Amid near-record levels of antisemitic incidents, Chicago business leaders have issued a full-throated open letter to Mayor Brandon Johnson in response to a Chicago City Council resolution calling a “permanent cease-fire” in Gaza, without fully dismantling Hamas, a designated foreign terrorist organization. 

Johnson cast the tie-breaking vote in favor of the resolution, which passed 24-23 on Jan. 31.

Chairman and CEO of Jet Support Services Neil Book told Fox Digital News that the Chicago business community “as a whole was angry and shocked about this resolution.” In search of “an outlet to express their frustration” and “hold leaders accountable,” Book authored the full-page letter to the mayor, published in the Chicago Tribune on Mar. 24 and signed by 31 business leaders. The letter urges the mayor to “remember that the first responsibility of Chicago’s Mayor and…City Council is to focus on Chicago, not on a conflict 6,000 miles away.”

An Israeli soldier patrols near Kibbutz Beeri in southern Israel on Oct. 12, 2023, close to the place where 270 revelers were killed by Hamas terrorists during the Supernova music festival on Oct. 7. (ARIS MESSINIS/AFP via Getty Images)

During the Jan. 31 hearing over the cease-fire resolution, protesters’ “noise and yelling” were so loud that Silverstein said she had to “wait…for [Mayor Johnson] to control the crowd.” She said the mayor eventually “cleared the gallery because it was just too chaotic.” 

Some protesters loudly chanted accusations that Silverstein was responsible for genocide, an allegation falsely lobbed at many Jews and Israel supporters since Oct. 7. Charney says such statements are antisemitic in that they assign “personal responsibility for an alleged genocide” to American Jews. She also noted that the term “genocide” is misused. On Jan. 26, the International Court of Justice issued a preliminary ruling that it did not find Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. 

As executive vice president of Orthodox Union, Rabbi Moshe Hauer helps represent more than 1,000 synagogues around the country. Hauer told Fox News Digital that the Chicago City Council’s cease-fire resolution fails to recognize Israel’s “moral obligation” to prevent Hamas from its goal of repeating attacks on Israel. While Israel “desire[s] to minimize civilian casualties and provide humanitarian aid while decisively defeating the enemy,” Hauer said that “Hamas just wants to destroy, and puts its citizens deliberately into harm’s way.” 

Hauer said Chicago’s “glaringly flawed” cease-fire resolution is “indicative of an ongoing animus towards Israel and the Jewish people that has grown in very disturbing ways over the past months.” As an anti-Israel narrative is “repeated in bullhorns in threatening and menacing rallies all across the country,” Hauer said it is “making life for the Jewish community very uncertain, and very uncomfortable.”