City hall says no to Gaza ceasefire petition
A week after saying yes to the local micro-birthers and a year after the "barbaric" resolution
City says no to ceasefire petition—a lovely community sukkah—odds and ends
City hall says no to Gaza ceasefire petition
A week after city officials allowed a “show me your papers” petition onto a council agenda, they’ve decided to block a different one: a Gaza ceasefire resolution submitted by a coalition of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian organizations.
In denying the submission, the city clerk’s office cited the same city rule used ahead of last week’s meeting to allow an item from the Worcester Republican City Committee requesting that immigrants be required to show their naturalization papers to the clerk’s office in order to run for local office.
Organizers of the ceasefire petition were notified of the denial at 4:02 p.m. on Friday, minutes before the agenda was published. They had submitted it a week prior. In an email to organizers, Deputy Clerk A.J. Pottle wrote:
I am reaching out, as your attached petition was reviewed by the City Clerk, and he has ruled it cannot be added to the City Council agenda, citing the request being in violation of Rule 11 of the City Council. I have bolded the portion of the Rule in issue.
Rule 11. Regarding Propriety of Items
No petition, paper, order, communication or report of any description which deals with personalities, or with matters not within the general supervision and/or relating to city government, or does not specifically state the business to be discussed, shall be placed on any city council agenda by the city clerk. The city clerk, with the assistance of the city solicitor, shall determine when an item is not appropriate for placement on the city council agenda.
If you would like to refile a petition more closely aligned with an issue within the City Council’s purview, we would be happy to review it accordingly.
Last October, the clerk’s office allowed, and the city council voted on, a resolution to condemn Hamas. The text of that resolution read:
That the City Council of the City of Worcester does hereby condemn the recent barbaric and inhuman taking of hostages in Israel, including a number of American citizens, and prays for their immediate and safe release and return to their loved ones.
The vote was 8-2, with Etel Haxhiaj and Thu Nguyen objecting to the loaded use of “barbaric and inhuman,” as was the right thing to do. But we don’t need to relitigate that. Point is: that item made it onto the agenda and the council voted it. Rule 11 was very obviously not invoked by the city clerk as it was with the ceasefire resolution.
The ceasefire resolution steers clear of the “clash of civilizations” rhetoric seen in the October item city officials found permissible. It reads:
A RESOLUTION TO END THE WAR ON GAZA
Be it resolved by the City Council of the City of Worcester, in City Council assembled, as follows:
WHEREAS on October 17th, 2023, the Worcester City Council voted 8 to 2, with one abstention, in favor of a resolution condemning the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel that took nearly 1,200 lives,
AND WHEREAS the ongoing war on Gaza has resulted in over 42,000 Palestinian lives lost, more than 50% being women and children,
AND WHEREAS Israeli hostages in Gaza and Palestinian detainees in Israel have died in custody and face ever-increasing risks of dying,
AND WHEREAS the United Nations reports that over a million Gazans face starvation and life-threatening diseases as a result of the present blockade of desperately needed medical supplies and the staples of life itself,
AND WHEREAS the International Court of Justice ruled in July 2024 that Israel's occupation of the Gaza strip and the West Bank is unlawful, and that Israel's legislation and actions violate the international prohibition on racial segregation and apartheid,
AND WHEREAS US law proscribes the sale or transfer of American munitions to systematically carry out indiscriminate attacks on civilians and prevent the transport and delivery of US humanitarian aid,
AND WHEREAS the United States has backed a ceasefire plan passed by the United Nations Security Council,
BE IT RESOLVED that the City Council of Worcester calls on the US government to facilitate and demand:
1. An immediate and permanent ceasefire to end the violence
2. Immediate release of hostages and detainees on all sides
3. Immediate resumption of the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza unhindered
4. Enforcement of US laws, including the Leahy Law of 1997, the Conventional Arms Transfer Policy, and the Arms Export Control Act, which would halt US weapon sales and transfers to Israel that make us accomplices to the present mass slaughter of innocents
About 13 cities and towns in Massachusetts, including Boston, have passed resolutions similar to this. Those resolutions were, of course, not blocked by the clerk and law department of their respective city and town halls.
