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Waite: Saratoga council remains silent on Palestinian deaths | News

Posted on by angelo
Waite: Saratoga council remains silent on Palestinian deaths | News

The city, through its council, “unreservedly condemns the atrocities recently committed against the State of Israel and its people,” reads the unanimously adopted resolution.

Earlier at the Oct. 17 meeting, the council observed a moment of silence in honor of the more than 1,200 people killed in the brutal Oct. 7 terrorism.

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But seven months after Israel’s retaliatory bombing of Gaza, violence that killed more than 34,000 people, the Saratoga Springs City Council has remained silent on the Palestinian deaths.

The council will soon face public pressure to change this situation.

At a peaceful pro-Palestinian May Day rally in Saratoga Springs last week, Saratoga Black Lives Matter co-founder Lexis Figuereo said he would ask the city council to pass a resolution denouncing the killing of Palestinians, just as the council did after the rapes and murders perpetrated by Hamas on October 7.

“We are calling on the Saratoga Springs City Council to create a resolution similar to the one they passed right after October 7, saying they stood up for Israel,” Figuereo said.

The council took action in October, despite remaining “silent while 100,000 people were injured and killed by Israel,” Figuereo said.

Of course, city leaders can argue that the current council has a different mayor and public safety commissioner than it did in October, and therefore the actions taken last fall have little impact on the work of the current council .

Nonetheless, it will reveal grave hypocrisy if the city’s leaders resist any attempt to pass a resolution condemning the massacres in Gaza. In fact, with around two-thirds of the dead in Gaza being women and children – not combatants – the double standard is already evident.

Mayor John Safford, whose term began in January, did not respond to a voicemail asking to discuss a resolution focused on Palestinian deaths.

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Figuereo told me Monday that he is still drafting the specific proposal he plans to submit publicly later this month, but that it will likely include a call for a ceasefire and support for humanitarian aid .

But really: “It’s pretty simple: no more killings,” Figuereo told me.

This should not be a controversial statement.

Certainly, a call for a ceasefire – the terms of which Hamas leaders reportedly agreed to on Monday, with Israel planning to respond – is different from a resolution strictly condemning the violence. And in some ways, a ceasefire resolution in Saratoga could contradict the October resolution that said the council “expresses its unreserved support for the State of Israel and the Israeli people in their continued struggle to survive as a free and independent nation.”

But after condemning the killing of Jews in October, the Saratoga Springs City Council should also be willing to denounce the killing of Palestinians.

Somewhere, in the rubble and anger of this terrible war, many have lost sight of the fact that Palestinians and Jews alike faced unfathomable misery, with hostages held captive and grieving families left with holes. gaping. And while the world seemed to mourn after the October 7 attack, the Israeli counter-offensive and its ramifications come under increasing criticism every day. Over the weekend, the U.S. director of the United Nations World Food Program said northern Gaza was now plunged into “total famine.”

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Yet some tend to view one life as more valuable than another and to be selective in how murders are perceived. Depending on one’s position, some killings have been justified in the name of a cause, while other killings are denounced as senseless.

This all makes no sense.

Whether Palestinian or Israeli, a child in a body bag remains a dead child.

So Saratoga Springs leaders should be ready to make it official.

In Schenectady, the council faced public pressure at several meetings to sign a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. But unlike Saratoga, the Schenectady City Council has not taken any action in response to the current crisis on behalf of either party. As a result, Schenectady leaders who do not commit to a ceasefire resolution do not risk the kind of hypocrisy that Saratoga Springs leaders face by failing to condemn the deaths of Palestinians. .

Yes, there is plenty of room for debate about the merits of these types of resolutions at the city council level. How important is it really that a local organization in upstate New York speaks out against atrocities happening halfway around the world? Residents may argue that such legislation stands in solidarity with local Jews or Palestinians and puts pressure on local businesses that may have ties to a given foreign conflict.

Yet does a local council’s declaration of a distant war really have much force?

But in Saratoga Springs, the purpose of these resolutions is beside the point.

The war between Israel and Hamas was a devastating conflict that brought immense hardship for all.

So, if the Saratoga Springs City Council was prepared to quickly “unreservedly” condemn murder in Israel, it should be unequivocal in denouncing the murder of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians.

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