When the War Comes Home: Seattle as Gaza

Grappling with the scale of genocide and the weight of unequal lives

When I read the latest news from Gaza, I feel numb. The scale of the atrocities is staggering. My heart breaks and my mind shuts down.

But should we turn away from what is happening simply because it’s horrible? No, of course not. Understanding precedes action, and so morality demands that we attend to reality. Still, it’s hard to contextualize what’s happening on-the-ground beyond reading trustworthy news sources.

Even that can only go so far when the headlines have been nearly the same every day for two years: “Israel pounds Gaza, killing 70.” “UN report finds over 40,000 in Gaza may have life-changing injuries.” “Israel threatens all staying in Gaza City, kills at least 53 in enclave.”

The war comes home

One of the ways that I have stayed connected to what is happening is to look at the situation as if it were happening in my hometown, Seattle.

Gaza is 25 miles long, between 3.7 to 7.5 miles wide, and has a total area of 141 square miles. The population is — or rather, was — 2.2 million.

Seattle is almost exactly the same size, just over 142 square miles. Gaza and Seattle also have a very similar geography: elongated from north-south, with water to the west and a boundary (Lake Washington in the case of Seattle; a militarized border wall in the case of Gaza) to the east. But the population of Seattle is only 800,000; to reach 2.2 million, imaging crowding all the residents of King County into the city limits.

This striking similarity in size and shape has been on my mind the last two years as Israel has escalated their decades-long settler-colonial slow genocide in Palestine into a deliberate and meticulously planned fast genocide.

Welcome to Biocentric, a newsletter about sustainability, overshoot, greenwashing, and resistance. It’s written by me, Max Wilbert, the co-author of Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It, co-founder of Protect Thacker Pass, and organizer with the Community Legal Environmental Defense Fund.

If you want to follow, you can subscribe for free. Paid subscribers, in return for supporting this publication and the activism you see here, receive access to private posts which contain behind-the-scenes reports and unreleased drafts, such as this one.

Imagine if Gaza were Seattle

The entire city has been enclosed by fences and walls. Cameras, drones, and guard towers line the boundary. Inside the walls, more than 80% of the city’s land has been declared “off limits” to the people and is occupied by Israeli troops.

Currently, the Israeli military is “laying siege” to Gaza City, located in the northern quarter of the strip. That’s as if north Seattle — the University District, Ballard, Ravenna, and surrounding areas — were being targeted by sophisticated, relentless military bombardment. Imagine drone strikes, air-to-ground missiles, artillery, and mortars raining down on 65^th Avenue; armored personnel carriers and tanks grinding their way through the University of Washington, systematically demolishing buildings as they advance westward.

Laurelhurst, Wedgewood, Lake City, and Green Lake are already gone, nothing but dust and hunks of concrete.

A million people flee from north Seattle to south. It, too, is a bombed-out wasteland. But there is nowhere else to go; everyone is trapped. People form vast tent encampments in the only areas remaining open to them: SODO, Beacon Hill, West Seattle, and Rainier Valley.

There is almost no food. Aid shipments are blocked. Flotillas bearing aid are deemed “terrorists” and turned away. Those who gather for the scanty supplies which are allowed through the blockade are targeted indiscriminately. Hundreds are killed in breadlines on Alki when troops open fire, day after day, on the desperate.

Infants and elders die first from hunger. The young and healthy grow skeletal. Women, desperate to feed their children, prostitute themselves in tents and the shells of homes in Madrona.

Every hospital has been destroyed. Swedish, UW Medical Center, Children’s, Providence; they’re all in ruins. A few doctors and nurses clear rubble by hand and tend to the wounded in tents located in Hillman City, but without supplies and equipment, they can only do so much. The bombs rain down around them, and sometimes on top of them.

All the local media were destroyed early on. KUOW, KING 5, FOX 13 and the rest are all smoking craters. Whenever journalists show their faces, targeted assassination follows. AI tracks them, drones and soldiers fire on them.

Over the last two years, Seattle has been hit with bombs and missiles with equivalent explosive power to 10 Hiroshima atomic bombs.

Basic infrastructure is gone. Schools are demolished. Lake Washington and the few other water sources in the area are cesspools due to untreated sewage and rotting bodies. Nearly every home, from Beacon Hill to Madrona to White Center, is in splinters.

At least 65,000 people (and likely more than half a million) are dead. At least 19,424 of those are children. Before the war, 50,000 children attended public schools in the Seattle school district. Forty percent of them have been murdered.

Two in every five.

More than 160,000 people are injured. Many have lost limbs, eyes, hearing. Children are burned across their entire bodies.

The United Nations, Amnesty International, the International Criminal Court, and countless other organizations and experts have named what is happening in Seattle as a genocide, but no one intervenes.

The United States, the UK, Germany, and many other nations provide arms and direct support. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE, Turkey, China — none intervene. Despite mass protests against the genocide around the world, and legal action by South Africa, only a few are brave enough to actually fight back: the Houthis, the Iranians, Hezbollah. Despite deplorable politics in many areas, they are the only groups — outside armed factions inside the strip, and a few isolated groups like Palestine Action — who’ve taken direct action against the genocide.

There is no happy ending to this story. For those in Seattle, including my family, it is just a story. For those in Gaza it is reality. The bombs rain down. Drones and fighter jets fly overhead. U.S.-made bullets take more lives.

This is a difficult piece to write, because what good are words against a genocide? I cannot single-handedly stop the atrocities. Collectively, we can make a difference, as is being shown by the brave actions of dockworkers in Italy and Greece in recent weeks. But what is even more important, in my view, is that those of us in the West become traitors to the empire we were born into; that we commit to dismantling the imperial project here, in its heart.

Biocentric focuses mainly on the ecological crisis and the need for action to address it, but my writing and organizing has always ranged across issues — imperialism, colonialism, racism, feminism — not simply because these are all worthy causes, but because they are intertwined.

Both Israel and the United States have been genocidal states since their founding. There are striking parallels between the Nakba, the carving up of the West Bank, and the enclosure of Gaza on one hand, and the Trail of Tears, the Puget Sound War, the Nez Perce War, the Indian Removal Act, and the establishment of reservations on the other (a good primer on this is

Stephen Carr Hampton

’s piece titled “Will Americans watch a million Palestinians starve?”) And in both cases, violence against civilian settler-colonists (whether or not someone stealing your land can be genuinely considered a civilian is a question I will not explore here) has been used a justification for campaigns of extermination.

The settler-colonial project is no different whether it takes place under the aegis of manifest destiny or Zionism.

Words are not enough. The killing must be stopped. The truth must be told. We must remember. And it must never happen again.

Through one of the organizations that I’m part of, Fertile Ground, some friends of mine are organizing an upcoming fundraiser event in Seattle on October 25th for CleanShelter.org, an organization that funds safe shelter, clean water, and basic sanitation services for women and children in Gaza. You can get an admission ticket, register to attend for free, or donate to support by clicking here.

I need your help. I’ve left all social media to focus my attention on organizing, coordinating resistance actions, and writing. That means I rely entirely on readers like you to share this content online. If you appreciate what you read here, please take the time to share your reasons why on social media, discussion forums, and in direct messages to friends. Thank you!

This post, like everything you read here, was written without the use of any AI tools.