On a Saturday evening in May, Zwelivelile “Mandla” Mandela, an elected member of the South African National Assembly and the grandson of Nelson Mandela, stood on stage at the Chicago Teachers Union and recited a chant from a South African tradition that echoed across the rooms of the hall.
Mandela, invited to Chicago by organizers from the U.S. Palestinian Community Network (USPCN) and the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, was in town to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Nakba and to encourage solidarity between Black people, Palestinians, and other oppressed communities.
The Nakba refers to the initial creation of the Israeli state. In 1948, nearly 750,000 Palestinians were violently expelled from their land in a mass displacement. In The Nation, Mohammed El-Kurd described the Nakba as “an ongoing process of ethnic cleansing.”
“To be a Palestinian family is to have a Nakba story,” Mandela said to the crowd. “These stories form the foundation. They unite the Palestinians in a community of suffering and resilience. They unite all of us who identify with the suffering of the Palestinian people, and who stand in solidarity with the greatest moral issue of our time.”
Earlier in the same week of May, a former public school teacher and organizer with the Chicago Teachers Union was sworn in as the 57th Mayor of Chicago. Mayor Brandon Johnson has spent a considerable amount of time in the same building that Mandela stood in.
As Chicago was undergoing a citywide election this spring, ripple effects were felt here from conflict in the Middle East as Israel began another wave of violence in Palestine. Raids at mosques, refugee camps, and neighborhoods have killed over 100 Palestinians so far in 2023 according to the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights.
Johnson ran his campaign on taxing the rich to address homelessness, investing in schools, supporting mental health services, and focusing on the root causes of crime. His historic campaign was backed by a coalition of labor unions and Chicago’s grassroots progressive movements.
However, on March 30, shortly before the election, Johnson told a group of Orthodox Jewish voters that the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement was not aligned with his values. This was documented by the online publication Jewish Insider.
During the same election season, 50th Ward City Council candidate Mueze Bawany also condemned BDS. His comments came after facing backlash over old tweets that were unearthed where he criticized Israel during the 2019 assault on Gaza.
BDS, a nonviolent tactic inspired from the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, is a call from Palestinian unions, civil society organizations, and activists for international solidarity to put pressure on companies and governments to stop supporting the Israeli occupation.
Both Johnson’s and Bawany’s comments highlight the complexities of how the Israel-Palestine conflict comes up in local elections, especially as a multiracial progressive movement coalition is increasingly gaining power at City Hall.
“One of the main strategies for us as a broader movement for Palestinian rights is having relationships with oppressed communities,” said Hatem Abudayyeh, the national chair of USPCN. “Now that some of those oppressed communities have representation in the city council on the leadership level and in the mayor’s office can only be a positive for us.”
When Bawany first decided to run for City Council in the 50th Ward, he and his team had a vision of creating a campaign that was inclusive of the diversity that made up the neighborhood of West Ridge. The neighborhood, home to Orthodox Jews and working-class South Asian immigrants, is where he grew up after his family immigrated to Chicago from Pakistan.
In an interview with the Reader in January, Bawany said that despite whatever geopolitical tensions might be happening in West Ridge’s community members’ country of origin, “we’re all family here.”
However, after months of organizing, controversy erupted.
On February 2, the Chicago Tribune published a story featuring tweets posted in 2019 from a now-deleted account where Bawany wrote, “Fuck Israel and fuck all you Zionist scum,” in reaction to Israeli airstrikes that killed over 100 Palestinians that year.
The backlash was swift. Bawany was accused of being anti-semetic and a racist.
His opponent, incumbent alderperson Debra Silverstein, said in a statement, “As a member of Chicago’s largest Jewish community, I am particularly horrified by this attempt to delegitimize the State of Israel and deny its fundamental right to exist. This kind of hateful rhetoric is a part of a broader pattern that normalizes violence and creates space for animosity to become violent action. It puts my Jewish friends and neighbors at risk.”
