Israel, Palestine, and the 9/11 Era: The Perspectives of Ackerman, Beinart and other Jewish Left Leaders on September 11, 2016
You can listen to our entire conversation on our show on the NYT Audio app or wherever you can get your podcasts. Our guests have a list of book recommendations.
The attack by Hamas against Israel shocked the country. Israel had repeatedly fought short battles with Palestinian militants in Gaza in recent years, but nothing approaching the scale and brutality of the assault.
My approach is going to be to try to cover it from many different perspectives, but I wanted to start with the one I’m closest to, which has felt particularly tricky in recent weeks: that of the Jewish left. So I invited Spencer Ackerman and Peter Beinart on to the show.
Ackerman is an award-winning columnist for The Nation and the author of “Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump” and the newsletter Forever Wars. Peter Beinart is an editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, the author of the Beinart Notebook newsletter and a professor of journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. And they’ve each taken up angles I think are particularly important right now: the way that Sept. 11 should inform both Israel’s response and the need to empower different kinds of actors and tactics if we want to see a different future for Israelis and Palestinians alike.
Yocheved Lifshitz, 85, was released from Gaza by militants on a motorcycle in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack
Yocheved Lifshitz, the 85-year-old woman who was released after being held hostage by Palestinian militants in Gaza for 17 days, on Tuesday described being beaten while her captors took her away on a motorcycle.
Hamas has released four hostages, including Judith and Natalie Raanan, American-Israeli citizens who were freed last week. She is the first person to speak publicly about her captivity.
“I went through hell,” Ms. Lifshitz told reporters the day after her release, sitting in a wheelchair at a hospital in Tel Aviv amid a thicket of microphones.
She and Cooper were freed on Monday and then transferred from Hamas custody to Israeli forces by the International Committee for the Red Cross. People are being held hostage in Gaza.
Her account of the tunnels offered a glimpse of the difficulties facing Israel as it weighs whether and how to launch a ground invasion of Gaza to eliminate Hamas, which led the devastating Oct. 7 attack against Israel.
Hamas has built a labyrinth of underground passages in Gaza for its fighters, military analysts said, complicating both Israel’s anticipated ground operation and any attempt to rescue the hostages.
Ms Lif Shitz said that peoplestormed their homes, beating people, and abducting people, like her. It did not make a difference, they snatched the elderly and young.
She said that her kidnappers took her watch and beat her in the ribs, which made it hard for her to breathe. They drove off through the fields surrounding Nir Oz.
She said they took her through the network of tunnels until they found a hall with 25 people in it. After about two to three hours, they separated five people from her kibbutz into their own room, where they were overseen by guards and a medic, she said.
Ms. Lifshitz said that she and other people were given the same medicine and food as their liberators. She said her abductors worked diligently to keep their area free of disease, and doctors would periodically check on them. She said that they were treated with all of their needs met.
Ms. Lifshikatz criticized the Shin Bet and the Israeli military for ignoring warning signs about the threat to towns near Gaza. The Israeli military acknowledged after the attack that it had not kept its promise to protect Israel’s citizens.
In the weeks leading up to the assault Palestinians threw balloons near the Gaza border fence sparking fires in southern Israel.
I have lived in the United States twice since I was born. Following the invasion of Kuwait as a child. For graduate school again. I have had the privilege of being a young adult in countries where Palestinians were fairly common. A heavy identity wasn’t a contest. I hadn’t had to learn the respectability politics of being a Palestinian adult. I became aware of what I knew quickly.
The Israeli War on Gaza: A Case Study of the Abujayyab-Yamaev-Mumford Execution
A missile did not hit the hospital but rather the parking lot next to it. The blast was caused by a missile that was supposed to kill Israelis but malfunctioned and rained down on the ground, according to US intelligence and independent analyses. There is no solid reason to believe the death toll was over 500. The Hamas-owned Gaza health ministry is towing and promoting whatever the terrorist organization wants, even if it is a political body.
The Palestinian territories are republics of fear because of the fear of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. Palestinians are just as honest as people in other countries. But, as in any tyrannical or fanatical regime, those who stray from the approved line put themselves at serious risk.
Hani al-Agha, a Palestinian journalist, was tortured by Hamas and jailed for weeks. In that case, the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate took the extraordinary step of condemning al-Agha’s arrest and torture as “an attempt to intimidate journalists in Gaza Strip, who are subject to repressive police authority.” Yet, outside of a few news releases, the story received almost no coverage in the wider media.
