Remembering Seattle’s CHAZ/CHOP in the Era of Pro-Hamas Encampments
Because nothing opens hearts and minds like an urban encampment!
GUEST POST by Mallory Mosner - Click here to view more of her work
It was the summer of 2020, and uprising was in the air. After the tragic killing of George Floyd, people mobilized across America to protest for Black lives. It was a watershed moment in transforming the collective consciousness around racism, though the full impact of these protests remains to be seen.
I was deeply involved in activism during and in the years leading up to 2020, and I also happened to be unemployed throughout that summer of protests. Consequently, I found myself attending a large volume of protests, and devoting much of my time to spreading awareness about the cause.
For the record, “the cause” remains important — policing in America is broken, and Black people are disproportionately (though far from solely) victims of police killings and brutality. Though four years later, I certainly don’t agree that policing itself is inherently wrong and should be defunded or abolished, that ACAB (all cops are bad/bastards), or that the tactics of the 2020 protests (in particular the violence, theft and rioting) were “good” or successful in affecting meaningful change.
Seattle was a notable hotbed of protests during that charged summer, and the local movement seemed to reach an apex upon the establishment of what was referred to initially as “CHAZ” (and later comically rebranded as “CHOP” due to the name Chaz triggering people with its invocation of a basic white dude’s name) — the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.
I attended countless protests throughout my adulthood, but even in my most intensive phases of activism, I never would’ve participated in the violent creation of something like CHAZ. In early June of 2020, vicious clashes between protesters and police caused the Seattle Police Department to retreat from the East Precinct in Capitol Hill, culminating in the establishment of the “autonomous zone” (or “organized protest” zone, as in CHOP).
The CHAZ encampment was in place for nearly a month, until a shooting left a 16-year-old boy dead and a 14-year-old critically injured, resulting in Seattle’s mayor Jenny Durkan issuing an executive order to clear the encampment by July 1st.
CHAZ was a focal point in conservative media fixation with maligning the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, and for good reason — it was a farce. Then again, so much of the “activism” that ensued in the aftermath of 2020 read like satire; a 2021 paintball fight between the Antifa and Proud Boys in Portland felt simultaneously like the horseshoe theory in action, and the most stereotypically Portlandia-esque fracas ever to happen.
But to have personally witnessed and spent considerable time inside of CHAZ is a perspective that I am grateful for; seeing the mirror of what the movement became helped me to eventually understand the lunacy and futility of those tactics — despite at the time feeling like questioning ANY tactics of resistance made someone de facto racist. Thankfully, I have grown a lot from my former naivety.
While I wasn’t present for the violent clashes that gave rise to CHAZ, I had been part of a number of protests leading up to its advent in which we were tear-gassed, pepper sprayed, and a number of people faced brute force from police. It was traumatic, but the energy was also all-encompassing, fiercely bold, and indignant. In other words, it felt revolutionary.
The sweeping energy of something that felt unequivocally like “progress” (or at least that was being framed irrefutably as “progress”) was both captivating and empowering, yet dangerously emboldening and dissociated from reality. The cause demanded absolutist, almost religious devotion — and yet, there was a miasma of euphoric anarchy that made everything seem frighteningly and seductively unpredictable.
I recall a few specific moments in CHAZ when I realized it wasn’t all it was chalked up to be (pun intended). One was when Black organizers planned a music festival inside the encampment, which was widely promoted on social media and in- and outside of the protest zone.
When the actual music started on that fateful day, multiple Black organizers quieted the music and took to sound systems to inveigh against the non-Black people who had the audacity to smile, enjoy themselves, or heaven forbid, dance. “Some of y’all look like you’re just here for a music festival,” one of the speakers bellowed into a megaphone, before demanding that non-Black people wipe any shred of joy off their faces and turn to a Black person to give them cash reparations right now.
In another moment, I recall walking through the zone of Cal Anderson Park that had been settled by countless people in tents, and I suddenly realized that CHAZ was little more than an unauthorized homeless encampment with a specific crust punk Antifa flavor. The area was littered with needles, cardboard, and trash.
But the most formative moment of all was encountering a mixed Black person I know break down in CHAZ. Despite having darker skin and being very obviously Black, he had not been raised by his Black parent, and the incessant guilting of organizers in CHAZ (“Y’all should be here every possible second to show up for Black Lives!” was a common refrain heard over the megaphones) brought him to the point of paralyzing emotional agony.
CHAZ may have been born of an entirely valid complaint (police brutality killing innocent people), but it was coopted into a dystopian hellhole of guilt and coercion and anarchy. Did it do anything to help Black people in the long run? It certainly instilled an obsessive fixation with “anti-racism” among non-Black participants, but fawning and doling out miniscule “reparations” to random Black people doesn’t actually address racism or police brutality.
The whole ordeal reminds me of a haunting character in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Colonel Aureliano Buendía. He starts as a revolutionary with a noble cause, and in a riveting homage to the horseshoe theory, becomes a lot like a fascist right-wing dictator in the end. It’s a nuanced commentary from Márquez, who was a staunch leftist — but who understood that communism, Marxism and socialism are complex philosophies, which don’t always engender “justice” or “progress” in practice.