Elected officials across the state condemned Bawany’s tweets. The Jewish caucus of the Illinois General Assembly wrote a letter to both the Chicago Teachers Union and SEIU Healthcare (who had donated large amounts of money to Bawany’s campaign) requesting a meeting regarding the issue. There was an uproar on social media.
As the controversy unfolded, donations to Bawany’s campaign slowed. Meanwhile, Silverstein’s fundraising remained steady. She even received $1,800 from To Protect Our Heritage PAC, a pro-Israel group.
Underpinning the controversy is a debate on the definition of anti-Semitism and whether or not it includes criticism of the state of Israel.
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) defines anti-Semitism as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”
Human rights groups argue that this definition has been unfairly used to label critics of Israel as anti-Semitic. The IHRA definition has been adopted by the U.S. State Department, the United Kingdom, Germany, and other local governments. The United Nations is currently facing pressure by pro-Israel lobbying groups to adopt IHRA’s definition as well.
Asher Kaplan, a volunteer organizer with If Not Now, grew up hearing stories about family members who died during the Holocaust. According to him, as a response to the trauma of the Holocaust young people are told that the establishment of a Jewish nation-state is their assurance that Jewish people will always have a safe place to live.
“We’re taught that being Jewish and loving and advocating for Israel is one and the same thing,” he said. “And any sort of attack on Israel is an attack on Judaism.”
“The crux of the thing is that criticizing Israel is not anti-Semitic,” Kaplan continued. “Zionism in its form as a political social movement is a relatively new development in the history of the Jewish people. It is not the same thing as being Jewish. To critique Zionism and reject it is not anti-Semitic but actually just another way of being Jewish.”
When we’re conflating anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism it makes it hard for us to address the intersection of anti-Semitism, racism, homophobia that are alive and well.
Scout Bratt, Chicago organizer with Jewish Voice For Peace
As reported by Jewish Insider, former candidate Paul Vallas said his view of anti-Semitism is aligned with the IHRA. While Johnson did not specifically name IHRA, his view of anti-Semitism is “any speech or any effort to delegitimize Israel and its right to exist.”
According to Scout Bratt, a Chicago organizer with Jewish Voice For Peace, there have been anti-Zionist Jewish people for generations. “When we’re conflating anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism it makes it hard for us to address the intersection of anti-Semitism, racism, homophobia that are alive and well,” Bratt said. “We are not focused on how other forces of hate are linked on the ground because we are focused on how criticisms of Israel are anti-Semitic.”
It was amid this ongoing debate that Bawany was accused of anti-Semitism. In response to the outcry, he stated, “I want to own that these were my tweets and let those they hurt know that I apologize unequivocally.”
A few weeks later Bawany made another comment in an attempt to address the controversy that sparked further backlash.
At a community forum he disavowed BDS and said that the movement unfairly targets Israel, “without taking into consideration the behavior of other bad-faith countries,” according to reporting from Block Club Chicago.
His comments were perceived by several on the left as an abandonment of his values as a progressive organizer that stands with oppressed people. When asked recently by the Reader about this issue, Bawany declined to comment.
As a result of Bawany’s anti-BDS comments, the Chicago chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America rescinded their endorsement of him. In addition, several volunteers had accused Bawany of mistreatment, prompting Asian American Midwest Progressives to also rescind their endorsement.
The multiracial working class coalition that the campaign had spent months building unraveled in just a few weeks. Bawany lost the election, receiving only 32 percent of the vote.
A few weeks later Johnson would make similar comments about BDS, claiming that the movement doesn’t align with his values. Johnson’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
“I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t disappointment,” Abudayyeh recalled.
Bratt also was let down by Johnson’s comments. “I was like, ‘Come on Brandon. I don’t really think this is aligned with the way you’ve been speaking about the rest of your values and your platform,’” they said.
Shortly after Johnson made his comments, Abudayyeh and other Arab American organizers in Chicago reached out to the campaign for a conversation. Johnson agreed.
