Pro-Palestinian activists of San Francisco have been hard at work lately organizing demonstrations attended by tens of thousands and, following the lead of other Bay Area towns, working on a “ceasefire” resolution. The latter is an attempt to get Israel to lay down its arms as the country nears victory over Hamas.
Although the final version of the document adopted by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors included some pro forma statement about the terrorist organization, like all both-sidisms, it was meaningless. Hamas already made clear both in word and deed that it won’t abide by ceasefire agreements. All efforts to impose a long-lasting truce are intended to declaw the Jewish state. Likewise, as customary, the resolution degraded the genuine concerns about antisemitism with allusions to islamophobia and anti-Palestinian sentiment.
Overall, the resolution was what one expects — nowhere does it say that Israel has the right to defend itself or call on Hamas to surrender. It both insinuated that Israel targets civilians while erasing any difference between the collateral damage sustained by the Palestinian side and the intentional murder and torture of Israelis and their friends. In fact, it shies away from mentioning the horrific ways in which Gazans treated Israelis. The statement that Israeli hostages are “also” at risk is particularly heinous because Palestinian sympathizers would have you believe that it’s Israel’s campaign to liberate them that endangers these men, women, and children, not the Palestinians who took them hostage.
It a darkly comical situation — America’s most dysfunctional municipality, a town of under a million people with a budget of $14.6 billion that can’t figure out how to get nearly 8000 of its resident drug addicts off the streets or to keep stores from being ripped, takes it upon itself to dictate to the Jewish state how to defend itself. It’s also a very familiar situation — antisemitism is an ideology of failure.
When the Board of Supervisors voted 8:3 to support the resolution, boomer grannies in attendance, pink dye covering the grey of their heads, got off their seats, clapping and chanting through their tightly fitted masks, “Free Palestine!” OK, fine, a few token youngish men were in the audience—also a young woman with a baby strapped to her chest. The baby tolerated the noise well. But the IDF is shaking in their boots. They are going to roll over and die now.
Predictably, the reaction on social media was ridicule. @TheDailyFreir commented on the video of the pro-Palestinian jubilation: “I used Artificial Intelligence to create a video of Maoist Trustafarian Hypochondriacs.” And @HilzFuld quipped: “Tel Aviv just voted 10-0 to have SF clean up the human feces and heroine needles on their streets before thinking they have a right to preach to anyone about literally anything.”
Historically, local resolutions calling for a change of direction in American foreign policy don’t amount to much. I expect the Biden Administration to continue with its rather lukewarm support for Israel, unfazed by the demands of the Board of Supervisors and friends.
Yet the resolution in question is not painless. Because it energizes some of the most aggressive elements in the Bay Area, its results will be felt negatively throughout the region.
San Francisco’s State Senator Scott Weiner, of whom, on balance, I am not a fan, noted both the failure of the resolution to include language acknowledging Israel’s righteous grievances and the foul character of its supporters:
[Supervisor] @MattDorsey asked to include language about Hamas’s mass sexual violence against Israeli women & was met with shouts of “liar” — part of a QAnon/January 6-style conspiracy theory that these rapes didn’t happen.
While denying the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, pro-Palestinian protesters routinely shout slogans, like “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” that amount to calls for genocide. And how do they conduct themselves during the local protests?
When the January 6 anti-Israel demonstration in the El Cerrito suburb was met with a small counter-protest, a man with a face entirely obscured by a desert scarf “pushed a woman down to the ground from behind, injuring her, and then stole her Israeli flag by force. He then burned the flag in the street.” Although El Cerrito Police launched a hate crime investigation, the man’s identity is still unknown. The distinctive denim jacket he wore that the cops are asking to identify might have been a decoy.
Incidents like this are part of a global pattern of violence against Jews, and local authorities should be prepared to deal with them. They aren’t. What is lacking is local leadership — the kind that discourages mobs.
Aside from Wiener and the supervisors who voted against the resolution, nobody in the San Francisco establishment is speaking out against the grossly unethical resolution. It’s only radio silence from Mayor London Breed or the former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. California Governor Gavin Newsom owes his political fortunes to the San Francisco machine and is likewise mum.
As expected from a man with presidential ambitions, Newsom went to Israel following the Simchat Torah massacre. There, he took pictures with the victims, some of them from California, but what did he do to fight antisemitism and antizionism in his own backyard?
Laughing off San Francisco’s ceasefire resolution is easy, but global intifada manifests itself locally. It’s an important ideological victory for the local anti-Israel camp. Expect them to go from strength to strength, shoring up support among the naïve and uneducated while flexing their muscle literally at every turn. When a masked thug sucker punches a woman for speaking her mind, and police are nowhere to be found, the local Jewish community has a problem.
Unfortunately, the war on another continent does have a lot to do with San Francisco, just not in the way pro-Palestinian activists imagine. Responsible local leadership would go beyond refusing to take the ceasefire resolution to vote. It would reprimand violence — the natural, physical kind — and address the ideological causes of it. Another suggestion is to ban masked public events — obviously, the goon in El Cerrito came prepared.
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