Seattle
January 2022: Antisemitic graffiti found across the street from Jewish Family Service, apparently a response to an op-ed in the Seattle Times by JFS’s CEO, Rabbi Will Berkowitz (see also statement from the Jewish Community Relations Council of the Jewish community of Greater Seattle)
January 2022: Derek Kammerzell, a police officer in Kent, Washington displayed Nazi military insignia on his office door. The officer was initially suspended but, after an outcry, the Mayor of Kent asked for his resignation.
July 26, 2021: Proposed Seattle City Council Bill 120142 would have banned the Seattle Police department from cooperating with or traveling to countries that, according to specific criteria, violate human rights. Unlike an earlier draft, the final version of the bill didn’t explicitly mention Israel, but that was clearly its intended target. Callers to the Council Meetings on July 19, July 26, and August 2 spoke on both sides of this initiative. Anti-Israel supporters of the bill, including some who identified as Jewish, used talking points found here and here. StandWithUs and the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle issued action alerts opposing the initiative. The bill failed to pass by a 5-to-4 vote at the City Council meeting on September 20, 2021.
July 6, 2021: Following media exposure, the Washington State Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction removed gratuitous, inflammatory, and one-sided language about “Israeli dominance” over “Palestinian sacred lands” from a lesson plan for U.S. History elementary school curriculum.
June 21, 2021: An anti-Israel bill expected to be introduced at the Seattle City Council did not materialize, after community members spoke against it during the Public Comments period of the Council meeting.
June 2 to June 18, 2021: Anti-Israel protestors, led by Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant, blocked the unloading of a cargo ship, the ZIM San Diego, at the Port of Seattle (#BlockTheBoat campaign). The ship was unloaded after Seattle Police arrested 10 protestors who were blocking the entrance to the Port. (ZIM is a publicly traded corporation headquartered in Haifa, Israel. The ship was carrying cargo from China and South Korea to customers in the Seattle area, including Microsoft, Amazon, and Costco.)
June 14, 2021: The Representative Assembly of the Seattle Education Association, the labor union representing teachers in the Seattle Public Schools, passed a resolution endorsing the call to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel and calling on the Biden administration to end security assistance to Israel.
June 14, 2021: The Puget Sound-American Muslim Empowerment Network took out a full-page ad in the Seattle Times, signed by over 70 other organizations, alleging that “Israel gassed, stunned, and shot at religious worshippers at the third holiest site in Islam.” The ad endorsed the Defending the Human Rights of Palestinian Children and Families Living Under Israeli Military Occupation Act (H.R. 2590), introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives by Congresswoman Betty McCollum.
June 13, 2021: Anti-Israel protesters demanded that a major grocery chain “boycott companies complicit in Israeli apartheid.”
June 2021: Large anti-Israel demonstrations took place in Kirkland (June 12) and Bellevue (June 13).
May 24, 2021: Seattle City Councilmembers Lisa Herbold, Teresa Mosqueda, and Kshama Sawant sent a letter to President Biden and members of the U.S. Congress urging them “to end military aid and weapons sales to Israel” and “urgently condemn the brutal attacks on Gaza.” The letter decried Israel “decades–long policy of occupation, oppression, and expropriation land and resources from the Palestinian people.”
May 2021: Hundreds of faculty and staff members, students, and alumni at the University of Washington signed a Community Statement of Solidarity with the Palestinian People that accused Israel of “an ongoing project to uproot Palestinian life from Palestinian land” and supports the Palestinian people’s “indigenous liberation struggle against forced dispossession by the Israeli settler colonial state.”
May 22, 2021: Seven faculty members (including the Israel Studies chair) and graduate students at the University of Washington were among hundreds of Jewish Studies and Israel Studies academics who signed a statement condemning Israel’s “unjust, enduring, and unsustainable systems of Jewish supremacy, ethnonational segregation, discrimination, and violence against Palestinians.”
May 16, 2021: Israeli flags burned, chants of “Long live the intifada,” and Jewish journalist assaulted at a Nakba Day rally at Westlake Park. (video) Seattle Councilmember Kshama Sawant spoke at the rally, condemning President Biden for “US Imperialism supporting the Israeli’s ruling class’s apartheid against the Palestinian people.”
ADL tracked 345 incidents of white supremacist propaganda in Washington in 2020 — a shocking 245% increase over the previous year and the second highest number of incidents nationwide. (Source: We must face our domestic extremism problem by Miri Cypers, The Seattle Times, January 7, 2022)