Heather Yingling, sporting a checkered kaffiyeh around her neck and bright eye makeup drawn like a watermelon, walked toward the middle of a bridge above Interstate 5. She unfurled a plastic netted sign that read “CEASEFIRE NOW, FREE PALESTINE” over the railing facing hundreds of cars hurtling south toward Seattle.
Then Yingling stood in the biting wind for a couple of hours, as she and other activists have every weekend afternoon for months, absorbing the honks of support and rude hand gestures from drivers down below. Their goal: drawing local attention to calls for an immediate cease-fire in a conflict that has led to a worsening humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip, in turn pressuring public officials and corporations to seek an end to the violence in Gaza and withdraw U.S. backing for Israel.
Some cease-fire activists, like Yingling, have pursued that goal by standing on Seattle overpasses, marching in Westlake, and disrupting events like New Year’s Eve and tree lighting celebrations. Others have drawn ire for their more disruptive approaches, halting traffic on the University and West Seattle bridges, and more recently, Interstate 5.
Tactics differ. Some demonstrations are small, like Yingling’s. Others garner thousands of protesters and are disruptive. Many activists choose not to demonstrate at all, focusing their efforts on targeting elected officials and organizing online. What those efforts have in common, though, is their staying power.
“With movements like this, you tend to see them die off after months and months,” said Yingling, who started a human rights nonprofit in response to the Israel-Hamas war. “Anger has been consistent since November, and [our demonstration] is only growing. Every time, we have more people.”
In the months since Oct. 7, when thousands of Hamas militants broke through the Gaza border barrier in an attack that killed 1,200 people, the Israeli military has responded with airstrikes and a blockade of the Gaza Strip that have killed over 30,000 in Gaza, including at least 13,000 children. Throughout the war, hundreds of people in Seattle have poured into the streets, called their legislators and wielded social media to demand a cease-fire.
And while Seattle has a rich history of protest, the choreographed efforts to call for a cease-fire have endured here in ways that outpace most other local protest movements around international affairs.
According to the Harvard Kennedy School’s Crowd Counting Consortium, which collects data on political crowds across the U.S., Seattle has sustained cease-fire protests in 2024 on a level similar to much larger cities, like Chicago and Los Angeles.
The city has also been home to the most crowded demonstrations, by far, in the Pacific Northwest. In February alone, the consortium documented about 15 protests — several of which amassed hundreds of people.
The cease-fire movement further stands apart from older protest campaigns in that it’s been marshaled by a wide intersection of local activists, not only those with ties to the region, those involved say. Activists have encompassed newer, smaller movements, like Yingling’s, and older Palestinian- and Jewish-led movements, like the Westlake demonstrations organized by Palestinian collectives Falastiniyat and Samidoun.
“Palestine is going to liberate us all,” Yingling said. “We’re not free until we’re all free.”
Behind the protests
Seattle’s protest movements, grand in scale and history, have given momentum to global issues over generations.
Such campaigns have long vexed officials with questions of how to respond, exemplified by recent backlash against cease-fire demonstrators and the State Patrol over an hourslong blockage of I-5. They’ve also drawn fierce opponents, both among political adversaries and others who take issue with civil disobedience.
In the first camp are those who criticize the cease-fire demonstrations as antisemitic — drawing attention to controversial protest phrases like “from the river to the sea,” which they view as a call for eradicating Israel and building a single state on the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, in line with Hamas’ rhetoric.
Cease-fire demonstrators disagree with those who roundly criticize their movement and defend use of the phrase, saying it advocates for peace, justice and equality for Palestinians. They also liken Israel’s 57-year occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem to apartheid governance that stifles Palestinians’ self-determination.
Against that backdrop, the Anti-Defamation League plotted several Seattle-area demonstrations last year as “anti-Israel rallies which featured overt antisemitism, anti-Zionism and/or expressions of support for terror.”
