After the events of October 7, Spokane City Council was quick to pass a resolution in support of the state of Israel and in solidarity with our local Jewish community. Written by Council Member Jonathan Bingle on October 9 and rubber-stamped by the rest of the council later that night, the resolution came under heavy criticism just as quickly.
Though there was some language denouncing Islamophobia alongside anti-Semitism, local advocates criticized the resolution for ignoring the history of Israeli military violence against civilians in Palestine and the impact that it has had on their family members in Spokane. Community members organized to speak at city council meetings during open forum, leading eventually to the Spokane City Council’s walkout on November 8.
In late October, Council Members Zack Zappone and Betsy Wilkerson met with local Muslim and Arab leaders and expressed remorse for passing the motion so quickly and without consulting community members first. And while RANGE has seen several rounds of draft revisions to the resolution, those efforts are not widely known in the larger community and no public vote has yet occurred.
While the city council deliberates, the death toll in Gaza has eclipsed 20,000 — an estimated 70% of whom are women and children — meaning the dead represent nearly 1% of the total population of Gaza.
Locally, incidents of Islamophobia and anti-Arab hate have spiked.
Azalyn, a local Afro-Arab and Muslim community member and cofounder of the group Spokane 4 Palestine recounted multiple stories in which she and people close to her have faced physical violence, threats, harassment and constant microaggressions in Spokane.
“When I was walking back to my car after class, someone driving by leaned out the window and yelled ‘Fuck Hamas and fuck you,’” she said. “Last week I was walking on the sidewalk and a guy walked past me and said, ‘Terrorist, go back to your country.’”
Hate and threats of violence have followed her online as well. “I accidentally found a video of me posted on a Spokane news site at a protest I was at,” she said, “and there were 300 comments calling for me to be murdered, imprisoned, deported and that I am a terrorist who hates America and that I should never have been let in.”
Local Muslims and Arabs say that Islamophobia and anti-Arab hate are not new in Spokane. “As Muslims, we walk around with a target on our back,” said Naghmana Sherazi, a previous Spokane City Council candidate and member of both Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom and Muslims for Community Action Support (MCAS).
However, since October, Azalyn and Sherazi both say the situation has become worse. Sherazi described her experience as a Muslim and the experience of many other Muslims in the city as “trauma on trauma.”
Swift action supporting Israel, inaction supporting Arabs & Muslims
The blow-by-blow of how Council Member Bingle’s resolution was written and approved by the city council in a single day, just two days after Hamas’ attack on Israel, has been well-documented, including by RANGE. So have the public protests by activists during subsequent council meetings.
Less well-documented moments are behind-the-scenes gatherings with community leaders. In these meetings, groups have urged council members to revise the document, formally called Resolution 2023-0091, to include similar expressions of solidarity on behalf of Arabs, Muslims, and members of other groups who are mistaken for Arab or Muslim when targeted for hate.
The resolution has no impact on city policy or funding, but it does voice unequivocal support for the state of Israel and Spokane’s local Jewish community. In the statement, council members condemn violence against Israel, assert that Israel has a right to exist, and denounce anti-Semitism. And while there is passing condemnation for Islamophobia and vague expressions of support for “inclusion and belonging” for every Spokane resident, Muslim and Arab community members RANGE spoke to felt those words were tepid and thin, compared with the full-throated support for Israel in the resolution.
Sherazi felt that Spokane City Council’s hastily-made statement excluded the voices of local Muslims, Palestinians and Arabs, so she arranged a meeting to bring together community leaders and council members.
The meeting took place midday on October 30, and gathered more than 20 community members to meet with Council Members Wilkerson and Zappone.
Attendants included leaders from 10 different organizations, including Muslims for Community Action and Support (MCAS), Peace and Justice Action League of Spokane (PJALS), National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Refugee and Immigrant Connections Spokane (RICS), Faith Leaders and Leaders of Conscience and Western States Center.