In response to the clerk, a member of the coalition asked “How was this considered a matter ‘within the general supervision and/or relating to city government’ and ours was not?”
As of my writing this, that email has gone unanswered. Perhaps because it’s a tough one! (And, as was made clear last week, the clerk defers to the law department on these matters.) Looking at both items, it’s pretty hard to see how Rule 11 can be invoked to block one and not the other. Condemning barbarism is council business but the mass killing of civilians? Nope. Outside the scope.
The double standard accusations are gunna be hard to beat, especially after the city lawyer neatly laid out his argument for allowing birtherism on the agenda last week. That petition was “asking for a charter change and that’s within the scope of the council’s authority,” City Solicitor Mike Traynor told the council. If it’s in the council’s scope of authority, it goes on the agenda—no judgments made on the content, he said. But here we have a resolution deemed outside the council’s authority despite the very first line of it relating to an action the council took in real life, in public with all the proper documentation, just last year.
Apropos of nothing here’s a line from Michael Parenti’s Inventing Reality: “They may obligingly report whatever politico-economic elites pronounce, be it truth, half-truths, or lies, but they instantly resuscitate their critical faculties when dealing with dissenters or foreign leaders out of favor with the United States.“
In instantly resuscitating their critical faculties here, city hall didn’t just step on a rake, they willfully jumped on it. If you’re furious, you have every right to be. While seemingly small gestures, these local resolutions play a practical role in bringing the genocide to an end. They show our federal delegation they have community support to move on this issue, and, with Jim McGovern, we are in the rare position of having a congressman who can be moved.
On Tuesday, organizers will hold a protest on the third floor of city hall ahead of the meeting, starting at 5:30 p.m. The more people that show up the better!
In a statement, the multi-faith coalition behind the petition said:
After obtaining over 1200 signatures, the multifaith coalition had filed a petition calling for a ceasefire in Israel-Hamas War; the return of all hostages; the resumption of humanitarian aid to Gaza; and enforcement of US laws prohibiting assistance to foreign militaries violating human rights. With the resolution barred from the official agenda, activists plan to highlight the city administration’s discriminatory use of procedural mechanisms to deny supporters of Worcester’s Palestinian diaspora community the opportunity to participate in local governance.
At an event Sunday afternoon, members of Worcester Havurah, a newly formed local independent Jewish group, said the decision to block it amounted to silencing the community.
“I think it’s even more important for folks to show up if you are able to, given that this is a pretty obvious concerted attempt by city government to keep Palestinian voices and allies of Palestinians off of their agenda and silenced,” said organizer Allie Cislo.
About 50 people gathered at the Quaker Friends Meeting house on Pleasant Street for the group’s Community Sukkah celebration. Worcester Havurah is part of the multi-faith coalition that submitted the resolution. The group had already planned to show up on Tuesday in support of their petition, but now the demonstration takes on a different tenor.
“This is totally silencing. The council is being unfair,” said Aliza Levine, Havurah organizer. “This gives us even a bigger opportunity to amplify what’s happening on college campuses and all across this country. People who are saying this genocide has got to stop are being silenced and shut out of the public conversation.”
They asked that folks in attendance spread the word to get as big a crowd out as possible on Tuesday. So consider this post me doing so! If you can make it, see you there.
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Anyway on to part two of this post which is considerably nicer.
Community Sukkah!
The Havurah event Sunday afternoon wasn’t just a political organizing meeting—it was a lot more than that and it was beautiful. I’d be remiss to not depict it in full.
I arrived at the meeting house unsure of what to expect. I’d never been there before and was somewhat surprised to learn it was a Quaker institution. At the top of the driveway there were two signs—one that said “Community Sukkah” and another that read “STOP ALL RACISM—COLONIALISM—NOW.”
