Cleveland leadership's silence on Gaza, explained

Parma Sean looks at how the Israeli lobby and Cuyahoga County's investment in Israel bonds co-opts the moral clarity of local politicos.

This is Part 2 of Parma Sean’s look at how the slaughter in Gaza brought Cleveland politics to a standstill.

Read Part 1 here:

How Israel’s war on Gaza brought Cleveland politics to a standstill

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The Lobby

With the exception of Councilwoman Rebecca Maurer, Cleveland politicos have largely restrained any sympathy for the plight of Palestinians to private meetings with advocates.

Behind closed doors, they are far less likely to attract the eye of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the powerful lobby which has repeatedly put its thumb on the scale to prevent Israel critics from holding office all across the country.

In 2022, AIPAC and other Israel-affiliated groups collectively spent over $1 million in Cuyahoga County alone to stop progressive firebrand Nina Turner for the second time from unseating former Cuyahoga County Council President Shontel Brown as the Representative for Ohio’s 11th District.

It’s reasonable to assume that this spending spree was as much a consequence of Turner’s outspoken anti-apartheid stance as Brown’s personal affinity for Israel.

Although, as part of her grooming to assume the mantle of “anodyne centrist Black face in a high place” from former Congresswoman Marcia Fudge, Brown took a free trip to Israel in 2021.

As one of Cuyahoga County’s primary connections to DC, Brown wields massive influence within the local Democratic Party. Several local politics knowers have shared that she has utilized that influence repeatedly over the past 18 months, personally intervening to stall any efforts to shift the city and county’s stance on the conflict.

In a deranged national political climate where Elon Musk is offering $1 million as a sweepstakes prize to single voters, it might be worthwhile to drill a little deeper into just how remarkable Representative Brown’s funding relationship with the Israel lobby truly is.

Per OpenSecrets, since assuming Fudge’s vacated seat in 2021, Brown has taken in $6,090,561 in total campaign donations across three election cycles. Of that amount, $1,143,556, or about 19%, has come from PACs and other donors specifically advocating for pro-Israel policy.

These donations represent the largest single “industry” to support her across all cycles. This dollar amount also places her among the top recipients of Israel lobby support in the entire country.

Broken down by donor, Representative Brown’s top five donors have been Pro-Israel America PAC ($700,366), AIPAC ($264,290), RMS Investment Group ($93,000), NorPAC ($87,400), and Rock Holdings ($56,750).

While the first two should be self-explanatory, NorPAC is also a pro-Israel political action committee. Rock Holdings is the private investment outlet of local oligarch and Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert, a somewhat underrecognized Israel booster who can be seen here receiving an award from “Friends of the IDF” in 2006.

Much more recently, his brother and business partner, Gary Gilbert, briefly came under fire for stating his violent opinions toward pro-Palestinian protests rather proudly on social media, saying, “We’re armed and ready for you punks.”

RMS Investment Group is the shared private investment company of the Ratner, Miller, and Shafran families, three prominent local Jewish real estate dynasties who together ran the prestigious development firm Forest City Enterprises from the 1920s all the way until it was gobbled up in 2018 by Brookfield Asset Management, a Canadian private equity firm, in what was surely a riveting Succession style tragedy.

Forest City more or less literally built Cleveland, first through their pioneering of “pre-built” post-war family housing and then through helping to fund developments like Tower City as their formidable cash reserves and political sway grew throughout the end of the century.

These families remain influential in Cleveland’s elite business and philanthropy circles, and the Ratners and Millers in particular were singled out for their extensive ties to Israel in an April 2023 listicle by the Cleveland Jewish News.

Forest City founder Leonard Ratner counted Prime Ministers David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir among his personal friends. At the same time, his brother Max Ratner was a founding member of the American-Israel Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

Sam Miller, who married into the Ratner family, also boasted of a close personal friendship with Golda Meir.

Current patriarch Albert Ratner was a founding member of the Ohio-Israel Chamber of Commerce and once chaired the Jewish Federation of Cleveland, of which he is a lifetime trustee.

