Washington Governor candidate Dave Reichert’s links to Israeli settler extremists

This Tuesday, Nov. 5, Washington State voters will finish mailing in their ballots or dropping them off at their local collection boxes. For many of us, the presidential election will be a top source of anxiety and concern.

We may despair at the bipartisan support for Israel shown by the main presidential candidates, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. This is despite Israel’s campaign of mass slaughter against Palestinians in Gaza over the last year, which would be entirely impossible without U.S. military aid.

Faced with a poverty of choices on the federal level, there may be a desire to turn attention toward local and state races, which have relatively limited impacts on foreign policy. Yet it is important to keep in mind that local policymakers also have the capacity to put pressure on Israel and support Palestinian freedom. 

For example, leaders could adopt symbolic statements and resolutions, end trade partnerships or sever sister city agreements, like Seattle’s ties with Be’er Sheva (occupied Bir al-Saba’). They may be able to instruct local public employee pension funds to divest from Israeli state bonds and other BDS targets. Or they could even ban police training with Israeli military and security forces, as the Seattle City Council nearly did in 2021.

One politician on the 2024 Washington State ballot who has shown outsized support for Israel is Republican gubernatorial candidate Dave Reichert.

Known for his work as a King County Sheriff and Republican member of Congress, Reichert has expressed continued solidarity with Israel and developed ties to extremist Zionist settlers in the occupied West Bank. This level of support appears anomalous, even for the Republican Party which is known for its outright backing of the Netanyahu government. He currently trails Democrat Bob Ferguson, the current Attorney General of Washington who has not spoken as much on international issues.

As the representative for Washington’s Eighth Congressional District, which spans from the Eastern hinterlands of the Seattle area into Chelan and Kittitas counties, Reichert vocalized support for Israeli military actions. On July 23, 2006, Reichert spoke at a downtown Seattle rally in favor of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon (pictured above) amid its war against the armed group Hezbollah. In 2010, he took to the floor of the House of Representatives to endorse Israel’s infamous raid of the Gaza humanitarian flotilla that resulted in the deaths of 10 people, including U.S. citizen Furkan Doğan.

More directly, Reichert led a police exchange to Israel in 2013. As a former law enforcement leader, he invited personnel from across the region to join. Public records, obtained when I was a member of the End the Deadly Exchange Seattle campaign, show two Seattle Police Department (SPD) officers, an SPD captain and several King County officials accompanied Reichert on the training trip.

The trip’s program included tours and meetings with a wide variety of officials embedded in all levels of Israel’s security apparatus, including the Israeli national police, its SWAT training facility, the border police and the military. The trip, as well as a 2014 follow-up trip which was also attended by SPD personnel, was coordinated by Yisroel Stefansky, the founder of the Advanced Security Training Institute, a security firm which specializes in training trips to Israel.

A video posted to YouTube shows Reichert visiting an Israeli settlement in the northern Occupied West Bank during his 2013 trip. Arutz Sheva, the religious Zionist news outlet, also discussed Reichert ties with Israeli settlers. This included meetings with Gershon Mesika and Yossi Dagan, the extremist leaders of the “Shomron Regional Council,” a municipality in charge of northern West Bank settlements. Reichert also met with then-members of Israel’s parliament Yoni Chetboun and Danny Danon. These politicians are part of or closely associated with several far-right Zionist political parties in the current ruling coalition, including the Prime Minister Benjamin Netenyahu’s Likud and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s Mafdal–Religious Zionism.

Reichert’s support for Zionism has continued during his current bid for governor. Reichert attacked his opponent Ferguson for not condemning the UW Liberated Zone encampment protests. He also applauded the arrest of 46 pro-Palestine protesters who blockaded a road outside of the SeaTac Airport in April. The charges against the SeaTac activists were dismissed in August. For his part, Ferguson has condemned Hamas’ October 7 Al-Aqsa Flood attack. 

I reached out to both the Reichert and Ferguson campaigns for comment and will update this post if I receive a response.