In this panel six professors from the Gaza Strip discuss their efforts to sustain higher education in the face of genocide and scholasticide. Our guests will also address avenues for rebuilding higher education in Gaza as well as the sorts of contributions others can make.
Dr. Ahmad Abu Shaban, Al-Azhar University and York University
Dr. Wesam Amer, Gaza University and Cambridge University
Dr. Yousef Algherbawi, Al-Azhar University and AUC
Dr. Mohammed Hamdona, Islamic University of Gaza and AUC
Dr. Osama Hamdouna, Al-Azhar University
Dr. Mohab Sawali, Al-Azhar University and AUC
Moderated by Prof. Asli Bali, Yale Law School and President of MESA.
Aslı Ü. Bâli is a Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Bâli’s teaching and research interests include public international law — particularly human rights law and the law of the international security order — and comparative constitutional law, with a focus on the Middle East. She has written on the nuclear non-proliferation regime, humanitarian intervention, the roles of race and empire in the interpretation and enforcement of international law, the role of judicial independence in constitutional transitions, federalism and decentralization in the Middle East, and constitutional design in religiously divided societies. Bâli’s scholarship has appeared in the International Journal of Constitutional Law, University of Chicago Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Yale Journal of International Law, Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law, Chicago Journal of International Law, Cornell Journal of International Law, Virginia Journal of International Law, American Journal of International Law Unbound, Geopolitics, Studies in Law, Politics and Society, and in edited volumes published by Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press. She has also written essays and op-eds for such venues as The New York Times, The Boston Review, The London Review of Books, Jacobin, and Dissent.
Ahmad Abu Shaban is Associate Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine at Al-Azhar University, where he has played a pivotal role in shaping the institution's academic and research agendas. He is currently a visiting professor in environmental sociology at York University.
Yousef Algherbawi is a Palestinian researcher and academic specializing in law. He is also a certified legal arbitrator. He holds a Ph.D. from Alexandria University and is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Law at Al-Azhar University. His research focuses on private law in its various branches, examining the principles of justice, the rule of law, and equality.
Gaza in Context Collaborative Teach-In Series
We are together experiencing a catastrophic unfolding of history as Gaza endures a massive invasion of genocidal proportions. This accompanies an incessant bombardment of a population increasingly bereft of the necessities of living in response to the Hamas attack in Israel on October 7. The context within which this takes place includes a well-coordinated campaign of misinformation and the unearthing of a multitude of essentialist and reductionist discursive tropes that dehumanize Palestinians as the culprits, despite a context of structural subjugation and Apartheid, now a matter of consensus in the human rights movement.
Find more information at: https://www.palestineincontext.org/
The co-organizers below are convening weekly teach-ins and conversations on a host of issues that introduce our common university communities, educators, researchers, and students to the history and present of Gaza, in context.
Co-Organizers: Arab Studies Institute, Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, George Mason University’s Middle East and Islamic Studies Program, Rutgers Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Birzeit University Museum, Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Brown University’s Center for Middle East Studies, University of Chicago’s Center for Contemporary Theory, Brown University’s New Directions in Palestinian Studies, Georgetown University’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies, Georgetown University-Qatar, American University of Cairo’s Alternative Policy Studies, Middle East Studies Association’s Global Academy, University of Chicago’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, CUNY’s Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center, University of Illinois Chicago’s Arab american cultural Center, George Mason University’s AbuSulayman’s Center for Global Islamic Studies, University of Illinois Chicago’s Critical Middle East Studies Working Group, George Washington University’s Institute for Middle East Studies, Columbia University’s Center for Palestine Studies, New York University’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies
From Mosab Abu Toha
Pictured, Sama at 7 years old
I write with a heavy heart that my cousin Sama, 7 years old, has been killed in the air strike on their house along with 18 members of her family, which is my extended family.
In the house was the grandmother, Fatima, who was my grandmother’s sister. She was killed too with two of her daughters and their children.
I posted about this yesterday before the house was bombed. I told everyone that tanks and soldiers were besieging the area. But no one heard. No one did anything to save them.
I took this picture of Sama in June 2022.. it was Eid.
Community Honorees at The Physicians for Social Responsibility Gala: Global Health and Peace Awards Ceremony
Maria Udalova on the left and Talia Wilcox on the right
Here I am privileged to be with the two 2024 youth recipients honored by Physicians for Social Responsibility. Maria is a remarkable Brookline High School Senior, a valued Trebuchet Team Member, who I successfully nominated to become an Oslo Scholar of the Human Rights Foundation, working with a Belarus Activist. Talia is a Tufts Senior, passionate about nuclear disarmament who advocates for education as President of the Tufts Women in International Relations Club, Co-President of the newly formed Tufts University Nuclear Activists, she is also a member of the Students for Nuclear Disarmament Steering Committee.
