Sister cities: Be'er Sheva and Seattle's shared history of ethnic cleansing

The Israeli military has kidnapped, tortured and imprisoned Hussam Abu Safiya, a pediatrician and director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza, since December 27 2024. Human rights organizations, governments and millions of people around the world have called for his release and accountability for his kidnapping and torture. 

However, just a week ago, an Israeli district court in Be’er Sheva ruled that Abu Safiya’s indefinite detention would continue based on a “secret” set of facts. He has been held at Sde Teiman, an infamous Israeli torture camp where thousands of Palestinians are actively being caged on the outskirts of Be’er Sheva, Seattle’s “sister city” in Israel.

According to Seattle’s Office of Intergovernmental Relations, the sister city partnership was established to “promote peace through mutual respect, understanding and cooperation - one individual, one community at a time.”

In Be’er Sheva, an Israeli court has condemned a pediatrician to rot in a torture camp where well documented abuses, including systemic sexual violence, of Palestinians are taking place. Israeli human rights monitor B’Tselem has interviewed Palestinians who have been held in Israeli torture camps like Sde Teiman. Their report, titled “Welcome to Hell” lays out stark evidence of torture and crimes against humanity. 

In May of last year, legal experts said that Be’er Sheva’s deputy mayor violated international law when he posted degrading photographs of kidnapped Palestinians while he was serving in the Israeli military. 

In some ways, Seattle and Be’er Sheva mirror each other's history. I recently found a copy of Ruth Gruber’s 1950 book Israel without tears. Within it, Gruber describes Be’er Sheva as it existed in 1949, immediately after the Nakba.  

“Before 1948 it was an all-Arab town of Bedouins, fellahin and rich pashas,” Gruber writes. “Today it is an all-Jewish town of new immigrants and soldiers, with Bedouin Arabs on its fringes moving noiselessly through the desert with their camels, their children, and their black tents.”

Native Duwamish have also been forcibly displaced and disappeared too, for generations.

Today, Native Seattleites are 10x more likely to be on the receiving end of Seattle police violence than white Seattleites.

The town fathers of white Seattle engaged in explicit campaigns of ethnic cleansing, driven by real estate speculation, signing an Indian ethnic cleansing ordinance into Seattle law in 1865. 

Gruber writes that Be’er Sheva, “in many ways, is the Israel version of the American Wild West of the 1880’s… It is to Israel’s Negev frontier what Seattle is to Alaska.”

During the 1948 Nakba, 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their homes. “​​Approximately 12 percent of the population of the Beer Sheba district remained within the territory that became the state of Israel in 1948,” according to the Palestine Lands Society. In Seattle, 0.6% of the city’s population now identifies as solely American Indian or Alaska Native according to U.S. Census data.

The majority of Be’er Sheva’s Palestinian population was forcibly expelled to Jordan, Hebron and to the Gaza strip, where Israeli genocide and ethnic cleansing, the Nakba, continues today.

Some of Seattle’s largest emerald city makers are active partners with Israeli Occupation Forces. A +972 mag report highlights the Israeli military’s use of Amazon Web Services (AWS) to store Palestinian surveillance data.

“According to three intelligence sources, the army’s cooperation with AWS is particularly close,” writes Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, “the cloud giant provides Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate with a server farm which is used to store masses of intelligence information that assists the army in the war.” 

Seattle’s sister city partnership with Be’er Sheva constitutes an ongoing official Seattle government endorsement of a place and the culture that sustains it.

Judge for yourself what that reflects. 

Note: Photographs used in this editorial were taken by Seattle Fire Department employees while accompanying former Seattle Mayor Ed Murray on a pinkwashing trip to Israel in 2015. They were obtained through a public records request.