“He actually opened his door to people from the community,” Abudayyeh said. “He took time to meet with folks about the issue, about what he said, about wanting to learn more. We believe that he was being sincere about it.”
“The fact that he took time to meet with us in a meeting that was organized by allies of ours in the Black community proves that he’s different from what we’ve seen in the past in the mayor’s office,” Abudayyeh continued. “We give him the benefit of the doubt unless and until he proves otherwise. We feel he doesn’t know the issue very well, yet.”
Abudayyeh says that progressive Palestinian Arab community members are not single-issue voters and that, “they care about a lot of other issues, including issues that Brandon Johnson cares about.”
“The community was ultimately happy that he won and that it was important for the development of this city that we got control of City Hall from those who only care about business interests,” he said.
According to Abudayyeh, Johnson’s response to their conversation was markedly different from discussions USPCN has had with other local officials they consider “Progressive Except For Palestine” who were more defensive.
After all, this isn’t the first time that BDS has come up in a local election in Chicago. In 2017, Daniel Biss, the current mayor of Evanston who was running for Illinois governor at the time, dropped alderperson Carlos Ramirez-Rosa from his ticket due to Rosa’s support of BDS.
USPCN also currently has an active campaign targeting Congressperson Jan Schakowsky, demanding that she support a bill that would prohibit Israel from using U.S. taxpayer dollars on the occupation of Palestine.
Abudayyeh noted that even though Israel-Palestine can be a contentious issue, there are several progressives who have won offices and are willing to criticize the Israeli occupation, such as Jesús García, Marie Newman, Danny Davis, and Bobby Rush.
Johnson and Bawany were both backed by United Working Families (UWF), an independent political organization formed in 2014 that trains and runs progressive candidates for office who come out of Chicago’s grassroots social justice movements. Despite many campaigns led by the Arab American community in Chicago, UWF has not publicly made any stances around BDS or Palestine and did not respond to requests for comment.
Chicago and surrounding suburbs are home to thousands of Palestinians whose families have been displaced from Palestine. Many live in Bridgeview, a southwest suburb also known as Little Palestine, which for years has been under FBI surveillance targeting Arab Americans.
Palestinian organizers have held massive marches in downtown Chicago over the years protesting Israeli violence. In addition, students at local universities have led BDS campaigns. Currently, organizers are calling on a Chicago-based architecture firm to withdraw from participating in plans to build a new U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, a move that was finalized by the Trump administration and is continuing under Biden’s administration.
According to election data, the majority of Orthodox Jewish voters in Chicago did not vote for either Johnson or Bawany, despite their anti-BDS comments.
In three precincts with a high concentration of Orthodox Jewish voters in the 50th Ward, Bawany received only 10 to 15 percent of the vote.
Similarly, in both the 50th Ward and 39th Ward, also home to Orthodox Jewish voters, Johnson also only received 34 percent of the vote. In precincts with a high concentration of Orthodox Jewish voters, Vallas received over 80 percent of the vote.
Similar to Chicago’s Palestinian community, Orthodox Jewish people are not single-issue voters.
According to Rabbi Shlomo Soroka, the director of government affairs at Agudath Israel Illinois, the Orthodox Jewish community in Chicago has an existential need for Jewish day schools to help preserve their culture. “There are certain government programs that have enabled us to sustain that system and help it grow and thrive,” he said. Other important issues for Orthodox Jewish communities are crime and public safety and the rise in anti-Semitism.
Soroka says that the Orthodox Jewish community in Chicago is growing, with increased voter turnout in 2023 and new schools and synagogues regularly opening.
In the mayoral race, it appears that Vallas’s campaign promoting school choice and more spending on policing ultimately won over Orthodox Jewish voters more than Johnson’s disapproval of BDS.
However, USPCN and other Palestinian organizers in Chicago are not deterred. “Our issues are not separate from the issues of his community, the Black community, the immigrant community, and other oppressed communities in Chicago, because they’re not separate,” said Abudayyeh.
“We believe that, you know, we will be able to address Palestine, with him and others as well.”
