdrop that an outsider, a man from Colorado Springs, Colo., yelled “Free Palestine,” the authorities said, as he threw Molotov cocktails at demonstrators marching on Sunday to support the Israeli hostages. Twelve people were injured. Federal officials plan to charge the man with a hate crime.
There was no indication that he had any connection to Boulder, his target apparently chosen through an online search for Colorado groups that he believed were supportive of Israel, according to law enforcement officials. But the attack rattled a city that was already feeling consumed by tensions over a war thousands of miles away.
“It’s been a hard time here in Boulder,” Mayor Aaron Brockett said. “We reiterate over and over and over again that international affairs are not the business of the Boulder City Council, and our work is to clean the streets and make sure the water comes out when you turn the tap.”
Roughly 30 miles northwest of Denver, Boulder thrived as a center of counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s as students at the University of Colorado staged anti-Vietnam protests and flocked to Grateful Dead shows.
The city of 105,000 residents has maintained its easygoing reputation. Its pedestrian-friendly downtown has rainbow crosswalks, shops offering psychic readings, crystals and hiking sandals, and a view of the city’s iconic crimson rock formations, known as the Flatirons.
Boulder has gentrified in recent years, and the median home price now approaches $1 million. Tech companies, including Google, have built campuses here, and the city is increasingly mentioned in the same breath as places like Austin, Texas, as a landing spot for weary coastal climbers. It will host the Sundance Film Festival starting in 2027.
Still, as in Berkeley and other college towns, a contingent of progressives in Boulder remains vocal and has demanded that city leaders take a stand against the war in Gaza.
For the past several months, council members have resisted weighing in, despite public commenters showing up week after week asking them to declare a cease-fire resolution or divest from companies that do business with Israel.
Pro-Palestinian activists, however, point out that the City Council had previously adopted resolutions opposing the Iraq War, as well as conflicts in South Africa and Myanmar.
In April, an opponent of the war in Gaza circulated a “Wanted” poster online that showed the faces of seven council members and accused them of “complicity in genocide” for not passing the cease-fire resolution.
Mayor Brockett said the protesters and threats of violence had made council members, and Boulder’s large Jewish community, feel unsafe. He said he didn’t understand why the demonstrations had been so persistent.
Some might assume that the University of Colorado has played a factor, given the prominence of college students in the pro-Palestinian cause in the United States. But protests at the university have been tame compared with those at campuses in the Northeast or California. And the action seems to be driven by local progressives wanting to raise awareness of humanitarian issues in Gaza, not students.
The unusually tense council meetings suggest a changing Boulder, where big-city problems have begun to infiltrate the so-called Boulder Bubble. There’s been an uptick in homelessness and property crime, as well as a frustrating rise in the cost of living — and sharp disagreement about the correct way forward.
“People on the left are divided in a way that I don’t recall us being divided before,” said Judy Amabile, a Colorado state senator who has lived in Boulder since 1975. She added: “People feeling unsafe in a way that I think is new, and this attack certainly feeds into this idea that we’re not so safe anymore.”
Troy Bush, 56, a fourth-generation Boulderite, recalled a simpler time, when downtown Pearl Street, a brick-lined, pedestrian-only area where the attack took place, was filled with locals “hanging out, smoking weed, making out.” He called it the city’s “Mork and Mindy” years, alluding to the popular sitcom set in Boulder, featuring Robin Williams as a zany alien.
But life has become more difficult in Boulder in recent years, he said. He supports the Boulder City Council declining to pass a resolution of any kind pertaining to the Israel-Hamas conflict.
“Nobody has time now for anything but local issues,” said Mr. Bush, a businessman, sitting in a downtown cafe on Tuesday. “The city is behind on road work. They’re behind on infrastructure. We have a huge problem with homelessness. You can’t even take your kids to the public library anymore because of all the homeless around there. Those issues affect everybody.”
There has been no indication that the suspect in Sunday’s attack, Mohamed Sabry Soliman, had any connection to activists in Boulder. But some council members drew a connection between the physical attack and the ongoing war of words.
“Violent speech leads to violent actions,” said Tara Winer, a council member who was depicted on the “Wanted” poster.
Councilman Mark Wallach said he wondered if the troubles at the City Council were what drew an out-of-town attacker to Boulder. “The only attraction that I can imagine is that he has been following meetings,” Mr. Wallach said, “and he has seen the toxic atmosphere we are experiencing around the council.”
But Martha McPherson, a retired massage therapist who has urged the City Council to call for a cease-fire in Gaza, said that the pro-Palestinian efforts should in no way be seen as an incitement to violence. She called the attack on Sunday the work of a “random wacko” who “has never been part of our group.”
The suspect “has done a great disservice to our cause,” she said. “This is exactly what the Zionists want — they want the victimhood of their position.”
Some hoped that the community would come together after this week’s violence. Many said they remembered residents supporting each other after a 2021 mass shooting at a Boulder supermarket that killed 10 people.
Lauren Folkerts, a Boulder city councilwoman who has advocated considering a cease-fire resolution, said she had noticed in recent days that residents were uniting in unexpected ways.
“I am sad that it took such a vicious act of terror against our Jewish community for this to happen,” Ms. Folkerts said in a statement. “But nevertheless I am glad to see our community lean into some tough and needed conversations. Through these conversations we are finding ways to heal and to love each other even when we disagree.”
But some remain divided.
On Monday, the city of Boulder released a statement condemning the attack and calling it an act of antisemitic violence.
One councilwoman, Taishya Adams, an outspoken critic of the war in Gaza, declined to sign on. She wanted the statement to say the act was not just an act of antisemitism but also of anti-Zionism, and to distinguish between those two ideas, she said in an interview.
“I, too, am furious and deeply saddened, and my heart is with the victims, their families and Boulder’s Jewish community,” she said in a separate statement. “This was both an act of antisemitism and anti-Zionism. If we are to prevent future violence and additional attacks in our community, I believe we need to be real about the possible motivations for this heinous act.”
But Mayor Brockett said that antisemitic rhetoric at City Council meetings and Sunday’s attack had eroded the sense of safety for Jewish residents in Boulder. He said he believed both were fueled by a rising tide of antisemitism nationwide.
“We’re going to have a lot of work to do in the coming weeks and months to cope with what’s happened, and also to show people that being Jewish in Boulder is safe,” he said. “People do not feel safe, and we have to change that.”
Soumya Karlamangla is a Times reporter who covers California. She is based in the Bay Area.
Matt Richtel is a health and science reporter for The Times, based in Boulder, Colo.
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