As attendants arrived, some embraced each other, exchanging “hellos” and talking about their families. During the meeting, the depth of emotion was apparent on the faces of many in the room. Tears fell as Muslim community members expressed the discrimination they and their children had faced since October 7.
Sherazi criticized Resolution 2023-0091, saying it was “very divisive and one-sided” and “very irresponsible.” Her goal throughout the meeting was to find a solution that would include members of the Muslim community alongside members of the Jewish community. “We are two sides of the same coin. We love the whole community here,” she said.
Some members of the Jewish community attended as well, including Joan Braune, who specializes in Critical Hate Studies and teaches at Gonzaga University. “There’s a diversity of opinion on this in the Jewish community,” she said.
Spokane’s local conservative Temple Beth Shalom and the reform group Congregation Emanu-El have expressed explicit support for the state of Israel and victims of the Hamas attack. Emanu-El has additionally said, “We pray for a swift end to the war, healing for those injured, the safe return of all those taken captive by Hamas, and for the many innocent Palestinian civilians impacted.” Chabad of Spokane — a congregation rooted in the Chabad-Lubavitch movement — has raised funds specifically for the Israel Defense Forces.
There are also pockets of local Jews who are members of Jewish Voice for Peace and advocate for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and, ultimately, Palestinian liberation.
Braune noted how the negative rhetoric targeting Muslims, Arabs and Jews has given more opportunity to white supremacists: “Neo-Nazis are loving this,” she said.
She also criticized the wording of Spokane’s resolution and how it conflates Jewish identity with a connection to the contemporary state of Israel.
“It’s kinda anti-Semitic to equate Jewish people with Israel,” she said.
Brimo Nyinkuany, assistant director at Refugee & Immigrant Connections Spokane, brought up concern for other immigrant and multicultural groups in the city.
“The whole world is in Spokane,” he said. “What is happening to the Muslim will happen to the whole of Spokane.”
The focus for many was the direct impact of hate crimes in Spokane. Multiple people also expressed concern about what procedures are in place to gain community input before writing resolutions.
“This is your responsibility,” Sherazi said, asking council members to take more initiative in protecting the community going forward. “We all need to be safe, and I am not safe.”
Both Wilkerson and Zappone acknowledged at the meeting that the resolution was made too quickly and without enough community input. “I didn’t know the full history,” Wilkerson said.
“I think it’s clear I made a mistake,” Zappone said.
Both council members also expressed that they wanted to hear more from marginalized community members in Spokane, stressing the importance of active communication going forward. Wilkerson also stressed that she wanted to work on establishing more permanent systems to prevent the passing of other rushed, under-researched resolutions.
“I can’t capture your lived experience without your voice,” Wilkerson said. She then offered an open question to the community: “How can we help support you in keeping the conversation and education going forward?”
The council members said their short-term goal was to create a new resolution, but the meeting ended without a firm consensus on how to move forward.
Fear breeds silence
But while Wilkerson urged members of the Arab and Muslim communities to raise their voices, many people RANGE spoke with say fear of harassment and even violence has led them and other community members to stay silent.
Because of the heated political rhetoric across the US, local Arab and Muslim leaders say that people — especially immigrants and those in the US on student visas — are afraid to speak openly about their experiences, either about the suffering of their families in Gaza or the hate they’ve experienced here.
“I do know a couple of Palestinians, but they have refused to speak out in public as they are worried about backlash against their families and themselves,” said Sherazi. “We are all getting hate mail, including the school board directors.”
“My Saudi friends who are here to study in Spokane are terrified to speak up publicly in support of Palestine because they’re worried about what they say being linked to terrorism and being deported,” Azalyn said. “There seems to be no free speech for most of us.”
Azalyn has found that harassment follows her regardless of whether she is protesting or not, and is especially bad when she is in a group among other hijabi women (this term refers to Muslim women who adhere to the religious practice of wearing a head covering).
“There are creepy guys with body cams who will follow us at protests and zoom the cameras in on our faces,” Azalyn said. “The only time it was this hateful and bad was right after 9/11, but I was a child then.”
