On October 13, 2023, Chicago’s City Council passed a Zionist, Islamophobic resolution supporting Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. The resolution and its unequivocal support for Israel made no mention of the injustice and violations of human rights suffered by Palestinians. Since we could not count on City Council to do the right thing, The Hoodoisie authored our own resolution calling out City Council, condemning Israel state-sanctioned terrorism and expressing solidarity with Palestine. Read below and sign on.
Outraged by the Islamophobic and Zionist resolution passed by Chicago’s City Council on October 13, despite the city boasting a “progressive” mayor and more alderpeople than ever, The Hoodoisie decided their collective’s statement of solidarity would be a counter resolution. The resolution embraces The Hoodoisie’s in your face spirit and “block-optic” gaze to call out City Council and Mayor Brandon Johnson, school Chicagoans on Israel’s settler colonialism and genocide of Palestinians, and make critical connections between social struggle in Palestine and Chicago. The People’s Resolution is “ratified” by every Chicagoan who signs it, with over 700 signatures since the resolution’s website dropped last week.
Ultimately, the resolution aims to make visible the local support for Palestinian liberation and archive the fact that many Chicagoans were not willing to be complicit with genocide like City Council. The Hoodoisie hopes the resolution demonstrates Chicagoans have the back of Palestinians abroad but also here in Chicago and can connect Chicagoans to the many Palestinian-led and radical Jewish-led efforts to stop Israel’s U.S.-sponsored genocide against Palestinians.
Check out the resolution and visit the site to add your name.
WHEREAS, on Friday, October 13, 2023, Members of City Council of the City of Chicago passed a resolution condemning the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel, expressing solidarity and sympathy with Israel, and praying for the safe release of Israeli hostages without any acknowledgement of Israel’s status as a far-right, Zionist, settler colonial, apartheid state that has oppressed the people of Palestine for decades; and
WHEREAS, City Council debated and passed this resolution precisely while Israel was engaged in genocidal violence violating international law against the Palestinian people; and
WHEREAS, a number of human rights organizations and international bodies condemned Israel’s actions against the occupied Palestinian territories; and
WHEREAS, President of Israel, Isaac Herzog, mobilized racialized and genocidal rhetoric stating “there are no innocents in the Gaza strip” referring to a population of inhabitants that is 50% children to justify and valorize Israel’s genocide of Palestinians; and
WHEREAS, our city is bearing witness to the most public genocide in the history of the world, watching over thousands of Gazans be martyred as Israel refuses humanitarian corridors and bombs escape routes, hospitals, schools, residential buildings and places of worship where civilians are seeking refuge; and
WHEREAS, the Israeli’s government’s decision to cut power, water, and fuel supply to the Gaza strip is nothing but the collective punishment of its entire population of 2.3 million people and directly violates international laws; and
WHEREAS, the Israeli government used white phosphorus bombs in Gaza, resulting in hundreds of cases of suffocation according to Palestinian medical sources, and in directly violating the 1980 Geneva Convention which forbids use of white phosphorus against humans and the environment; and
WHEREAS, Israel’s carpet-bombing of Gaza and vigilante attacks in the West Bank have claimed the lives of nearly 4,000 Palestinian people, a third being women and children; and
WHEREAS, such violence is not an aberration in the history of Israel but merely a continuation of decades of Israel state terrorism against Palestinians since Israel’s establishment that ranges from dozens of massacres by Zionist paramilitary groups, the Nakba, and the routinized violence of occupation; murderous repression of peaceful protests like the Great March of Return; and fostering Hamas to thwart negotiating Palestinian statehood as decided during the Oslo peace process; and
WHEREAS, Israel was founded on the violent racial exclusion of the Arab population in Palestine, was established as a state by the United Nations because of white, Christian, European anti-Semitism, with the support of hegemonic imperialist powers like the U.S. invested in Israel’s establishment for their strategic interests; and
