Seattle police officers arrested three people, including 21- and 33-year-old men for obstruction and disorderly conduct, on Sunday afternoon at a protest, which drew 75 protesters at its height, the Seattle Police Department stated.
The protesters were demonstrating outside a StandWithUs Northwest event with Miss Israel, Noa Cochva, at Town Hall in downtown Seattle. Organizers kept the event location private, but Hannah Saunders, editor of a self-identified “antifascist” news site, encouraged readers to register and pay for the event to learn the location and then share the address on social media.
A security guard whom StandWithUs hired for the event, who told JNS that he has worked several Town Hall events in recent months including one with Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, said that he hadn’t encountered a protest like the one on Sunday.
“Is that what people have to deal with going to events like this every single time?” he told JNS. “Oh, my Lord. Why? Why? You’re making life hell for everyone, including people that are not here for the event. The people that are working.”
The website editor, who posted the address of the event, accused Israel of “genocide” and said that Miss Israel, who used to serve in the Israeli military, was part of the Israeli “occupying” forces. She also referred to the speaker as a “baby killer.”
Many Jewish and pro-Israel event organizers keep the location secret for security reasons. A gunman shot and killed two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington after they left a May 21, 2025 event at a Washington Jewish museum, and an attacker threw firebombs at Jews marching in Colorado on June 1, 2025. Terrorists killed 15 people at a Chanukah event in Sydney on Dec. 14.
Anti-Israel protesters at the Seattle event yelled “Death, Death to the IDF” and accused Israel of “genocide.” One man lay in a pool of fake blood on the sidewalk outside the event. (JNS sought comment from the Seattle mayor and from Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson.)
Michal Jacoby, 92, who attended the StandWithUs event, told JNS that the protesters’ claims were an “ancient blood libel invented in Europe from the Middle Ages.”
The protest began just after 4 p.m. Demonstrators wore keffiyehs, waved Palestinian flags and blocked the entrance to the Town Hall parking lot. JNS saw one person with a bag over his head making a neck-slashing gesture to drivers who tried to enter the lot.
The American Party of Labor Puget Sound Division and the Puget Sound Workers League encouraged members to “join us in resisting Noa Cochva’s presence in our city” and called her a “child killer.”
Melissa Rivkin, director of day school strategy for the Samis Foundation, which supports Jewish schools in the state, told JNS that she was carrying a combined U.S. and Lion-and-Sun flag as she walked up to the event. (The lion and sun are a pre-Islamic Republic symbol of Iran.)
“The protesters pulled the flag from me and burned it,” Rivkin told JNS.
An attendee told JNS that a protester attempted to break off her car’s side-view mirror as she drove up. Another told JNS that a protester spilled fake blood on her.
A man told JNS that a protester punched him in the face and tried to steal his hat.
Cochva, who was crowned Miss Israel in 2021 and served as a medic in the Israeli military for 150 days during the war in Gaza, addressed about 350 people at the event. JNS heard protesters, who were beating drums outside the event, from inside Town Hall.
“Social media is delivering this message into young people’s minds,” Cochva told attendees. “It’s slowly dripping one lie at a time, and it changes people’s mindset not only to think that the Jewish people are the worst thing to ever happen to humanity but also that violence is the answer.”
Cochva spoke about her grandmother. “My grandmother survived Auschwitz with both of her sisters,” she said.
She told attendees that her grandmother’s sister stood up to the Nazis, which ensured that they would survive. “Who am I, as her granddaughter, not to stand up to these people, who have no idea what they’re talking about?” Cochva said at the event.
Regina Sassoon Friedland, Seattle regional director at the American Jewish Committee, told JNS it is “deeply troubling, though sadly not surprising, to see a peaceful event met with violent aggression, including assault.”
“Disagreement is part of democracy. Violence is not,” she said. “People have every right to protest, but what’s happening here goes beyond that. The Jewish people will not be intimidated to halt our events and activities.”
