Local organizers push for permanent cease-fire in Gaza amid rising death toll

The violence may be thousands of miles away, but it’s local to Sacramento-area residents who have family abroad — and they underscore that living in the U.S. is interconnected with the bombardment of Palestinians.

Elk Grove resident and Palestinian Yassar Dahbour, who has been organizing with the Sacramento Regional Coalition for Palestinian Rights, said he expected “that the United States [would have] learned from its history and its foundation that was based on the genocide of the Native Americans, and that they would remedy that by being more sensitive to the issue [of Palestinian struggle].” 

“Instead, we find America yet again supporting colonialism … the uprooting [of] Palestinians and [those] trying to ethnic cleanse their existence,” he said. 

After just the first week and a half of Israeli military airstrikes, at least seven of Noel Hassouneh’s extended family members — including Sherif Ashraf Hassouneh, Aya Khamis Hassouneh, Sherif Atta Hassouneh, Imad Atta Hassouneh and Muhammad Imad Atta Hassouneh — had been killed, she told CapRadio in October. 

"These are civilians that are dying in Gaza,” Hassouneh said. “Whether they agree with what's happening politically or not, they don't have a choice to even make a political statement. They're just trying to eat and they're trying to live.”

Among other actions, she’s been calling elected officials to ask them to support a permanent cease-fire given that U.S. tax dollars go toward Israel’s military. 

Hassouneh is just one of the many Sacramentans who have lost family due to Israeli bombardment.

“I can name two names [of affected community members], and both of them together have probably lost over 100 family members — one of them, around 98% of his family is now refugees totally displaced from Gaza,” Omar Altamimi, a policy and advocacy coordinator for CAIR Sacramento Valley/Central California, said.

“We got a call from my father-in-law [recently] and we found out that some of our extended relatives have also been killed by the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces],” law student Erin Waugh added. “Even since the bombing campaign has resumed, it's very frustrating to speak to our representatives over and over again, and to not be recognized.” 

The gap between elected officials and constituents in their sentiment on Israel’s bombing campaign on Gaza continues to widen: While over 60% of U.S. voters across the ​​political spectrum polled by Data for Progress said they supported a permanent cease-fire late last month, only 11% of Congress has called for one. That includes a solitary California legislator, Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee.

“There’s going to be real ramifications for elected officials,” Altamimi said of politicians not supporting a cease-fire. 

Pressure on elected officials 

Since Oct. 12, the Sacramento area has seen hundreds of people at over a dozen rallies — including one at the state’s Democratic Convention that the party responded to by canceling an evening of events — calling for an immediate and permanent cease-fire in Gaza along with justice for Palestinians. 

Sacramento rallies support Palestine and demand ceasefire in Gaza

At the end of the convention, party chair Rusty Hicks called for the release of hostages and an end to the war, but did not call for a cease-fire. 

“Claims that there was a building on fire, that people were attacked and ran over, that there was a horse that got into the building — all these rumors seem to be spreading in order to push away from from the main message of that sit-in,” Altamimi said. “And again, to give people who have not been heard, and are continuously … not listened to another challenge to be heard.”

Demonstrators call for a cease-fire in Gaza outside the Saturday afternoon session of the California Democratic Party’s convention in downtown Sacramento on Nov. 18, 2023.Nicole Nixon / CapRadio

Many demonstrations have included chants that highlight the U.S.’s complicity in the conflict, as President Joe Biden has repeatedly expressed support for Israel, and last month’s $14.5 billion U.S. aid package to the Israeli government is just the latest in U.S. tax dollars bolstering the violence. 

“What is unfolding abroad, particularly in Gaza, cannot happen without U.S. taxpayer and U.S. government support, that the money and the weapons that are going [toward], that have led to this crisis are, if not entirely, predominantly U.S.-led and U.S. linked,” said Dr. Umer Waris, a Sacramento-based physician who has been organizing with the Sacramento Regional Coalition for Palestinian Rights. 

There have also been over thirty smaller events in the region organized and co-facilitated by groups like SRCPR, Yolo for Palestinian Justice, local and university chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, and more. Those have focused on building art and community for future demonstrations, calling congresspeople to ask them to support a permanent cease-fire, offering educational context about Palestine and Israel and honoring lives lost, including the Woodland vigils. 

