Updated Sept. 11
Jewish leaders in the Bay Area are condemning public remarks made by the mayor of Richmond, in which he likened the Oct. 7 attack to someone lashing out after being bullied on the playground, and said the question of whether he supported Hamas was “complicated.”
Mayor Eduardo Martinez, who has held the office since January 2023, delivered the remarks during the People’s Conference for Palestine, held in Detroit from Aug. 29 to 31.
Martinez, a former public schoolteacher, is a staunch progressive who, as of late last year, was one of seven American mayors affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America, according to the online Richmond magazine Jacobin. He spoke on the conference stage Aug. 29 to an auditorium filled with ardent pro-Palestinian activists.
Martinez told them he’d received a flurry of hate mail after the city council passed a resolution condemning Israel and accusing it of ethnic cleansing in October 2023; among the messages was a note asking him whether he supported Hamas.
“The writer wanted to know if I supported Hamas. This is a complicated question, like asking if I support my country,” he said at the Detroit conference. “A yes or no would never address the complexity that created Hamas, nor the complexity that created this nation.”
Martinez, who was born in Texas, said his childhood experiences of being physically and verbally bullied by his peers shaped his understanding of Hamas and of Oct. 7, 2023.
“After so much torture, I couldn’t help but lash out. I was filled with frustration, and it came out with the ferocity of retaliation,” he said.
“If Palestine were a schoolyard playground, I would be a Palestinian, and that part of me that couldn’t endure the abuse anymore would be Hamas,” Martinez said, to loud cheers and applause.
In his speech, he also compared Palestine to “a broken bone.”
“What happened on Oct. 7 was the festering of this broken bone,” he said. “It was broken by the division of the Middle East, by Europeans who allowed the Nakba to happen and continue to happen.”
The Nakba, meaning “catastrophe” in Arabic, is used by Palestinians and anti-Zionists to refer to the creation of the State of Israel.
Martinez did not respond to J.’s request for comment.
Marc Levine, director of the Anti-Defamation League’s regional office based in San Francisco, who previously served in the state Assembly, called Martinez’s words “revolting” and an embrace of “Hamas terrorism.”
“It is difficult to see how his words benefit his constituents in Richmond, where crime rates are above state and national averages. But he didn’t stop there,” Levine wrote in an email to J. on Sept. 8.
He added that off-stage at the conference, Martinez wore a hat that read “DDTTIDF,” an acronym calling for death to the IDF.
“We will ensure that his actions are not left in Detroit and are shared with his colleagues on the Richmond City Council,” Levine added.
The S.F.-based Consulate General of Israel said in a Sept. 10 statement that it was “appalled” by Martinez’s comments, particularly for minimizing the Oct. 7 massacre.
“Mayor Martinez trivializes the profound grief of survivors, the families of the murdered, and those still waiting for their loved ones to return from the dungeons of Palestinian terrorist captivity. Worse still, his comments legitimize and glorify the atrocities of Hamas,” the consulate said. “Such rhetoric has no place in responsible civic leadership, nor in public discourse at any level.”
Dean Kertesz, rabbi emeritus of Temple Beth Hillel, a Reform synagogue and the largest shul in Richmond, told J. that Martinez’s remarks were not surprising, given his history of support for the Palestinian cause. On Oct. 24, 2023, the Richmond City Council became the first U.S. city to pass a cease-fire resolution — the resolution condemned Israel but not the Oct. 7 massacre. More than two dozen cities, towns and counties in Northern California followed.
Kertesz blasted the mayor’s comparison of childhood bullying to Hamas’ attack on Israel, calling it “a pathetic, absurd analogy.”
“He can’t deal with the problems of Richmond, and so he wades into the problems of Palestinians and Jews in the most irresponsible, inflammatory, simplistic, absurd analyses,” Kertesz, who retired in June, told J.
He also felt the remarks were unequivocally antisemitic.
“Any pretense that he might have had that he’s not an antisemite, that he doesn’t believe that Israel should be violently destroyed, is gone,” Kertesz said. “This is clearly what he believes and what he supports.”
In a statement emailed to J., the Jewish Community Relations Council Bay Area condemned Martinez’s “inflammatory” remarks and added that his peers should call him out.
“Excusing terrorism is not a path to peace and he admitted as much himself,” the statement said. “Such extremist rhetoric from an elected official is a clear danger to the people he governs and creates an environment where antisemitism thrives, as we’ve seen during Richmond City Council meetings.”
At the Aug. 26 city council meeting, Richmond officially entered into a sister-city relationship with Sebastia, a Palestinian village near Nablus in the West Bank. The following day, a Palestinian flag was raised over Richmond’s civic center.
Kertesz, who is a longtime supporter of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, hopes others can see the distinction between support for Palestinian statehood and the destruction of Israel.
“You want to have a sister-city relationship with a city in Palestine is one thing,” he said. “Saying you support Hamas, whose stated goal is to kill every Israeli Jew and wipe Israel off the map, is very, very different.”
Prominent speakers and Bay Area representatives at the Detroit conference included UC Berkeley lecturer Hatem Bazian, U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, former Columbia graduate student and federal detainee Mahmoud Khalil, S.F. State professor Rama Kased and community organizer Linda Sarsour.