From the Port of Oakland To Marin Civic Center: Marin County's Jewish and Palestinian Ceasefire Proponents Continue To Show Strength and Solidarity

(And wherein a high school student punctures the sterility of the the Marin Board of Supervisors' chambers with a plaintive: "Hey, can I ask you guys a question? Don't you have any emotions?")

By the time I arrived at the Port of Oakland on the 100th day of Israel's assault on Gaza, the sun had yet to rise, but there were already over 1,000 (mostly young) protesters marching and repeating anti-war chants in the darkness, quite a few of them having made the trip from Marin County.

And there, on the wide streets of the Port, surrounded by massive industrial machinery, flickered demonstrations of remarkable tenderness: A father cradling his infant son at the perimeter, a couple holding hands as they marched, a young woman assisting an older man who had stumbled. Palestinian flags fluttered hopefully above us, carried aloft by the youths.

Anyone looking for a coffee truck was out of luck, but in what could be considered a "courtesy wake-up call", there was a mobile drum circle and women with bullhorns leading chants. From the organizers' platform, from which the main chants were being called through loudspeakers, the playwright and activist Cat Brooks, co-founder of the Anti-Police Terror Project, began to speak about the parallels between the treatment of Palestinians under occupation and the plight of vulnerable communities here in the Bay Area. Many who had been marching streamed toward the small platform to hear her better, but protest organizers gently reminded the crowd to keep marching, in order to maintain the nascent blockade.

The peaceful, multiracial crowd, organized by the Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC), would eventually grow to 2,500, shutting down unloading operations at the entire port for the day. (AROC's effort had the tacit blessing of the union that unloads the ships, the ILWU, a union which has boycotted plenty of ships over many decades prior.) Around the perimeter of the march, a group of primarily young women, including many Black, Arab and Jewish women, constituted a kind of low-key security system that demonstrated remarkably peaceful but effective tactics. (I watched later as they defused a hostile white interloper who tried to charge his cargo truck past the simple barricade of bicycles; their deft handling of that situation was an act of impressive strategy.)

Even in that early, bleary hour, and in the thin light coming through the rainclouds, it was hard not to be struck by how many women seemed to be prominent in the management of the protest/blockade. Later, local media would try to downplay the accomplishment of the organizers by claiming that the Port of Oakland was closed until Monday, even though operations take place during the weekend. But measuring the calculus of operations between a Saturday and a Monday was missing the point. AROC was demonstrating that it was capable of pulling in over 2,000 protesters on a Saturday, starting at 5:30 a.m.

You could think of it as a kind of test-run just across the bay from where the 1934 San Francisco Waterfront Strike took place. That 1934 strike lasted for 83 days and built one of the strongest, most racially integrated, and most politically radical unions in the country.

Ten Days Later in Marin....

Ten days later, on January 23, 2024, some of the same youths who had protested at the Port of Oakland showed up again at the Marin Board of Supervisors' meeting to urge the Supervisors to pass a ceasefire resolution. But while the Port of Oakland march had seemed to be primarily young people, the age range of the pro-ceasefire speakers in Marin that Tuesday was more equally distributed.

Among the dozens of pro-ceasefire speakers, the intimacy of the discussion was palpable even via Zoom, and the arguments they made in favor of ceasefire were heartfelt, carefully researched, and made with obvious concern for people on both sides of the conflict. One of the speakers, Chris Jewell, had recently hosted a Palestinian refugee family, and he related the desperate plight of those Palestinians who had not been allowed to escape. David Glick, the grandson of a well-regarded East Coast rabbi, made an impassioned speech to the Supervisors that emphasized Jewish values in calling for a ceasefire.

When attendees could not help but applaud Glick's ardent and compelling speech, they were admonished by the President of the Board of Supervisors that they should merely wave their hands, a mark of appreciation that could not be registered by the public trying to view the meeting on zoom. This is the sort of prohibitive nonsense that prompted a Marin high school student to pierce the false decorum of the genocide-complicit Supervisors with the simple line, "Hey, can I ask you a question? Don't you guys have any emotions?"

It was a fair question. Like Lear's great fool, the student had allowed himself to ask one of the most basic questions about power's absence of humanity. In doing so, he exposed all of us in the room as somehow complicit, bowing to anti-democratic "norms" like the prohibition of mere applause for a comment condemning yet another in a series of US-funded genocides. Ours was a false decorum which helped the Supervisors cover for extreme violence.