Bias and bullying incidents have been reported at local Spokane schools. At the meeting on October 30, one Iraqi person recounted a story about their daughter. Her fellow students accused her of being part of ISIS and of being a terrorist while at school. The child was also targeted with physical violence. The parent choked up, explaining how she had brought her family to the United States for safety, but now her child is still unsafe, even while in school.
Even raising money for humanitarian relief efforts has stirred hateful responses.
On October 17, Middle Eastern chefs from a local nonprofit restaurant, Feast World Kitchen, held a fundraiser for the Red Crescent Society, a volunteer-based humanitarian network. The organization received a barrage of angry comments on social media in addition to one emailed threat of violence.
“We got one very racist and threatening email that fell short of any specific threats,” said Ross Carper, co-founder and co-executive director of Feast. “It has happened in the past, you know, people making racist comments about our chefs when local news covers our work, so sadly it wasn’t very surprising.”
They clarified that the fundraiser was not intended to be a political statement, but a humanitarian one. They also apologized to members of the Jewish and Israeli community for the offense that the fundraising caused. In a Facebook post, Feast wrote “The current fundraiser for the most vulnerable in Gaza should not be interpreted as any sort of sympathizing with hate, violence, or terrorism. Some have made the leap to this assumption, and sent us threatening hateful emails.”
“We simply acknowledge that the fragility of the healthcare infrastructure specifically within Gaza makes its 2.2 million inhabitants particularly and extremely vulnerable,” Feast wrote.
Some Muslim and Arab community members who have spoken up have reached a breaking point after the trauma of the past few months. Carper, a white man, spoke to RANGE on behalf of Feast alone. This was partially because the organization’s co-director, Maisa Abudayha, whose mother is from Palestine, was exhausted and stressed from fearing for her family here and in Lebanon, the threatening letters Feast received and the public vitriol in general.
Rising hatred in Spokane reflects a national spike in both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), respectively. CAIR wrote that they received 2,171 calls reporting hate incidents nationally in the eight weeks between Oct. 7 and Dec. 11, compared with 5,156 in all of 2022.
The US Bureau of Justice statistics estimates that 56% of all hate crimes go unreported, so both of those numbers are likely far higher, and it’s possible that Arabs and Muslims are even less likely to report incidents given the current national mood.
That mood feels chilling in more ways than one — it discourages those who have experienced discriminatory and hateful incidents from speaking out and is reminiscent of previous decades in the 21st century when public attitudes ran to dangerous places.
Rami Al-Kabra, a friend of Sherazi, is the deputy mayor of Bothell, Washington and a Palestinian-American. He said, “There are multiple emotions that are happening within us. There’s a lot of sadness, a lot of anger, a lot of despair.”
“Personally, I got a lot of flashbacks to the post 9/11 tragedy with massive Islamophobia and the anti-Arab, anti-Muslim sentiment that just swept through the country from the general population all the way up to policy-makers,” Al-Kabra said. “It’s scary times for Palestinians and Muslims and anyone who looks like those groups.”
Muslim and Arab community members aren’t the only ones who have faced discrimination and estrangement in recent months.
At a November 19 protest in Riverfront Park by the recently-formed Inland Northwest Coalition for the Liberation of Palestine (INWCLP), a local Jew named Morton Alexander told the audience, “I am an old Jew, older than Israel. My wife, Paige Kenney, and I are members of Congregation Emanu-El in Spokane. I am also a member of Jewish Voice for Peace, nationally. Most of my comrades in the organized Jewish community regard this as incompatible and see JVP as heresy.”
He spoke of some of his experiences in Spokane’s Jewish community. “Some there consider me not a Jew, even an anti-Semite. I’m used to that.”
At the city council’s recent open forums, many people have spoken up about how the violence in Palestine and Israel has impacted their lives.
