I will go to war for Israel, and the Palestinians are not my enemy

The Israeli-Palestine conflict in Armenia: What the international system was like last week, when Armenia invaded Nagorno-Karabakh

He said the Palestinians are reminded of the extent of Israeli society being militarized. Those you were eating with yesterday are where you are now.

I am now going to defend my country against enemies who want to kill my people. Our enemies are the deadly terrorist organizations that are being controlled by Islamic extremists.

The Palestinians are not the enemy. The millions of Palestinians who live right here next to us, between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan, are not our enemy. Just like the majority of Israelis want to live a calm, peaceful and dignified life, so do Palestinians. Israelis and Palestinians alike have been in the grip of a religious minority for decades. The stubbornness of a small group has led to violence on both sides. It doesn’t matter who is more cruel, or more ruthless. The ideology of both have fueled this conflict, leading to the death of too many innocent civilians.

This war, like others before it, will end sooner or later. I do not know if I will come back but I know that after the war is over, both Israelis and Palestinians will have to consider who led them to this moment. We must wake up and not let the extremists rule. Palestinians and Israelis must stand together against extremists. The Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and the finance minister Bezalel Smarich will be ousted from power because of their far-right circle.

Last week, as war broke out in my home, I was in Armenia, spending hours talking to people whose own lives have been wrecked by war. The people of Nagorno- Karabakh were driven out of the enclave by the military assault of the Azeri army. In a crumbling, Soviet-era kindergarten hastily repurposed as a shelter, people told me about their overwhelming sense of loss. One man just kept repeating, “Homeless, homeless, homeless.”

If you were to ask what the international system was, it would be forgiven. The global institutions so painstakingly built over decades seem to be no match at all for the things that really run the world: money, oil, arms, interests. The Armenians feel betrayed by the international community for its near-complete inaction in the face of Azerbaijan’s punishing, nine-month blockade on Nagorno-Karabakh since December, leaving 120,000 people — mostly civilians — lacking enough food, medicine or fuel. The United Nations sent its first mission to the enclave in 30 years only after most Armenians had been driven out by the violence. The countries of the world were frustrated by the failure of international law, as seven more areas of its own territory were under control of Armenia in the 1990s.

Israel has scoffed at international law for decades by expanding settlements, annexing territory conquered in war, and suffocating the civilian population in Gaza through a 16-year blockade, with few repercussions. Countries that don’t like international courts — including the United States — largely ignore them. Vladimir Putin will probably avoid prosecution for his invasion of Ukraine. Hamas certainly had no concern for international prosecution or for the fate of the liberal rules-based world order when it slaughtered over 1,300 Israelis. Much of the world will view Israel’s unfolding and brutal retaliation — so far, more than 400 Palestinian children have been killed, according to the Palestinian health ministry — as justified.

“I feel like I have been abandoned by my country, and now I am stuck in Gaza with my family” said Beseiso, who was born and raised in Utah and lives in Salt Lake City. “We’re American citizens and we’re not being treated as American citizens.”

Duaa Abufares, a psychology student from New Jersey, waits for word from her father every day. He had gone back to Gaza to visit relatives in early September.

Now, Mr. Abufares, who is a U.S. citizen, is sheltering with relatives amid the sounds of nonstop bombing, and calling his five children back in New Jersey during brief periods when he can access electricity. During a video call with them on Thursday, Mr. Abufares, 50, described seeing the bodies of dozens of women and children killed in an airstrike blocks from his family home.

American citizens in Gaza are not yet stuck with an arrangement. Many people said they were asked to fill out forms and wait. They were scared and unsure of if bombings or crossfire would get to them before they came home.

“Right now, they — they can’t leave. Mr. Kirby had no means of allowing that transit to leave. “And so, that’s why we’re so actively having conversations with the Israelis and the Egyptians about a safe passage corridor so that people who want to leave can leave.”

Ms. Shehada said her aunt was visiting Gaza now and could not leave. Ms. Shehada said that she did not believe the buildings on either side would survive the war.

Ms. Okal and her three children were at the border Tuesday when it was bombed. The neighborhood where they were staying was also bombed. Mr. Okal said they had moved into her sister’s apartment.

