Activists who interrupted another Berkeley City Council meeting Tuesday to demand its members pass a resolution calling for a cease-fire in Gaza vowed that their disruptive protests will continue until the city acts.
About 30 people took part in the demonstration at a special City Council meeting Tuesday morning, which was called to take up the agenda from another meeting last week that dozens of pro-Palestinian activists shut down.
Demonstrators want Berkeley to join Richmond and a handful of other city governments, as well as a growing number of members of Congress, who have called for an end to the Israeli bombardment of Gaza that has killed more than 11,000 people, many of them children.
Council members and city staff left the dais soon after the protest began.
The council resumed its meeting in another room from which members of the public were prohibited, citing a provision of California’s open meetings law that allows government boards to bar the public from meetings that have been “willfully interrupted by a group or groups of persons so as to render the orderly conduct of such meeting unfeasible.” The law requires journalists to be allowed into the meeting area, which city staff did; the public could continue to watch the meeting and participate in it via Zoom.
Mayor Jesse Arreguín declined to comment on the protest after the council meeting adjourned Tuesday.
As the meeting continued a few rooms away, demonstrators chanted, cheered and gave speeches in front of the empty dais. One speaker — who asked to be identified only by her first name, Angelica, because she said she feared endangering family members in Palestine — said the protests would continue at future council meetings and there would be “no business as usual when there’s a genocide.”
The council is set to meet next Tuesday.
“It’s absolutely absurd that calling to stop killing people is controversial,” said Imtiaz Ghori, a Berkeley resident and pediatrician who took part in the demonstration and plans to continue protesting at future meetings.
“It’s heartbreaking,” Ghori said with tears in her eyes, “and it’s so nauseating to see the indifference of our leaders.”
Berkeley’s rent stabilization board could soon become the city’s first body of elected officials to call for a cease-fire — members have scheduled a special meeting next month to discuss a resolution, and several indicated they would support it last week.
No council members have so far called for a city resolution about the war in Gaza, and two members told Berkeleyside earlier this month they believe such a measure would not be productive.
At a council meeting on Oct. 10 — soon after Hamas fighters launched attacks on Israeli civilians, killing about 1,200 people, and Israel began its bombing campaign — Councilmember Sophie Hahn asked that the meeting be ceremonially adjourned in honor of “all who have died through acts of terrorism … and to pray that the loss of life — all loss of life — cease.”
A draft resolution that activists have asked the City Council to pass accuses Israel of engaging in “an ethnic cleansing campaign” in Gaza. The resolution urges the Biden administration to call for a cease-fire and humanitarian aid, and demands the end of military support for Israel “in order to fund urgent needs in the United States such as homelessness, food insecurity and education.” It also calls for the release of about 240 hostages taken by Hamas, as well as Palestinians arrested since Oct. 7.
Several demonstrators calling for a resolution contend there is a moral imperative to speak out against the Israeli military’s actions, and say the war is relevant to Berkeley even though it’s far from the city.
“I’m a low-income, Black single mother — if we don’t make a stand about something as blatant as this genocide, how can I expect that they will protect me?” said Whitney Sparks, who attended Tuesday’s protest. “It is a local issue, absolutely.”
