Honestly, on October 8, 2023, one day after Hamas’s horrific assault on Israel, with 1,200 dead, thousands wounded, those rapes, and 251 hostages taken, if I had told you that, in response, almost one year (yes, one year!) later, Gaza itself would lie in utter ruins — mosques, churches, schools, hospitals all destroyed — infrastructure bulldozed out of existence (as is also happening on the West Bank), at least 41,000 Palestinians dead (and many more possibly under the rubble of that tiny 25-mile strip of land), god knows how many wounded, and children devastated in too many ways to even imagine, or that the war Israel launched against Hamas in response would now be spreading all too horrifically, thanks to exploding pagers, walkie-talkies, missiles, and bombs, to southern Lebanon, some of which would also be left in “smoldering ruins” (with hundreds, possibly thousands more dead, including once again children), and the possibility that, by the time Helen Benedict’s latest piece is posted at TomDispatch, Israel might already have begun an invasion of that region (as it has), or that the war started on October 7th might be threatening to spread to Iran, Iraq, Yemen, and who knows where else in the Middle East, or that the U.S., which has been reinforcing its military personnel in the region (now at almost 50,000) and has an aircraft carrier strike group there, might even join the fighting, or that in those grim 12 months, Israel would have become a pariah state, I doubt you would have believed me for a second.
And yet here we are.
Fortunately, today TomDispatch regular Benedict, a journalism professor at Columbia University and the author most recently of the novel The Good Deed, offers us voices from Israel and Palestine of a sort we normally don’t hear in this all too violent world of ours, Israelis and Palestinians who actually have the urge to break the cycle of revenge and engage in some process of genuine reconciliation. Just having Israelis and Palestinians talking together about how to create a better world is, I think, deeply moving. Tom
“What Should I Do With This Pain?”
Bereaved Israelis and Palestinians Use Their Grief to Advocate for Reconciliation and Peace Together
With the first anniversary of the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel approaching, the death toll in Gaza climbing to more than 41,500, and Israel inflicting ever more extreme violence on the West Bank and now on Lebanon as well, something very different happened recently in a poky classroom at Columbia University. Two young men, one Palestinian and one Israeli, both of whom had lost people they deeply loved to the conflict, came to speak not about fear and anger, revenge or oppression, but about reconciliation, friendship, and peace.
One of them was Arab Aramin, a 30-year-old Palestinian from Jerusalem whose little sister, Abir, had been shot and killed in front of her school by an Israeli soldier. She was 10 years old.
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