As I approached a woman named Anna walked out of the house with a folding table and smiled. “You here for the sukkah?”
I followed her down a path, under an oak tree with bright yellow leaves, to a small, contained field, sunlight glittering through trees onto folding tables with potluck fare and crafts and, in the far corner, a curious three-walled hut, somewhere between a pergola and a screen porch, that children were in the middle of decorating with leaves and ribbons and tinsel. To the left of it was a pile of non-perishables in various boxes and shopping bags that folks had brought for the Worcester Community Fridges. That’s what Anna’s folding table was for, until she opened it to find a leg had come clean off. “We can make do with three,” she said, holding it.
Talking to organizers, I learned that the pergola porch was the centerpiece of the event, the “sukkah” erected to celebrate the week-long Jewish Sukkot festival.
Before we get any further, I know almost nothing about religion. I’m clueless on Catholicism, for instance, (i.e. is Mary the mom or wife? Not sure/don’t care) despite being baptized and confirmed, so if I sound like a simpleton describing these Jewish traditions—guilty as charged. Like timeshares and short-selling, religious rites are a matter on which I have resolved to maintain a blissful ignorance.
So anyway, about this sukkah: Some members of the group had driven to Hull to pick it up on Facebook marketplace then put it together in this nice little field for the week. It had an endearing homemade quality to it.
In Judaism, a “havurah” is a lay-led religious organization. The Worcester Havurah has been slowly building itself up for the past couple years in private. Recently, they decided to make the group public-facing (there’s now a website and a sign-up page and an Instagram), they have about 70 members, and the community sukkah on Sunday was one of their first public events.1
The point, Cislo told me, is to show that, “Jews are not monoliths and people who are paid by Jewish fundraising organizations to kind of claim that—they don't have a premium on Jewish identity, they don't have a premium on religious or cultural expression.” Not anywhere, she said, least of all Worcester. “I think the hunger people have for something that is rooted in a leftist politics and rooted in a diasporist identity, it’s just not represented in any of the institutional ways.”
The event was well attended, full of young families and children and a few familiar faces from my time in and around Worcester politics. The spread was vegetarian and bountiful, centered on three loaves of challah that organizers passed around on trays halfway through the event. Feeling freaky for tzatziki, I scooped a big dollop of it on my piece of challah and it felt a little blasphemous, so much so that a momentary rush of middle-school-dance embarrassment welled up from the suppressed Catholic depths. But if it was no one seemed to notice or care and challah-tzatziki is a pretty good combo I gotta say.
The Worcester Havurah is pointedly diasporist and approached the event with a critique in mind. In a Zionist context, the erection of a sukkah can tend to take on a certain instrumentalization, organizer Lerm Lerman-Sinkoff told me, in that people assign it an inherent relationship to land within the state of Israel. (Just yesterday, it turns out, right-wing Israeli organizations built a “sukkot tent city” on the border of Gaza as part of a campaign to “resettle” it.)
The Worcester group put up their sukkah to represent the spirit of it, not any land claim. It’s meant to symbolize harmony with the outside world, with nature, and the welcoming in of people outside the faith.
The crowd gathered in a semi-circle around the sukkah as Aliza Levine explained its meaning, three loaves of challah on the table behind her and children playing within. “What does a sukkah need?” she asked. “Leaves!” a little girl shouted and everyone laughed.
Sukkot comes around once a year, she said, in the fall. The sukkah is a temporary shelter, meant to be eaten in, ideally with company, sometimes slept in. It stays up for a week or so, the duration of Sukkot. It can only have three walls—a symbol of being open to the world. It’s not something sturdy, immoveable, unchanging, Levine explained. “Safety isn't built by border walls and security fences. Isolation will never make us safer.” The central quality of the structure is its openness to guests, she said. “Likewise, peace requires an open relationship.” And peace cannot be secured once and for all. It’s not a castle that can be built once and never come down. It’s flimsy like a sukkah. “We expect it to fall down sometimes ... And in fact there’s a teaching that if in a storm your sukkah does not fall down, it was not kosher to begin with.”
