Miami Beach mayor, commissioner are targeting critics of Israel with protest rules | Opinion

There was a time when Miami Beach was proudly in the liberal camp — no more.

Now Miami Beach has a mayor, Steven Meiner, elected on an explicitly pro-law-and-order platform and an avowed right-wing city commissioner, David Suarez. Both have an undisguised hostility toward those with whom they disagree.

Meiner and Suarez are uncompromising supporters of Israel, and their comments at last month’s commission meeting about efforts to control protests in the city leaves little doubt that critics of Israel are the law’s intended targets.

While the ordinance passed unanimously, Meiner and Suarez were its only public defenders. Both complained repeatedly of protests in the city directed at Israel’s brutal military assault on Gaza, although the protests have been peaceful and unarguably protected by the First Amendment.

But Meiner and Suarez do not intend to let the Constitution get in their way. Meiner has even made the breathtaking proposal that speech be limited because of “the importance” of “supporting nations that share [our] values, including the state of Israel.”

The ordinance allows Miami Beach police to order protesters to move from the city’s public sidewalks. How this would work was apparent when protesters tried to pass out leaflets at a recent climate conference about Israel’s destruction of Palestinian natural resources.

When they went to the venue, police forced them to move to a “free speech zone” so remote from the venue’s entrance that no conference attendee could possibly have known of the protesters’ message. Speech that no one can hear is not what the First Amendment contemplates.

One Miami Beach resident, who spoke at last month’s meeting, said she wished there had been more protests against Nazi Germany, prompting Meiner to interrupt her and warn her about comparing Israel to Nazi Germany and then launched into a diatribe about Hamas atrocities.

When she said she had made no such comparison, the mayor angrily instructed aides to cut off her mic.

When I spoke next at the meeting and said that Israel’s “values” included the use of starvation as a weapon of war, Meiner again shouted to “cut the mic” and warned that I was “close to being removed from this meeting.”

As for the proposed efforts to quash protests, I noted that the Supreme Court had once said of a law allowing for the arrest of protesters on the “whim of any police officer” that it “bears the hallmark of a police state.”

Later in the meeting, Meiner and Suarez lashed out at protesters who had gathered outside of a synagogue where attorney and Israel defender Alan Dershowitz was speaking.

“As mayor,” Meiner said, “I will not tolerate our residents being harassed and accosted and threatened for simply trying to pray.”

Of course no one had come to the speech to pray, and the only person “accosted” that day was a Jewish woman in the audience who had yelled, “Ceasefire now!” and was wrestled to the floor by audience members.

Suarez, in one of the meeting’s uglier moments, warned Wayne Jones, the city’s first Black police chief, that his handling of the event at the synagogue was “grounds for firing,” adding, “If that were a KKK rally, things would have been different.”

Meiner and Suarez are entitled to their personal views about Israel. But they also have a responsibility to ensure that those who disagree with them have an opportunity to express their opinions.

Cutting the mic of members of the public whose views they disagree with, yelling at constituents speaking out about injustice, and enacting anti-protest rules, this is not the behavior of responsible public officials.

Alan Levine is a civil rights lawyer who has specialized in First Amendment cases. He lives on Miami Beach.