CLEVELAND — On Monday night, while Cleveland City Council was conducting its weekly meeting on the second floor of City Hall, a group of pro-Palestinian demonstrators was holding its own meeting in the entryway of the building to draw attention to, and vote on, a resolution of their own.
For weeks, the Cleveland Palestine Advocacy Community and its supporters have attended City Council meetings, demanding legislators to call for a ceasefire. A number of the meetings were disrupted by the demonstrators, who chanted and held up signs in Council chambers.
"For the past 15 weeks, we have been pushing for Cleveland City Council to pass a ceasefire resolution and they have been unwilling, and have instead been giving us every roadblock that they can to prevent us from coming in and saying our piece and giving every excuse in the book of why they can't pass one," Noelle Naser, a Palestinian American activist, said. "So today, we are taking matters into our own hands and we are passing a resolution that the Cleveland Palestine Advocacy Coalition wrote ourselves, drafted with language that we firmly and strongly believe in."
The resolution affirms Cleveland's support of Palestine and refuses to support Israel financially, among other points. The demonstrators first gathered in the main space on the first floor, where their chanting could be heard in chambers upstairs as the weekly City Council meeting took place.
Ultimately, Cleveland police (including Chief Annie Todd) told the demonstrators that the building was closed except for the City Council meeting, and asked them to either join the meeting upstairs or leave. In the entrance area, demonstrators gathered to hold what they called the "people's council," a parallel meeting to City Council in which they read the resolution aloud and ultimately verbally voted on it.
"Really, all we're asking for is the ceasefire resolution for our community to know that we are safe and we are valued and we feel like Clevelanders here in the City of Cleveland, and that we are a vital part of Cleveland society," Chance Zurub, an organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement, told 3News.
"This is a symbolic resolution for our community to stand in solidarity with the people in Palestine," Naser added. "And kind of stick it to Council a little bit of, you know, 'You don't want to pass a resolution? Well the people will stand together,' and that we will."
Council President Blaine Griffin says he understands the frustration of the demonstrators, but expressed Council has been feeling frustrated, too.
"We're being pressed by all sides, and at the end of the day, whether we move left or whether we move right, people are always going to say we got it right or wrong," Griffin said. "And at the end of the day, we just think it's best to let the people who are the experts — who are the people like the federal leaders — to negotiate this and then give us some background."
Griffin told us a lot of councilmembers have had conversations, and many have said they'd "rather not be involved in this." He added that while this group has been vocal in their desire for a ceasefire, Council has also received hundreds of other letters from community members urging Council not to move forward with a resolution.
"Everybody wants to see peace in the Middle East, on both sides," Griffin stressed. "There's a lot of nuances to this ceasefire agreement that they have asked for that, quite frankly, once again — the same statement I made before, a few weeks ago — it would be great to see people who are closest to this conflict to get together and advise us and educate us and give us language that [is] mutually acceptable by all of these different groups."