The news media still needs to get more information out to the public in war zones. People consuming media should know the dangers and pressures that journalists operate in, not because of a distrust of them, but because we appreciate the danger they face.
Readers want to know how the information about the alleged Israeli atrocity was acquired and from whom, next time there is a story. It’s bad enough that Hamas tyrannizes Palestinians and terrorizes Israelis. We don’t need it misinforming the rest of us.
The legacy of displacement also loomed large inside Israel, said Nathan Thrall, author of “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama,” a book about the lives of Palestinians and Israelis. He said the attack played into the fears of the Israeli that all of the Palestinians who live on the other side of the wall would return and try to take back their homes.
Then Mr. Abujayyab’s grandmother had a close call. The residents of 25 apartment blocks near his grandmother were ordered to leave by the Israeli military early Friday. A small strike on a rooftop reinforced the message.
A split occurred in the family group. His grandmother was still defying the Israeli order to evacuate, even though Israel’s military would soon warn that residents who stayed risked being considered a “a member of a terrorist organization.”
His sister, Doaa, wasn’t sure. Mr. Nigeriayyab and his siblings were arguing about whether she should go to her grandma’s apartment. Or take the long, dangerous journey south?
Mr. Abujayyab’s sister or matriarch likely did not hear about it. They had no power, limited internet and more bombs were falling, his sister said in a voice message to her family.
The Inconsolable Case of a Palestinian Family: How Do I Get What You Want to Tell Us About Their Lives and Deaths?
It is, of course, a remarkably effective strategy. A slaughter isn’t a slaughter if those being slaughtered are at fault, if they’ve been quietly and effectively dehumanized — in the media, through policy — for years. Nobody can be a victim if they are not a civilian.
A novel about a Palestinian family was published last year. It was published and given a book tour, but got a lot of press. I spoke on panels, to book clubs. I answered questions about my readings. There was a refrain that kept coming up. People kept commenting on how human the story was. You’ve humanized the conflict. This is a story about people.
These days, everyone is trying to write about the children. An incomprehensible number of them dead and counting. We are at night and we are looking through our phones to find something to prove a child is a child. It is an unbearable task. Will this be the image that finally brings it to an end? This child is on a roof. This video, reposted by Al Jazeera, of an inconsolable girl appearing to recognize her mother’s body among the dead, screaming out, “It’s her, it’s her. I think it’s her. I know her from her hair”?
There is nothing more draining on a writer than trying to come up with analogies. There is something humiliating in trying to earn solidarity. I keep seeing infographics desperately trying to appeal to American audiences. Imagine most of the population of Manhattan being told to evacuate in 24 hours. Imagine if the President of the United States told everyone on NBC that all people are. Look! Here’s a strip on the edge of the Mediterranean Sea. That’s Gaza. It’s the same size as Philadelphia. The entire population of Las Vegas can be summed up by three.
This is demoralizing work, to have to speak constantly in the vernacular of tragedies and atrocities, to say: Look, look. Remember? The other suffering that was deemed not good was eventually deemed unacceptable. Let me hold it up to this one. Let me show you proportion. Let me earn your outrage. Let me earn your memories, if that’s not present. Please.
I don’t hesitate for a second to condemn the killing of any child, any massacre of civilians. It is the easiest ask in the world. And it is not in spite of that but because of that I say: Condemn the brutalization of bodies. By all means, do. Condemn murder. Condemn violence, imprisonment, all forms of oppression. But if your shock and distress comes only at the sight of certain brutalized bodies? If you speak out but not when Palestinian bodies are besieged and murdered, abducted and imprisoned? It’s worth asking yourself if brutalization is acceptable to you, quietly, even subconsciously.
Asking for freedom is straightforward. Palestinians deserve equal rights, equal access to resources, equal access to fair elections and so forth. If this makes you uneasy, then you must ask yourself why.
The truth is that the Palestinians aren’t really diasporic. Their diaspora-ness is a direct result of often violent, intentional and illegal dispossession. One day a house is yours; one day it is not. One day a neighborhood is yours; one day it is not. One day a territory is yours; one day it is not. This same sort of dispossession is grounded in the same mind-set and international complicity that is playing out in Gaza.
Palestinians are cast with both terror and invisible people but they can’t return to their homes.