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Two weeks ago, the Portland chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America held a press conference alongside the four socialist members of the Portland City Council to announce a pledge aimed at curbing any complicity within city limits with Israel’s military campaign against Gaza.
The local DSA chapter wrote the pledge and Councilor Mitch Green agreed to help champion it. All six members of the council’s progressive caucus (commonly called Peacock) signed it.
At the Oct. 17 virtual press conference, Green, an Army veteran and economist, said he had “seen firsthand the harm caused by weapons of war.”
“It is my obligation as a Portlander to think about how our city is involved in these networks of violence,” Green said, growing emotional. “We cannot stand by while our public resources and our taxpayer dollars are used to fuel atrocities abroad that in turn fuel the militarization in our own streets.”
That militarization offered the most obvious point of consensus between Peacock councilors and their more centrist counterparts. The City Council has largely presented a unified front to oppose President Donald Trump’s sending National Guard troops to quell protests against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
That peace is now being tested. The signing of the pledge by Peacock councilors has inflamed ill will between the two blocs of the council that opposing Trump had briefly salved.
Centrist councilors say the timing of the pledge—just one week after a tentative ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas—is ill-advised and takes time and focus away from the city’s real crises of federal overreach, homelessness, and lagging economic development.
“At a time when we are really all needing to link arms around what’s going on at the federal level, we’re going to bring up something like this?” asks Councilor Olivia Clark. “It’s just highly inappropriate.”
Peacock councilors say the timing is actually just right. That’s because the ceasefire is a fragile one (Israel dropped bombs on Palestinians returning home after the ceasefire and on Tuesday resumed air strikes concentrating on Gaza City) and, they say, because the attempted troop deployment in Portland by the Trump administration is part of a continuum with Israel’s actions in Gaza.
“The connections between what we are seeing in Gaza and what we’re seeing from ICE and the federal government,” Councilor Angelita Morillo said at the Oct. 17 press conference, “are absolutely clear to me.”
The tensions between Peacock and centrist councilors have reignited just as interest groups gear up for the 2026 election, which will see all District 3 and 4 council seats up for grabs—including three seats held by centrists and three by socialists.
The pledge and accompanying press conference came at a time when the city is in the throes of a tense legal battle with the Trump administration over National Guard deployment. So what might have otherwise been a cascade of interest group statements was, instead, the sound of crickets.
The notable exception was the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland, whose president Marc Blattner said in a statement that councilors who signed the pledge were “amplifying their hate against the Jewish state” and that “their goals are divisive and inflammatory.”
Peacock councilors forcefully deny the characterization that the pledge is at all rooted in antisemitism. “It’s not antisemitic to call this a genocide. We don’t want to conflate a state with its policies and people, and I don’t do that here,” Green tells WW. “There’s nothing here about Jewish people and Judaism.”
Adding fuel to the already volatile issue: Rockne Roll, editor of The Jewish Review, was ousted from the virtual press conference before it began. The DSA acknowledged it had ejected Roll, but said it was a mistake. Organizers “mistakenly identified Rockne Roll as a fake name,” the DSA wrote, adding that the mistake was “being used to smear [the councilors] and to distract from the important issues at hand.” The socialist councilors in a joint statement on Monday apologized to those who “are hurt this happened at all.”
Behind closed doors, however, the press conference reopened the council’s ideological divide.
Clark calls the pledge “highly inappropriate,” and in an email Councilor Eric Zimmerman sent to Peacock on Oct. 16, he implored the caucus to cancel the press conference, saying it was “hurting your colleagues” and “many of my constituents.”
“Yesterday was an incredible day when this Council was united during such an important time and on such an important topic. I’m afraid your actions tomorrow threaten that unity,” Zimmerman wrote. “Doing this after the announcement of a ceasefire and the return of hostages seems targeted and the sole concern over Israel and not others is on the nose antisemitic.”
Perhaps more than anyone else, the pledge puts Council President Elana Pirtle-Guiney, who is Jewish, in a delicate position: She’s in the final months of her first year serving as president of the council, a role that comes with significant powers—she sets the council’s agenda—but also immense scrutiny. She’s been accused by Peacock councilors of favoring the policy proposals and speaking time of centrists like Zimmerman, and Peacock has hinted at its discomfort with her leadership on the dais this year and more bluntly in texts.
That means a fight for a new president is simmering in the final months of the year, and Peacock’s pledge once again puts her standing with them in a precarious position.
In a statement to WW, Pirtle-Guiney threaded the needle carefully.