The high school student managed two other things with his comment. He correctly identified the bombing of every single hospital in Gaza by the IDF, and he did something that no one else appeared to have done during that meeting. He successfully threaded his concern for Israel's Palestinian victims, an urgent humanitarian concern which the vast majority of speakers understandably focused on, with an equally important reality which was being largely ignored: Israel's genocidal campaign has already expanded into a larger regional conflict, further involving the US, with the possibility of the return of the draft.

The high school student's comment is probably the only concern that might move the political machine in Marin County. It is true that there is a surfeit of Marin County fortunes tied to the military industrial complex who have no hesitation in an amping up of our “forever wars”. But sadly, it is likely only selfish concerns about security and continued access to national power that could move those with power in Marin County: judging from the polls, Biden will lose in November, and no one in this true-blue county is even talking about a challenger.

The “Ceasefire Now Marin” Petition Remains a Wholly Grassroots Effort

Most of the youngest ceasefire speakers had organized around the school walkouts, while millennials and older ceasefire proponents (many of whom have been active in other Palestinian civil rights groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace and 14 Friends of Palestine), had coalesced around the “Ceasefire Now Marin” petition started in Fairfax. That petition was generated by Joe McGarry, a workingclass dad raised in Marin who has long been active in Fairfax town politics. McGarry's grassroots, unfunded petition now has over 700 vetted signatures, a number that has not been matched by a much better-funded, anti-ceasefire petition organized by Guila Rice, a co-Director of Chabad of Marin. Rice’s essentially pro-war petition has the added benefit of sharing the same anti-ceasefire position of very large and powerful NGO/lobbying groups, including the Jewish Community Relations Council, the Anti-Defamation League, and the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

In other words, David was edging out Goliath in Marin’s signature gathering effort. This may explain why some of the anti-ceasefire crowd emerged out of their prior retreat, but they still only managed three speakers, one of whom was Guila Rice, who once again did not identify herself as a co-Director of Chabad of Marin, an extension of Chabad Lubavitch in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The pro-ceasefire speakers at the Tuesday meeting stood at approximately 27. (From that number, I have omitted those speakers who merely criticized Israel's abuse of Palestinians but who did not have time in the narrow speaking time to ask for a ceasefire.)

That ratio is more impressive when you consider the personal cost and risk of retaliation to the (many workingclass) pro-ceasefire speakers in Marin. The ceasefire proponents speak in the context of a McCarthy-esque environment where people have lost jobs simply for speaking up on behalf of Palestinian rights, and where not a single supervisor has moved to put even a discussion of any ceasefire resolution on the agenda.

Nor has any Marin County supervisor, to my knowledge, even made a public statement in response to the hundreds of concerns patiently expressed over a period of several months by County residents about the ongoing slaughter of Palestinians by the US-funded State of Israel. According to multiple Marin County residents, the Supervisors are choosing to ignore polite, civil, heartfelt letters sent requesting that a ceasefire resolution be placed on the agenda.

The silence from the Supervisors is matched by the silence from the conflict-of-interest-laden County commissions, working groups, and boards, which are appointed by the Supervisors themselves, and not elected by the populace. The petition for the ceasefire resolution itself, as confirmed by McGarry, had no input or assistance from any County or municipal committee/ board/working group in Marin. It is entirely grassroots.

Notably, not one member of the County's Human Rights Commission (HRC) has spoken on the issue at the Board of Supervisors, nor has any item relating to Israel/Palestine been placed on the HRC agenda. This silence is ongoing despite the large numbers of Marin residents of Israeli and Palestinian descent who have repeatedly brought the matter forward at the BoS, and others who have appealed directly to the HRC.

Further, there appears to have been silence from the Women's Commission, and the Youth Commission, etc., despite the obvious relevance even within the County.

That raises the ongoing question about what the purpose of Marin County's Supervisor-appointed commissions are. Are they designed to function as independent bodies that respond to the concerns of the populace? Or are they instead inherently anti-democratic bodies that function as reinforcement of the Supervisors' own wishes?

Then there is the question of the role of U.S. Congressman Jared Huffman, who represents the prime, if crumbling, real estate along California North Coast, from the Golden Gate Bridge to the border of Oregon. Huffman, considered something of a regional "kingmaker", had called for a "ceasefire" that did not in any way resemble what would be necessary to ensure peace. Specifically, Huffman’s ceasefire demanded only the return of Israeli hostages, but made no mention of the Palestinian demand for the return of thousands of imprisoned Palestinians civilians, many of them children, detained for years in brutal Israeli jails where many have been sexually assaulted by Israeli prison guards.