“I think we’re good,” someone in the crowd quipped. “This is a very kosher sukkah,” said another.
Amid laughter Levine continued: “And just like peace we need to tend it, and give it support, and trust it.”
Jeuji Diamondstone, sitting to her left, chimed in: “That’s like solidarity, you have to make it and remake it.”
A murmur of agreement rippled around the semi-circle. They sang a song, the Sukkat Shlomecha, that the Israelites first sang on their first night in the desert, Levine explained, "after they left bondage and began toward liberation."
“I hope that this year we all collectively continue our journey toward liberation this year,” said Levine. “And we keep at the work of building our sukkahs of peace.”
They sang the Sukkat Shlomecha several times in a row, each rendition more confident than the last. “Ufros aleinu Sukkat, Sukkat Shlomecha.” In English it translates roughly to “spread over us your structure, your structure of peace.”
Odds and ends
Thanks for reading! I felt this was worth pushing everything else aside for. My ‘Guide To The Election And/Or Kevin Can Fuck Himself’ can wait a few days. Hope we get a good crowd out on Tuesday!
And please consider supporting this newsletter while you’re at it.
Meanwhile, at the Boston Herald...
I can’t believe the Boston Herald of all places misrepresented a story to make it red meat for townie whites. Good piece explaining all this drama in This Week In Worcester.
Accounta-Billy time: In the section of my last post about a new challenger in School Committee District E, I used some careless language. The first version (which went out to inboxes, since updated online) read “Now Chafoya is picking up where Medina left off…” After posting, I realized this carries the implication that Medina is not planning to run again—not what I intended! It’s very early in the election season, and Medina hasn’t yet announced either way.
The deputy chiefs story continues to unravel: the state civil service commission is now formally investigating the city for not hiring a real police chief.
Early voting has started. Will go until election day. And like I said my guide will be out soon.
The little-known chat function of this newsletter has been picking up of late. It would be nice to turn that into a proper little community. Example: Andrew Kennedy following up on the news of Russo closing and the Polar Park death spiral of the Canal District.
It's been a long time since I seriously addressed the subject. Maybe time to revisit this one from 2021: “The Phenomenon is strangling us”
Any paid subscriber can start a thread or post a comment in there. So feel free to do so! Just be nice.
My favorite podcast TrueAnon has a newsletter on their Patreon page called Crackpots now and it is very good. The first edition is written by host Liz Franczak:
That the realpolitik id of social media production allows for loose interpretation of the rules of reality is a feature built into the design of the machine. I'm not sure there is another way to post.
People—especially, but not only, media people—love to insist that this type of toxic storytelling is contained to those who are terminally online. As if that wasn't everyone. The sludge of the social media machine invariably leaks to the outside.
It’s a paid-only product but consider this my recommendation to pay for it.
Linked within is a recent piece in New York Magazine by Max Read about AI and the endless slop that’s making the internet illegible.
If it were all just a slightly more efficient form of spam, distracting and deceiving Facebook-addled grandparents, that would be one thing. But the slop tide threatens some of the key functions of the web, clogging search results with nonsense, overwhelming small institutions like Clarkesworld, and generally polluting the already fragile information ecosystem of the internet.
It makes me realize I should update the Worcester Sucks bio/make it very clear that no AI at all is used in the production of this newsletter. These posts in their stupidity are simply impossible for a machine to replicate.
Need to keep it under the crank radar a bit so I’m being sneaky: very cool event coming up in mid-November.
Re: rejecting that petition, sounds like the city hasn’t lost a lawsuit in a while and they’re missing that feeling of defeat.
Thank you for continuing to report on what so many of us care about