The coverage of the Gaza Hospital was pointed out by the editors
The Last Stand Against Hamas: David Darawshe’s Face to the Death of a Palestinian and a Palestinian
Mr. Darawshe was at the festival as part of a small group of paramedics that were hired by an Israeli company to take care of medical emergencies. When the shooting began, his colleagues fled but he felt compelled to help people, according to his cousin, Mohammad Darawshe.
The day before Hamas’s attack on Israel, DAWN, an organization founded by the slain Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi to promote democracy in the Middle East, published an interview with Thrall. In it, Thrall was asked about his depictions of Israelis, and whether he had qualms about “humanizing the occupation.”
Israel’s national unity government and much of Israeli society agree on the need for a war to end Hamas, so the calls for one will be blunt. The peacemakers are in the minority as a devastating invasion of Gaza looms.
The Prime Minister believes the conflict can be managed by mowing the grass, in spite of the fact that the conflict is insoluble.
When something bad happens far away from home, you feeluselessness, but that same feeling of pain is felt by your friends and neighbors.
Another Jewish friend has been working through her own grief, albeit from a distance — one of the women in her broader friend network lost two nieces. One was killed by Hamas and the other is missing.
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’m supposed to come up with a conversation that makes us all feel connected. There isn’t an easy spiritual salve for these horrors. 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 came across an article by a professor of Jewish history. His name is David Myers. He wrote for the campus paper, trying to stake out some middle ground, where Jews and Palestinians on campus could safely stand and grieve for one another.
I wanted to know if he would be willing to talk after I reached out. I also craved a long view. A historian’s take. Because perhaps, with distance, the pain is lessened? It became clear very quickly that historians fix their gaze in the past, but they live with us here, now, in this present moment, 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. And I realize I’m not there. I’m not in Israel-Palestine. I’m at a remove. So what must it be to be there 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 and it’s almost unbearable. I spend my time teaching, doing media appearances, and then disappearing back into a cave of depression.
Martin: So in all this, you’re dealing with your own grief over the tragedy. You still want to be a history professor. You are watching these tensions build among the students on your campus. How much do you feel like it’s necessary to write this op-ed?
The students on the other side of the divide failed to understand where they were, and that is what I encountered. “Can you help me understand what took place in the geopolitics?” was more of a question about how that group could be so lacking in basic empathy?
Myers: I did. Some who arePalestinian and Arab are represented by these groups, which are meant to represent those who are supporters of Israel and those who are not.
I think both bear within them a deep sense of grievance. The Jewish students or the pro-Israel students feel like the progressive left, with whom they have natural solidarity on many other issues, refused to condemn a massacre of Jews. Supporters of the Palestinian cause think that the United States political culture is not paying attention to the plight of the Palestinians.
Israel as a Palestine Gaza Religion: “His Call for Empathy has Made a Jewish Studies Professor Feel Isolated”
It became clear to me that the time was right for me to write a simple and intuitive claim that this is the time to recognize the humanity of all. Now is not the time, at least for me, to take sides.
I knew it would get people to think I was a traitor to my people. I knew that it would prompt lots of claims that I didn’t understand the suffering of the Palestinian people. I had to write down the words that I had to say. I think it’s intuitive and 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.
In the best of circumstances, people sometimes need to choose sides. It’s understandable that people don’t feel like they can 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 superior person, but I do think it’s important to carve out a small portion of our humanity so that we can empathize in such moments.
How Have We Blown Out of the Mold? — Towards a Dialogue of Holocaust and Nakba Traumae
In your job as a history teacher you should look back through time and identify patterns so that students can break them, and you should also teach them how to identify them. As people, as societies, as humankind. How do you do that in this conflict when the same cycles of violence repeat themselves over and over for generations?
He said, “Myers.” Yeah. And those cycles are rooted in profound traumas, which in some sense 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. I guess my answer to your question, Rachel, about how we break out of the mold, is to ask ourselves, how’s it going? How well is it working? I think it is not working well at all over the last two weeks. I think of Jacob and Esau as being detrimental to the health of both of them because of that death embrace.