Fast forward to the anti-Israel encampments that have swept college campuses across the country in 2024. Privileged students who often pay almost $100k per year in tuition are antagonizing Jewish students, calling for “intifada” (random violence against Jewish people), threatening and ostracizing Jewish students while openly supporting the terrorist organizations of Hamas and Hezbollah.
They have gathered in matching tents, setting up disruptive, disgusting, exclusionary encampments that are designed to ensure that Jewish students feel unsafe, and that no one can go about any of their normal activities without thinking about the official “social justice” narrative that Israel should be destroyed (and all its inhabitants either displaced or killed), and that any Jewish person with a connection to Israel should be bullied into submission.
It is quite a mindboggling fixation, since Israel is far from the only country receiving American aid (and American aid to Israel is usually provisioned as a more mutual benefit anyway, since it bolsters the American economy through American arms sales, and the exchange of military intelligence and technological developments from Israel).
In fact, there are a long list of countries that receive American aid, including several that are experiencing actual, unequivocal genocide, such as Sudan and Congo. But those go mysteriously ignored by college activists, who froth at the mouth at the opportunity to join a “movement” that could wipe out the ultimate enemy — the Jews, who are once again scapegoated in the misguided, lonely, hateful antisemite’s search for meaning and “justice.”
Reflecting on the protests, and especially the encampment of 2020 is useful context for this moment, as it illustrates a few different things. First, it points to Jew-hatred as a far more galvanizing impetus for extreme rebellion than even something as urgent and devastating as continued police killings of Black people in America. CHAZ was an anomaly; the annihilation of the state that is home to half the world’s Jews is a far more compelling cause, it seems.
Second, it speaks to a collective guilt and yearning for belonging that was incipient in 2020; the same firestorm of bastardized “intersectionality” that became a proxy for weaponizing identity politics to guilt random white people into shutting up and/or opening their wallets to the winners of the oppression Olympics is the pretext for today’s students who came of age with this behavior as a foundational guide to morality.
Last but not least, it nods to a convenient collective amnesia, where it doesn’t matter whether or not such tactics actually or have ever worked, but instead that they generally function to disrupt, annoy, and coerce by any means necessary.
It wasn’t world news that 2021 was the deadliest year for police shootings since the Washington Post began tracking them in 2015, despite the actions of 2020. We may now have DEI efforts that ensure we see more Black people in television commercials, but the rioting and looting of 2020 didn’t actually make anything safer for Black people. So, what did it do?
When I think of tactics like encampments, I can’t help but think back to Occupy Wall Street in 2011. I happened to be living in New York City at the time, and recall the contempt I felt as I watched unemployed, entitled crust punks sitting in Union Square each day, always with ample food and drugs to keep them satisfied as they drummed and chanted the days away. Did it make Wall Street less corrupt? Did it engender less economic inequality? Obviously not.
I am not so cynical as to think that no forms of activism work — activism can be extremely powerful and transformative, and there are innumerable moments across history that exemplify that. I also recognize that subtle effects can reverberate from any action, though correlation does not imply causation.
However, it amazes me when social justice warriors, who are well-acquainted with the outrageous level of contempt that the public feels towards homeless people, think that emulating homeless encampments will benefit their cause.
This is not an argument about the morality of the visceral reaction most non-homeless people feel towards homeless encampments (nor is it an indictment of actual homeless encampments or people); the truth is, privileged adults behaving like evil children are cosplaying homelessness under the illusion that such posturing will somehow lead to compassionate awakening and change.
Of course, it isn’t actually about that, and it never has been. Just like many people jumping on board in 2020, Gen Zers today are not really seeking a panacea for the world’s ills (though many of them do earnestly believe that Israel and Jews are the root of the world’s problems).
Rather, in the absence of religion (or any common practice or consensus of right and wrong), and in the aftermath of a society that has devolved into the mores of identity politics and cultures of outrage rather than meaningful reflection, inclusivity or change, these very unwell, pseudo-intellectual children are finding meaning and belonging in the imagined power and self-victimization they wield when they feel part of something important and virtuous.
Israel will win the war against Hamas, and Jews will continue to exist — and be proud of our cultural and ancestral homeland. As for these students, just like their Nazi-sympathizing student forebears in 1930s Germany, they will eventually come to see what they have wrought.
For more articles by Jewish authors, subscribe to the JPF on Medium (click on the image below).
Want even more Jewish bang for your buck? The JPF recommends subscribing to the following Substacks:
Maccabee Nation by Jason Crystal has a series of superb Jewish interviews on all subjects.
Looking for an in-depth read full of passion? Dear Chevra by Gail Zahtz is the Substack for you.
is a voice of light reporting directly from Israel. writes and deserves more love - subscribe today!And there is a reason why
of has over 2000 subscribers. Beautiful, heartfelt writing, you won’t be disappointed.
"They have gathered in matching tents..."
Worth noting that everyone waited until spring to set these camps up. Where were the tents in January/February?
Reuben, thank you so much. What a lovely, lovely endorsement!!
And so glad you’re here. These days we really need each other.