Last week, on Dec. 12 — two months since the Sacramento area saw its first rally in support of Palestinian lives and rights — local organizers looking for recognition of the devastation from elected officials saw their labor bear some fruit in two places in the Sacramento region: Folsom and Davis. 

Folsom City Council passed a declaration calling for the world’s leaders to pursue means to “urgently cease violence against civilians.” 

Altamimi said city, Muslim and Jewish leaders met to discuss resolution language beforehand.

And in Davis, after more than four hours of public comment, the city council unanimously passed a resolution calling for “peace in Israel and Gaza”, namely “an immediate cease-fire by all parties, an end to all hostilities, and to begin through diplomacy a reinvigorated effort that seeks a permanent, just solution to the conflict and lasting peace in the region.”

The first version of the resolution, drafted by Davis Mayor Will Arnold and council member Gloria Partida, did not use the term “cease-fire.” Many public commenters pointed out its exclusion, and both Partida and Arnold said the initial language was intentionally chosen in order to strive for peace on both sides.

“I don’t know that any of us got everything we initially wanted out of this process — however, I believe we’re as close as any group of five laypeople half a world away can get,” Arnold said before calling the vote on the resolution. 

Both the Folsom and Davis resolutions explicitly mention the rise in Islamophobia and antisemitism after Hamas militants’ attacks on Oct. 7, with the Folsom resolution denouncing “hate crimes of any type” and the Davis resolution “condemning the rise of Antisemitic, Islamophobic, Anti-Arab and other racist and xenophobic attacks in our community, our region and throughout our world.” 

Davis has a history of taking a stand on international struggle: It was the first city in the U.S. to hold a referendum on divestment from South Africa under apartheid. In explicitly calling for a cease-fire, it joins a handful of other California cities, including Richmond, Cudahy and Oakland.

Long Beach City Council also passed its own cease-fire resolution on Tuesday.

The Davis resolution will be sent to several elected officials, including the Yolo County Board of Supervisors, Gov. Gavin Newsom, Rep. Mike Thompson, California's U.S. senators, President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. 

“We will continue to ask our representatives, of all types, up and down the electoral chain — city council members to Yolo Board of Supervisors — to be in solidarity with a resolution for cease-fire and to show that publicly,” said Scott Steward, a long-time Yolo County resident and part of the Davis Peace and Justice Network. “Because that is what’s going to be effective for getting our federal representatives, as well, in line.”  

Over the last two months, community members have been pushing for politicians holding state office in the region, including Thompson, Rep. Ami Bera, Sen. Alex Padilla and Rep. Doris Matsui, to sign House Resolution 786, which calls for “an immediate deescalation and cease-fire in Israel and occupied Palestine.” 

Those supporting a cease-fire say it’s been an uphill battle having conversations with the elected officials — while they’ve been able to meet with Bera, Matsui and Thompson, none of them have pledged support for HR 786 or made a public statement calling for a permanent cease-fire. 

Waris, who helped work on Bera’s campaign, said he and other local physicians have been “very disappointed” with the representative’s lack of support for a permanent cease-fire. 

“This is a public health crisis and atrocities are happening on a scale unprecedented, particularly when you also consider the fact that hospitals have been targeted,” he said. “Recognizing the harm that’s being done to the civilian population but also to our fellow healthcare workers and fellow healthcare facilities, we are required to speak out. This is coming from the [Hippocratic] oath that we have taken as physicians.” 

While Matsui did meet with a small group of Palestinian constituents and released a statement during last month’s temporary cease-fire, saying “the basic needs of civilians like clean water, food, and medical supplies must be met,” her office also stopped a series of planned sit-ins local organizers set up in early November. 

Michael Blenner, one of the organizers for the sit-ins, said after a day and a half, Matsui’s office staff closed the office citing “security concerns.” 

“None of us were threatening them,” he said. “We were reading the names of the Palestinian children that Israel has killed, we were reading legal documents about Israel’s war crimes and the culpability of the American government.” 

Matsui, in a statement, did not respond when asked about the closures.

“I have met with constituents whose loved ones are in immediate and constant danger – including my Palestinian constituents who have lost family members and my Jewish constituents with relatives held hostage by Hamas,” the congresswoman said. 