None of this is intended to allude to some vague Jewish control of Cuyahoga politics. That would be antisemitic. This is an extremely diverse county, and our politicians are for sale to anyone, regardless of ethnicity or religion. It does help you get elected if you’re Irish, though.

Rather, I’m using Congresswoman Brown’s donors to illustrate the extent to which Cleveland’s political and business elite were deeply enmeshed with Israel well before Oct. 7.

This alone goes a long way towards explaining the uphill battle that local pro-Palestine activists have faced in their struggle for divestment.

Bonds, Israel Bonds

So what the hell are “Israel Bonds” anyway?

Bonds are essentially government debt purchased with the promise of later repayment, a type of loan from private investors to governments that will be repaid with future tax revenue.

When bonds “mature,” they are paid back with interest, and investors turn a profit.

As long as the economy and tax base grow, bonds remain a very stable investment. But should a tax base shrink, as Cleveland’s does perpetually, paying back bond interest can become a particularly burdensome obligation for a government.

In times of fiscal hardship, they’ve occasionally been known to default.

In our unfathomably overleveraged neoliberal economy, bonds have become a major part of the duct tape and rubber bands that keep the whole thing from collapsing in on itself. Cash-poor governments rely on bond sales to fund major development projects that they hope will stimulate future growth, enabling them to repay the bonds.

Because just raising taxes on wealthy people and corporations is completely fucking out of the question, bonds have become the most reliable way for governments to fundraise the money they need out of thin air for all their big ticket projects like football stadiums, county jails, and Ethnic Cleansings.

Some economists believe that the federal government’s increasing inability to repay its own Treasury Bonds is the reason the Trump Administration appears to be deliberately trying to trigger an apocalyptic recession with tariffs, to devalue the currency intentionally and artificially shrink the debt.

Personally I think they’re just fucking morons and kinda winging it. Buckle up.

In Israel’s case, investing in their bonds has long been seen as another way of signifying your support for the world’s only Jewish state, and they have often been aggressively marketed as a patriotic gift for any Jewish person.

Issued to Americans by the “Development Corporation for Israel” since 1955, Israel Bond purchases have particularly served as a lifeline in times of war.

In peacetime, the bonds tend to mature without issue, as Israel’s economy punches way above its weight for a country of its size, aided no doubt by its large tech sector, massive foreign investment, and the use of underpaid Palestinian labor.

Israel’s excellent reputation for bond repayments has been frequently cited by those arguing against divestment. Cuyahoga County first purchased Israel bonds in 2006, and has gone on to regularly re-up ever since, most recently growing the investment in 2019 by $3 million to bring it up to today’s total.

On that occasion, then-County Executive Armond Budish declared, “Our return on Israel bonds has been outstanding,” and that “Maintaining our holdings in Israel bonds is one of the best ways to strengthen Cuyahoga County’s financial outlook for the long-term.”

The problem is, since the beginning of this war, Israel’s economy has teetered increasingly towards collapse.

The war has created an entire armada of economic pressures separate from the massive cost of prosecuting it, among them: waves of Israelis fleeing the country, the evaporation of the Palestinian low-wage labor base, sanctions and boycotts by former trading partners, large amounts of the workforce being on constant standby as IDF reservists, and an increasing number of injured and killed soldiers being taken out of the workforce entirely.

The best thing that could be done to save Israel’s economy would be to end the war.

However, Israel’s current finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, is among the most virulent ethnonationalist ideologues in an administration full of them.

Self-described as “racist, anti-Arab, supremacist, colonialist, pro-annexation and revisionist” Smotrich has said that there is “no such thing” as a Palestinian people, has called for Arab parties to be expelled from Knesset since long before Oct. 7, has punitively withheld funding from Arab Israeli communities as finance minister, and has repeatedly egged on pogroms by Israeli settlers against Palestinian villages in the West Bank.

Here’s one choice quote:

"Nobody will let us cause two million civilians to die of hunger, even though it might be justified and moral, until our hostages are returned."

This is not the man who will be sounding any alarm bells that it’s time to wrap it up because they’re out of money. This is a man who would probably fold the treasury’s last shekel into a paper airplane so that he could throw it at a Palestinian child.

