Kansas City, MO – This afternoon, dozens of community leaders occupied Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II’s Kansas City office building, demanding a ceasefire in Gaza.
The leaders delivered a letter from 30+ community organizations demanding a ceasefire. The constituents read testimonies of Gazans, shared their personal experiences, and chanted “Ceasefire Now! Ceasefire Now!”
The sit in began with an opening statement from Al-Hadaf KC, a Palestinian-led organization:
“The community of Rep. Cleaver’s district is united across faith, race, class, and zip code in our demand for a ceasefire. Let us be clear—a “humanitarian pause” is not enough. It is not enough to pause the bombing to send in bandages and food, just to resume the bombing once again… Israel’s siege has killed over 10,000 innocent people, over 4,100 innocent children, with a combined 6,000+ innocent women and children.
This is not a war, this is a genocide. To us, ceasefire means a complete end to Israel’s genocidal campaign, now and forever. Palestine will be free. The US should immediately apply pressure, as only we can, on Netanyahu’s government to stop the killings.
Rep. Cleaver is a man of God. He should be a moral leader in this moment. Right now, Rep. Cleaver is complicit in America’s support of Israel’s war crimes, the deaths of thousands upon thousands of innocent people, the destruction of homes, and the ongoing genocide. Enough is enough. Ceasefire now.”
The direct action represents a historic moment in Kansas City activism, symbolized by an unprecedented coalition of organizations that has united in radical solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle.
The diverse array of groups—from civil rights stalwarts and Islamic relations councils to Jewish peace activists, veterans, churches and working-class tenants—joined forces for the coalition letter which was delivered during the action.
“This action follows weeks of concerted efforts to move the Congressman, including daily actions, hundreds of calls, and rallies throughout the city,” they said in a statement. “Representative Cleaver has ignored his constituents’ call for immediate ceasefire. In the time he has remained silent, Israel’s siege has killed over 10,000 Palestinians.”
The group that gathered today plans to continue coordinating efforts until Rep. Cleaver supports a ceasefire. In response to the group’s efforts, Cleaver has committed to meet with Palestinian leaders. The meeting will take place on November 18.
Maha Odah, a Palestinian Kansas Citian who occupied the Representative’s office building, spoke on the event:
“We took action in Rep. Cleaver’s office to deliver our anger, our fury, our heartbreak that our own Congressman has not listened to us and shown his humanity towards Gazans. We sent a clear message—either he must stand with the majority of his constituents demanding justice, or he will be written on the wrong side of history.”
Local Action Tied to International Solidarity
The demonstrators’ action coincides with a global appeal for peace in the region. On Monday, the heads of 18 United Nations bodies, including the UN Chief and the High Commissioner for Human Rights, jointly called for a humanitarian ceasefire as Israeli airstrikes enter their fourth week.
Polling shows that 66% of Americans support a ceasefire, including 80% of Democrats. The majority of voters oppose the US sending weapons to Israel. Public demands for a ceasefire continue to escalate nationally, with sit ins, demonstrations, and marches happening every day. Earlier today, congressional staffers staged a walkout in DC to support a ceasefire.
Since October 7th, Israel has continued an indiscriminate bombardment of Palestinians in Gaza, targeting hospitals, schools, journalists, and millions of innocent people. The death toll has surpassed 10,000 people, half of whom are children. Human rights experts have confirmed Israel’s use of white phosphorous bombs, banned by international law.
The Historic & Current Significance of Direct Action
The sit-in at Congressman Cleaver’s office is part of a broader, more intensified campaign by the increasingly growing coalition of KC community members.
They are calling for tangible actions: co-sponsorship and a yes vote on the Ceasefire Resolution proposed by Representatives Bush and Tlaib, increase humanitarian assistance for Gaza, reject any and all proposed military aid packages to Israel, and for Cleaver to meet directly with constituents, including members of Al-Hadaf, a Palestinian-led justice organization based in the Kansas City metro to hear their testimonies.
While the immediate outcomes of today’s efforts may unfold in the chapters to come, the resounding unity of over 30 organizations in signing this coalition letter is an indelible marker of change in Kansas City’s social and political landscape.
