Another failure to communicate

On June 5 the Sonoma City Council responded to a long festering demand by local citizens – including a significant number of students from Sonoma Valley High School – by drafting and introducing a ceasefire resolution about the war in Gaza. The resolution was reasonable, moderate, well-written, and authored by Mayor John Gurney and Vice Mayor Patricia Farrar-Rivas. But it did not pass, the authors backtracked and outrage erupted. 

If you’re my age you’ve been down this road before. Vietnam, Panama, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia and Croatia, Kosovo, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq (again), Syria, and on and on. All these wars have been controversial – at least two of them tragically, outrageously wrong – and they’ve all inspired protests from one political sector or another. But none of them hit as close to home in America as the current war in Gaza, and the tangled web of interests, loyalties, territories, atrocities, religious beliefs, political alliances and tragic histories associated with the land of Israel. Depending on which census you have faith in, the United States has either more than, or just as many, Jews as Israel. So it’s close to home. And, parenthetically, roughly a million of Israel’s population comes from Russia, one of the most openly anti-Semitic cultures in modern times.

Criticizing Jews and discriminating against them for their faith, their culture, their race or their disproportionate success in science, medicine, commerce, finance, the arts is anti-Semitic and tragically consequential. 

Criticizing Israel for some of its military practices and repression of Palestinians is not. Hamas is undeniably a terrorist organization committed to destroying the state of Israel and killing all Jews. But Hamas does not represent more than a tiny minority of Palestinians, who are being punished catastrophically and indiscriminately for the October 7 massacre committed by Hamas.

But this is all just partial context for the June 5 Sonoma City Council meeting and that body’s refusal to adopt a reasonable cease fire resolution. The argument given by two councilmembers – Gurney and Ron Wellander ­ is a familiar one – that American foreign policy (i.e. giving giant bombs to Israel to eradicate Hamas from Gaza) is not appropriate agenda content for a small town city council that will have no influence on national policy.

The problem with that opinion is that it denies the citizens the Council represents the most empowering public voice they have – the voice of the representative body they elected. And it denies the evidence of history that when enough elected bodies object – to slavery, to segregation, to apartheid, to war – legislators listen.

I spent two years lobbying in the halls of Congress against the war in Vietnam and I learned over and over again how closely Members of Congress pay attention to the voices of their constituents.

Of course, if the Sonoma City Council doesn’t believe a ceasefire is called for then they are free to say so and be done with it. Sadly, they seemed stuck inside some sort of rhetorical/political limbo. That may have been in part because the pro-ceasefire voices beseeching them quickly turned angry and unwisely hostile. The Council meeting was ultimately suspended amid outrageously offensive chants of “City Council you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide.”

In the end, battle lines were drawn, the two sides stopped listening to each other, and the ceasefire resolution died for lack of a motion.

Which is supremely ironic because it mirrors the failure of Jews and Palestinians to listen to each other for the past 76 years.