She acknowledged that “our Sacramento community is hurting – and I feel the deep grief and anguish caused by the violence in Gaza and Israel,” adding that she and her staff will “continue to engage with our community members, listen to their concerns, and advocate for a peaceful resolution.”

Earlier this week, a coalition of people from SRCPR, including Palestinian, Muslim, Arab, Indigenous and Jewish folks, confronted and talked with Matsui in a cafe to continue to push for her support of a cease-fire.

“I understand what it means to be interned. I also understand what it means to be an outcast to a certain degree. And I also understand what it means for Jewish people to be a part of this society,” she said. 

“And Palestinian people,” she added after a coalition member asked about Palestinians. “This started with a terrible attack.”

“It started in 1948,” the member said.

“We can’t go back that far,” Matsui responded.

Buxton, the resident who spoke at the Woodland vigil, said it’s been common that people look at the Oct. 7 Hamas attack “as if it was the first thing that happened, and everything has been a response,” and urged politicians — along with community members — not to evaluate it in a vacuum. 

“Mike Thompson mentioned that Israel has the right to defend itself, but you never hear the flip side: that Palestinians also have the right to defend themselves as well,” he said. “And the other part is not just language, it’s also history: This year before the 7th of October was one of the most deadly years for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.”

“It’s easy to jump and just say … ‘Why would people get angry? Why would people behave the way that people behave?’” he continued. “Unless you understand the history and the context and the power relations, you’ll never understand that.” 

Cease-fire the ‘bare minimum’ ask

The Israeli occupation of Palestine is decades old. It dates back to 1947, when armed Zionist groups forcibly pushed out 750,000 Palestinian people from their ancestral communities. That expulsion is now known as Al-Nakba — Arabic for “the catastrophe” — and Palestinians being forced out of their homes in Gaza due to the airstrikes have termed the ongoing violence “a second Nakba” due to the mass displacement occurring. 

Israeli security cabinet member and Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter explicitly said in November that the government is “rolling out Gaza’s Nakba 2023.”

More than 80% of the Gaza Strip’s population — over 1.8 million Palestinians — have been displaced since Israeli military retaliation began, with at least 60% of buildings destroyed. 

And Palestine’s territories — the West Bank and the Gaza Strip — are bisected by the country of Israel, which also illegally occupies both areas. In the Gaza Strip, which human rights organizations have called an open-air prison, residents have been under a land, air and sea blockade for over 15 years.

After the temporary cease-fire in the last week of November, trucks bearing humanitarian aid were again blocked from entering the Gaza Strip, exacerbating a deadly famine in Gaza.

Dahbour with the SRCPR criticized the U.S. for not learning from the parallels between its history — particularly the genocide of Indigenous peoples — and Palestinians’ modern-day plight. 

“This is a horrible thing — America doesn’t learn from its past,” he said. “If anything, it’s continuing on this genocidal methodology going forward.”

He also expressed fear about the growing conflation of antisemitism with any criticism of the Israeli government, even if it is similar to that leveled against any other country’s government — something which the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance argues is not considered antisemitism.

Recent U.S. legislation would prevent any institution of higher education from receiving any federal funds allocated in the federal budget if it “authorizes, facilitates, provides funding for or otherwise supports any event promoting antisemitism” per the IHRA definition. 

Free speech organizations have urged legislators to vote against the legislation, arguing that it targets protected speech like protests. And there’s already been a visceral reaction to university students speaking out in support of Palestinian rights and cease-fire — even with their critique rooted in criticism of Israeli government actions.

Notably, pushback against support for Palestinians’ rights and ending the Israeli occupation is not new. Palestine Legal, which provides legal support for those whose speech is targeted by being supportive of Palestinian rights, has responded to 1,707 such incidents between 2014 and 2020.

In 2021, Israeli bombardment on the Gaza Strip in May killed hundreds in 11-day strikes that marked — at the time — the most deaths since 2014. 

Though the Human Rights Watch released a 213-page report documenting the Israeli government’s committing “crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution,” Facebook removed and suppressed content about Palestinian rights and the violence committed against Palestinians. Platforms have similarly taken down content this year. 