“Sometimes I have the hope and faith that I will make it out alive,” she said on Thursday. She starts to wonder if it’s our turn tonight after the darkness hits and the airstrikes get heavier.

On Friday, she said her family had moved south after the directive from the Israel Defense Forces. She said in a text message that they found a family that let them in.

American citizen of New Jersey going to Gaza to visit her family while giving birth to their third child, said Iman Museitef, 31, when she was trapped there in September

More than 170,000 people in the United States identified as having Palestinian heritage in the 2020 census, a number that is considered to be a significant undercount by many within the Palestinian community given longstanding challenges in tallying the number of Americans of Middle Eastern and North African descent.

Palestinian Americans in the United States were already worried and have been frustrated by statements in recent days from government officials, universities and employers that expressed solidarity and sympathy for Israeli loss of life but did not mention Palestinian civilian casualties.

Families desperate for the government to help their loved ones say the lack of attention has been devastating. Over 1,500 people, including 500 children, have died in Gaza according to the Health Ministry.

Iman Museitef, 31, said her parents, American citizens who live in Newark, N.J., were trapped in Gaza City, where they went in late September to visit her 85-year-old grandmother.

They ask me if I call the embassy when they say so. What did they say?’” She said so. “It is always something dreadful to have to explain to them that the place they have lived for half of their lives is not really helping them.”

Her parents tried to cross to Egypt on Tuesday, she said, but were unable to leave when the border crossing was shut down. They are now moving from apartment to apartment as evacuation orders are given.

Ms. Museitef said that they are trying to contact the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem and Cairo, but they don’t have any information on when the border will open. Maybe, she said, the U.S. State Department doesn’t care about that right now.

She said she and her siblings were waiting for an appointment. “My parents are over 60 and they’re really scared. I just want their safety and I want them to come back to us,” she said.

Abdulla Okal and his wife, Haneen Okal, Palestinian American citizens who live in New Jersey, went to Gaza with their children over the summer, because Ms. Okal wanted to be near her family while giving birth to their third child, he said on Thursday. Mr. Okal flew back to New Jersey in order to speed up the process of getting an American passport for the baby. But war broke out after that.

At the moment, Mr. Okal said his wife and children had lost power and that she was trying to conserve her phone battery. He said that he wanted her to just text him and tell him he was still alive. The 3-year-old daughter of his is scared and has been running a high temperature. During the bombings, the child shakes when he sleeps.

She is at the border. They just need to open the door so they can cross over,” he said. “What worries me is that my wife will die there before they evacuate.”

He said, “Just treat us like we’re American.” He said that they are both American citizens and good citizens. I want the government to care about me a little more.

Source: Gazans Flee to South as Israel Calls for 1.1 Million People to Evacuate

Palestinians in Gaza are afraid of what is coming next: How Israelis will look inside Israel, and what will they do in the future?

Even if there was a way, Mr. Abufares told his children he didn’t want to leave his mother and other relatives.

The executive director of the Palestinian American Community Center in New Jersey said she was frantic all week and kept in touch with her friends and family in Gaza. The scariest moment came when people were without power, and it was unclear if they had been robbed or if something terrible had happened.

Most of Gaza’s residents aren’t from Gaza. They are the descendants of refugees who were expelled during Israel’s 1948 war of independence. They live in what Human Rights Watch has called an “open-air prison,” penned in by an Israeli state that — with help from Egypt — rations everything that goes in and out, from tomatoes to the travel documents children need to get lifesaving medical care. From this overcrowded cage, which the United Nations in 2017 declared “unlivable” for many residents in part because it lacks electricity and clean water, many Palestinians in Gaza can see the land that their parents and grandparents called home, though most may never step foot in it.

And Ms. Shehada, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, is afraid, to put it mildly, of what may come now, after the massacre of Israeli civilians by Hamas. “Everyone is in great distress,” she said. There is a fear that there will be revenge.

In Lod, which lies just south of Tel Aviv, Jews and Arabs often live in the same building, she said, but now Arabs are reluctant to go into the air-raid shelters. According to Ms Shehada, they see hate in the eyes of the Jews. I think what they see is distress and fear and that’s why they say they see hate.

Normal tensions have been raised to almost unbearable levels after the Israeli Jewish community called for revenge after the killing of Israelis inside Israel.

