Extra

On Monday, April 28, 2025, at 5 pm, the Berkeley City Council will consider the Ceasefire Resolution. passed by Berkeley’s Peace and Justice Commission last year on September 30 in an 8 to 7 vote. 

For so long I’ve wanted Berkeley to live up to its history. Instead on October 24, 2023, Richmond, California, was first city in the nation to call for a ceasefire in the Israel Gaza war. San Francisco and Oakland followed in Richmond’s footsteps passing ceasefire resolutions. Yet here in this city which is thought of worldwide as progressive, liberal or whatever label you want to use for a city that is known for the Free Speech Movement and once stood for the end of apartheid, we wait. 

Here while we wait we recite the Land Acknowledgement Statement to start city meetings: “The City of Berkeley recognizes that the community we live in was built on the territory of xučyun, the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo apeaking Ohlone people, the ancestors and descendants of the sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County…” 

Yet we fail to acknowledge the similarities between taking the land we live on from the indigenous peoples and the Nakba, expelling approximately 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and homeland, dispossessing them of their belongings , in order to establish the Jewish majority nation-state of Israel in Palestine. 

I’m not expecting much from the Berkeley City Council. I see councilmembers’ minds made up as they’ve picked their sides with their Peace and Justice Commission appointees. Former Mgyor Arreguin and Councilmembers Tregub and Humbert quickly appointed commissioners prior to that September meeting who could be trusted to vote against the Ceasefire Resolution. After the vote, Councilmembers Bartlett and Taplin replaced the commissioners who voted for the Ceasefire Resolution. 

New Mayor Ishii has left in place Arreguin’s appointee, at least for the present, though on numerous occasions in her campaign she voiced her support for a ceasefire resolution. 

It is possible that the council gave a brief sigh of relief that a vote was unnecessary as a ceasefire had been negotiated and took effect on January 19, 2025, during the Biden Trump transition, but Netanyahu breached the ceasefire on March 18, declaring Israel has “resumed combat in full force”. 

gIt should be no surprise that it was Israel that broke the ceasefire, not Hamas. 

On October 28, 2023 , Netanyahu had used scripture to sell his war to Jewish supremacists in Israel and right-wing Evangelicals in the US, citing Deuteronomy 25:17, urging them never to forget Amalek. . 

The story of Amalek is found in the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) or Old Testament in Christian Bibles in Deuteronomy and 1 Samuel. The command to which Netanyahu refers is clearest in 1 Samuel 15:3, “Now go and smite Amalek and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass”. 

Even before the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel, on September 22, 2023, Netanyahu stood before the United Nations General Assembly with his “New Middle East” map showing Gaza and the West Bank completely absorbed into Israel, leaving no Palestinian territory. 

The phrase the “River to the Sea” when uttered by a college student or pro Palestine person is immediately declared anti-Semitic, but when that same phrase comes from the lips of Netanyahu it slides off without an issue. 

Removing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will not end the brutality against the Palestinians. 

Last week I finished One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad my twenty-first book on Palestine, Gaza, the West Bank and Israel since October 2023. If I were to recommend just one book from my list, it would be One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. If I was to recommend a second book it would be the first book I read after October 7, 2023, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy by Nathan Thrall. 

My recommendation for a third reading might be The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917 – 2017 by Rashid Khalidi.  

If you want to get a flavor for the developing mindset in Israeli history and the violence Palestinians suffer under then pick up and read Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations by Ronen Bergman. In my July 2, 2024 Activist’s Diary, I wrote that Rise and Kill First was brutal with descriptions of bombings and torture followed by murder, but even that did not prepare me for brutality in Ilan Pappe’s description of the Nakba in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. 

The meticulous surveillance and intelligence gathering in Rise and Kill First to limit what we politely call collateral damage (killing innocent civilians) is gone with the present-day program Lavender that uses AI algorithms to identify suspected Hamas militants to develop kill lists. Then the program Where’s Daddy tracks when the AI identified suspect on the kill list goesh home, as it is easier for the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) to kill by bombing the entire building into rubble. 

It so often feels like there is no interest in portraying the Palestinians as anything other than terrorists rather than as a people oppressed by one of the most powerful militaries in the world, supported by the United States with funding, bombs and munitions. 

Killing entire families, maiming and orphaning children is routine, giving the acronym WCNSF (wounded child no surviving family) and earning Gaza the designation as the place with more per capita child amputees than any other place in the world. 

The sheer number of Palestinians killed tells a story different from the one which floats out of the mouths of pro-Israel politicians and such. As of April 8, 2025, the Gaza Health Ministry lists more than 52,000 Palestinians killed. That is the number of bodies counted or more accurately the body parts large enough to identify the person. The 52,000 is not the missing dead buried under buildings bombed into piles of rubble. In the dead are counted 166 journalists and media workers though I’ve heard numbers of up to 200, 120 academics, over 224 humanitarian aid workers which includes 179 employees of UNRWA. 

The numbers of Palestinians killed are staggering with 80% estimated to be civilians and 31% children. 

It is hardly a war between two equally balanced powers. 

1,706 is the number of Israeli lives lost including October 7, 2023 for the same time period. 

gggOHCHR (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights) found that 70% of the Palestinians killed in residential buildings or similar housing were women and children. 

Even that number somehow takes in the assumption that just being male risks being labeled as a Hamas militant. 