Organizations That Signed Onto the Letter Demanding A Ceasefire
Advocates for Immigrant Rights and Reconciliation, Kansas City
Al-Hadaf
Al-Inshirah Islamic Center
Beth-Judah Ministries Church of God in Christ
Black & Brown Men’s Healing Circle
Black Student Solidarity Network
Council on American-Islamic Relations, Missouri
Council on American-Islamic Relations, Kansas
Decarcerate KC
Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee
Islamic Society of Greater Kansas City
It’s Time 4 Justice
Jewish Voice for Peace, Kansas City
JoCo MoveOn
Kansas City Democratic Socialists of America
Kansas City National Lawyers Guild
KC Defender
KC Tenants
Kansas City Law Enforcement Accountability Project
Missouri Justice Coalition
Missouri Youth Action Coalition
Muslim American Society, Kansas City
Operation Liberation
PeaceWorks, Kansas City
People’s Spark
Queer Black KC
Reale Justice Network
Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Kansas City
Sunrise Movement KC
Showing Up For Racial Justice, Kansas City
Trinity United Methodist Church
University of Missouri-Kansas City College Democrats
University of Missouri-Kansas City Students for Justice in Palestine
Veterans for Peace – Chapter 97
3 Full Testimonies from Sit-In
MAHA
I have spent the majority of my life in Kansas City, I was born here, I was raised by fiercely proud Kansas Citian parents. I am also Palestinian, with my entire extended family in Gaza. In all of my years on this earth, I have known that Palestinians have suffered at the hands of settler colonial forces; of imperialist ideologies rooted in hate with the goal of ending the existence of Palestine and Palestinians in it; of the greed of those who profit off of violence.
I spent my childhood playing in the streets and on the beaches of Gaza. I feel like the mediterranean sea is part of the genetic sequences in my DNA. I feel the pain of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and across the world as for the last month the world has witnessed first hand the atrocities committed by Israel against the Palestinians, it is the same pain I have felt in my bones for the last 24 years, the same pain we have felt for generations passed down from father to son, mother to daughter, grandparent to grandchild.
My father’s family has roots hundreds of years old in a town called Hamama. Its ruins can still be found 15 miles north of Gaza. My family was forced out of their homes in the Nakba, the Catastrophe, of 1948. My father was born in a refugee camp as a result, he has painfully recounted the horrors he faced as a child when the refugee camp north of Gaza was also forcibly expelled by violent, brutal, inhumane, zionist forces.
He recounts being a boy so tired of walking as his family fled in the hopes of survival. He will tell you of the elderly lady who scooped him into her arms and onto her back to allow him to rest as they fled to Gaza.
My mother’s family comes from the beautiful town of Yaffa. My mother’s family was also forced to flee for their lives and headed south to Gaza during the Nakba and the Naksa. My grandfather has told me the stories of humanity, the stories of grace, the stories of hope that existed as his father greeted Jewish people fleeing the persecution of their existence, their faith, their families.
He spoke to me about sharing the oranges of Yaffa with his new neighbors. Of offering them clean water and words of comfort that in the lands of Palestine, Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike could co-exist. My mothers family was then forcibly displaced from their homes in Yaffa and fled south to the Gaza Strip.
My mother and father recall the occupation of Gaza by military forces, the smell of gas from a jeep carrying soldiers, the sounds of their boots as they went from home to home, breaking windows, lining up men and boys against walls, jabbing them with the front of their guns, spitting on and cursing the mothers and sisters pleading for their lives. As the military capabilities progressed, so did the brutality.
My mother and father have both described what it sounds like to hear a missile from an israeli aircraft. My cousins describe the scratch of their throats and burning of their eyes as sand and dust fills their homes and streets as you try to feel from the next strike. I, to this day, still wake with a jolt as the reverberations of the bombing of homes, hospitals, churches, mosques, palm trees, and the sandy beaches haunt me. I still hear the missiles. I still feel the shifting of the earth.
My past, my family’s past, and the present reality of every Palestinian collide each time I hear the sound of another documented by the brave journalists on the ground is Gaza.