Smotrich is what you might call an ideologically motivated war criminal, as opposed to a slightly more pragmatically motivated war criminal like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who seemingly violated the ceasefire in March in order to avoid testifying at his own corruption hearing.

Netanyahu likely recognizes that if he lets the war end, he will go to jail. And so he grits his teeth and smiles while Trump stands next to him and talks favorably about how Nazis would supposedly “sneak an extra piece of bread” to Jews during the Holocaust, because Netanyahu knows that it’s steadfast US support for the endless siege that keeps his own ass from being thoroughly cooked.

The war has also exacerbated deep fractures within Israeli society that have led to increasing speculation about the potential of civil war. All of this has created a paradox whereby the very bonds that help maintain the war become less and less likely to get paid back the longer that it goes on. So if you were looking for a purely cold-blooded capitalist reason that the slaughter needs to end as soon as possible, there you go.

The truth is that the political forces maintaining these investments are obviously not motivated by rational fiscal responsibility. Rather, it’s a toxic stew of panic, grief, and nationalism.

Zionist Jewish communities are operating from their own traumatized worldview that they are beset by an antisemetic siege as the world’s sympathies definitively turn against Israel.

As impressive and relentless as the organizing of Cuyahoga County’s Palestinian community has been, it was inevitable that there would be a massive pushback.

Counterprotests

After a brief pause following their successful pressure campaign against Cleveland City Council, CPAC formally turned its attention to County Council beginning on April 9 of last year.

Dozens of Palestine supporters flooded the public comment period. They were highly disciplined in their messaging, emphasizing personal familial connections to Gaza and the many, many unmet needs in the county that $16 million could probably help to address.

Shereen Naser, a professor at Cleveland State University, who has emerged as a major leader in CPAC, gave poignant testimony:

Thank you all for having us here today for public comment. I usually come to these things very prepared with something written, but I have to be honest, over six months of watching my family be slaughtered it's become very difficult to sit down and write words.

On Saturday morning I woke up and found it out that my cousin in the West Bank was… her home was raided by the Israeli military in the middle of the night and she was detained. We have no idea where she is, they will not let us… they won't tell us where she is. There are no charges that have been filed.

My cousin is one of 9,000 Palestinian prisoners who are illegally being held in detention centers outside the West Bank in the 1967 borders of Israel. This is against the Fourth Geneva Convention Article 76.

To say that I'm afraid for my cousin is an understatement. What we know from reports both from Israeli guards in the jails and from Palestinian prisoners who have been released is that in the prisons the conditions are deteriorating horrifyingly so they have no access to clean food and water.

They are being sexually and physically abused by the guards and they are in completely unsanitary conditions and while my cousin is sitting there we can't find her being held in a prison off outside of her own country in her own home… I'm wondering if the cuffs around her wrists are paid for by my tax dollars. I'm wondering if the cage that she's sitting in is being paid for by the $16 million portfolio that this County holds in Israel bonds.

When we tell you that this is a local issue we mean it these are my tax dollars. I do live in this community. I work in this community. I plan to stay in this community.

I'm raising kids in this community. I don't want to be up at 3:00 in the morning wondering when I press that button to pay my taxes where that's going and if it's going to hurt my people.

Instead what I'd like to see is that money invested here at home to end things like food deserts. I work in education and there are plenty of families right here that can't put food on their table. I'd like to see the folks who are outside this building as I walked in who are unhoused be given the things that they need.

I'd like to see this County quit investing in foreign investments for countries that regularly break humanitarian law. Thank you for your time.

After months of these kinds of comments, a major breakthrough seemed to come much quicker than it had with the city.

On June 2, 2024, County Council members Cheryl Stephens and Patrick Kelly introduced a resolution to divest from the bonds and prohibit future investments in foreign securities.

Both of their public statements about the proposed legislation were finely tailored to avoid singling out the Israel bonds, even though they’re the only foreign security the County invests in and were explicitly mentioned in the Resolution:

Resolution 2024-0208:

A Resolution urging the Cuyahoga County Executive and the County Treasurer to immediately cease any additional County investment in bonds and other sovereign debt issued by the Nation of Israel; and urging the Investment Advisory Committee to amend the County’s Investment Policy to prohibit future investments in any foreign securities; and declaring the necessity that this Resolution become immediately effective.