Maria's Remarks
https://gbpsr.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2024/09/2024-Maria-Udalova-remarks.docx.pdf
Talia's Remarks
https://gbpsr.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2024/09/2024-Talia-Wilcox-award-remarks.docx.pdf
Elaine Scarry on the left
Here they are pictured with Harvard Professor Elaine Scarry author of "Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing Between Democracy and Doom", with whom I worked decades ago on nuclear disarmament and the MX missile controversy.
Professor Robert J. Lifton, was awarded PSR's Lifetime Achievement award. Bob was an important mentor for me. I first met him after reading The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, I am pictured here with him at the Truro library, where at age 98, where he gave a talk on "The State of The World". Bob is truly extraordinary. At age 97 he published a new book, Surviving Our Catastrophes: Resilience and Renewal from Hiroshima to the COVID-19 Pandemic. This is reassuring for me since I now have 17 more years to consider publishing one. :)
Robert J.Lifton on the left and Sherman on the right
PSR Awards Event Poster
Essay: The Gaza We Leave Behind
I no longer recognize many parts of my homeland. Only my memories of them remain.
By Mosab Abu Toha October 7, 2024
Photograph by Larry Towell / Magnum
On a summer evening many years ago, my father and I sat on the roof of our family home in Beit Lahia, in northern Gaza, and we talked about my grandfather Hasan. I never met Hasan. He died forty years ago, before my father was married, after a lengthy struggle with diabetes that required him to use a wheelchair. I craved stories about him from my father and his sisters. I wanted to know what Hasan used to drink, eat, watch, and wear. I felt like hearing my family’s memories opened up a room in my mind, where I could stand and paint my own portrait of Hasan.
“Did my grandfather ever travel abroad?” I asked.
“Sure, he visited Lebanon and Jordan,” my father replied. But he could not tell me when, with whom, or for how long. We sat there a while, trying to escape the heat of the house. The electricity was off, and it was getting dark.
Recently, I called my father from Syracuse, New York, where I have taken refuge with my wife and three kids. He continues to live in northern Gaza. He told me that he has been trying to grow vegetables in our neighborhood. “I waited for hours to fill some buckets of water for the plants, but no luck today,” he told me. Then I brought up Hasan. “I know it’s not appropriate to ask this now,” I said. “But do you know if anyone from the family has my grandfather’s passport?”
My father laughed. “How can I know? It was a long time ago.”
I expected that answer, but it made me want to weep. Even before Israel invaded Gaza last year, I could not find my grandfather’s grave. My parents had told me that he was buried in a cemetery in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood of Gaza City. How will I ever find it, now that so many cemeteries have been damaged in the war? No one could even tell me Hasan’s birthday. All I knew was that he was seven years older than his wife, my grandmother Khadra, who was born in 1932. The date of his death, too, was like a math problem. I knew that one of my cousins was born two months later, which suggested that he died on October 30, 1984.
Whenever I visit friends in the United States, I see portraits of parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents on the wall, and my heart stings. Why haven’t I inherited such treasures? Was it because Hasan lived and died in a refugee camp? If he saved the documents and photographs that could answer my questions about him, would they still exist now, after all that Gaza has endured?
When I think of how little I know about my grandfather, I think of my three children, and what I myself can pass down to them. When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, three generations of my family lived together under one roof. Five days later, Israeli forces dropped leaflets that ordered us to evacuate the area. We left everything behind except some clothes and food. On October 14th, after an air strike hit my neighbor’s house, I checked on our home and found broken windows, fallen books, and dust covering every pillow, mattress, and blanket. I tried to clean off the couches. I thought my house, my books, and my writing desk would be there for us when the war ended. I took pictures of the damage so that I would remember.
Two weeks later, our house was destroyed in an Israeli air strike. When I risked returning, days after the bombing, I felt compelled to spend an hour or so digging through the rubble, hoping to salvage some clothes or shoes or blankets. It was autumn, and the ghost of winter was looming. All I saved was a notepad and one copy of my début poetry book.
Only recently did I remember something that I was unable to recover: a photo album that contained photos of me, my siblings, my parents, and my grandparents. As soon as I thought of the album, I texted my brother Hamza. “Can you try and see if you could find the photo album in the ruins of my library room?” I felt embarrassed to ask this of him at a time when he can hardly find food for his family. But those photos were precious to us. They were our way of remembering.
My family in Beit Lahia could not find the album or the remnants of the room it was in. To this day, there is no visible trace of our beds, couches, closets, or even the walls of my bedroom and kitchen. Only our memories of them remain.