WHEREAS, Zionism may have been motivated by desires of oppressed Jewish people to escape European anti-Semitism and notions of living free on a biblical homeland, it has evolved into a genocidal ideology deployed to enable ethnic cleansing just as Manifest Destiny and Lebensraum was mobilized for European American colonists and German Nazis, respectively; and
WHEREAS, nothing can justify the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, who share no blame for the brutality of Europe’s pogroms and Holocaust against European Jews; and
WHEREAS, Chicago is home to approximately 85,000 Palestinian Americans who deserve to know they are not alone and belong to a city that recognizes their historic oppression and the current genocide against them; and
WHEREAS, the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights reports Chicago taxpayers contribute $40,705,222 in federal tax dollars toward the $3.8 billion the U.S. spends on military funding for Israel which could instead fund 4,838 households with public housing for a year, 14,163 children receiving free or low-cost healthcare, 444 elementary school teachers, 115,886 households with solar electricity produced for a year, and 1077 students with their loan debt canceled; and
WHEREAS, demographically, Chicago is approximately one-third Black and one-third Latino and home to other racialized minoritized communities who live in circumstances of oppression contrived from the same colonial logics and practices shaping the lives of Palestinians; and
WHEREAS, Palestinians live in confinement in what has been classified as “apartheid” by Amnesty International and deemed the largest “open-air prison” on the planet by Human Rights Watch where they are subjected to impoverished and degrading conditions resonant with those surviving in Chicago’s divested and socially abandoned communities of color that is part of Chicago’s historic and ongoing formal and informal class and racial segregation; and
WHEREAS, Palestinians live under the constant threat of state-sanctioned terrorism such as military brutality, slaughter, and torture and violence by the Israel Defense Force that reverberates with Chicago’s historic and ongoing police brutality, slaughter and torture, principally of the city’s Black denizens residents; and
WHEREAS, Western media’s incendiary lies and Islamophobic claims such as debunked claims of Hamas beheading 40 babies echoes the same media lies and sensationalism framing Chicago as a land of terroristic and criminal racialized others to engender violence against our city’s dispossessed people of color; and
WHEREAS, Wadea al-Fayoume, a 6-year old Palestinian American boy in nearby Plainfield, Illinois who was stabbed 26 times and murdered by his elderly white landlord spurred by Zionist, Islamophobic propaganda by the U.S.; and
WHEREAS, offering unequivocal support for a Zionist and extremist Israel as it displaces millions of Palestinian people with support of U.S. foreign policy only validates unjust U.S. intervention that yields situations like the Venezuelan migrant crisis with which we currently contend in Chicago; and
WHEREAS, Members of the City Council of the City of Chicago have failed communities of color and working-class communities time and again, historically operating as rubber stamp body enabling ruling-class and white supremacist interests and apparently continue to do so even as it touts more “progressive” members than ever; and
WHEREAS, Alderwoman Debra Silverstein who introduced the resolution passed on October 13th may be an unapologetic Zionist and Islamophobe championing the genocide of Palestinian people but that doesn’t mean all of Chicago should be; and
WHEREAS, Mayor Brandon Johnson is on record defining anti-Semitism in pro-Zionist terms that valorize Israel’s settler colonialism and genocide of Palestinians while campaigning for mayor during a closed-door candidate forum hosted by the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago; and
WHEREAS, Mayor Brandon Johnson needs a new haircut because he looked ridiculous standing despotically while presiding over debate of Silverstein’s resolution and ejecting protestors with a faux-hawk; and
WHEREAS, the people of Chicago cannot count on Members of City Council of the City of Chicago to stand on the right side of history since they seldom ever have so we must do it our damn selves; so
BE IT RESOLVED, that we, the People of the City of Chicago assembled virtually this twenty-sixth day of October 2023, condemn Israel’s far-right Zionist and settler colonial project and genocide of Palestinians, express solidarity for the Palestinian people and their struggle for liberation, deem City Council as enabling and valorizing genocide, and clamor for a free Chicago and free Palestine.