Jessi Pederson, a local health care worker with family in Israel, spoke at the October 30 city council meeting. “I know intimate details reported by my family, the atrocities that have been and continue to be committed in that region,” they said. “My family, having been conscripted, have taken part in this. It is tearing our family apart unfortunately. I stand against genocide in all its forms.”
In the course of this reporting, RANGE contacted roughly 20 members of Spokane’s Jewish, Arab and Muslim communities, in addition to allies and various organizations working locally for justice. Of those people and groups contacted, only four Spokanites agreed to full interviews. A few more organizations and individuals shared publicly-available statements, and everyone else either declined to speak or ignored any requests for comment.
Because of this reluctance to speak, it’s hard to know how many people in Spokane are directly impacted by the violence, either in Israel, Gaza or the West Bank, so we are left mostly with anecdotes.
At the November 19 protest in Riverfront Park, a person named Enam detailed her experience growing up in Palestine and the constant fear she and her family would experience.
“When I was a kid living in Palestine, it was always a battle,” she said. “I remember as sirens in our villages went off and the Israel military would come in and torture us. We would have to turn off all of the lights, hide for hours, so they wouldn’t take my brothers or my dad. They had and still have all the control over us.”
“I have lost a family member doing humanitarian work in Gaza and several friends,” said Azalyn. “I look at people living a normal life and cannot comprehend it at all. The genocide consumes my thoughts — I am not well.”
“I think they forgot we existed”
As of today, more than two months after that first Oct. 30 meeting with community members, and despite internal deliberations about a revision, Spokane City Council has not openly addressed concerns about Resolution 2023-0091.
This has left some Muslim, Arab and Palestinian people feeling forgotten. Azalyn said, “They didn’t even want to touch the Israel resolution revisions until after the elections. I think they forgot we existed here too and have loved ones in Palestine too.”
In interviews, Council Members Paul Dillon and Zappone both explained that part of the delay in writing and passing an updated resolution was the criticism over how rushed the initial resolution was.
Zappone said that Sherazi’s group specifically requested that further discussions be postponed until after the elections. He said that the group told him, “We’re all kinda at capacity and tired right now.”
In a conversation with Sherazi, RANGE verified that her group did make that request because many of the people in the October 30 meeting were working actively on local campaigns.
Two more meetings have occurred with community members since October. The process “has been a lot slower and more deliberate,” said Zappone. “Our goal is that we can get to something that everyone agrees on.”
Dillon, who was sworn into office on November 29 and did not have a hand in the original resolution, said that he has participated in one of the community discussions so far. His perspective on the meetings is that, “People are leaving the discussions more frustrated than they were at the beginning.”
As of December 15, a new resolution had been drafted, but debates were still ongoing as to whether the resolution works for the entire community. The new resolution’s purpose is to address only anti-Semitism and Islamophobia within Spokane, not to advocate for peace or apologize for any of the harm that the previous resolution did.
“The intent of the new resolution is to kind of be an updated or amended position by the City of Spokane,” said Zappone. “Spokane City Council cannot solve war in the Middle East, or in Israel and Palestine, so what can we do? What do we have control over?”
The most recent draft RANGE has seen dates from December 13th, and contains statements like, “the City of Spokane has taken great steps to promote and foster inclusivity, diversity, anti-racism, and belonging” and “profound collective grief has followed Hamas’ attack and Israel’s military response, and the resulting humanitarian crises.”
The closest that draft comes to advocating a permanent end to violence are statements like, “we envision a world where every life is cherished and valued as equal – where all humanity lives in peace, freedom and safety” and “we yearn for the swift recovery of the injured, the safe release of those taken hostage, the safe return of those displaced from their homes, and we welcome and support efforts to ensure that basic necessities … are provided to the civilian population of Gazans caught in the midst of war.”
Neither Dillon nor Zappone thought that reaching a resolution that satisfies everyone was possible. Activists advocating for language calling Israel’s policies “apartheid” or calling the death, disease and destruction resulting from Israel’s invasion a “genocide” will not find it.
“There might be things left out that people would like,” said Zappone.
