With Congress moving to criminalize criticism of Israel through a so-called “anti-zionism is anti-semitism” bill, American legislators are increasingly at odds with their constituents over how to respond to the devastating war on Gaza. As Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, the body’s only Palestinian American, has pointed out, only 11 percent of her colleagues have called for a ceasefire in Gaza, even as recent polling shows 61 percent of Americans support one. That gap is also playing out in cities across the United States, where voters are packing city council meetings to challenge their elected representatives over their stance on Israel’s U.S.-funded war.
Nine days into the war, the City Council of Akron, Ohio, for example, passed a resolution citing the “at least 1,200 people” killed during the October 7 attack by Hamas while omitting any mention of the number of Palestinians who had been killed—which, by the time the draft was voted on, had already reached twice that number. The council fast-tracked the one-sided measure, short-circuiting any public input, including from its Palestinian constituents.
In the weeks since, Israel’s war machine has claimed about 16,000 more lives—Palestinian civilians who were slaughtered as they fled, as they sheltered, as they convalesced. The horrifying scenes emerging from Gaza, along with the weekly presence of Palestine advocates in city council chambers, prompted the Akron body to pass a second, more “balanced” resolution on November 20. The measure pairs a timid call for a ceasefire with an insistence that Palestinians and Israelis (in that order) “abide by international law.” That language was added after the council’s rules committee tabled the draft for a week, citing its rushed pro-Israel resolution as precedent.
Before it would even consider the draft calling for a ceasefire, the Akron council insisted on brokering mediated discussions between the city’s Palestinian community and representatives of two local Jewish organizations. That no such courtesy preceded the original, pro-Israel resolution casts light on an entrenched bias among local officials, one that has revealed itself in cities across the country since October 7. Amid a horrific, U.S.-funded Israeli bombing campaign, ground incursion, and siege that together have, as of November 13, killed at least one in every 200 Palestinians in Gaza, activists in places like Akron have struggled to wrest recognition of that suffering from local politicians who, at the same time, have been all-too-willing to back Israeli narratives justifying the genocidal campaign.
Akron’s ceasefire resolution is, at last count, among only a handful passed in a country with nearly twenty thousand cities. Although some of these cities, especially those with sizable Arab American populations, specifically call out Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza and apartheid rule throughout Palestine, most use watered-down language that, while rightly focusing on ending human suffering, avoids identifying its root causes.
This manufactured murkiness further marginalizes pro-Palestine activists in the public sphere, adding to the dehumanization they are already facing on U.S. campuses and elsewhere. But even in cities where activists have successfully pressed for ceasefire resolutions, the compromises they have had to make along the way make plain that Palestinian deaths, like Palestinian lives, can only be conjured in the abstract. After all, to hold Palestinian life as something other than an aggregate body count—as no less human than ours—would be to shrink in shame at the thought of 7,300 children killed in just the first six weeks of this slaughter.
America’s city councils, with few exceptions, have either stood by silently or passed half-hearted declarations.
Instead of acting quickly to reject the barbarity being unleashed in their names—and with their tax dollars—America’s city councils, with few exceptions, have either stood by silently or, in a marginal number of cases, passed half-hearted declarations that have been parsed for any hint of straight talk. Among the exceptions are Richmond, California’s resolute declaration that “Israel is now engaged in an ethnic cleansing campaign,” or Ypsilanti, Michigan’s call for “an immediate end to military aid” for Israel. Given the scope and scale of Israel’s bloody rampage, however, even these appear too tame.
More to the point would be to call on city officials to cut ties with businesses that support Israeli apartheid, as Akron’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter tried to do, or to ban police training in Israel, where brutal tactics long used on Palestinians have wrought institutionalized violence on Black and brown people in the United States and elsewhere. Last June in Akron, for example, police shot Jayland Walker ninety-four times following a vehicle chase and traffic stop, prompting a federal lawsuit accusing the police department of a “culture of violence and racism.”
Underscoring the link between anti-Black racism and the kind visited upon Palestinians, local activists have also called on officials to end Akron’s sister-city relationship with Kiryat Ekron, an Israeli town that was built on the ruins of a Palestinian village “depopulated” in May 1948 (by the same Israeli brigade that is now laying waste to Gaza).
With half of Gaza uninhabitable and Israeli officials openly touting a second Palestinian Nakba, or mass displacement, America’s cities, with few exceptions, seem oblivious to their government’s role in this catastrophe. Yet even if elected city officials cannot find it in themselves to question the morality of U.S.-backed death and destruction, their willful blindness to Palestinian suffering is at odds with American sentiment writ large. A Reuters poll published on November 15 showed that only 32 percent of Americans said the United States “should support Israel” in its war on Gaza, and a November 19 NBC poll showed a staggering 70 percent of eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-old Americans are opposed to the Biden Administration’s handling of the war.
While protests against Israel’s assault continue to rage across the United States, mirroring the massive mobilizations throughout the world, U.S. cities have made it clear that they, like Congress, are on the wrong side of history. Instead of heeding calls, not just for a ceasefire but for an end to Israel’s brutal military occupation, city councils are stymying the public’s ability to sway policy (as with Akron’s recent move to limit public comment). As constituents watch their local and national representatives ignore public sentiment and turn a blind eye to the industrial massacre of civilians, they can now count democracy among the many casualties of Israel’s horrific war.