How Israel’s war on Gaza brought Cleveland politics to a standstill
Parma Sean returns to The Rooster for his first installment in an eye-opening look at how international warfare crippled Cuyahoga County politics.
How it Ended
The Feb. 11, 2025, meeting of the Cuyahoga County Council got off to a surreal and dystopian start when Rev. E. Regis Bunch, pastor of Fifth Christian Church, was carried out of the council chambers by five sheriff’s deputies holding him loosely by his arms and legs.
What was Reverend Bunch’s crime?
Being annoying during that most sacred of our country’s flag-based civic rituals: the Pledge of Allegiance. Specifically, he said the words “I PLEDGE!” loudly in what might be called “an aggressively sing-songy manner.”
Suddenly, everything stopped.
Council President Dale Miller banged the gavel and asked for the disruption to be removed. Reverend Bunch refused to leave and sat down on the floor. So five cops lifted him up and hauled him off to be booked at the Cuyahoga County Jail, a disgusting charnel house where at least 24 people have died over the past six years alone.
Every local media report made sure to mention that one of the cops “injured his hand” while carrying a black clergyman and veteran out of a public meeting as though he were a particularly gross rug that needed to be brought to the curb.
Much local reporting has also focused on Reverend Bunch’s clearly stated desire to “provoke change or an arrest” and the warnings given across multiple meetings for his disruptive behavior, including previous removals.
The intended implication seems to be that he fucked around and found out. What is obscured by this framing is precisely why he was being disruptive, whether it’s merited, and why he and many, many other Cleveland activists have resorted to such tactics of disruption over the last year and a half.
It’s because of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
The war, which has defined global politics for the last 18 months, entered a new bloody phase after a two-month ceasefire on March 18th with an onslaught against the newly repopulated northern part of the region, which is estimated to have already killed over 1000 people as of this writing.
Until February 21, 2025, about a month before Israel broke the ceasefire, Cuyahoga County had $16 million invested in Israel bonds, which by some estimates hardly covers the cost of a single bomb.
This has now dropped down to $13 million, for reasons we’ll get into.
Cuyahoga County maintains no similar investments in any other foreign country. What this relatively small investment represents is simply a symbolic show of solidarity with the State of Israel and its supporters throughout the broader American Jewish community, which has deep roots in Greater Cleveland.
To the residents who have been trying to pressure County officials to divest from these bonds, they also represent a show of solidarity with the nightmarish siege Israel has conducted against the small Palestinian enclave of Gaza since the shocking Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks which killed at least 1,195 Israelis and resulted in the kidnapping of about another 250.
As of writing, as reprisal for that day, the Israeli military and allied settlers have killed at least 50,000 people in Gaza, at least 555 in the West Bank, at least 3,100 people in Lebanon, and at least 260 people in Syria in well over a hundred strikes on that country alone, which they are also partially annexing amid the chaos created by the collapse of the Assad regime.
All the while, officials within the Israeli government and military apparatus have been quite explicit about their intent to expand Israel’s borders by ethnically cleansing the Arab population from any areas that come under their control.
From the moment it started, the war has been conducted with such wanton indiscretion that, as just one example, only 2 months in, IDF troops shot three Israeli hostages who were holding a white bedsheet with the words “SOS” written on it in old food.
The conflict has become the world’s leading producer of alarming statistics.
92% of all housing and 70% of all structures in Gaza have been destroyed. An August 2024 survey revealed that over 60% of Gazans had lost at least one family member. The conflict is considered the deadliest in the twenty-first century for journalists, with over 162 killed.
Gaza has the most amputated children per capita in the world.
When I call this a “genocide”, while it may offend U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, I’m in consensus with the UN Human Rights Commission, the International Court of Justice, Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch.
Until recently, these were widely recognized as the definitive authorities on whether a “genocide” is taking place. And while the death count has not reached the hopefully unreplicable scale of the Holocaust or Rwanda in the ‘90s, it has surpassed several other widely recognized genocides, including the massacres of Yazidis and Turkmen by ISIS, the Bosnian Genocide, and the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar.