This rhetorical tip-toeing fooled no one, and Zionist residents of the County began showing up in full force—quite literally by the busload—to make sure it did not pass. A sternly worded letter to Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne by Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost also served as an additional dressing down, reminding the County that explicitly divesting from Israel is illegal in Ohio.

The bill was promptly withdrawn.

Nevertheless, the battle lines had now been drawn for the June 18 meeting of County Council, in which roughly 70 community members testified in a public comment period that lasted nearly four hours.

The difference in perspective was striking.

Pro-Israel commenters were relentlessly patriotic and effusive with their praise for the County Council, thanking them for removing the resolution and apologizing that they had to spend so much time dealing with a geopolitical issue at all.

The divestment proposal was antisemitic, self-evidently so, but all was forgiven so long as it never comes up again. Repeated canned lines touted Israel as “America’s strongest ally” and “the only democracy in the Middle East.”

To claim that what is happening is a genocide is also antisemitic. In her comments, Michelle Weiss, Vice Mayor of University Heights and currently a mayoral candidate, illustrated some of these disparities.

Good evening my name is Michelle Weiss. I am the vice mayor of University Heights and I've been on city council for the last 9 years. I've been a resident of Cuyahoga County my entire life.

I am proud that University Heights is one of the most diverse suburbs on the east side.

I want to thank Council persons Miller and Sweeney for their response to my email regarding the bond divestment and the other council persons and County Executive for not considering the legislation.

I need to give some personal background before I discuss the issue at hand. I feel safer in Israel than in America right now.

The United States was a refuge for people to flee persecution, not to feel persecuted. I love this country and I have and I am a servant leader for this city in more than one capacity. I have personally traveled to Israel twice since 10/7.

I have a daughter and her family that live there. I was there in November during a siren and during a terrorist attack a block away from where she lives yet I still feel safer there because everyone who lives there wants to be there and cares for one another. The second time was because my cousin was killed fighting in Gaza and I went to pay my respects to my cousin.

Their family moved to Israel from Cleveland and raised their young family there. They made the ultimate sacrifice for all of the Jewish communities' protection. Don't fool yourselves these terrorists are not going to stop with Israel. If they are not defeated in Gaza, America and Europe are next. Don't listen to the US media, Israel is United.

They do not want to be at War. They were attacked and are defending themselves so they can be so they can live in peace.

Do you know rockets are still being shot every day in the north? Do you know how many Terror attacks are thwarted daily in Israel? Have any of you watched screams before silence or the 10/7 documentary?

This legislation that you have thankfully suspended and hopefully will never consider again is an attempt to cover anti-jewish and anti-israel sentiment. If you have ever seen those documentaries you would never even be considering this legislation. All that resolution would have done is to have divided the County residents further.

Besides the fact that Israel bonds are amongst the strongest performing investments in the County's portfolio. Councilwoman Stevens we go back a long time not just as colleagues but having a personal friend in common as well to all of the council please do not bring this back on the table thank you.

There is obviously a shared pain and a shared exhaustion with war here between two opposing camps, despite their total separation into different media echo chambers. I feel sympathy for anyone who has lost a family member in this conflict.

Nevertheless, it feels grotesque to hear an elected official from one of the safest and wealthiest communities in the county say that they feel “safer” in a country at war.

She speaks of the United States being a land people go to in order to flee persecution, without seeing that Cuyahoga County’s Palestinians came here for the very same reason.

For all that they share, there is a seemingly insurmountable wall here between the two communities, and an unwillingness by Zionists to think critically about Israel’s actions when egos can be better protected by lobbing accusations of antisemitism at any and all dissenters.

As any advocate will tell you, the movement for Palestinian liberation is not about antisemitism, but about demanding that the international community redress the very concrete injustices that have been perpetrated against the Palestinians by the Israelis since 1948.

However, the conflation of these things is a thought killer for many people in the Jewish community, who have been made to feel that any concession to the Palestinian perspective presents an inherent mortal danger.

This has been very deliberately cultivated by Israeli organizations under the belief that their state’s survival is contingent on the support of American Jews.

