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By Antonio De Jesús López
It took courage to cast that vote.
I still remember how quiet the chambers got just before we cast the vote in March 2024. The dais of the East Palo Alto City Council. My year as mayor. Four of us in the room — Councilmember Abrica was absent — raising our hands together to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. Our small city of 30,000, mostly Black, Brown, immigrant, and working-class, became the first in San Mateo County to make that call.
We did not pass it because it was easy. We passed it because we had already been told, in the months leading up, that to call for a ceasefire was somehow to be antisemitic. That to name what was happening to Palestinian civilians was an attack on Jewish people. We refused that conflation. We refused it because moral clarity — the capacity to name violence against innocent civilians as wrong, regardless of which actor, state or otherwise, is perpetuating it — is not the same as moral selectivity.
Less than two years later, the same collapse is back at our doorstep — only this time, the council is being asked to ratify it.
This week, the council is being asked to adopt a proclamation against antisemitism that incorporates the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s “working definition of antisemitism.” Nothing in what follows questions the need to act against antisemitic hate. Jewish students, Jewish families, and Jewish institutions deserve our unequivocal protection — in EPA and everywhere else.
But the IHRA definition is, in fact, the codification of the very collapse our ceasefire vote refused. It has been criticized — including, importantly, by many Jewish scholars, civil rights organizations, and legal experts — for conflating criticism of the State of Israel with hatred of the Jewish people. To embed that conflation in our municipal policy is to tell our Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and allied neighbors that questioning a foreign government’s conduct is now functionally equivalent to bigotry. That is not a defense of Jewish life.
“Antonio,” some will say, “what’s the harm? It’s a non-binding definition.” But a “non-binding” framework, once adopted, becomes the language of training, of HR complaints, of grant compliance, of which voices get heard at public comment and which get gaveled out of order. “Antonio,” others will say, “isn’t this just symbolic?” When has anything in EPA ever been only symbolic? The ceasefire resolution was symbolic too. It was also the proudest vote I cast as mayor.
The timing makes this harder, not easier. Our City did not formally recognize Arab American Heritage Month, even as the City of San Mateo did, and the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors did.
And the current mayor brought this proclamation forward within days of attending an all-expenses-paid Combat Antisemitism Movement gathering in Savannah, Georgia. I am not making accusations. I am asking that we be honest about what a sponsored trip from a national political organization looks like to the people who actually live here. Sequencing matters. Sponsorship matters.
This is not abstract. East Palo Alto is the Black families who built it before there was an EPA to build. The Tongan and Samoan churches. The Mexican abuelas walking pan dulce home from Mi Pueblo. The Yemeni shopkeeper on University Avenue. The Palestinian family whose nightly news is also their family WhatsApp group. The Jewish neighbor who chose this city, in part, because it knows how to hold differences. A proclamation that elevates one community’s pain by chilling another community’s speech does not represent any of them. And contrary to what its proponents claim, it does not make Jewish residents safer. Hate that goes unnamed in one direction does not stay contained. It metastasizes.
I urge the Council to:
Remove the IHRA Working definition from the proclamation. We are fully capable of condemning antisemitic hate plainly and forcefully, in language that does not double as a speech code.
Reconsider our public alignment with the Combat Antisemitism Movement gathering. Supporting Jewish safety is one thing. Lending our City’s name to a particular political organization is another, and it should not happen in the slipstream of a sponsored trip. CAM does not disclose its funding. Its board and senior staff include former Israeli government ministers, former Israel Defense Forces spokespeople, and a former chief censor of the Israeli military. In 2023, two of the most mainstream Jewish organizations in America — the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and the Jewish Federations of North America — withdrew from CAM’s coalition.
In the same proclamation, reaffirm our commitment against Islamophobia, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian discrimination, and the targeting of any community in our midst. If we are speaking against one form of hate, we must speak against all of them.
This was never only about Palestine. The memory of the Holocaust should teach us, of all things, never to deprive a people of water, of education, of a homeland. To weaponize that memory in service of the opposite is not a defense of Jewish life — it is a betrayal of what that memory demands of us. The council can condemn antisemitism without conditioning Jewish safety on Palestinian silence, without chilling the voices of those protesting apartheid, without forfeiting our right to critique a foreign government. That is what courage looks like in 2026.
Antonio De Jesús López is San Mateo County’s 2025–2027 Poet Laureate and a former mayor and councilmember of the City of East Palo Alto (2020–2024). He is a PhD candidate in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University. His second book of poetry, The Right to Remain Violets, is forthcoming from the University of Arizona Press.
The narrative being pushed here is simply not accurate.
My engagement with the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) was not some last minute, politically motivated trip. I met with CAM in March as part of a mayoral network responding to a synagogue attack and standing in solidarity against antisemitism. I also participated in a Northern California municipal leaders forum focused on how cities can address antisemitism at the local level.
The timing matters because the facts matter.
I proposed bringing this item forward in the beginning of April, but the agenda already included a proclamation for Ramadan, so it was moved to May to coincide with Jewish Heritage month. That’s it. There was no connection between any travel and the scheduling of this item.
Trying to suggest otherwise is not just misleading, it undermines a serious conversation about how we address hate in our community.