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My Town Passed a resolution on Palestine. I’m not sure how progressive it was [1]

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Date: 2023-11-04  

By David Helvarg

When it comes to multi-generational trauma I’m first generation. My father, as a child, was one of 20 Jews to survive a massacre of hundreds of civilians in his Ukrainian village of Nemerov in 1919, escaping with his mother and sister. 2 years later they made it to a new life in the United States.

Now Ukraine is again burning and at war while on October 7 Hamas terrorists carried out massacres of over 1,400 Israeli Jews, over 1,000 of them civilians. Weeks and almost 10,000 Palestinian deaths later there’s no question that in their retaliatory rage (in part at their failure to protect their own citizens) the Israel Defense Forces and political leadership has gone beyond military action, to collective punishment that’s targeted Gaza’s traumatized population of 2.2 million people, while also increasing lethal force against protestors and passersby on the West Bank.

So, I could have supported my town of Richmond California becoming the first U.S. city to pass a resolution in support of Palestinian rights on October 18th, if it had opened with these two amendments that read:

AMENDED - WHEREAS, 1,400 Israelis have been killed by Hamas on October 7th and nearly 6,000 Palestinians have been killed by the state of Israel in this escalated conflict; and

AMENDED - WHEREAS, we mourn the loss of all civilian lives lost on both sides from October 7th to the present and also throughout the decades of displacement, occupation, oppression and blockade endured in Gaza and the West Bank;

Unfortunately, these were the 15th and 16th paragraphs of this 22-paragraph opus of solidarity for Palestine and only added on after much angry public feedback from the Jewish community and others and a long night of anguished public comment from people who mostly talked past each other and whose support for families and babies over bombs and bullets seemed to depend on who was doing the trigger pulling.

In 2000 I led an environmental journalism training in Tunisia where the head of the Palestinian Journalists Association proudly showed me his new passport and talked about the imminent establishment of a Palestinian nation alongside the Israeli nation as a result of the Oslo peace accords. That was before religious and rightwing extremists sabotaged that last serious hope for peace between two people who number 7 million each.

We also know that for the last decade the religious fanatics of Hamas have been indirectly maintained and supported by Benjamin Netanyahu and the religious fanatics he’s brought into his far-right government. By maintaining Hamas in Gaza and a corrupt Palestinian Authority on the West Bank he’s been able to argue there was no Palestinian entity to make peace with, thus justifying endless war, occupation and planned annexation of the West Bank. That’s not paranoia but the well-documented analysis of much of Israel’s pro-democracy and pro-peace opposition (some of whom are now held as hostages by Hamas).

Even as these wars threaten greater disasters to come the planet is growing warmer and less habitable by the year and by the day –resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of more people. This past summer was the hottest in world history and, according to EU health studies, as many as 61,000 people died from the previous summer’s heat waves. The unprecedented rapid growth of Hurricane Otis that wiped out a large sections of Acapulco on October 25, killing dozens of people, may indicate what future storms will do as a result of climate change but went largely unreported as the world media focused on the war on Gaza.

So, while I’m deeply saddened I still refuse to feel helpless. If I can’t be hopeful, I can at least advocate for Triage, saving who and what we can while we can and finding ways to be effective, express empathy and solidarity (though I wish more eloquently and equitably than my city has) and say Kaddish for all the beloved dead before we can move on.

David Helvarg is a writer and founder of a national Ocean policy group based in Richmond California.

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