Berkeley’s progressive mayor parties in apartheid state

By taking off on a nine-day junket to Israel, Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin not only shirked his responsibilities to city residents, but also made a mockery of his own progressive pretensions and the city’s proud tradition of opposition to apartheid.

Unbeknownst to most of his constituents, Arreguin left town on May 12 on a tour sponsored (and presumably paid for) by the Bay Area’s Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC), an active champion of the state of Israel. There’s been no public announcement of the trip, and Arreguin has made no mention of it on his Twitter feed, but he is clearly identifiable in photos on the tour’s Instagram page:

The delegation arrived in Israel just days after an Israeli sniper shot and killed Shireen Abu Akleh, a widely respected Palestinian journalist for Al Jazeera TV, and Israeli police brutally attacked mourners carrying her coffin. Those tragic events have been condemned by governments and human-rights organizations all over the world, including by a rare unanimous vote of the UN Security Council.

But Arreguin and his travelmates partied on regardless: Instagram photos show them laughing and smiling as their hosts hauled them to tourist sites and meetings with Israeli officials and military officers, then to wine and dine. According to one participant’s post, on their second night they “danced til our feet hurt.”

We don’t know their full itinerary, but just in the first days of the trip, according to their Instagram posts, they toured the Golan Heights, Syrian territory Israel has illegally occupied since 1967, over which Israeli sovereignty is recognized by only two countries in the world, Israel itself and, since Trump, the United States. Later they dined in the old city of Jaffa, once the economic and cultural heart of Palestine, which Zionist militias bombarded then took over in 1948, driving out all but 4,000 of its pre-war 120,000 Arab residents and looting their homes; after the war the Israelis refused to allow any of the refugees to return, fenced the remaining Palestinians into a single neighborhood that both sides came to call “the ghetto,” and eventually incorporated the whole city into Tel Aviv. (All this, by the way, is acknowledged by Zionist historians.)

A day or two later they toured the Knesset, where “they saw Israel’s Declaration of Independence, unique works of art, and democracy in action,” according to their posts. Later in the tour, they also visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City of Jerusalem, were taken to a refugee camp in Ramallah, and met with an “Israeli Arab” politician. Perhaps the Israelis also set the visitors up with some handpicked members of the Palestinian Authority or others among the tiny minority of Palestinians who have reconciled themselves to Jewish domination or still cling to the illusion that a two-state solution is around the corner – an option Israeli leaders, including Benjamin Netanyahu and current Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, have long since dismissed.

But they certainly didn’t get to the besieged Gaza Strip, and even if they got to see more of the occupied West Bank than just Ramallah and the Old City of Jerusalem, it’s safe to assume that they didn’t get a clear view of how Israel has been stepping up its decades-long project of seizing Palestinian land, demolishing Palestinian homes, and expanding Jewish settlements there. (Just a day before the JCRC group arrived, Israeli soldiers and bulldozers began the forced eviction of some 1,200 Palestinians, including 500 children, from Masafer Yatta, an area of tiny pastoral hamlets in the southern West Bank – a move the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights denounced as a “serious breach of international humanitarian and human rights laws.”)

But wherever Arreguin and his group went and whomever they met, the real question is what were they doing there at all. Clearly, the JCRC organized the trip because it wanted to bolster Israel’s badly tarnished image in the US. In the last 18 months Israel’s leading human-rights group, B’Tselem, and the two most respected international rights groups, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have all formally classified Israel as an apartheid state, after concluding that it meets the definition of the crime of apartheid laid out in international law. (Palestinian groups, of course, have been making this case for years).

Do Jesse and his fellow travelers imagine they somehow know better, from their offices more than 7,000 miles away, than human-rights groups that have had expert observers on the ground for years? Or do they simply not care?

Either way, Arreguin is betraying one of the proudest moments in Berkeley’s history, when, under the leadership of then-Mayor Gus Newport, it became the first US city to divest from companies that supported South Africa’s apartheid government. Jesse even claims that “the battles against apartheid in South Africa” were among the experiences that shaped his “lifelong commitment to fighting for social justice.”

He has called himself an “unapologetic progressive,” and he was elected on his pledge to “restore Berkeley to the forefront of progressive leadership.” Many would argue that his record has already disproved these claims. But by agreeing to take part in a propaganda trip organized by apologists for Israel’s crimes, he has made it harder than ever to take his pretensions seriously. Israel is anything but a progressive state, and Berkeley’s mayor has no business participating in a project designed to suggest that it is.

The authors are all Berkeley residents.

You can sign a petition protesting Mayor Arreguin’s trip to Israel here. It is addressed to Berkeley residents, but the organizers encourage everyone, regardless of residence, to sign – they plan to sort out the petitions from Berkeley and non-Berkeley residents before delivering them to Arreguin and the City Council.