The war against Gaza is the place where journalists are targeted and more have died than in any other war in history. Fatma Hassona the 25-year-old Palestinian photojournalist living in Gaza became another number to add to the list. On April 16, 2025 the day after Fatma Hassona learned that the documentary film about her and her work Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk had been selected to premiere at the ACID Cannes 2025 film festival she was killed with her family by an Israeli missile that hit the building where she lived. 

For now, her Facebook lives on https://www.facebook.com/fatma.hassona.526 

I might add Peter Beinhart’s book Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza to the reading list. 

On May 4, 2025 I’ll be attending the conversation between Peter Beinhart and Rabbi David Cooper at the Kehilla Community Synagogue (on zoom and in person). The conversation with Beinhart will, of course, be after the Berkeley Council vote, but you can listen to what I expect will be much the same with Chris Hayes in the April 15, 2025 episode of Why Is This Happening? https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/being-jewish-after-the-destruction-of-gaza/id1382983397?i=1000703563937 

Another book that gives much to think about is The World After Gaza: A History by Pankaj Mishra. There are other excellent books that fill in what is absent from most of the media that crosses our screens. 

You can read the non-fiction book The Lemon Tree by Sandy Tolan about two families one Arab, one Jewish who occupied the same house in al-Ramla. The Palestinian Khairi family was forced to flee the house they built. The Jewish Eshkenazi family from Bulgaria emigrated to Israel after WWII and on arriving in Israel was given the choice of which vacant house they wished to move in to as their own. They chose the house with the lemon tree. 

Last August I joined a monthly online discussion group of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917 – 2017 by Rashid Khalidi with Rabbi Cat and the Beyt Tikkun team. I read The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine in book club well over a year ago, but I was interested in being part of a group led by a rabbi. I’ve missed more sessions than I’ve attended, but it has still been enlightening that like others in the group, we knew little to nothing about the Palestinians, their history or culture. To say The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine is eye opening is an understatement. 

There is so much information packed into The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine that I gave up taking notes for my reading journal from my library copy and bought the book. When I check the New York Times best seller list it has been on the list every week but one since October 2023. 

The problem with these recommendations is that reading serious non-fiction literature in any sort of volume doesn’t seem to be something many people do. Even reading one book a year is too many for too many people including some of my closest friends. For me it was the pandemic that spurred me into the voracious reader I am now. 

It is the Palestinian voice that we so rarely hear. Yet those of us who seek out to hear those voices are accused of bias, being uninformed as if the stream of pro-Israel content is the end of the story and conversation. 

Where and how we get the news or choose no news at all is where the generational and societal divides sit and the parallel universes begin. 

While main stream media, well-funded politicians, Zionist organizations and religious orders pushed supporting Israel and called anyone supporting the Palestinians in Gaza anti-Semitic and suggested they were funded by Hamas and terrorists, the college students who demonstrated so fervently last year for a ceasefire were seeing firsthand the war on Gaza as a genocide long before the International Court of Justice made it official. 

If Zionism isn’t part of your vocabulary, Zionism is the creation of and support of a Jewish nation state. The movement for a Jewish nation originated in Europe in the late 19^th century. 

The 1917 Balfour Declaration by British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild established support for a Jewish national home in Palestine. At the time less than 10% of the population of Palestine was Jewish, but with the signing of the Balfour Declaration at the end of WWI, the British began to facilitate the immigration of European Jews into Palestine. 

The Rapture is an Evangelical Christian belief in the End of Times originating in the 1830s centering on Jerusalem and the return of Jews to Israel as necessary to bring the Second Coming of Christ when all dead Christians will be resurrected and join with living Christians to rise in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. 

Most Christians do not believe in the rapture theology. 

Christians United for Israel (CFUI) a Christian Zionist organization which claims to have more than 10 million members is led by televangelist John Charles Hagee. Hagee’s support for Israel is wrapped in his ministry and belief in the Rapture. 

Some sources will give other dates for the origin of Zionism and the Rapture and some groups will claim that biblical history predetermines that Israel is the promised land for Jews, but any thorough reading of the bible gives multiple cultures as occupying the land. And through various times in ancient history they were at war with each other. Regardless, the thrust of the Balfour Declaration and the upheaval that followed and continues up to the present with the taking the land from a population that was 90% not Jewish to create a Jewish nation state was predictable and predicted. 

The Peace and Justice Commission is not expected to take up the ceasefire resolution again though the March 3, 2025 agenda included “Discussion and Possible Action Resolution Opposing an American Occupation of Gaza”. This was placed on the agenda after President Trump’s meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu in the Oval Office on February 4, 2025 when Trump said that all two million of the Palestinians in Gaza should be relocated to countries like Egypt and Jordan and the U.S. would take over the Gaza Strip and rebuild it into the “Middle East Riviera”. 

The commission meeting room was filled that March evening with attendees to speak on the resolution. I counted the members of the public who gathered in groups in support of the resolution to outnumber those against it by about 3 to 1. One of the members in the opposition wrapped himself in an Israeli flag while others in the small group passed out orange balloons to represent two children with reddish hair who taken as hostages and died. 

The item was pulled before it came up for discussion. Most of the pro-resolution group received the announcement early and had already left by the time it was made official. 

In One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This Omar El Akkad lays out to question how killing and maiming became justified. 

Isn’t that where we should be? How can we continue to justify daily killing and maiming Palestinians and not call for a complete and permanent ceasefire?