Archives: Seattle Mayor Wes Uhlman’s 1971 Trip To Israel

Four years after Israel captured the Golan Heights, Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza strip and the West Bank during the war of 1967, ethnically cleansing roughly 300,000 Palestinians from their homes, Seattle Mayor Wes Uhlman traveled to the newly expanded country on an invitation from the Israeli government.

Palestinians called the war of 1967 the Naksa (the setback), not to be confused with the Nakba (the catastrophe) of 1948 where Zionist forces expelled at gunpoint around 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. 

To this day, the Israel State Archive continues to conceal official records of the Nakba and Naksa and censor documents from this period under “security grounds,” according to Al Jazeera. Only one percent of 400 million pages of documents have been made public from the Israel State Archives according to the Akevot Institute, suppressing the true reality of Zionist violence and dispossession in Palestine. 

[The film Farha depicts some of what may be hidden within the Israeli state’s founding historical record.]

In 1971, the specter of continued violence in Palestine was at the forefront of media reporting and punditry. It was then, in January 1971, that Seattle Mayor Wes Uhlman made a trek across the earth to visit.

Seattle’s Jewish Transcript newspaper, billed as the “First Leading Jewish Newspaper in Western United States,” published a report on Uhlman’s trip in March of 1971, writing that the Israeli government prepared Uhlman’s itinerary and that he and his wife were jointly invited to Israel “by the Israeli Government and El Al Israel Airlines, the carrier he used to reach Israel.” 

Beyond a passing mention within the Seattle Daily Times and the Seattle Post Intelligencer, the purpose of Uhlman's trip was not overtly made clear to the public.

Any pretense that Uhlman had traveled to Israel to advance the interests of the people of Seattle was definitely rebuffed by Uhlman himself, after Jewish Transcript asked him, “were you able to forget about Seattle and its many problems?” while in the country. In response, Uhlman laughed and said “he accomplished that completely.”

According to Jewish Transcript, Uhlman “returned with the impression of a modern, vibrant state whose residents have a pioneer spirit possible [sic] similar to that in the United States in the decade of 1840-1850.” The haunting echoes of Manifest Destiny and the genocide of the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island was conspicuously absent from Jewish Transcript’s reporting. While in Israel, Uhlman recalled that the Israelis “wish to preserve not only reminders of Jewish history but also the history of the crusades.” 

Uhlman met the Israeli President and other Israeli officials, visited Israel’s Yad Vashem museum of the Nazi holocaust and the Western Wall, his junket mirroring Seattle Mayor Ed Murray’s trip to Israel 44 years later.  

Jewish Transcript reported that Uhlman “said that he was asked to bring back the message to the people of the U.S. that it is perfectly safe to visit Israel.” Below Uhlman's story in the newspaper was a conspicuous ad to “Buy Israel Bonds.”

[I recently reported on the Chair of Israel Bonds New York.]

During Uhlman’s administration, the city of Seattle later established the Be’er Sheva sister city partnership that continues to this day. 

Uhlman’s trip shows that the Israeli government has a long history of aiming to overtly influence public officials and private interests in the Emerald City. While the details of Uhlman's meetings may be buried or scattered across other archival materials, we can largely guess what specifically the Israeli government wanted out of his visit.

Seattle is a strategic port city, a hub for military technology development and manufacture, NSA spying, and capital accumulation. A nuclear submarine base is located miles away and Washington State itself is home to multiple military units that have deployed to the Middle East. And yet, while Seattle is a frontier city, its populace today is not ideologically aligned with the vision of Greater Israel, posing a threat to Israeli interests. From block-the-boat, to legislation threatening to cut off direct Israeli training of the Seattle Police Department, to BDS, each action, taken with the goal of ending human rights abuses against Palestinians, is seen as a threat.

That threat that the citizens and Seattle's elected officials pose to a foreign state, is meant to be neutralized through a sophisticated mesh of overt Israeli government influence, Israeli media reporting and cutout organizations that act in the interests of the Israeli government under the guise of countering antisemitism. All these operating under the umbrella of hasbara.

Today, as in 1967, the Israeli military continues to expand its territorial occupation and violent plunder of Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.

As Mayor-elect Katie Wilson takes office, she has already drawn the ire of Israeli media, and it's all but certain that overt and other influence operations will aim to push pro-Israel policy narratives into Seattle city hall.

Those attempts to influence Seattle officials have been ongoing for over half a century.