Consequently, a heavy burden has fallen on those who have the moral clarity to speak out against the myopia of their own community.

They are many, and growing, but they remain outnumbered. But they do have a profound authority to attempt to articulate and reconcile the shared grief of all involved, as several commenters did on June 18.

Hello my name is Nicole Born-Crow. I'm a mother, a member of Jewish Voice for Peace, and my family are longtime residents of Cuyahoga County. I want to talk a little bit tonight about grief and acknowledge the different griefs many of us are holding as we enter this space tonight. First is the grief of the Palestinian people with us here who have lost loved ones and family in Gaza.

That's the grief shared by anyone with an intact soul or working moral compass for the 37,372 mothers, fathers, and children lost in this genocide since October. There's the grief many of us have carried in our families since 1948, grief connected to their loss of land, home, family, loss of peace, loss of dignity, and loss of freedom.

I will also acknowledge the ongoing grief of the Jewish people for the loss of millions and millions of lives during the Holocaust in World War II, one that many of us here have spoken about and carry with us still. It's this grief that moves so many of us to be here tonight fighting to stop another genocide.

A grief that many of us didn't expect is the profound grief from the betrayal of our Jewish leaders, our Jewish institutions, our rabbis, and mainstream Judaism in general in the United States. It's the grief that comes with realizing your entire community is not who they said they were, that the faith and morals that they purported only extend towards fellow zionists.

Many Jews in the US didn't know or care or understand the difference between Zionism and anti-zionism before October but that division has become glaringly obvious when we see Jews like myself that refuse to allow a genocide to be waged in the name of our safety and then you have Jews in this country who are here tonight talking about money and investments and anti-semitism. There's the grief of having your own community move against you. The grief of disagreement being called anti-semitic.

The grief of being called derogatory terms like kapo or having our Jewishness questioned or picked apart by the very community that raised many here tonight. This is the weight of what so many of us are carrying in this room tonight just so we're clear that this is not just about bonds or investments.

I'm not a financial person and honestly I will never be the type of person who talks about dollars when an entire country is being slaughtered and starved and decimated. I am here tonight to ask you to stop investing in a war machine. Stop investing in the creation of more grief and more loss. Choose to do good and keep the money in Cuyahoga County. Free Palestine! Thank you.

These voices are many, and growing, but they remain outnumbered. But they do have a profound authority to attempt to articulate and reconcile the shared grief of all involved, as several commenters did on June 18.

And so it went on like that for hours, back and forth, amid jeers and applause from both sides. As the volume of speakers began to make conducting council business impossible, they quickly moved to restrict public comment.

First, by determining that a random lottery would select speakers, and then by restricting the previously open block of time to only 20 speakers, each with two minutes instead of three.

Despite these moves, the war continued to be the defining issue at every meeting, back and forth for months, through the election. Sometimes there were more pro-Palestine commenters, and sometimes there were more pro-Israel commenters.

On at least one occasion, things got so rowdy that the council cut the mics and moved into Executive Session. Sometimes there were rallies outside the building before and after the meeting.

Early on, Council members made some efforts to directly address the hurt in the room. By the end of last year, they were mostly sitting steely faced and silent as horrific war crimes were described to them every two weeks by one half of the room and justified by the other. Then they would move on to council business.

Neither community conceded a thing, and as time wore on, the comments became increasingly ugly and accusatory. Advocates for Palestine began to speak in more and more condemnatory terms about the County Government. Advocates for Israel began to speak in more and more condemnatory terms about the Palestinians.

On Feb. 11, six advocates from CPAC conducted a sit-in outside Ronayne’s office. They were allowed to leave and attend the meeting without incident, arriving just in time to witness Reverend Bunch being hauled to jail.

This is what finally broke the stalemate.

The Moreno Effect

The truth is that Reverend Bunch’s arrest would probably not have taken place were it not for the veiled threats of one Senator Bernie Moreno, who is nothing so much as the concept of a “shit-eating grin” in human form.

A showboating luxury car salesman and cryptocurrency evangelist who pulled off a massive upset against long-term incumbent and vanishingly rare “decent man in politics” Sherrod Brown, it’s hard to blame Bernie for feeling himself right now.