“Hamas’s terrorism against Israel and their own people is unacceptable, as are the extremist policies of Netanyahu and his government. Both should be held accountable for any war crimes committed,” Pirtle-Guiney says. “DSA’s press conference and my colleagues’ pledge are deeply problematic. The proposed ‘investigations’ are vague and concerning. The exclusion of a Jewish Review reporter, intentional or accidental, is unacceptable. This is a more complex and consequential issue than a single pledge or statement can capture.”
The pledge also gives ammunition to a battle between two powerful interest groups, the DSA and the Portland Metro Chamber, that is sure to dominate the 2026 council elections that leave all six seats in Districts 3 and 4 up for grabs.
The Metro Chamber, the city’s powerful business lobby, calls the pledge “performative.”
“The Peacock caucus continues to show a greater interest in the DSA’s political agenda rather than a laser focus on solving real city issues,” says Jon Isaacs, the chamber’s executive vice president of public affairs. “This latest performative announcement echoes their previous effort to defund the police in this year’s city budget. We implore upon them to refocus on the actual job of a city council, which is to solve the city’s problems, balance the budget, ensure the delivery of quality basic services, and support economic vitality.” (Isaacs is referring to Peacock’s successful spring vote to reroute $1.9 million in new funding earmarked for the Police Bureau to the parks bureau for maintenance.)
Though the election is still a year away, the Metro Chamber has made it clear it’s seeking to oust the socialist members of the council. The DSA has pledged to protect the socialist councilors and is sure to seek additional seats.
The more immediate fight is over whether the pledge becomes a council resolution. Bob Horenstein, spokesman for the Jewish Federation, says his organization plans to lobby forcefully against the pledge if any fragment of it ever makes it to the council’s docket. He says all non-Peacocks are “potential allies” in preventing its passage.
Green says he has no immediate plan to bring forth a proposal to the full council. That’s partly because Green is unsure he could get a seventh vote to make it official city policy. (He says the first piece he’d bring is a divestment policy. City spokeswoman Carrie Belding says the city “does not knowingly contract with companies involved in selling or transporting weapons to any foreign government,” and she adds that the city’s investment policy “currently places limits on corporate investment and includes a socially responsible investment screen per prior City Council direction.”) Councilor Steve Novick, who sometimes offers a seventh vote for Peacock, says none of his colleagues has yet approached him about the pledge. “I don’t have a position on something if I don’t know what it is,” Novick says.
Controversy over the pledge may, in fact, be for a measure with few teeth and little chance of becoming an official city policy.
Councilors pledged to investigate four things when they signed DSA’s document related to “any complicity our city may have with Israel’s illegal occupation, apartheid, or genocidal violence against Palestinians.” They promised to probe “manufacturing of weapons and weapons parts intended for use by the Israeli military within city limits,” any transport of weapons or weapon parts headed to Israel out of the city, city investments or contracts with “companies complicit in Israeli illegal occupation, apartheid, or genocidal violence against Palestinians,” and any diplomatic ties.
At the Oct. 17 press conference, Green said he would “use the power of my office to determine the extent of our economic and material ties to the weapons and surveillance technologies used in Gaza. If the supply chain of any of these items flows through Portland, I want to know about it.”
In an interview with WW, Green said he does not have a concrete plan for his research into local companies that may be providing weapons or weapon parts to the Israeli government. He says he has not yet dedicated any of his office’s resources to such research, though he mentioned that he has an economist on staff and is himself an economist who could conduct research.
The five other Peacock councilors did not respond to an inquiry about whether they had dedicated any staff time or resources to such an investigation, or if they planned to.
Olivia Katbi, co-chair of the local DSA chapter, declined to share the full list of elected officials who had signed the pledge, saying the DSA is waiting for more signatures “so that councilors feel safety in numbers.” Katbi says there are 10 total—including the six Peacock councilors and officials from two other states.
Part of the challenge likely to face Green if he lives up to the promise of investigating local companies himself: Untangling a global supply chain, much less determining what exactly complicity in Gaza looks like, is a herculean task.
“It’s challenging data, no question,” Green tells WW. He will also lean on activist research, he says, and when asked if he had concrete evidence of Portland companies that may be supplying weapons to Israel, Green said he didn’t “want to speculate.”
Still, Green says he wouldn’t make an empty promise.
“I don’t like to do hollow pledges,” Green says. “I’m always going to be wary as an elected in a position of power: Are we spending our time doing things that are symbolic only, or do they have the potential for meaningful change? I think there’s high potential for meaningful change here.”