A lot of Cuyahoga County residents have a big problem with all that, many of them from Palestine, Lebanon, or Syria themselves, or with family members who still live there.
The response by those in local office has been chiefly to wield the cudgel of “decorum” to silence and demoralize people who are upset, for some reason, about indiscriminate war crimes that have been live-streamed for the entire world to see.
This piece will explore how much the war has disrupted the day to day business of Cleveland politics, the unexpectedly deep ties between this city and the State of Israel, and what the implications might be for the future.
The Other Perspective
I understand that Israel represents an ideal of safety, strength, and self-determination to a great deal of people in the Jewish diaspora.
While I firmly reject the conflation of critical viewpoints on Israeli policy with antisemitism, particularly as it is now being used as a predicate to destroy civil rights in this country, I can still understand that this is a scary time to be Jewish, and that Oct. 7 represents perhaps the most destabilizing single event to that community’s sense of safety since the Holocaust.
That does not justify returning that new trauma 50 times over to the community the attackers came from, but perhaps it helps explain why it’s happened.
I feel a tremendous amount of empathy for the many Jewish people struggling to reconcile the crimes being committed in their name with their families, communities, and faith.
I think that if I were in their shoes, and I had been raised with the knowledge that my entire ethnicity was nearly exterminated in the Holocaust, the allure of Israel’s myth would be inescapable for me.
I would feel very vulnerable if I believed that the Jewish community was under threat again. I would be inclined to seek out news sources that affirmed my priors and soothed me. I might lash out.
For this reason, even now, a year and a half into this slaughter, I still feel compelled to attempt a good-faith account of both sides of this conflict and how it came to this awful point.
I had a comprehensive document typed out that provided context, tracing back to the founding charter of Zionism in 1897 and extending to these last few weeks.
All the hits were there. You bet your ass I talked about the Balfour Declaration and the Camp David Accords. I tweaked it for weeks until I felt I had assembled an intricate and even-handed timeline of 100 years of massacres, bombings, and treaties.
It was over 5000 words by itself. And it wasn’t funny at all.
It also didn’t help tell the story that I’m here to tell: the ways in which the conflict has trickled into our humble city of Cleveland, and laid bare the moral cowardice of much of its leadership.
So while I attempt to focus on that story, if you’re unfamiliar, I recommend you find your own time to read about things like the “The Irgun” and “Nasserism” and the “Munich Olympic Massacre” in any of the 57 million other Substack articles written about Israel in the last year and a half.
I would be remiss if I did not also recognize the many, many Jews, including Israelis, who have spoken out against Israel’s apartheid policies and its regional aggression for decades, and the growing number speaking out about the current war.
Their perspective has been marginalized, but their ethical courage helps highlight what has always been essentially a struggle for human rights: whether all people deserve them or whether our global society will continue to allow a state of exception to continue in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.
At the end of the day, you don’t need encyclopedic knowledge of this long conflict to understand that apartheid, forced expulsion, deliberate starvation, arbitrary incarceration, torture, and the bombing of schools, hospitals, and places of worship are wrong, nor to understand why people would want to do anything they could to stop more from being killed.
A tremendous amount of money and effort has been invested in obscuring that fundamental truth over the last 18 months.
There is no need to equivocate.
Freedom of Speech
On March 25, 2025, in a genuinely obscene instance of Prosecutorial Overreach, Reverend Bunch was charged with felony obstructing official business, along with misdemeanor charges of resisting arrest, disturbing a lawful meeting and disorderly conduct.
To the degree that there is “a book” for singing the pledge of allegiance in an allegedly disruptive way, it has been thrown at Reverend Bunch.
Even a dogged centrist like cleveland.com editor Chris Quinn, who published an “AI debate” over whether we should abolish the income tax in his newsletter last November, can see what an egregious attempt to chill First Amendment rights this represents.
He called the felony charge “preposterous” and “not what the law was created for” in the Today in Ohio podcast.
“You wish that the Democrats, looking at what the Republicans are doing to the First Amendment, would lead by example, do the right thing. This is ridiculous,” Quinn said, possibly alluding to the recent ICE arrests of foreign-born students who have spoken out against the genocide.