Three months into his term, he has already attained an impressive infamy for completely blowing off his constituents, some of whom have been picketing outside his Cleveland office every Wednesday for months.

But given the Trump Imperium’s clear directive to clamp down on all dissent against the genocide, it was absolutely crucial that he stick his dick into how the Cuyahoga County Council has been running their own meetings.

Following a characteristically intense County Council meeting on Jan. 28, which Moreno apparently watched online, he wrote a sternly worded letter to Council President Dale Miller, capping it with a threat to pull the 13 percent of the County’s budget that it receives from federal funding.

He also lambasted President Miller for failing to maintain decorum, again alleging “threats” to the Jewish community posed by the rowdy public comments.

Miller, who is honestly just a kind and forthright public servant, did an admirable job of responding and defending himself as well as the First Amendment, politely disarming the threat of funding cuts and vowing that the county had “a plan in place” for preventing future interruptions of the Pledge of Allegiance.

While neither party singled out Reverend Bunch by name, nearly every article covering the exchange did, alluding to “racist comments” made by Bunch at the meeting which Moreno apparently live-streamed.

So what exactly did Reverend Bunch say on Jan. 28, a week after Martin Luther King Day, that was so hateful that a U.S. Senator had to step in and threaten the federal funding of a county government?

Here it is, printed entirely in the media for the very first time (emphasis mine):

What always upsets me is that we always see you know all these Black folks up here and you are silent in moments of genocide. Do y'all know where we came from? We came on ships! Full of feces!

Cuz people like Dale Miller and Robert Schlepper and Michael Gallagher and Mark Castleberry and Martin Sweeney and Patrick Kelly and Sunny Simon said they were too lazy to do the work! So they said let me go get Yvonne Conwell, Pernell Jones, and Meredith Turner and Michael Houser and said put these niggas to work!

But I stopped by to tell you genocide is still wrong. I don't care how many white moderates you put up here it's still wrong, it’s still wrong. This jail you're trying to build over here, a multi-billion dollar jail, one facility, when you can put multi-billion dollars in Collinwood, Lee-Harvard, Mount Pleasant, Kinsman, Lee-Miles but you want to put it in one building… that frustration tells me in my spirit, in my spirit, that you have lost any type of moral decency that King brought to this world.

‘Cause what King did is actually bring Black and white folks together! And you’re supposed to build on that not just bring us together, but to do justice together! Not to rubber stamp, not to do business as usual not to invest in genocide! And to the Israeli folks that are in the room you are so far from being from Israel you don't even know where Israel begins and when it ends! Because Israel began in genocide and slavery and they said never again that's why Passover happens all the time cause never again.

Free, free Palestine!

I’m gonna go ahead and say that while maybe some of his points were made inelegantly, the idea that this warranted breathless columns on the limits of the First Amendment, much less felony charges, is completely ludicrous.

Is it maybe a bit risque to invoke slavery by explicitly juxtaposing every white member of County Council against every Black member? Sure.

But it’s hardly hate speech.

Is it maybe rude for a Black man to call Black elected officials “niggas” in a public meeting? Sure. But the repeated line that he referred to council members as “an offensive racial slur” is obviously farcical in context.

Is bringing up the Jewish people’s own experience of genocide, including in the Book of Exodus, antisemetic? Of course not.

Reverend Bunch, in a passionate and somewhat flustered way, was simply trying to invoke a sense of shame and cognitive dissonance in a bunch of people who should know better.

The man’s a preacher. Being a little grandiose with rhetoric is his thing.

We should be grateful he’s putting his talents towards the cause of justice, unlike local pastors who do the opposite. It’s also important to remember that he had been providing public comments on the issue for over a year before this particular meeting.

Like virtually every controversy manufactured over the last eighteen months to tar pro-Palestine protesters and their manifestly just cause, Cleveland media’s back and forth hand-wringing over this shit has been in profound bad faith.

More importantly, it served to temporarily shift the conversation to be about whether or not one man’s comments crossed a line and not whether our tax dollars should be funding the wholesale dispossession of an entire population.

