“My people have been suffering for the past 76 years, myself included,” said longtime Lakewood resident and Palestinian activist Linda Badwan. “I’m not relying on [politicians] to make the changes.”
It was late Monday evening, February 12, and the Denver City Council had just voted 9-4 against a proclamation calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Organizers had brought the proclamation to the council after months of community pressure. More than 48 cities across the United States passed their own resolutions or proclamations calling for a ceasefire. Denver’s attempt came as the Israeli military has killed more than 29,000 Palestinians, including over 12,000 children, in Gaza following the Oct. 7 attack when Hamas killed at least 1,140 people in Israel.
“We wanted that humanity to come through,” Badwan sighed, calling the council’s rejection of a ceasefire “hurtful.”
“[A ceasefire] shouldn’t be something that we have to convince anybody of,” she said.
Coupled with Israeli attacks on humanitarian aid convoys and restrictions on the entrance of aid into Gaza, the months-long assault has also spurred widespread hunger and starvation in Gaza, with 2.2 million people facing “crisis or worse” levels of acute food insecurity according to the World Food Program. A December New Data for Progress poll found that 61% of Americans support a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, standing in stark contrast to the 12% of Congress members who have publicly called for one.
Badwan, who is originally from Beitin, a small village near Jerusalem, grew up between the U.S. and Palestine. Over the past several months, she worked alongside a team of Palestinian and Jewish activists and their allies to draft the proclamation language. That team included Giselle Herzfeld, who Badwan first met at a letter-writing event Herzfeld organized last fall—together, they were responsible for fielding community feedback and negotiating the documents’ content with city officials.
Genocide is familiar territory to Herzfeld, who has Ukrainian, Jewish and Mexica lineage. Her great-grandfather was killed in the Holocaust, and her father’s side fled Ukraine before the Holodomor, the two-year period of systemic starvation of the Ukrainian people by the USSR. Herzfeld’s mother’s family is descended from the Mexica, an indigenous group targeted by the Spanish Conquistadors during the colonization of what is now Mexico.
“On every side of my family there is a linkage of surviving genocide,” Herzfeld reflected. “Seeing my own Holocaust trauma being used to justify committing genocide against the Palestinians is the most horrific thing. I can never get it out of my head.”
Herzfeld first learned about the Palestinian liberation movement more than 10 years ago, but it wasn’t until Oct. 7 that she got involved in community organizing. Since then, she and Badwan have been an active part of the Denver organizing scene, most recently working with the Colorado Palestine Lobbying and Advocacy Group to draft the proclamation’s language.
Both Badwan and Herzfeld emphasized that pushing for a ceasefire proclamation at the city level was not their first plan of action. Since Oct. 7 and during prior Israeli bombardments of Gaza, Coloradans have held protests, sit-ins, poetry readings, educational events and meetings with elected officials.
“It’s not like we think that city councils are the deciders in this,” Herzfeld said. “We started with the federal government, we started with our congress members, we had rallies week after week. We tried everything to get our congress members to act, and we were met with complete silence and disregard.”
Colorado Sens. John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet have spoken strongly in support of Israel before and since Oct. 7. While Sen. Hickenlooper has called on President Joe Biden to allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza and take diplomatic action to curtail Israeli settler violence against Palestinian civilians in the Occupied West Bank, he has refused to support a ceasefire. Sen. Bennet has similarly called for Israel to take limited measures to protect civilians but has also declined to support a ceasefire.
“We felt this is our direct way of being able to engage with our council members, especially because our tax dollars are going to military funding,” said Badwan. “We had the hallway packed. We had the chamber packed. We had the overflow room packed. And still, [the council] did not listen.”
Herzfeld also noted that, contrary to what some elected officials have claimed, support for a ceasefire spanned religious and ethnic divisions.
“When they say at city council that this is only dividing our community, that’s not true,” Herzfeld said. “In this movement, we’re seeing Palestinian, Jewish—every community—in a way I haven’t seen united for any other issue.”
