Nearly a decade ago, student activists met for the annual National Students for Justice in Palestine conference. Titled “From Campus to Community: Building a Vision for the Future,” the 2015 gathering focused on strategies for moving anti-Israel activity off into the broader community. Efforts to mobilize activists to challenge their municipalities to pass anti-Israel legislation faced significant hurdles for years, but exploded in the wake of the Oct. 7 terror attacks.

Since Oct. 7, some 70 U.S. cities, including Chicago and Seattle, have passed resolutions on the Israel-Hamas war with most calling for the Biden administration to broker a cease-fire. At least 48 cities have passed symbolic resolutions calling for a halt in the war.

Mika Efros doesn’t consider herself an activist. But when her “small, close-knit” Southern California town of Claremont became the center of a proposed cease-fire resolution — which called on Israel to immediately end its war in Gaza without defeating Hamas —  the mother of two “had 10 days to react and do something.”

“It started with a group chat [among neighbors] with everyone who was Jewish,” Efros recalled in an interview with Jewish Insider. “We basically said let’s meet up and strategize… We just said we need to get together and figure this out because now it’s coming to our backyard,” she said of the suburban Los Angeles city, which is home to seven colleges and graduate schools – Pomona College, Claremont Graduate University, Scripps College, Claremont McKenna College, Harvey Mudd College, Pitzer College and Keck Graduate Institute. 

On Feb. 27, the Claremont City Council joined a fast-growing group of local legislative bodies to vote on a cease-fire resolution in the Israel-Hamas war. The vote was actually on two resolutions: one that called for neutrality on social and political issues not local to Claremont, and another that called for a cease-fire in Gaza. The first resolution passed, negating a vote on the second, and local residents chalk up the victory to a grassroots effort led by about 20 people — previously politically disengaged Jews who took a stand against more than 300 college students, SJP members and local community members. Their winning campaign slogan was “Claremont: Stay local.” 

As cease-fire resolutions continue to jump from college campuses to local city councils, a long-term SJP goal, Efros said that other towns could use Claremont as a model for what “worked” in the deep blue town to combat the resolution. “None of us knew what to do,” she said of the small group of activists, which consisted of a variety of residents, from stay-at-home moms to a rabbi to non-Jewish spouses of Jewish community members. 

Efros said “lobbying” is too strong of a word to describe the group’s efforts. Rather, she detailed the period of time between the idea of a cease-fire resolution initially being introduced by several attendees during a mid-Feb meeting, up until the vote, as consisting of “a lot of letters written to the city council members and phone calls to them.”

She called communication with the council members “cordial.” “Some responded to phone calls and were open to understanding why the local community was opposed to the cease-fire being voted on.” 

“It’s not like we have a playbook,” Efros continued, noting that the group looked at Pomona, a nearby city where the council passed a cease-fire resolution one month earlier, as an example of what not to do. “We didn’t even know the rules of city hall when we first started organizing,” she continued. 

American Jews overwhelmingly see Israel’s war in Gaza as a justified response to the most devastating massacre of Jews within their lifetime. Some lost friends and family members in the attack in which Hamas murdered 1,200 people in Israel — and continues to hold 134 captive. The Claremont City Council meeting easily could have turned into “an hours-long tearjerker,” Efros said. 

But she recommends a less emotional response.  

“We found that the best thing is to have a strategy that does not get into details of who is wrong, who is right… but rather formulate an adult approach saying that this is not a local issue,” Efros said. 

“Claremont is a small, close-knit community and we don’t want to bring matters outside of the juxtaposition of City Council into the meeting, that was our strategy.” 

The resolution, brought to local government by the group Claremont Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and supported by eight other organizations from Claremont Consortium, stated, “The City Council hereby supports Congressional Resolution H.R. 786, and joins other cities in calling on Congress and the Biden administration to demand: an immediate ceasefire; an immediate release of all hostages; urgent safe passage and delivery of substantial and sufficient humanitarian aid to Gaza; and a lasting political resolution that protects the lives, health, and security of all innocent civilians.” 

The meeting, which lasted nearly seven hours, concluded with a unanimous vote by council members in favor of the first resolution, effectively ruling out the possibility of their voting on the second. 

The resolutions, whether or not they pass, often embolden antisemitic rhetoric around town, as seen in the San Francisco Bay Area, which has been the center of at least a couple dozen community cease-fire resolutions since Oct. 7.   

Tyler Gregory, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council Bay Area, told JI that a unanimous vote by Oakland City Council to pass a cease-fire resolution in November, which called on Congress to demand an end to the war in Gaza, is the most prominent example of how the resolutions have “led to a decay.” 

The cease-fire resolution, which did not condemn Hamas, “led to mass antisemitic graffiti around town,” Gregory said, adding that soon after, on Dec. 6, the local teachers’ union “felt emboldened to support a teach-in for Palestine.” 

“Ultimately [it led to] the menorah being desecrated and thrown into Lake Merritt,” Gregory continued.

JCRC, along with several other Jewish groups, have offered guidance to community members on how to fight the resolutions. The approach is different in each community, depending on the strength of relationships with council members, political views and the type of resolution.  

“Our approach is always asking if we can defeat it,” Gregory said. “If we can defeat it, we work with the community, meet with legislators and try to have them vote it down. Sometimes that is successful. But realistically, we try to amend the language that’s there, [such as] including that all the hostages will be released or a condemnation of Hamas and the language that Hamas needs to be removed.” 