While I recognize that we live in a media environment overwhelmed by polemics and propaganda, some of the coverage has been fueling the fire specifically because it goes out of its way to avoid offending anyone.

I think traditional journalistic ethics are essentially worthless if they dictate that “both sides” of an genocide must be fairly represented but that you must never, ever, under any circumstances, provide crucial context to vague allegations of racist epithets by printing the word “nigga.”

This logic is incoherent, meaningless, and effectively works in fealty to all of the forces engaged in dismantling our democracy as you read this.

Generally unremarked upon are the deeply racist assumptions about Arabs and Muslims embedded not only in much of the pro-Israel arguments, but also in the response of local elected officials. Palestinian demands for equity and dignity have, from the very beginning, been treated as inherently dangerous and threatening to the power structure in this country.

And Reverend Bunch’s charges should be dropped immediately, if this County has any shame at all.

In the end, all of the County’s resistance crumbled before Trumpanomics.

Just a “Freeze”

After all was said and done, the protesters partly got what they wanted when, on Feb. 21, Cuyahoga County announced a temporary freeze on all outside investments until the County can be confident that it has $100 million on hand, hopefully by September.

This included $3 million of the Israel bonds that expired in March. Notably, the freeze was announced in the wake of Trump’s “temporary federal funding freeze” that sent bureaucrats across the country into a 48-hour freakout.

Conceding absolutely nothing to the protesters, County Treasurer Brad Cromes attributed the freeze to fiscal necessity, per cleveland.com:

Additional large upcoming expenditures and uncertainty surrounding federal funding have made increasing this cash reserve even more critical so the county can continue to meet obligations to our residents and protect taxpayer dollars,” Ronayne’s chief spokeswoman Kelly Woodard echoed in an emailed statement to cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer.

The county has been freezing long-term bond investments since September 2024 to try to free up more cash, Cromes wrote in his letter. He noted eight bonds that he’s let expire without renewal, netting about $61.5 million in cash, and four bonds he sold for $31 million.

But it hasn’t been enough to cover the bills.

He quoted $540 million in county spending in January, because of routine bills, advances to local municipalities and “atypical expenses” that included things like an extra pay period, the $17 million in new bonds the county took out to pay off Gateway’s debt, and the nearly $27 million the county had to pull from reserves to cover excess spending last year.

There’s also several more “large expenditures” coming due this year, Cromes noted. They include plugging the $25 million budget deficit that is expected at the end of this year, $25 million in refunds owed to communities from property taxes they paid to cover the costs of real estate reappraisals over the past six years, and about $32 million in spending needed to keep planning for the new jail moving until the county can issue bonds.

And that’s just what’s known.

The county is also waiting to see what happens to a $129 million federal grant for solar energy projects in the county that the Trump administration froze and then unfroze this week, which Cromes said creates “tremendous uncertainty.””

In other words, like local governments all around the country, Cuyahoga County is very likely to be completely fucked by this time next year.

In a roundabout way, Moreno’s threat was the icing on the cake that made the decision to let the bond expire necessary. By alluding to the Trump administration’s new mafia-like policies that federal funding is essentially subject to the whims of the mad king, he put a sharp point on the threat that the Burgerreich is moving to consume us all in short order.

This reminded the county pencil pushers that we need to pinch every penny we can.

Whatever the stated reason may have been for the County caving, the advocates of CPAC rightfully consider this a victory. It is well deserved.

It was difficult to fully capture the full extent of their resolute struggle over these last 18 months. There are still many battles ahead, and the organizing strength of CPAC could potentially spearhead a sea change in local politics.

Notably, Mohammad Faraj, a young Palestinian-American attorney, has announced he is running to represent Cleveland’s Ward 7 this year. Tanmay Shah, an attorney and activist who has also worked extensively with CPAC, has announced his run for Ward 12.

A particular shout-out is owed to the 11 students at Case Western in February for very minor vandalism that could not possibly have involved them all.

These kids are incredibly courageous. Greater Cleveland’s campus solidarity movement has been militant and extensive, facing down significant repression from school administrations just like student bodies all across the country.

Unfortunately, this was too big a story to cover in this article on top of everything else.

