Palestinians in Gaza: The impact of Hamas attacks on the Palestinians, the Israeli–Israeli border and Israel’s armed forces
Mr. Darawshe was at the festival as part of a small group of paramedics that were hired by the Israeli company to take care of medical emergencies. His colleagues fled when the shooting began, but he “felt compelled to help people as one human being to another,” said Mohammad Darawshe, a cousin who is himself a prominent mediator between Palestinians and Jews.
The loss of the bridge-builders still committed to a peaceful settlement of theIsraeli-Palestinian conflict may be thought of as an apt example of Awad Daraw She, a young Palestinian Israeli citizen who died for peace in the Jewish homeland. Yet, often marginalized, mocked as naïve and targeted as traitors, some of these stubborn advocates of peacemaking now see an opportunity, however remote, in the aftermath of Hamas’s slaughter of more than 1,400 Israelis.
The calls for a war like no other to root out Hamas “once and for all,” a consensus in Israel’s national unity government and much of Israeli society, will blunt their voices for now. The peacemakers are in the minority as a devastating invasion of Gaza looms.
But the Hamas attack has shattered Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conviction that the conflict — insoluble in his view — could be managed by “mowing the grass,” in the dismissive Israeli expression for periodic weeding out of Palestinian militancy.
There’s a particular feeling of uselessness that can take hold when you are watching a horrible thing happen far away from your home — but that same thing is causing your friends and neighbors deep pain.
Mr. Shaban said that his cousin took his family to the south after the attacks on Gaza City. He told us that an Israeli airstrike killed the cousin’s wife and two daughters in the city of Khan Younis a week ago. The cousin returned to Gaza City with his surviving family members — a wounded son and his sister — to be treated at Al Shifa Hospital.
I am not Jewish or Palestinian. This is not my grief in the same way it is for those whose people’s very existence is at stake. I’ll come up with a conversation that makes us all feel connected, and that will inspire some kind of hope. These horrors are not easy to salve. There is no single conversation that can represent the pain accumulated over generations in this existential struggle over land and God and who does and does not get to see their children grow up.
I don’t like the fact that the statement was vaguely about Hamas killing of Israeli civilians. In calling off his Friday evening appearance, 92NY, a Jewish organization, was playing by rules much of the left established, privileging sensitivity to traumatized communities ahead of the robust exchange of ideas. It is Zionists who feel intimidated by a censorious atmosphere because of their support of Israel. A professor at the University of California, Davis is being investigated for a social media post that called for the targeting of “Zionist journalists,” which included a knife, an ax and three drops.
What’s going on at UCLA? What did you see and didn’t you see? — David Myers’s take on Israel-Palestine
I wanted to hear if he’d be willing to talk, since I was hopeful about that idea. I was looking for a long view. A historian’s take. Because perhaps, with distance, the pain is lessened? Historians fix their gaze in the past, but actually live with us now and it can be too much to bear.
David Myers: Terribly. My heart is broken. I’m grieving, mourning, angry, bewildered, scared — all of those things. I realize I’m not there. I’m outside of Israel-Palestine. I’m about to take something away. It needs to be on the ground. And I do spend a lot of time there, but I’m not there now and I’m feeling all of these things It’s almost unbearable. I spend a lot of my time teaching and doing media appearances, then I go into a cave of depression.
Martin: How did things start to evolve on campus? Because UCLA, like many college campuses around the country, has been beset with a lot of students who are angry, who are hurt, who are suffering, who want justice for all the people who’ve lost their lives. What did you see that started to manifest?
Myers: I think what I encountered was a great deal of mystification about how students on the other side of the divide failed to understand where they were. It was much less about, “Can you help me understand what took place in geopolitical terms?” and more about, “How could that group be so uncomprehending and so lacking in basic empathy?”
Myers: I did. Both groups, and I’m sort of generalizing and speaking of these groups, the groups represent those strong supporters of Israel who tend to be Jewish students, and supporters of the Palestinian cause, some of whom are Palestinian and Arab and many of whom are not.
I think both of them have a deep sense of grievance. The Jewish students don’t feel like they have to condemn a massacre of Jews because they have a natural solidarity with many other issues. A number of people who support the Palestinian cause think that the university and wider political culture in the US is not attentive to the suffering of the Palestinians.
Israel, Gaza, and the Jews: The Call for Empathy prompted by Israel’s Call for Israel-Has Palestine Gaza Religion
It became clear that I needed to write something very simple and intuitive in order to say that the time is right to recognize the humanity of all. I don’t think it’s a good point to take sides right now.
I knew that that would elicit many suggestions that I was a traitor to my people, the Jewish people. And I knew it would elicit many claims that I failed to understand the depth of suffering of the Palestinian people. But I had to write what I had to write. And I believe it’s not only intuitive, it’s the moral place where I need to be.
Which is to say, it is an absolute moral imperative to condemn without equivocation the massacre that took place on October 7th. And it is a moral imperative to attend to the extraordinary suffering that Palestinians in Gaza are now undergoing, and that the two are not exclusive of one another.
All too often, in the best of circumstances, people feel the need to choose sides. In this environment, it is understandable why people are not able to hold on to both. But I guess I would ask: Is there not a small portion of our hearts that can be reserved for the other, even in this time of grief?