MICHAEL:
I am a lifelong Kansas City Jew- and a constituent of Rep. Cleaver. My great grandfather, Max, was born in Bransk, Poland. He came to this country in 1904 after fleeing the pogroms and antisemitism of the Tsarist regime in Russia. Many of my family members stayed in Europe, and to this day, I don’t know where they are, or if any of them were left. I was reflecting on this with a fellow a Jew, and she pointed out that it’s pretty likely they were killed in the Holocaust.The trauma of the Holocaust and antisemitism looms large in the Kansas City Jewish Community.
So large, that in the third grade, my Sunday school teacher had us role-play being in a concentration camp. I was chosen to role-play being a “kapo” – which is one of the Jews who betrayed their comrades in exchange for an extra cup of soup or piece of bread. By the time I was in the 6th grade, I knew every fact about the Holocaust forwards and backwards. By the time I was in the 10th grade, I was begging not to go to Hebrew school anymore. I knew what “never again” meant. It was drilled into me. When I learned about the attacks by Hamas on Oct. 7th- one of my first thoughts was about my aunt and cousins. They’re Israeli citizens. We haven’t been on speaking terms since my aunt called me a Kapo a few years ago for speaking out in Kansas City about Israel’s attacks on Gaza in May 2021.
When I realized what was happening to Palestinians, supposedly in the name of the Jewish people, my people- I remembered what “never again” meant and I spoke out then. But still I checked in with my family daily those first few days- asking over and over- are you okay?When I talk to my Palestinian comrades and tell them I have Israeli family- that’s always one of their first questions- even though right now, so many of them have family members who aren’t okay.But my Israeli family is okay. They’re Israeli-American settlers. They have the financial privilege to leave the country. One of them did.
I’m here because the root of this violence is oppression: 75 years of apartheid enabled by my tax dollars and the weaponization of my people’s trauma. I’m here because the Israeli comrades I’m still in touch with know that war only leads to the loss of more lives. I’m here because a lot of people, Jewish or not, seem are pushing for a genocide of Palestinians in my name. I’m here because never again means never again for anyone. Rep. Cleaver- you are a man God. In the book of Isaiah it is written:“Lo Yisa Goy El Goy Cherev, Lo yil’medu Od milchamah.” Nation shall not raise sword against nation, and they shall not learn any more war.As a Jewish constituent, who represents so many others not here- sign onto the Ceasefire Now Resolution for Rashida Tlaib and Cori Bush.
FATIMA (reading an excerpt from ‘At the Threshold of Humanity by Karim Kattan’):
Those who should be brokers of peace have greeted with disdain calls for an immediate cessation of hostilities. This, in effect, gives a green light to Israel to act with full impunity, exacerbating an unprecedented humanitarian crisis born of seventeen years of siege and numerous major military assaults.
This wanton carelessness and dehumanization is why we feel a compelling urge to document and describe everything, big and small, to make sure that people understand what is at stake: “But this was a child,” we want to say, “and this an adult.” Not a thing bound to die a gruesome death in a devastated city but a child who would have grown by the sea, who would have been, perhaps, a good swimmer and bad at math or grown to really love cars or cooking. “And this,” we want to say, “was a residential building, this a restaurant on the seashore, this a house with a garden, where someone played or got into a fight in the kitchen, and this is all gone.” These are people with names, we want to say, and faces too, and lives, and friends grieving them, if they are not themselves now dead; and cities, cities, entire, whole. Real cities and towns which they call their own and which are now graveyards. Pundits on television, meanwhile, talk of the thousands dead as justified collateral damage—but this, we want to say, is the gleeful obliteration of a seashore, of families, histories, cities.
In the media, Gaza is an abstraction, a space designed for the violent death of an abstract people inhabiting it. This death comes at the hands of a natural, impersonal force – not one of the most powerful armies in the world propped up by the most powerful state in the world, with a government, and a people electing this government. It is a convenient framing, one that shifts guilt away from Israel. The destruction comes from above, and those who die are meant to die. All is as it should be. To that, we offer a correction: Gaza is NOT an abstraction. It is a shore and beaches and streets and markets and cities with names of flowers and fruits, not an abstraction but places and lives and people that are being bombed into oblivion.
This is a developing story.
