After cease-fire votes, some city councilors wonder if they should be debating foreign policy

Across Massachusetts, resolutions calling for a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war have passed in recent weeks with overwhelming support after at times heated debate. But now, even some elected officials in Cambridge and Somerville who backed a cease-fire effort wonder if local leaders would be better off sticking to matters closer to home.

On the one hand, councilors say they felt a moral and democratic obligation to speak out on behalf of their constituents against injustice, no matter where it’s taking place.

But others wonder if it’s beyond their brief.

“If we were to take up every single foreign policy issue that all of us care about, things like Ukraine or any tragedy on any continent, that’s all we would be doing,” Cambridge City Councilor Paul Toner said. Although he joined his colleagues in passing the resolution — a unanimous call for a negotiated cease-fire, humanitarian aid, and the release of all hostages — Toner said he would never vote anything other than “present” on future foreign policy questions, no matter the topic.

After votes that angered some of Cambridge’s and Somerville’s staunchest pro-Israel voices and brought out pro-Palestinian demonstrators in droves, even councilors who were proud of the message they ultimately backed as a group wondered if the process had been too disruptive.

Cambridge Councilor Patricia Nolan said she will think twice about diving into international affairs again, despite the council’s long history of doing so, including votes opposing apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s, the Iraq War in the early 2000s, and, in 2020, a controversial citizenship law in India. Nolan has sponsored similar measures herself in the past, including calling for an end to the US embargo on Cuba, in 2021.

But when the council can do so little on its own to right wrongs across the globe, Nolan now wonders, is it worth it to get people even angrier at one another here at home?

“Our doing this did not bring the community together. It probably further split it,” Nolan said.

Plenty of Cantabrigians, including her colleagues, don’t see it that way, even as they acknowledge their impact on leaders abroad is limited.

“No one is under any delusion that the [Benjamin] Netanyahu administration or Hamas cares at all what Cambridge thinks,” said Councilor Marc McGovern, referring to the Israeli prime minister, who is leading the retaliatory military campaign that has killed more than 30,000 in the Gaza Strip and created a humanitarian catastrophe, and the militant group that led the Oct. 7 attack, killing 1,200 and taking 250 hostages.

The intended audience, McGovern said, isn’t world leaders in the Middle East. It’s the federal decision-makers who do have the power to do something.

“We sent that resolution to our elected representatives to say to them as a body . . . we want you to advocate for this,” said McGovern, also the vice-mayor. “ ‘We don’t want any more people to die, we want hostages to go home, and we want humanitarian aid. And you, our elected representatives, have a lot more influence than we do.’ . . . I think that’s totally appropriate.”

McGovern said debating thorny foreign policy never distracted from local concerns.

“There was not one pothole that didn’t get fixed because we did this. We can chew gum and walk at the same time,” McGovern said.

The push for cease-fire resolutions has gained local momentum in the weeks since Somerville was first in the state to pass one in a 9-2 vote on Jan. 25, a week before Cambridge. Medford passed one on Feb. 6. Northampton followed three weeks later, then Amherst a week after that. Melrose followed this week.

For many Muslim and Arab residents, it means the world to see elected officials rallying behind the cause in votes that pass with so much support, said Sara Halawa, organizer of the group Somerville for Palestine, which pushed for the policy order in that city.

Resolutions, she said, are “an important symbolic tool.” And not just because they generate headlines or can get the attention of officials further up the political food chain.

“The Muslim community feels strongly that the reason [the destruction in Gaza] is being allowed to happen is because as a community we don’t value Muslim lives, we don’t value Muslim children, we don’t value our Muslim community members,” she said. Resolutions send the message “that Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian lives are valued just as much as any other lives.”

When the Somerville resolution passed, she said, “we were able to feel like we could relax our shoulders, even just a tiny bit.”

The Boston City Council has yet to put a cease-fire resolution to a vote. Councilor Ben Weber proposed one last month, then withdrew it because he said it “may cause more division.”

The debates over cease-fire resolutions come at a time when discord at local public meetings is already on the rise across the state and country, be it over school curricula or library books.

“Many of the matters that come before our city councils or town boards are acrimonious, whether they be hyperlocal or international,” said Adam Chapdelaine, head of the Massachusetts Municipal Association, which recently named addressing vitriol in public meetings one of its top priorities.

For Ben Ewen-Campen, the Somerville councilor who brought forward the cease-fire resolution there, the conflict in Gaza has always felt like a local issue, not just a foreign policy question.

As the death toll climbed, he heard repeatedly from Somerville residents with ties to the region who were “traumatized” by images of dead, displaced, and starving Gazans, and were sickened by the disconnect between what they were seeing and what they were hearing from elected officials. So was he.

“I myself am Jewish, and I’m a human being. I was horrified and felt hopeless and helpless, and I had heard from many, many constituents who were feeling the same way,” he said. “I felt like I could no longer explain to myself and my friends and my neighbors why I wasn’t bringing a resolution, so I did.”

He acknowledged that the debate was time-consuming, and “monopolized” councilors’ email inboxes for days. And he said he heard from residents who were moved to tears as they pleaded with him not to have the discussion at all.

“I don’t want to minimize the fact that this was an unusually intense week without question. And everything we do has an opportunity cost,” he said.

Addressing the hundreds of protesters who gathered at City Hall, and spilled out into the hallway, in January, some Somerville councilors said they felt the fraught debate on world issues put them in an uncomfortable position.

Although he did ultimately support the resolution, which passed 9-2, City Councilor Matt McLaughlin said during the meeting that he felt conflicted. He wants the killing to stop, he said, but didn’t feel qualified to tell the president or the state’s delegation in Washington how to make that happen. He’d rather focus on “the suffering I’ve seen in my community,” he said, citing rising substance abuse and a lack of affordable housing.

“I want peace,” McLaughlin said, but “I want to focus on the people living under the highway on I-93 in East Somerville, the people suffering from air pollution, the people who can’t afford to live in the city. And it has been hard this week to focus on those issues.”

Spencer Buell can be reached at spencer.buell@globe.com. Follow him @SpencerBuell.