Pray-In for Gaza at Senator Padilla’s Office Calls for Peace

SAN FRANCISCO (05-31) – Human rights activists assembled at San Francisco’s Harry Bridge’s Plaza this morning before marching through the Financial District to the downtown office of California’s U.S. Senator Alex Padilla demanding he use his voice and his vote to call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza. Activists called for him, to end his support for arms and military aid along with financing for Israel, the release of all hostages and political prisoners and for the immediate resumption of humanitarian aid to Gazans.

The senator’s other offices in San Diego and Los Angeles were also the scene of similar protests. Activists have characterized Padilla’s intransient pro-Israel position as “refusing to budge” on the issue.

Additionally, Padilla most recently voted for an additional $14 billion in aid to Israel in its war on Gaza and did not support Senator Bernie Sanders’ resolution calling for an investigation into human rights abuses using U.S.-supplied weapons for the Israeli military.

In trying to understand Padilla’s lack of support in calling for an end to the war in Gaza, one need only reference a profile of him that appeared in The Forward in December of 2020. In it, Jay Sanderson, president and chief executive of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, revealed that “We took Alex on his first trip to Israel about a decade ago. His eyes lit up; he totally understood how important Israel was, and not just for the Jewish community but for the United States.”

“The L.A. Jewish community could not have gotten a better person selected for this job” is how Sam Yebri of Los Angeles described Padilla in the same article and in going further said that “Padilla has been active in California’s Jewish and pro-Israel circles” and has become “a reliable and active leader with AIPAC.”

Padilla has also been involved, too, with the Muslim community and in 2017 spoke at a press conference during the sixth annual MDAC (Muslim Day at the Capitol) in Sacramento. The annual event sponsored by CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) is now in its 13th year.

Padilla was first appointed by California Governor Gavin Newsom to fill the Senate seat vacated by Kamala Harris after the election of Joe Biden in 2016 when she became vice president.

Senator Padilla is being approached as “a person of faith” due to his Catholic religion, but activists find it unacceptable that he “…has ignored requests to meet with a significant portion of the Interfaith community that he represents who are in support of a ceasefire and halting arms sales to Israel.” This, while to date over 34,000 people have been killed with scores missing, injured or wounded as starvation looms over the remaining refugees as they are continually forced to move as the war grinds on.

In this their second interfaith pray-in and fast, 77 faith communities from diverse backgrounds including, Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, and Jewish traditions from across the San Francisco Bay Area all united by demanding that Padilla use his voice and vote calling for immediate action in Gaza and the West Bank.

The large crowd took over the street in front of the building housing Padilla’s office where mothers with their children and infants in strollers created a sit-in memorial to the dead children of Gaza by placing effigies of dead babies wrapped in white cloth on the ground as a reminder of the horrific death toll among women and children.

After chanting, and praying the crowd heard from several speakers including Afaz from the Lighthouse Mosque in Oakland. He began by informing the crowd that there are an estimated 10,000 people still under the rubble in Gaza and if you had a funeral for everyone killed, “it would take 100 years to honor all those martyred.” He went on to recall the latest Israeli attack on Rafah that killed an additional 45 people including “women who were pregnant being burned alive”, that there are no safe places in Gaza.

He went on to say that Israel is “morally bankrupt” and the Rafah attack, characterized by Netanyahu as “tragic mishap,” was unacceptable. “This was not a tragic mishap, this is over 75 years and over $140 billion expended to ensure the ongoing ethnic cleansing, erasure and the violent dispossession of our brothers and sisters of Palestine. The powerful thing is that no matter how much they seek to erase Palestinian resistance and existence, we continue to gather in numbers they never dreamed imaginable. All of us here today is a testament that the resistance will never die until Palestine is liberated.”

Before leaving, the group prayed together and created a street mural calling for action from Padilla while pledging to remain in solidarity to see an end to the war in Gaza, while promising to return until their goals are met.

Report and photos by Phil Pasquini

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