Which is to say, Marin County's U.S. Congressional representative, who has occasionally gone so far as to compare Israel's treatment of Palestinian to apartheid, still toes the line on the actual war crimes committed by Israel over decades.

And as I write this, I still have to reckon with Huffman's immediate pro-Israel statement after the October 7 Hamas attacks, which he has not yet moderated. As Israel's own Channel 13 reported this week, many of the worst atrocities that Israel claimed Hamas had enacted (and which were used to "justify" the genocidal bombing of Palestinians in Gaza), never actually occurred. They were fabrications. This follows earlier reporting from Ha'aretz and other Israeli reporters indicating that the IDF itself was responsible for hundreds of the Israeli fatalities on October 7.

Any fabrications about Hamas atrocities are absurd when you consider the reality that the actual Hamas attack was sufficiently violent that Israel would not have needed to fabricate stories such as beheaded babies, or babies thrown into the oven, or mass rape, et cetera. That is, unless Israel wished to distract from its own criminal negligence that abetted the October 7 attacks by Hamas.

Piece by piece, Israeli reporters themselves are dismantling Israel's own propaganda. But none of the local publications in Marin County, principally the Marin Independent-Journal and the "alt-weekly" Pacific Sun, both of which "reported" the violence of the October 7 Hamas attacks, are making any corrections to their incomplete and in many cases inaccurate reporting.

Then there is the matter of local media simply ignoring the matter of the ceasefire, and editing out much of the criticism of Israel from Marin County residents' letters and opinion pieces, as Maxine Flasher-Dugenez pointed out during her public comment at the January 23 Board meeting.

Why Does Marin Hold Out?

Across two bridges from Marin County, neighboring cities and one City/County have passed ceasefire resolutions at the behest of residents, marking themselves as not merely compassionate, but aware of some of the most basic rules of war.

Marin County Supervisors' refusal to even place discussion of a ceasefire resolution on the agenda isn't any strategic failure on the part of Joe McGarry. It isn't the fault of Chris or Jane Jewell who have for so long tried to educate their Marin County neighbors about what the Palestinian people are suffering. It isn't the fault of high school students at San Rafael High School, the kids most likely to be drafted when this war expands. It isn't the fault of reporter Peter Byrne, whose article about a North Bay protest was reportedly spiked by the Pacific Sun/North Bay Bohemian.

The lack of an agenda item for even a discussion of the merits of a ceasefire resolution takes place in a particularly extreme bubble, a balloon that is blown to near-bursting by complicit County leaders and their sycophantic commissioners; biased reporters within our local media; and a Democratic Party that would rather lose the 2024 Presidential election (and with it many downstream Dem tickets) than grapple with the need to replace Joe Biden as the Presidential candidate.

Even in true-blue Marin, the ceasefire speakers seem to be warning, Democratic voters are dropping out. And while the Democratic Party might be able to sustain those losses in California, that will be harder to do in Michigan. And the larger regional war and US involvement in it is only now starting. Is anyone listening to the peaceniks?

Afterword: Kids and Media Yesterday, And Today

The day of the Board meeting, I received a response to a request I had made late last year of the County Archives. It was a photograph of Peter Risley from the Tamalpais High School 1965 yearbook. Peter Risley was the son of labor and housing activist Bruce Risley, who nearly managed the Herculean feat of installing cooperatively owned, racially integrated, affordable housing in Marin City in the late 1950s.

Peter Risley, who was raised in Marin City, was set to graduate from Tamalpais High School in good standing, but left before the graduation ceremonies with a Marin Independent-Journal reporter and two other Marin County high school students to travel to various southern states to register Black citizens to vote. In Georgia Peter Risley was beaten; in Mississippi, he was arrested.

I can see today's youth making a similar journey today. What I can't imagine is anyone from either The Pacific Sun or The Marin Independent-Journal making any similar trip to report on it. They're too invested in promoting the County government’s public relations needs.

But to close on a positive note, and perhaps an inspirational one, I urge you to listen to the full recording of your fellow Marinites at Tuesday's board meeting. As you can see, there are still good people in Marin, and they need your voice, too.

©️2024 Eva Chrysanthe