“No one’s going to be happy with everything we do,” said Dillon.
There’s likely to be an omission Dillon himself will be unhappy with. In a December 14 Facebook post, Dillon expressed his explicit support for a ceasefire, humanitarian truce and lasting peace in the region. “My whole life, I have always believed violence begets violence,” he wrote.
In an interview later that week, Dillon said he believed the new resolution should include ceasefire language.
“I’m anti-war. I’ve always been anti-war,” Dillon told RANGE. “Including a ceasefire [statement] sends a message of support for the people of both Israel and Palestine… and the rights of communities in Spokane to live, work, pray and protest, without the threats of harassment or violence.”
Bingle, for his part, said that he will “never support” a resolution calling for a ceasefire. He compared the violence that occurred on October 7 to 9/11, explaining that the United States had a right to retaliate back then, and therefore, Israel has the same right now.
“If somebody had come to the United States and said, ‘Well hey, your retaliation is overblown,’ we would say, ‘Forget you guys, what they did to our people will never happen again and we’re going to eliminate the group,’” Bingle said. “Had anybody told us ‘You need to stop,’ we’d be like, ‘There’s the door.’”
The most recent meeting occurred on December 19, and included city council members alongside community members representing MCAS, Temple Beth Shalom, and INWCLP.
Since then, additional edits have been made to a new draft. RANGE has not reviewed that document, but sources say that, despite the draft having no ceasefire language, this version is likely to be voted on, and is likely to pass.
No vote on the resolution is currently scheduled, and none will happen until January, at the earliest.
A growing community of grief
Immediately following the October 9 resolution, many community members critical of the language wondered why the city council had passed anything at all. Spokane is a midsized city with a small Arab and Muslim population and a smaller Jewish community. A resolution like the one city council passed wouldn’t change the shape of global geopolitics, so why bother?
Paul Dillon sees it differently. He believes that city councils should take a stand on global matters because they are more accessible to their communities than our state representatives, to say nothing of representatives of congress. Dillon also said Spokane has a unique opportunity to be an example for other cities across the state. “When Spokane leads, other cities follow,” he said, “Many look to us as the second-biggest city in the state for leadership. What we do matters.”
While communities wait for whatever solace might come from the revised resolution, some are making it for themselves, building an inter-faith community of solidarity and shared grief.
On Sunday, November 12, Feast held a second fundraiser where they served both Israeli and Palestinian cuisine. The cooks at the event were “Moms for Peace,” local women with Israeli or Palestinian heritage. The fundraiser was for The Parents Circle, an Israeli-Palestinian organization focused on reconciliation for bereaved families.
Carper, co-director of Feast, explained that the process of organizing the fundraiser was born out of conversations with Jer Swigart, cofounder of The Global Immersion Project, and between people of both Palestinian and Israeli heritage. “Food has the power to bring people together and it has the power to break down barriers between people,” Carper said.
He explained that Feast wanted to find “ways that we can support every day peacemakers … people who are creating space and dialogue to actively work for peace and against hate.”
After receiving threats for the Red Crescent fundraiser, though, Feast was hesitant to do much media promotion for the second fundraiser.
Despite that, the organization reported that sales amounted to over $11,000 and that they were able to send $10,000 to The Parents Circle. That donation, according to Carper, is about five times more than Feast does on a normal business day, Carper said. “The support really was incredible.”
And despite initial concerns about security, the organization did not run into any problems.
Carper was also careful to say that Feast was not running the second fundraiser out of remorse for the first. “I wouldn’t say that the November 12 thing was trying to correct for anything we did wrong,” he said. “We were very proud of our support of [the] Red Crescent Society.”
Since the November 12 fundraiser, the Moms for Peace have grown into a larger group of Muslims, Jews and Christians who have continued to meet together and build relationships — an expression, perhaps, that the path to any enduring peace has to begin in community.
Disclosure: Luke Baumgarten, Editor & Publisher at RANGE, also volunteers on the board of Feast World Kitchen