A spokesperson for Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Mike O’Malley, who is by all accounts a “Democrat,” defended the charge by saying that there are “limits to a person’s right to free speech.”
And while it is true that legal precedents have established some exceptions, like the incitement to violence, it is bizarre and arbitrary, and dare I say just a bit “Fascist”, to insist that the line should now be drawn at singing the Pledge of Allegiance sarcastically.
It’s worth noting that even the oft-cited “you can’t shout fire in a crowded theater” comes from an earlier era of authoritarian overreach in the US, and was used by the Supreme Court to justify cracking down on protests against World War I, now rightfully considered with 100 years of hindsight to have been the most pointless bloodbath of all time.
One day, everyone will have always been against this, too.
Setting aside the fraught moral minefield of this particular issue, acting out of pocket during public comment is a time-honored local tradition, and while removals and temporary bans are not infrequent, this is the first arrest that I’m aware of.
If there’s one thing that makes me proud to be an American, it’s that we provide the civic space to yell at the government when it’s warranted. Or when it’s not, whatever! Yelling at the government is the very essence of what it means to be American! And these bastards want to take that away from us!
The Good Kind of CPAC
Indeed, activists from the Cleveland Palestine Advocacy Community (CPAC) have relied on public comment over the last 18 months repeatedly to apply pressure and have an outlet to express their grief and outrage.
From Oct. 2023 through March 2024, activists flooded the public comment period at every Cleveland City Council meeting, all to pressure the body to pass a symbolic resolution voicing support for a ceasefire after several council members and the mayor had made public statements of solidarity with Israel.
On Oct. 7, both Mayor Justin Bibb and Council President Blaine Griffin put out what probably seemed to them very banal statements following what was a genuinely shocking and horrific attack, with or without the debunked atrocity propaganda that followed.
This statement more or less represents Bibb’s final word on the subject, even now.
Griffin mostly followed the same template but made sure to include a picture of himself looking very… dare I say… mayoral?
What both men probably anticipated was that the expectations of local electeds would play out as they had during the opening salvos of the Ukraine War.
Russia, after all, has been an Official Enemy™ for most Americans’ entire lives, give or take the brief period we were looting their new capitalist economy through “Shock Therapy” in the 1990s.
It was only natural to rally behind the country being invaded, with an extensive diaspora population in Greater Cleveland, who, for once, happened to be on the side that the US Military Industrial Complex was supporting, too.
Cleveland City Council passed a statement condemning Russia’s invasion within a week, and then essentially never discussed it again.
But what they should have known was that this conflict is not the same.
On Oct. 9, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant ordered a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip, announcing that “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel… We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.”
This statement of genocidal intent did not go unnoticed online.
It prompted a great many people to look up exactly what the deal was with this “Gaza” place for the first time, perhaps wondering why a giant fence surrounded it and why the Israeli government already had total control over the electricity, food, and fuel of the over two million Palestinians living there, mostly in deep poverty.
Within a few days, on Oct. 12, Griffin was already trying to appear more even-handed:
Then, a few days later, a week after the Hamas attack:
By the time Griffin tweeted this, the Israeli military had already killed 1,900 people in Gaza, more than the combined total of all those who died and were taken hostage on Oct. 7th.
By the end of the month, that number had already reached 8,000, and the war had become the most contentious topic in the entire world. Frightening rhetoric by Israeli leadership only served to fan the flames.
In a speech on Oct. 28, Prime Minister Netanyahu referred to the Palestinians as “Amalek,” a far-right dog whistle referring to a passage in the Book of Samuel in which God explicitly calls for the genocidal elimination of a rival tribe.
Three days later, over 200 people attended the Cleveland City Council meeting. Statements from members of CPAC dominated that evening’s public comments.
Right out of the gate, the coalition was highly organized, and they came out swinging with chants and signs commensurate with the unfolding death toll.
Councilmembers immediately took issue with anyone holding signs or chanting at all.
Unable to take the sudden and immense heat at what are typically procedural affairs, a couple of city councilmen particularly distinguished themselves with their batshit overreactions.
