A forgotten word, peace, revives its claim to the Holy Land
The New Ground Program: Israel meets Hamas, Israel’s defender, Syria’s healer, Palestine’s friend,” says Los Angeles Californian Janet Lucas
Aziza Hasan, a devout Muslim, looked out at the group gathered around her, spoke of the loved ones who had died in Israel and Gaza and began reciting the first chapter of the Quran.
She said that God’s strength was on her right side. Raphael, God’s healer, was behind me. God is above my head.
There was a war raging between Israel and Hamas on this day and two women were sitting on the grass. A group of Jews and Muslims are near each other.
The NewGround program helps more than 500 Los Angeles Muslims and Jews learn to listen, disagree, and empathise with one another.
RandySchmidt, a dairy farmer in Lone Rock, Wis., said that the president’s appeal for military aid would be hard to sell in the area.
Mr.Schmidt owned a dairy farm that was part of a swing district that voted for the winner of the presidential election every year since 1980, until the election of Donald Trump in 2020.
Mr. Schmidt said that money comes hard here. “It’s been a relatively tough year of farming for us. I don’t think we can do much to support Israel, but I think we do support it.
The moral questions posed by the violence in the Middle East were less important than the economic ones in suburban Milwaukee. She said the attacks by Hamas against Israelis were triggering for her.
There has been a disagreement between the two for years, according to Ms. Lucas. “But the way that it was handled recently, my heart just broke of the devastation,” she said of the Hamas killings and kidnappings of Israeli families. “It took me back to 9/11 — the same feeling, the same fear of, you know, is it going to happen to us, or who’s next?”
On Friday she went to Holy Hill, a basilica on a forested hillside with a country drive away from her community, to take in the fall colors with her son, Michael, 25, who was in town from Florida. They felt uneasy about the president calling for support of Israel. They sympathize with Palestinians and what they see as the long discrimination they have gone through, but they could not condone terrorist attacks.
Janet Lucas said that she can see both sides when she sits in the middle. “And then I also think, is there another way, could the United States or any other country get involved to help them to come to some form of peace?”
The Israeli Censorship of Hamas: The Case of the Sukkot Massacre and the Death of a Palestinian Paramedic
Awad Darawshe, shot in the abdomen, bled to death under the stage at the trance music festival that Hamas gunmen transformed into a killing field. A Palestinian Israeli paramedic, he died in a desperate attempt to save the lives of Jews at the Tribe of Nova peace-and-love gathering that marked the Jewish holiday of Sukkot.
That state of drift that peace had become a forgotten or even risible word is no longer sustainable. The Israeli cultivation of Hamas, intended to ensure that Palestinians remained split between the more moderate Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and the rulers of Gaza, so making Palestinian statehood impossible, is a policy in shreds. It looks like this idea that the Palestinians would drift into the ether when relations with Israel normalized is wrong.
Their calls for a war against Hamas that would be the most powerful one in Israeli history, will be blunt by the national unity government and much of Israeli society. 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.
