By J.D. Morris Jan 9, 2024 (SFChronicle.com)
San Francisco supervisors have joined the ranks of local legislative bodies calling for a sustained cease-fire in Gaza.
The Board of Supervisors voted on Tuesday in favor of a resolution spearheaded by Supervisor Dean Preston that urges the Biden Administration and Congress to support a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas War, along with the delivery of humanitarian aid and the release of all hostages in the region. Supervisors passed the resolution in an 8-3 vote after Board President Aaron Peskin successfully overhauled the document’s language in an effort to gain wider support from his colleagues.
The resolution — which also condemns antisemitism, Islamophobia and other forms of discrimination — drew an outpouring of public feedback, including from hundreds of pro-Palestinian demonstrators who packed City Hall when it was introduced late last year. A similar scene played out Monday, when the board’s Rules Committee advanced the resolution and public comment lasted for several emotional hours.
Tuesday’s meeting also drew a large crowd, most of whom appeared to be cease-fire supporters who loudly reacted to supervisors’ statements from within the board chambers and an overflow room down the hall. The vote became tense at times as pro-Palestinian advocates for a cease-fire booed and chanted when supervisors voiced opposition to the resolution.
After supervisors passed the resolution, members of the crowd inside the board chambers stood and began chanting “free, free Palestine.” The board briefly recessed its meeting.
Tuesday’s vote from city supervisors follows similar steps taken by a growing list of other legislative bodies in the Bay Area and beyond. Richmond’s City Council was the first in the nation to pass a resolution expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people in October; the Oakland City Council followed suit with a cease-fire resolution in November. Elsewhere, the Long Beach council passed a cease-fire proclamation in December, and other cities such as Denver and Minneapolis are considering their own measures. While such measures have attracted an influx of support from pro-Palestinian demonstrators, they’ve also drawn criticism from some Jewish community leaders who say any cease-fire resolution should include an explicit condemnation of Hamas, among other concerns.
Major protests supporting a cease-fire have occurred across California, including last week in Sacramento, where the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace shut down the state Assembly just as lawmakers convened for their first day of business in the new year.
Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza began after the militant group led an Oct. 7 attack on Israel, killing about 1,200 people and kidnapping about 240 hostages. Since then, Israel’s war has killed about 23,200 Palestinians — about 1% of Gaza’s population — and wounded tens of thousands of more, according to the Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza, the Associated Press reported.
In San Francisco, Peskin began Tuesday’s discussion by moving to pare down Preston’s original cease-fire resolution to try to reach consensus. Peskin’s proposed amendments, which his colleagues adopted, trimmed the text of the resolution and kept it focused on its core demands. Peskin also added language to condemn Hamas’s killing of Israeli citizens as well as Israeli government attacks on Gaza that have killed Palestinian civilians.
Additionally, Peskin amended the resolution to call for “new leadership on both sides” of the conflict and an investigation into “individuals who have overseen or engaged in war crimes and international human rights violations — including but not limited to gender based violence and killing of children.”
“I think that says it all,” Peskin said after reading his amendments at Tuesday’s meeting.
Preston endorsed the amendments and said he hoped they would allow supervisors to “come together on this and send … a strong and unified message in support of a cease-fire.”
Previously, Supervisor Matt Dorsey tried unsuccessfully to amend Preston’s cease-fire resolution in committee on Monday to call for the surrender of Hamas and endorse a two-state solution to Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Dorsey also wanted the resolution to reference a recent New York Times investigation that described “a pattern of rape, mutilation and extreme brutality against women” when Hamas attacked Israel in October. He was booed by some in the board chambers when he read that proposed amendment at the committee meeting, a reaction that the Jewish Community Relations Council later described in a social media post as “callous and insensitive.”
Dorsey was loudly criticized again by pro-Palestinian protesters when he brought up the same news report and raised other concerns about the resolution at Tuesday’s meeting, when he said that “what haunts me more than anything about this process … is hearing orchestrated denialism about what happened on Oct. 7.”
“I can acknowledge that there is enormous pain on both sides of this issue, but I am troubled that the pain of some people is being denied,” Dorsey said. He was one of the three supervisors who voted against the resolution, joined by Supervisors Rafael Mandelman and Catherine Stefani.
The Jewish Community Relations Council expressed support for the dissenting supervisors in a statement later Tuesday, commending them for “recognizing these municipal votes have no foreign policy impact.” But the council said it also appreciated some of Peskin’s amendments, particularly his inclusion of a “denunciation of Hamas and the need to remove this terrorist organization from power.” Those changes “do not take away from the pain this process has spawned for the Jewish community,” the council said.
Shortly after the board vote, a few dozen supporters of the resolution gathered atop the grand staircase under the City Hall rotunda. Lara Kiswani, executive director of the Arab Resources and Organizing Center, told the crowd that “San Francisco has sent a message” to President Joe Biden and other political leaders and helped build support for a cease-fire. She praised supervisors for having “the political will to do what’s right” and said “the genocide in Gaza must stop now.”
Reach J.D. Morris: jd.morris@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @thejdmorris
Jan 9, 2024
By J.D. Morris
J.D. Morris covers San Francisco City Hall, focused on Mayor London Breed. He joined the Chronicle in 2018 to cover energy and spent three years writing mostly about PG&E and California wildfires.
Before coming to The Chronicle, he reported on local government for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, where he was among the journalists awarded a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the 2017 North Bay wildfires.
He was previously the casino industry reporter for the Las Vegas Sun. Raised in Monterey County and Bakersfield, he has a bachelor’s degree in rhetoric from UC Berkeley.
He can be reached at jd.morris@sfchronicle.com.