“Sometimes we’re most successful in going from a bad resolution to one that we can live with,” Gregory continued. “That’s a second choice approach. Even if it is voted to approve, the community then has an understanding of who isn’t willing to condemn Hamas. [It tells us] who our friends are.” 

Gregory added that understanding the intention behind each resolution, and whether there are antisemitic undertones, is crucial. He pointed to a resolution in Richmond, just outside of Berkeley, “where Israel was declared to be an apartheid, genocidal state.” 

“It was openly antisemitic, in addition to their call for a cease-fire,” he said, adding that others are “more benign, saying we want people dying to stop.” 

“So when we are thinking about how we address these issues— we are angry wherever they happen, but we also need to stop and ask whether these resolutions are brought forward in good faith or not,” Gregory said. 

He called the rise of widespread attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict throughout the Bay Area “unprecedented.” “We’ve gone from the most liberal cities here, like Oakland, Berkeley and San Francisco to the suburbs of Palo Alto and Silicon Valley that have never seen any kind of fraught attention around the conflict. The community is waking up to this as a result.” 

The Anti-Defamation League issued local guidance on cease-fire resolutions last month. 

“We’ve seen many highly problematic ceasefire resolutions, which have downplayed or even failed to mention Hamas atrocities while placing the entire onus of this current war on Israel,” the group’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, said in a statement. “Some local hearings on these resolutions have featured shocking antisemitic rhetoric directed at Jews and Zionists, creating a hostile environment surrounding these actions for those in attendance. We continue to urge city councils, legislatures, and other bodies to consider more balanced measures that include the release of all the hostages, humanitarian assistance for civilians of Gaza and an end to the threat posed by the terrorist group Hamas. The reality is this war could end today were Hamas to release all hostages, disarm and disband and end its rule of Gaza.”

Jewish Federations of North America receives inquiries from federations nationwide dealing with local cease-fire resolutions “what seems like on the hour, every hour,” Evan Bernstein, the group’s vice president for community relations, told JI. “Sometimes it’s multiple times,” he continued. “They’ll battle a resolution and get a win and the other side keeps coming back and eventually the city council will approve the resolution. It’s been a real strain on the Jewish community and federation leadership. We’ve had some real wins and some where things are really stacked against us.”  

Bernstein said that JFNA has worked on how to handle the resolutions with close to 80 federations around the U.S. since mid-October. “[We help with] language around it, what to say if you’re testifying, how to work on op-eds, how to work on private conversations with city council,” he said, noting that many federations are experienced in dealing with state and federal elected officials, but have not focused on city council before.

“This has never been an issue the way it is now,” Bernstein continued. “People saw the opportunity and now federations are having to pivot and not only play defense but also offense.” 

SJP-led anti-Israel activity has infiltrated college campuses since Oct. 7—  including on campuses without much history of anti-Israel political activism. But SJP’s stated long-term goal —- one that predates Oct. 7 — was always to go a step further: for cease-fire resolutions to take over the wider community. 

In the years before the Oct. 7 attack, there have been sporadic efforts to pass anti-Israel measures. The efforts would usually pop up during previous conflicts between Israel and Hamas. 

Several of the efforts were related to police department trainings and summits involving travel to Israel and learning from Israeli law enforcement’s experience in preventing terrorist attacks. In 2018, a petition in Durham, N.C., asked the City Council to forbid the local police from attending programs hosted by Israeli law enforcement to learn how to stop terrorist attacks and mass shootings in their city — even though Durham didn’t send its cops to Israel. The City Council passed the resolution, a decision that “felt like a punch in the gut” for pro-Israel residents of Durham. In an op-ed at the time, a group of rabbis wrote, the “statement singling out partnerships with Israel for prohibition, but no other country in the world, was so distressing for many Jews in our community … the vote felt like a punch in the gut.”

Several of the communities that passed cease-fire resolutions last month, from Amherst, Mass., to Durham, N.H., are college towns. 

“What happens on campus does not stay on campus,” Jacob Baime, CEO of Israel on Campus Coalition, told JI. “The very same anti-Israel organizers bring BDS to campus and cease-fire resolutions to city councils. Our adversaries perceive and operate in a unified battlespace, sharing strategy, tactics and resources across domains of American society. The anti-Israel campaign in America is not grassroots. It is a top-down professional political operation.” 

ICC has been tracking the trend as far back as 2015. In its annual report that year, the group wrote, “SJP chapters and members spent a significant amount of effort building relationships with community members.” 

In February, California’s Riverside City Council was set to consider a cease-fire resolution. The resolution did not call for the release of hostages remaining in Gaza. Logan Fraigun, a University of California, Riverside third-year political science major, met with the student government and City Council to combat the resolution. 

After five hours of speeches, the resolution failed. “A lot of students from my campus were involved in the City Council vote,” he said, adding that the community resolution had ripple effects on the university, miles away from city hall, even more so than in the community itself. 

“I don’t really think it’s a big issue in Riverside, mostly because people don’t really care about the issue,” he said. “But on campus, I don’t feel safe doing Jewish activities or hosting Jewish events.”

“There have been incidents where we try to host pro-Israel events and SJP will try to shut us down,” Fraigun continued. “They’ve made it a non-open environment.”