Seattle Democratic Socialists of America

Israel continues its war to murder and evict households in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of east Jerusalem and resumes bombing Gaza to its southwest. This occurs the same week as the anniversary of the 1985 MOVE bombing where Philadelphia police shot and burned an entire block to displace, kill, and imprison a household of Black families as well as a journalist, Mumia Abu-Jamal, who is still incarcerated today.

These may seem like unconnected events. They are not. Seattle Police train with the Israeli Defense Force in the “deadly exchange”, a series of skillshares how to brutalize, surveil, and contain liberation movements. As Shaun Scott notes: “The IDF destroying press buildings in Palestine as Seattle PD — who trained under them — is the subject of a class action lawsuit for illegally targeting journalists and medics at protests last year. The symmetry is immaculate.”

Police are a domestic military occupation. US arm sales and military support to Israel are its international arm. There’s no freedom to be had in “principled support” of an ethnostate built on colonization and dispossession of indigenous peoples. To denounce violence on both sides is to “All Lives Matter” the most well-funded military in the world as people are displaced, at times without power or running water, who suffer hundreds of times the casualties.

Recognizing this, on Sunday, members of the chapter joined in the commemoration of the Nakba (Israel's 1948 destruction and division of Palestinian communities) in solidarity with liberation and internationalist cries for freedom, right of Return, and boycott, divestment, and sanctions on Israel until it ends its brutal war on Palestine and allows families back home.

No witty jokes this week. The differences in power between Israel and Palestine are simply too absurd. We cannot be free until we are free.

Thank you,

Seattle DSA Communications Team

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