The leading Arab politicians in Israel, like Mansour Abbas and Ayman Odeh, both members of the Knesset, have clearly condemned the actions of Hamas, the Palestinian faction that carried out the attack on Israel, and called for calm.

People tend to hide their feelings if they’re torn between them. Young Arabs at first felt pride in the resistance of Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, she said. “In the first moment when the people of Gaza invaded Israel, people were happy, they felt that someone was doing something about the situation.”

But that surge of pride faded quickly, she said. “This was before we saw all the images of slaughter, kidnap and rape,” Ms. Shehada said. “This is not a legitimate form of struggle.”

Arab-Israeli riots in Israel’s West Bank: israel and egypta agree on safe passage from gaza-a-us official-says

The police are the responsibility of a member of the Netanyahu government, the national security minister and leader of the ultranationalist Jewish Power party. Mr. Ben-Gvir, who has supported settler violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, has also been ramping up tensions with Israel’s Arab population.

He talked ofstorming the Aqsa Mosque compound in the past, and in July he led more than 1000 settlers to the site, prompting Hamas to say that it is fighting to defend Al Aq.

Mr. Ben-Gvir has spoken this week of renewed Arab-Israeli violence in cities like Lod and ordered the police to prepare for riots, which Ms. Shehada and others view as a dangerous provocation.

Mohammad Magadli, one of Israel’s most prominent Arab journalists, is more optimistic. The shock of the last week is what he sees. In mixed cities, the Arab and Jewish societies are more aware of one another’s pain and can understand howdestructive the consequences can be if they don’t consider each other’s feelings.

“There is greater responsibility between the two societies,” Mr. Magadli said, “even among the leaders who, from the outset, called for calming the situation.”

The market in Ramla was almost empty with a wariness in the air and Mousa Mousa, an Israeli Arab in a Hebrew T-shirt, selling juice. He said he was not sleeping. I am afraid of the villagers reaction to what Hamas did.

He said he had contempt for the politicians who stoked hatred inside each community. “They thrive on division,” Mr. Mousa said bitterly. Politics are based on that.

Source: ‘Hundreds of Thousands’ of Gazans Displaced Over 12 Hours, U.N. Says

Palestinians in East Jerusalem cannot be Israeli citizens, or does Israel and Egypt agree on safe passage for Americans from gaza a us official states?

In normal times, they tend to stop and check young Arab men every so often. Adham says he is stopped three times when he walks from his father’s shop to their home in the Old City. Each time, he is asked to show his ID card, lift his shirt and drop his trousers. His father wanted to keep his last name out of the public eye for fear of his security.

He does not have respect for Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority. He is a traitor for his cooperation with Israel, Adham said, especially on security in the occupied West Bank.

Unlike Arabs in Ramla or Lod, who are part of Israeli society, most Palestinians in East Jerusalem are not Israeli citizens and feel less torn between loyalties. In 1967, when Israel annexed East Jerusalem, it made the Palestinians there legal residents, but not citizens.

One of the finest bookstores in Jerusalem is run by Mahmoud Muna. He identifies as a Palestinian from Jerusalem and favors a unitary state based on democracy and equal rights. He believes that people like himself are potential models for a different kind of integrated state.

The police presence has been increased in and around East Jerusalem, and Mr. Muna himself has been stopped twice for checks in the past five days, always moments that can produce friction. “Being past 40 helps you keep your cool,” he said.

People working in West Jerusalem tell him that everyone is stressed and angry, but they are all faking it. Mr. Muna said that people say banalities like “it is crazy” or “I can’t understand it” because they don’t have to say anything.

Source: ‘Hundreds of Thousands’ of Gazans Displaced Over 12 Hours, U.N. Says

“We Don’t Know When to Call [the Army] into Reservists,” Rev. D. Muna, S. C. E. Poincar’e, M. S. Henson, F.

Moments like this one are clarifying, too, he said: “It is a good time to see things we don’t normally see,” like the absence of acquaintances who have been called up as reservists to the army.

The conflict was encapsulated this week, Mr. Muna said. He said that the high level of nationalism could not be higher. “Resistance becomes terrorism and vice versa, and us and them, and civilians and army — all these terms are in sudden contrast.” The other side of the story is about the Holocaust and the other is about the new catastrophe that was caused by the war in 1948.