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On Tuesday night, just 2½ weeks after the horrific pogrom in Israel, our local city council in Richmond passed a blatantly antisemitic resolution filled with inflammatory lies and propaganda to hold Israel accountable for everything that happened to the Jewish state on Oct. 7.

Although the original resolution was amended during the meeting to at least mention Hamas and the deaths of Israeli civilians, the intent and result remain the same.

I’ve lived in Richmond for nearly a decade. My family and I fell in love with our diverse and vibrant community. My husband (until this vote) served on the Richmond Design and Review Board, and our family volunteered many hours in support of our beloved city. That is the reason I went to the meeting. I wanted to make my family’s voice heard.

I was among a group of about 20 local Jewish community members, Jewish business owners and concerned allies alongside the Jewish Community Relations Council Bay Area staff who were allowed into the room. Another 20 or so were turned away because the room was already full.

We witnessed what can only be described as a verbal intifada.

Getting into the room and literally every procedural aspect of the night were organizational and ultimately legal disasters for the city. We were outnumbered dramatically, and the room was humming with seething hate coming from the other side. There were several moments when it seemed there would be a physical manifestation of that hate, but the police in the room were just enough of a deterrent when things started to escalate.

We sat with our Israeli flags and hostage posters, while they called for our mass extinction. This is not hyperbole. If you’d like to see with your own eyes, the whole meeting is recorded.

You can read about and watch what happened in that room. But you cannot imagine what it felt like to be inside, to look into the eyes of our local elected officials and to know immediately that they didn’t want us there. We were not welcome, though the council put on a fine show of pretending we were. The council members certainly didn’t want to hear reason or facts because they had the votes to pass the resolution 5-1.

The council members did not listen to a word we said. I could see the disgust in their eyes — when they would look at us at all.

As a member of the Jewish community, I felt like we were invisible to them — or worse, dispensable and of no value to our own community. The council had told us this already by dropping this resolution bomb with almost no warning or with zero interest in a peaceful dialogue to draft a product to represent the whole community.

We walked out of that living nightmare into the darkness and drove home, knowing that we have neighbors who would be gleeful if our entire families were murdered.

We see photos of our mayor with his fist of solidarity raised in celebration of passing of the most antisemitic resolution in the nation. We are terrified for our children — one of whom is at UC Santa Barbara dealing with the campus version of the same. She hears “Intifada! Intifada!” and “We don’t want Zionists here!”

My daughters, along with so many other Jewish students right now, are asking if they should remove their Magen David necklaces. It’s Santa Barbara! It’s Richmond! It’s not Berlin in 1938. It’s the United States of America in 2023!

I can deal with a raging white man with swastika tattoos and guns holstered. I grew up in Arizona and worked for the Anti-Defamation League for eight years. I’m used to that brand of Jew hater screaming in my face. I’ve come to realize I will take that variation of antisemite any day of the week over what I went through on Tuesday.

That’s because the poison-spewing Richmond crowd actually represents my side of the political aisle — albeit the far reaches of that left side — and yet they sure sounded like Nazis to me.

The far-left is gaslighting us, using the Holocaust as a bludgeon against the Jewish state and trying to convince anyone who will listen that the Jews are the Nazis now, as evidenced in the resolution: “BE IT RESOLVED that the City of Richmond takes seriously the entreaty of ‘Never Again,’ and that the historical memory of the Holocaust means fighting ethnic cleansing and apartheid everywhere.”

I’ve been an activist my whole life, standing arm-in-arm with the people who now firmly stand with Hamas. They stand with Hamas, not us, after more than 1,400 people were barbarically slaughtered in Israel and after an estimated 222 people — from babies to elders — were taken hostage into Gaza.

My community won’t even stand with both sides. Just the other side.

The decades of programming have worked. We are in the abyss. The Jews of Richmond may decide to divest from this rotten city, but we will not let the goals of Hamas, Iran, Russia or any other Jew-hating monster be achieved.

Our mezuzah will always remain on our doorpost, and my daughters will not take off their necklaces — no matter how many ways people tell us that they hate us.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of J.