I don’t consider myself to be a morally better person than the average person but I think it’s important to carve out a small portion that we can empathize with in times of need.
Source: His call for empathy has made this Jewish studies professor feel isolated
Breaking Cycles: How Do We Live? Martin: Towards a Cultural Understanding of War and Palestine’s Encounter with the Heavens
Martin: I think that part of your job is looking back through time and identifying patterns and then teaching students how to break them, because they aren’t serving us anymore. As people, societies, and humankind. How do you do that in this conflict when the same cycles of violence repeat themselves over and over for generations?
Myers: Yeah. There are profound traumas in those cycles and they clashed with one another. The trauma of the Holocaust, of course, known to almost all, and the trauma of the Nakba, of the displacement and expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians during the 1948 war. To ask ourselves how it’s going is the best way to break out of the mold. How well is it working? And I think from what we’ve seen over the last two weeks, it’s not working well at all. That kind of death embrace of two siblings, I often think of them as Jacob and Esau, is detrimental to the health of both.
I take solace in prayer and in my community, so it’s a difficult question. This is a time in my life where I feel that my community does not feel in lockstep with me. I feel a measure of the loneliness we are feeling at this particular time.
But I also see how, particularly the Psalms, offer sources of consolation. And open up the possibility of moving beyond where we are. Every day we recite a verse, written down by me, because I carry it with me. It says: “You turned my lament into dancing. You clothed me with joy.
Gaza, the Price of a Ride South Is Out of Reach for Many: Israeli Response to a Palestinian War Crime in the Gaza Strip
In response to questions from The New York Times, the Israeli military said that it did not intend to consider those who have not evacuated south to be members of armed Palestinian groups, which it considers terrorist organizations. It said in a statement that it doesn’t target civilians. A spokesman for the Israeli foreign ministry said that there was no basis in the suggestion that the warnings could lead to ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
Even as Israel has told Gazans to head south, airstrikes have continued to hit that part of the enclave. Israel would intensify its attacks on Gaza in the future, as well as launching a ground offensive, according to an Israeli military spokesman.
The cost of travel has gone up due to the danger of Israeli attacks on the road, said Amani Abu Odeh who lives in Gaza’s north. Drivers were now charging between $200 and $300 to take a family south, she said. The same trip cost $3 before the war.
“We can’t even afford to eat,” Ms. Abu Odeh said. “We don’t have the money to leave.” Instead, she and other members of her extended family have hunkered down together in one home.
Food, water and other supplies are in desperately short supply in Gaza, where officials say the health system is on the brink of collapse after Israel declared a complete siege of the already blockaded enclave nearly two weeks ago.
Since Israel launched its airstrike campaign, more than half of Gaza’s population have been displaced. The UN’s special envoy on the occupied Palestinian territories condemned the leaflets, which called for more people to move south.
She wrote on X on Saturday that it would be a threat of collective punishment and could lead to ethnic cleansing if they put hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians who are unwilling to flee as terrorists. She added that deliberately targeting civilians was a war crime.
The New York Times and Hamas: Analysis of the Occultary Demonstration of a Gaza City Explosion
That — coupled with the escalating humanitarian crisis across the enclave — is one of several reasons some families say they are staying put in the north.
“I didn’t go to the south because I didn’t know anyone there,” said Yasser Shaban, a civil servant in Gaza City. “We will end up in the streets.”
On Oct. 17, The New York Times published news of an explosion at a hospital in Gaza City, leading its coverage with claims by Hamas government officials that an Israeli airstrike was the cause and that hundreds of people were dead or injured. The Times headline was at the top of their website.
Islamic Jihad, the group blamed for the rocket launch, denied responsibility as Israel denied it was at fault. American and other international officials have said their evidence indicates that the rocket came from Palestinian fighter positions.
The Times continued to update its coverage as more information became available, reporting the disputed claims of responsibility and noting that the death toll might be lower than initially reported. Within two hours, the headline and other text at the top of the website reflected the scope of the explosion and the dispute over responsibility.
The Times editors should have taken more care with the initial presentation, especially given the sensitive nature of the news during a conflict, and be more explicit with what information could be verified. The major breaking news events and the use of the largest headlines in the digital report are some of the procedures that have been looked at by newsroom leaders.
What do I learn from 92NY about Thrall’s book about the Holocaust and the plight of Palestinians, and what can we do about it?
“I was very glad to be asked that question,” Thrall told me. “Because that was absolutely the ambition of the book, to depict real people” rather than villains and saints.
I will moderate a talk with Thrall this Thursday in Brooklyn, because I admire the book so much. But I’ve been shocked to learn that several of his other events, both in the United States and in Britain, have been canceled, either because of security fears or because it’s considered insensitive, right after the killings and abductions in Israel, to dwell on the plight of Palestinians.
Nevertheless, a commitment to free speech, like a commitment to human rights, shouldn’t depend on others reciprocating; such commitments are worth trying to maintain even in the face of unfairness. Art can make people see beyond the hatred of war and understand that we are all humans and not inhuman at the same time.
If the statement he signed didn’t live up to his own words’ generous spirit, 92NY would have been a good place to ask him why. The moments when dialogue is most fraught and bitter is when leaders most need to model it.