In light of that suppression, Makeez Sawez, an Afghan American Muslim and organizer with Youth for Palestine, echoed Dahbour in critiquing the lack of specificity in descriptive language and called for the importance of precision. 

“We don’t use ‘apartheid’ as a word in this country, we use the word ‘segregation,’” she said. “Wording choice was so particular at that time — ’we’re not going to call it that, we’re going to call it something else.’ We see that happening today. We’re not going to call it a cease-fire, we’re going to call it a ‘humanitarian pause.’ … We didn’t ‘bomb places’, we ‘cut off food, water, electricity.’” 

Dahbour and other organizers, including human rights attorney and long-time Jewish Voice for Peace member David Mandel called a permanent cease-fire — and elected officials’ support of one — the first step to addressing the occupation. 

“It’s really the bare minimum of what’s needed to provide humanitarian relief for the people of Gaza, the release of hostages still being held in Gaza and possibly under the best of circumstances, open the door to … really look into the issue of Israeli occupation and the continued lack of [rights for] Palestinians,” Mandel said. 

Hope, community buoy organizers forward

Organizers keep asking: “How many more people need to die before our politicians call for a permanent cease-fire?” 

Still, they aren’t planning to stop organizing and showing continued solidarity for Palestinians. 

“I think our government is banking on the fact that people are just going to get tired, they’re going to become apathetic and lapse into forgetting about this,” Blenner, who helped with the thwarted sit-ins at Matsui’s office, said. “But that’s not going to happen. I know that because the people I’ve met, people who were not really politically engaged before, were and are motivated to show up for Palestine.”

Blenner said he’s “been loudly and proudly exclaiming ‘not in our name.’” 

“There’s this idea that Jews can only be safe through Israel’s violence, which is … a contradiction in many ways, because I’m not made safer when a Palestinian child is killed by a bomb,” he said. “I'm not made safer when a hospital is raided or destroyed.”

Events to build community and call for a cease-fire are hosted every week, and since Nov. 21, they have been compiled in a weekly calendar posted on Instagram. Included are related petitions and action items like participating in a general strike and calling elected officials to show support. 

Gaza cease-fire protests prompt Newsom to hold virtual Capitol Christmas tree-lighting ceremony

That’s especially pertinent as Christmas approaches. The holiday commemorates Jesus’s birth in Jerusalem, a city in Israeli-occupied West Bank, and Palestinian leaders of Christian denominations cited the ongoing bombardment as a reason to cancel public celebrations. 

What’s giving organizers hope in the face of the relative lack of elected officials’ support is each other, and the diversity of the coalition calling for justice in Palestine and Palestinians’ basic human rights. 

“There are times when you feel significant despair, watching all of that [going on],” said Waris, the physician. 

“The little hope I have been able to find is seeing how cross-sectional the support has been from people, even outside the Arab and Muslim community — Jewish community, Christian community, people of all ages standing up and saying ‘This is not something we can allow to happen,’” he added. “And that to me, gives me some hope that hey, we will not only hopefully resolve this, but have a better world at the end of it, despite obviously, so many lives and so much harm done.”

Seth Sanders is a professor of religious studies and Jewish studies at UC Davis who lived in Jerusalem for four years. His grandparents fled pogroms, organized violence historically meant to ethnic cleanse a specific racial or ethnic group, particularly Jews, in Ukraine. 

He was among the Jewish students, faculty and residents who gathered to light Hanukkah candles outside the Davis City Council chambers before the Dec. 12 meeting, and said in a press release that “we light Hanukkah candles in public to proudly display a Jewish message: That we find safety through solidarity with our brethren.” 

“The fact that Congresspeople sometimes still think that Jews are a monolith, a politically undifferentiated blob, is really being shown to be false,” Sanders told CapRadio. “[It] terrifies me that my tax dollars are being used to support this ethnic cleansing [of Palestinians] and attempted extermination.”

And despite the crackdown on university students’ speech, Dahbour said discussions and organizing around Palestinian rights at universities have been heartening.

“They're forming networks in the universities and reaching out to the African Americans, to the Latinos, to LGBTQ [people], to all these minorities, and finding a common universal foundation for the struggle, and laying the ground that justice is a universal fight, not just for one community,” Dahbour said. “Because if justice is a monopoly of one community, then it’s not justice. It’s supremacy.”