(Antisemitic and Islamophobic hate incidents have been rising in the U.S. since Oct. 7. Positive opinions of both Israel and the Palestinian Authority have fallen sharply, according to a February Gallup poll.)
Other cease-fire detractors take umbrage with demonstrations that disrupt daily life in Seattle, such as repeated civil disobedience actions at Westlake Park and the I-5 blockade in January.
The freeway protest drew the heaviest scrutiny, both toward responders and demonstrators, who shut down northbound I-5 just south of Mercer Street for roughly five hours, causing traffic to back up for miles. The State Patrol ultimately referred charges against 12 protesters, but King County prosecutors sent the cases back to the agency, writing that they couldn’t move forward without additional evidence.
Those involved with civil disobedience point to the tactic as critical to their movement because it forces attention on the issue by disrupting daily commerce and transportation. Some also frame the arrests, as well as four others by Seattle police at a separate demonstration in February at the World Trade Center Seattle, as a law enforcement escalation and affront to their right to protest.
Equally important as civil disobedience and other public actions, cease-fire demonstrators say, is advocacy outside the public eye.
Local groups such as the Seattle chapter of the progressive anti-Zionist organization Jewish Voice for Peace, which criticizes Israeli governance , have demanded meetings with lawmakers to advocate for a cease-fire in addition to organizing protests.
The JVP chapter has also targeted local and national companies as part of the decades-old boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. Among activists’ biggest targets is Boeing, which has partnered with Israeli commercial aviation for decades and delivered bombs to Israel for airstrikes in the Gaza Strip.
“There’s action and effort going on on many levels, from the things that are visible in the streets to a legislative advocacy day in Olympia,” JVP member Ledah Wilcox said.
They also pointed to pressure their organization has placed on the Seattle City Council to pass a cease-fire resolution, which it did in November, as well as phone-banking lawmakers and urging local unions to support cease-fire resolutions.
“For every public action, there’s hundreds, if not thousands, of small things that individuals are doing every single day to try to keep this front of mind and not let it drop off the radar,” Wilcox said.
A growing movement
A year ago, Yingling said she was largely ignorant of the 75-year, intractable conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. By the end of October, after Yingling said she became more educated about the issue, she felt hopeless.
She went to a dollar store, bought supplies to make a sign and started demonstrating alone. “It felt better than doing nothing,” she said.
Now 39, she’s been protesting for social issues for over 20 years and recently formed a nonprofit whose scope extends beyond Gaza. Her garage is packed with mutual-aid resources, for example, and she opened her home to a family of Venezuelan refugees last month.
But much of her focus remains on the Israel-Hamas war and becoming better versed in regional history from people who were displaced from their homeland — including a survivor of the 1948 Nakba, or catastrophe, a mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians. Many of those people have joined her on the bridge.
She’s raised the contentious topic at her workplace, rallying colleagues to join her protests, and discussed her advocacy with her three children, finding it particularly difficult to explain to her youngest, age 6, that thousands of kids have been killed in Gaza.
A through line in her discussions is her stance that individual advocacy can create change.
“People that are wondering ‘Well, what do I do? What do I do?’ Start standing on a bridge by yourself. It will grow,” Yingling said.
Her nonprofit, Global Solidarity Network Seattle, now includes roughly 60 members, many of whom attend her Mountlake Terrace demonstration every week.
Standing near Yingling on a recent Saturday afternoon was 61-year-old George Kassis, who held a large Palestinian flag over the bridge’s railing. Kassis, a Palestinian American who moved to the U.S. about 40 years ago, said watching the destruction back home “opens up a lot of wounds.”
His family members live outside Gaza and are relatively unharmed, he said. His goal in Washington, he said, is to educate Americans about what’s happened to Palestinians.
“I have met so many people that have no connection to Palestine and were moved enough to join protests,” Kassis said. “It’s heartwarming. … It makes me hopeful that the younger generation will become decision-makers.”