Mike Polensek, who has been on the council since the Carter Administration, had this to say in his capacity as chair of the public safety committee:
“We’re gonna have to really take a good, hard look at security, [...] Folks that are making threats against members of the body, they’re gonna have to be dealt with.”
Exactly what “threats” were being made has never been elaborated on, although he would go on to euphemistically claim that protestors were bringing “contraband” into the council chambers when a couple of persimmons were confiscated from a few alleged snackers.
He was later caught on a voicemail giving an incredibly vitriolic tirade against the protesters, in which he repeatedly referred to them as members of the “Palestinian-Hamas Community” and said he would only be willing to sign a ceasefire statement if it was collaboratively written with the Jewish Federation of Cleveland to promote a generic message that war is bad.
In the same public safety committee meeting, Councilman Joe Jones, who is a piece of shit for reasons that are beyond the scope of this article, claimed he felt so threatened by the protesters that he was considering “bringing a gun” and felt as though he had to “check under his car for bombs.”
He was rightfully checked by Councilwoman Stephanie Howse-Jones, who pointed out how insanely racist his comments were towards Arab-Americans who have long had to defend themselves against being treated like they’re genetically predisposed to terrorism.
Only one Cleveland City Councilperson really managed to rise to the occasion, that being Councilwoman Rebecca Maurer, notably the only Jewish member of that body.
Her morally resolute statement at the Jan. 29, 2024, council meeting really ought to have set an example for literally any single fucking one of her colleagues to follow. In it, she apologized for holding her tongue for so long and called out her colleagues for their refusal to pass any statement that was not written in collaboration with Jewish community organizations:
"In insisting on a resolution that is shared between two communities, I fear we are replicating the harm that the speakers behind us are speaking to week after week,[...] Why are we putting Palestinian humanity in the hands of anyone else?"
Her statement came just a few hours after a written statement by President Griffin in which he suggested that there was no path forward to passing any kind of symbolic resolution, insisting that any “one-sided” resolution would be offensive.
And yet, after much more gnashing of teeth, including attempts to severely restrict the already limited public comment provisions, council eventually passed a ceasefire resolution two months later on March 25, the content of which was essentially just that “racism is bad” and vague support for a UN Security Council ceasefire resolution which had passed that same day after months of stalling by the US delegation:
“AN EMERGENCY RESOLUTION Condemning all forms of hate and discrimination in this City and around the world, and supporting the United Nations Security Council resolution calling for a halt to the fighting in Gaza.”
Despite being pablum clearly written to just get the protesters to fuck off, Mayor Bibb pointedly refused to sign even this incredibly bare-bones resolution. This is because he is a craven careerist who knows that steadfast support for Israel is likely to help advance his future political fortunes.
After months of protesters chanting “Bibb, Bibb, you can’t hide, we charge you with Genocide!”, he continued to equivocate in a mealy-mouthed statement defending his decision, and was rewarded with praise by Israel-aligned civil society groups.
By the end, City Council had ramped up to an absurd degree of security theater, with the front two rows of the council chambers cordoned off with crime scene tape and seemingly a quarter of the entire police department standing around outside on their phones collecting overtime.
This was probably intended to foster the illusion that council members’ very lives were under threat by the constituents asking them to acknowledge the slaughter of their family members.
It mostly made them look like huge pussies, because again, this was all about angry public comments accompanied by some signs and chants.
Immediately after the resolution passed, barely audible under the cheers of CPAC attendants, council seized the opportunity to pass a controversial measure funneling all property tax revenue downtown towards a handful of powerful development firms for the next few decades, biting out a chunk of the County’s already strained Health and Human Services funding.
As is often the case, a symbolic carrot came along with a sharp stick for the working people of Cleveland.
Meanwhile, by the time the resolution was passed, the attacks on Gaza had resulted in the deaths of over 31,500 Palestinians – 1 out of every 75 people in Gaza – averaging 195 killings a day, while displacing 1.7 million people from their homes.
At the beginning of the council meeting, Mike Polensek made an incredibly petty display of not paying attention by holding up some document and pretending to read it throughout the final public comments of CPAC supporters. Joe Jones, to his desperately needed credit, had made enough effort to apologize for his previous comments that he was invited to join CPAC members for a potluck on the city hall steps afterwards.
