Supervisors Push Israel-Gaza Ceasefire Resolution

Milwaukee County Courthouse. Photo by Graham Kilmer.

Supervisors on the Milwaukee County Board will consider a resolution this month calling for a ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

The resolution is sponsored by Sup. Ryan Clancy, and has co-sponsorship from Supervisors Juan Miguel Martinez, Caroline Gómez-Tom and Steven Shea.

If it passes, it commits the county board to supporting “an immediate and permanent cease-fire and the delivery of humanitarian aid and de-escalation in Israel and in Gaza and the West Bank.” The U.S., under the administration of President Joe Biden, has not called for a ceasefire.

“I have been really frustrated with a persistent narrative that this whole situation started on Oct. 7,” said Clancy, who told Urban Milwaukee he visited the Gaza Strip in 2011. “It absolutely did not. It’s a horrific, dehumanizing situation, and it’s been genocide for the last 75 years.”

Clancy, who is also a state legislator, was criticized in October after abstaining from a vote in the state Assembly condemning the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israel. Hamas has been designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department since 1997. It has governed the Gaza Strip since it won a plurality of a national vote in 2006 and expelled the Palestinian Authority in 2007.

“The resolution that was before us essentially erased Palestine,” Clancy said. “It talked about supporting one very specific party, one government in a very complex situation, and that was not the right thing to do in October, it is not the right thing to do in January of 2024.”

Clancy said his resolution recognizes that there has been “horrific loss on all sides there and to all civilian populations.”

The supervisor said he thinks the board has a responsibility to weigh in on issues and events occurring at the national and international level.

“What we often see is that some folks on the board, I’ll use Sheldon Wasserman as an example, don’t think that we should be weighing in on matters of state or national or international importance at the local level, and that’s an abdication of our responsibility,” he said.

Reached for comment, Wasserman told Urban Milwaukee that policies and issues like those raised by Clancy’s resolution are unrelated to the job of county supervisor.

“Our job is to be responsible for Milwaukee County government,” he said. “It’s not to be a congressman or to work in the United Nations.”

Elected officials at higher levels of government don’t care when local legislative branches pass resolutions on issues outside their brief, Wasserman said. “They take that little resolution and throw it in the garbage,” he said. “They don’t care. It doesn’t affect them.”

In recent years, the board has passed similar resolutions weighing on international affairs. One was a condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Another, similar to Clancy’s resolution in that it called on the U.S. government to change existing policy, called on the federal government to normalize diplomatic relations with Cuba. At the time Wasserman made similar comments, saying it was outside of a supervisor’s authority and that policymakers at higher levels don’t care what they have to say.

The practice is not unique to Milwaukee County, though. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors gained national media attention earlier this month when it passed a similar resolution calling for a ceasefire.