Updated March 20, 11:35 a.m.:
The Sacramento City Council passed a resolution calling for a cease-fire in Gaza just before midnight Tuesday after clearing the public from the meeting.
Officials approved the resolution in a 6-1 vote, with only Council member Lisa Kaplan opposing it. Mayor Darrell Steinberg said he had mixed feelings about how the meeting went.
“I think it is unfortunate … that we weren’t able to hear from everyone tonight, and yet we heard from almost 80 people,” he said.
The mayor ended public comments after some people interrupted a speaker with heckling.
The Sacramento Police Department said in an early Wednesday statement that it made 12 arrests after asking protesters to voluntarily leave the chambers.
The resolution drew criticism from people supporting Palestine as well as those supporting Israel. It’s unclear whether protests will continue at future City Council meetings.
Council member Mai Vang — who proposed a similar resolution earlier this year with fellow Council member Katie Valenzuela — was not present at Tuesday’s meeting due to “prearranged family commitments,” she said in a statement on X, the website formerly known as Twitter.
She went on to say she supports the resolution, but that “words matter and while I have deep concerns and disagree with several of the whereas clauses, the most important aspect about this resolution clearly articulates the demand for a permanent ceasefire to preserve human life and end the genocidal killing of Palestinians.”
Original story, published March 19:
The Sacramento City Council will discuss a resolution calling for a permanent bilateral cease-fire in Gaza on Tuesday, weeks after Mayor Darrell Steinberg blocked a proposal he said was too one-sided.
Protesters have urged the council to pass a cease-fire resolution for months, giving public comments and sometimes breaking decorum rules, prompting the city to end meetings early and clear the chambers.
Some Jewish community members and the Sacramento Valley/Central California chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations are backing the resolution Steinberg is bringing forward, but it’s unclear whether the proposal will receive widespread public support. The mayor and council can pass it with a two-thirds vote, or at least six yes votes.
The local CAIR chapter drafted and supported the cease-fire resolution Council members Mai Vang and Katie Valenzuela introduced in January, which Steinberg prevented from being considered at any meetings. Omar Altamimi, a senior policy and advocacy coordinator for CAIR, said the community was initially stunned by the decision.
The language in Steinberg’s resolution reflects the mayor’s belief that Jewish community members needed to be involved, Altamimi added, and is a direct result of the rejection of the previous proposal. The resolution aims to bring communities and Sacramento together, he added.
“Not every single person in the Muslim community, not every single person in the Jewish community will agree to every single thing that's in that resolution,” Altamimi said. “But they'll all find something that they can agree with and something that they can support. And I think that's what's important.”
Valenzuela disagrees with some of the language, but said she plans to support the resolution because it includes the goals of calling for a permanent ceasefire and release of hostages. Valenzuela added that she and Vang were prepared to support a resolution that CAIR backed, given that they were following the organization’s lead and CAIR wrote the previous proposal.
“I hope while people have disagreements over some of the semantics and the rest of the language, that we can all rally behind this being probably the strongest resolution we could get out of our current council,” Valenzuela said.
Resolution deals with international and local issues
If the resolution passes, the City of Sacramento will formally call for Israel to stop bombing Gaza and the West Bank, as well as for Hamas to end attacks against Israel. The proposal also urges the release of Israeli hostages and Palestians who are held without charge. The resolution says the city denounces both antisemitism and Islamophobia, too.
Another clause claims the city supports a two-state solution, which would create a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Sahar Razavi is an director of the Iranian and Middle Eastern Studies Center at Sacramento State and an assistant professor of political science. She told CapRadio that endorsing the two-state solution as middle-of-the-road without acknowledging how controversial it is oversimplifies the issue.
The crisis abroad, Razavi said, raises complexities locally.
“It's about what's happening in Sacramento, the complexities of the communities that are trying to come together and the issues that those communities are raising with each other and the desire to have mutual acknowledgment and a kind of co-created sense of community safety,” Razavi said. “Those things are very complex, those processes are very complex and they are extremely worthy. But I'm not confident that this resolution actually fulfills those objectives.”
She pointed out how the proposal repeats the same language in several places and swaps out different identities. The phrase “many in the Jewish community are rightfully offended” appears before the phrase “many in the Muslim communities are rightfully offended,” for example.
While Razavi said she can see the attempt to make the resolution inclusive, she added it has a forced centrism.
“That forced centrism ultimately serves to falsely equate the ‘two sides,’ right, although we know there are more,” Razavi said. “It serves to create this false equivalency between the two where there is absolutely a huge power disparity that is being obscured by that forced centrism.”
‘Can’t get more charged than this topic’
In a press release, Steinberg said the resolution includes points important to all sides. Steinberg, who is Jewish, has made multiple comments on the crisis in Gaza, including from the council dais and at a vigil calling for the release of Israeli hostages.
“It also includes some provisions that each side would write differently if they wrote it themselves,” Steinberg said in a Thursday press release. “That is the nature of principled compromise. We may not be able to create peace in the Middle East, but we can model what we want to see throughout the world here in our own city.”
When people have urged the council to adopt a cease-fire resolution over the past couple months, Steinberg has sometimes left the chambers, leaving Vice Mayor Caity Maple to chair meetings.
Kim Nalder, a political science professor at Sacramento State, said it’s understandable how emotions have run high in council meetings. When people have strong feelings about the issues for understandable reasons, she says they are less likely to want to give a short speech and leave.
“You can't get more charged than this topic and it goes to the heart of people's identity,” Nalder said. “And because of the history of antisemitism and Islamophobia, people are really primed to be especially concerned.”
The push for a cease-fire resolution isn’t the first time the Sacramento City Council has heard emotional and sometimes disruptive public testimony. The council has shut down meetings in response to extremist conspiracy theories and protests related to the killing of Stephon Clark. In a democracy, Nalder said it’s important for people to feel heard by elected officials, even if they don’t make decisions in their favor.
“Our City Council in particular has very much tried to allow for a whole lot of that expression, especially from groups or individuals who are really hurt and who have suffered an injustice,” Nalder said. “They really need to vent and to have their leaders understand how they feel. And so and that's just very much valued in democracy.”
The cease-fire resolution is scheduled to be discussed during the 5 p.m. council meeting at City Hall.
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