County Council
With a victory under their belt, CPAC set its eyes on a bigger fish.
Since last May, advocates have attended every single public comment period of the County Council with a more material goal in mind: pressuring the County to divest from $16 million in Israel Bonds.
This goal is aligned with the wider tactics of the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS), itself inspired by the economic pressure campaigns of the ‘80s, which helped bring about an end to Apartheid in South Africa.
In 2016, Governor John Kasich signed a bill making BDS actions by local governments or public agencies illegal, which was strengthened in 2022 by arch-reactionary State Senator Jerry Cirino to explicitly include public universities as part of his wider efforts to bring them under the boot of our state government.
Across the state, Ohio has $330 million total invested in Israel bonds, with $262.5 million in the State Treasury alone. This law has proved a persistent obstacle to local divestment efforts, which was obviously the entire point of passing it.
Cleveland’s left-wing activist community is undeterred, and the war in Gaza has united and galvanized it to a degree not seen since the 2020 protests against the killing of George Floyd.
Founded by several Arab and Muslim Civil society groups, like Arab Americans of Cleveland and the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), with support from members of the local Democratic Socialists of America chapter (DSA), the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), and a vast array of local student groups like the Case and CSU chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), CPAC has built a robust coalition with enough dedicated shooters to derail nearly every public appearance of County Executive Chris Ronayne for the last year.
The movement has increasingly opted to specifically target Ronayne, both due to his preeminent role in guiding County investment and for his steadfast refusal to meet with any representatives of CPAC since their campaign began. Ronayne rode into office in 2022 on a wave of good feelings about getting rid of our previous County Executive, the petulant and allegedly corrupt Armond Budish.
Ronayne’s administration has sought to cultivate the image of a friendly, optimistic, and progressive county government, which has been gravely undermined by the two defining issues of his tenure so far: building a big new fucking jail in Garfield Heights and trying his best to ignore the people coming to yell at him about the war. Throughout it all he has resolutely refused to meet with CPAC activists or consider divestment from the bonds.
Some have shouted nicknames at council meetings like “Complicit Chris” and “Racist Ronayne,” and even taken to protesting outside his house in the Detroit Shoreway neighborhood.
The most recent of these protests took place in November, when about 150 demonstrators were greeted on his lawn by several dozen CPD officers, who issued citations to every single person there who was holding a megaphone. A minor kerfuffle unfolded in the Community Police Commission the following week over whether or not the department had been legally authorized to follow said protestors around with a drone.
Turns out they were not. But be sure to look forward to flying surveillance robots coming to a protest near you once they’ve gotten the paperwork in order!
Some public commenters have gone a step further and called out Ronayne for a lack of solidarity with his Lebanese-American wife Natalie, who is Chief Development Officer of the Cleveland Metroparks.
Maybe that’s a bit of a low blow, and probably unlikely to encourage cooperation. But rather than tone police these protests, let’s focus on the greater overall point here. Does it upset you that your tax dollars are being used to help fund an army that is routinely targeting children with sniper fire?
If it does, I don’t think there’s any possible rhetoric that isn’t morally justified to stop that from continuing.
And if you think that’s not a very big deal, then sure, I guess this all seems over the top. I think the full bore state repression and lawfare trying to crush this peaceful movement is over the top. Nobody is being threatened here.
People just don’t want their money supporting the genocidal actions of a foreign state, especially one killing their own family members.
They have a right to feel that way, and until the Trump Imperium moves to throw out the constitution entirely, people have a right to express those feelings in a public forum.
Read Part 2 here:
Cleveland leadership's silence on Gaza, explained
This is Part 2 of Parma Sean’s look at how the slaughter in Gaza brought Cleveland politics to a standstill.
 | A guest post by
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If Christians were committing genocide would every article still come with paragraphs about how it’s probably hard for them too? Even in alternative media, everyone is still afraid to call out Jews for largely doing jack shit while this happens, in fact many are aiding and abetting genocide locally and online. Nothing changes until their community holds themselves accountable and the constant caveats for their feelings and privilege are cringe.