If you’re interested in learning about any of this in even more granular detail, follow CPAC, CWRU SJP, and PSL Cleveland on Instagram. From there, get involved. Join a protest. Give a public comment.

Write your legislators, maybe tell Senator Moreno to go suck a Bitcoin and receive one of his famous form emails! Send a thank you to the County Administration for their decision, even though they swear it had nothing to do with morality at all.

It couldn’t hurt.

To Our Esteemed Representatives

I want to address our city and county leadership here.

I do feel some degree of sympathy for the fact that you’ve been getting screamed at for the last year and a half over things far beyond your control.

It has to suck to come into your job where you’re just trying to fill potholes and give tax breaks to developers and be told nonstop that you’re complicit in mass murder by a bunch of uncouth hippies in keffiyehs. Nobody responds positively to that kind of accusation.

But this was a test of moral clarity, and nearly all of you have failed.

I get that it’s difficult to get right and that nobody wants to offend the Jewish community. Even Senator Bernie Sanders has been taking shit from the left for not calling it a genocide, and he’s taken a harder line than basically all of you.

But if the International Court of Justice calls it a genocide, it’s a fucking genocide. That’s what the ICJ is for. They’ve issued arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister and Secretary of Defense.

If you’re one of the council people who knows this is a genocide but has only shared your opinion behind the scenes, you are a coward. Now more than ever, we need leaders who can be outspoken publicly in their advocacy for peace, justice, and democracy.

The political considerations that bind your tongues will matter less and less as the next few years progress. Appeasement and compromise are famously inert against the steady march of fascism as it tears democracies apart.

Whoever’s money and votes you feel the need to stay quiet in order to shore up, I assure you that history will not give a shit.

This is an invitation to all of you.

Fix your hearts or get out of the way for the people who can. Now is the time to be bold. Wake up.

If you don’t feel equipped to handle these questions, educate yourself. These same activists who have relentlessly hounded you will rally behind you when you do the right thing. They’re looking desperately for champions right now.

With the normalization of mass deportation, panopticon surveillance, and propaganda capabilities that would have made Goebbels blush, we are on the precipice of a pitch black era for the human race. You must understand that Gaza is the canary in the coal mine.

As an example of the kinds of 21st-century nightmares that await us, Israel has made use of an AI-assisted targeting system that deliberately launches missiles at suspected Hamas militants, specifically when they’re home with their families.

They’ve dubbed it “Where’s Daddy?”

Closer to home, a Tufts student was arrested by plainclothes ICE officers wearing masks and taken to an internment camp for writing an op-ed opposing the war in her school newspaper.

Sorry to offend people who think drawing this comparison is gauche, but this is all Nazi shit. We live in Nazi world. It’s bound to keep escalating to ever more Naziesque places if we don’t leverage every kind of power we can to stop it. You have a lot more power than the people shouting at you in grief; that's why they've come to you for recourse.

If we let the fascists and war profiteers of this weary world get away with doing this to Gaza, on camera, in front of the entire planet, they’ll do it to everyone they can. Palestine must be liberated, or we’ll all be in chains.

There’s Still Hope

I’d like to leave you with an image that captures so much of what stirs my heart about this awful war.

It’s an image of devastation, and it’s an image of hope. Among the ruins, hundreds gathered in Gaza at one long table stretching far into the horizon to break bread and celebrate the beginning of Ramadan.

In all directions are the ruins of their neighborhoods, and among the only fully standing structures are the poles on which some festive lighting has been hung.

This was a population that most people have felt comfortable ignoring for the last 75 years. It now feels as though the persistence of any kind of gentleness and hope in this entire world is contingent on their survival.

I don’t intend to romanticize their plight. Their suffering is not some kind of lesson in resilience for the rest of the world. It’s just a travesty. They are merely trying to survive in a completely impossible situation.

But I hope that seeing them here, you can at least recognize the simple shared humanity of a people under siege. We should never treat anyone like this again. We don’t have to.

I hope that one day, after truth and reconciliation, they can be treated by their neighbors in Israel as equals and friends. That would be a beautiful redemption for this whole ugly story. Ultimately, we must find a way to coexist.

Free Palestine.