It’s a very tricky question, in part, because I take solace in prayer and community. But this is a period in time in which I do not feel in sync with my community and I feel my community does not feel in sync with me. I feel some measure of the loneliness that many of us feel right now.
I also can see how the Psalms provide a source of solace. Open up the possibility of moving further away from us. I wrote the verse down and carry it with me now. It said: “You turned my thought into movement.” You undid my sackcloth and girded me with joy.”
The Israeli Foreign Ministry said in Gaza, the Price of a Ride South Is Out of Reach for Many, that the Israeli evacuation warnings had no intention of targeting civilians
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 “treats civilians as such, and does not target them.” A spokesman for the Israeli foreign ministry also said that there was no basis for the suggestion that its evacuation warnings could amount to ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
Even as Israel asked Gazans to head south, the air force continued to hit the area. Rear Adm. Hagari said on Saturday night that Israel was going to intensify its attacks on Gaza ahead of the next stages of the war.
But Amani Abu Odeh, who lives in the town of Jabalia in Gaza’s north, said that the danger of Israeli airstrikes on the road had pushed up the cost of travel. She said drivers were now charging a lot of money to take a family south. The trip cost $3 before the war.
Ms. Abu Odeh said that they could not afford to eat. “We don’t have the money to leave.” Instead, she and the rest of her family have been staying in one place.
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.
More than half of Gaza’s more than two million residents have been displaced since Israel launched its retaliatory airstrike campaign. The UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories objected to the leaflets dropped over Gaza calling for more people to move south.
She wrote on X that if she had been designating hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians who were unwilling or unable to flee as a result of being involved in terrorism, then it would have been a threat to collective punishment and could be seen as ethnic cleansing. She said that targeting civilians was a war crime.
The New York Times and the Gaza City Emergency Service: Implications of the Gaza Attack on Human Rights, Public Policy, and Editorial Procedures
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 did not go to the south mainly because I know no one there; where am I to go?” said Yasser Shaban, 57, a civil servant in Gaza City. We will end up in the streets.
The New York Times covered a hospital explosion in Gaza City which was claimed to have been caused by an Israel air strike, with claims by the Hamas government that hundreds of people were dead or injured. The report included a large headline at the top of The Times’s website.
Israel subsequently denied being at fault and blamed an errant rocket launch by the Palestinian faction group Islamic Jihad, which has in turn denied responsibility. International officials say their evidence shows 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.
Given the sensitive nature of the news during a widening conflict, and the prominent promotion it received, Times editors should have taken more care with the initial presentation, and been more explicit about what information could be verified. Newsroom leaders continue to examine procedures around the biggest breaking news events — including for the use of the largest headlines in the digital report — to determine what additional safeguards may be warranted.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Why should we care about the Palestinians? The Nguyen paradox for the Israeli-Gazawi conflict
I was glad to ask that question, Thrall told me. “Because that was absolutely the ambition of the book, to depict real people” rather than villains and saints.
I fear viewing the catastrophe in Israel and Gaza through the provincial lens of America’scancel culture debate. In some ways, that debate has now come full circle, because pro-Palestinian voices were being censored long before the phrase “cancel culture” existed, one reason the left was unwise in recent years to prevaricate about the value of free speech. But if someone as evenhanded as Thrall now finds his talks being dropped, we’re in an especially repressive period. And in a time of war, particularly a war shrouded in fiercely competing narratives, free speech is more important than ever.
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 is one of the things that can keep our minds and hearts open, that can help us see beyond the hatred of war, that can make us understand that we cannot be divided into the human versus the inhuman because we are, all of us, human and inhuman at the same time,” Nguyen wrote on Instagram.
92NY would have been a good place to ask him why his statement did not live up to his words. The moments when dialogue is most fraught and bitter is when leaders most need to model it.