I’m a person who loves taking pictures. I feel grateful to have a phone with enough storage to save them. My photos from Gaza show my family in lush green fields, and on the beach at sunset. I have a photo of the clay oven where my mother used to bake bread and sometimes roast chicken. I have a photo of my daughter, Yaffa, throwing flower petals on a peaceful street. I have a photograph from late September, 2023, of my youngest child, Mostafa, wearing a Spider-Man costume and jumping off a bench in my bedroom.
For twenty-three years, I had the same neighbors, the same trees around me. I passed by the same schools, clubs, cafés, and graffiti-covered walls. I bumped into the same teachers, coaches, barbers, and baristas. Before October 7th, people rarely moved away. There was this tender relationship between us and things.
I miss my small neighborhood in Beit Lahia. I miss when my mother-in-law, who lived next door, would make maftoul and send us some. I miss when my three married sisters and their children visited us on weekends, and the eldest, Aya, would call me beforehand to ask me to make tea. My sisters loved my tea, and I enjoyed preparing it for them. I miss bringing the kettle and the cups out to a table under the orange or the guava tree. I miss going with my brother-in-law Ahmad to his cornfields. Around the edges, he planted eggplant, peppers, green beans, cucumbers, and pumpkins for his relatives. I vividly recall the time we had a barbecue there, and Ahmad invited each of us to pick ears of corn and put them directly onto the grill.
Over time, it has become hard for me to recognize the places I knew in Gaza. Since October 7th, whole neighborhoods have been levelled. These days, many streets and lanes cannot be seen under the rubble, and there is too little fuel for bulldozers to clear them. When I look at photos and videos in the news, I can’t tell whether I am seeing the remains of a pharmacy, a restaurant, an ice-cream shop, or a kindergarten. We loved these places. Each one is a loss.
I often think of the places I will not be able to show my children or my grandchildren, the memories I will not be able to share: the kindergarten I attended in Al-Shati refugee camp, the nearby field where I did cartwheels as a kid, the streets in Beit Lahia where I used to ride my bike at sunset. The soccer field where I used to play with my colleagues in the evenings, the hall where I had my wedding party. The mulberry tree where I played marbles with my childhood friends. Some of those friends have been killed.
I also think of the new memories I had hoped to make. Yaffa and her older brother, Yazzan, wanted to learn to swim, something that I never did because of problems with my ear. I wanted them to ride their bikes along the beach on Al-Rashid Street, which had been recently paved with asphalt. I wanted to take Yazzan to soccer practice in the summer. I wanted to introduce my students to the Edward Said Public Library, an English-language library that I founded in Gaza. On Saturday, a fellow-teacher told me that my best student was killed while looking for firewood for his family.
I have always loved a line from “Open the Door, Homer,” a song by Bob Dylan. “Take care of all of your memories,” he sings, “for you cannot relive them.” The words made me want to hang on to my memories, and to make good ones. In the past year, I have lost many of the tangible parts of my memories—the people and places and things that helped me remember. I have struggled to create good memories. In Gaza, every destroyed house becomes a kind of album, filled not with photos but with real people, the dead pressed between its pages.
Last May, I got a call from my friend Basel, a tennis player from my home town. He was living in a tent in Rafah, the city in southern Gaza that became a refuge for displaced Palestinians. Israel was preparing to invade the city, despite objections from the international community. Basel was preparing to move his family yet again. He could hear tanks and gunfire in the distance. He and thousands of others were looking for a ride to Khan Younis.
Basel was in the process of dismantling his family’s tent. I listened as he explained the painful process of building toilets and water faucets nearby. His family had not wanted to live there, but now they did. They had learned to tell the difference between their tent and all the others. They had learned how to get around. They had started to make new memories there. “Now we are leaving this for the unknown,” he said. This year, Gazans have done this again and again.
I thought back to the five weeks I spent in Jabalia refugee camp, shortly after the war began. Back then, it was still possible to find an intact apartment or U.N. school where you could take shelter with your family. After a while, I recalled, I became familiar with new shops and pharmacies, with the cafés where you could access the Internet and charge your phone. I learned new shortcuts and developed a routine. Many of those places are gone now. Still, I can close my eyes and imagine them. I can navigate the alleys of Jabalia in my mind. Just as easily, I can imagine the camp in ruins.
On October 13, 2023, my friend Refaat Alareer posted a poem called “If I Must Die” on Instagram.
If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself—
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a taleI saw the poem a few days later. It struck me so powerfully that it kept knocking at the gate of my imagination, and of my fear. Refaat wanted to live. He did not write when I die. Rather, he was communicating that if his death must happen, then everyone who lives after him must live to remember—to tell the story of him, of the murdered, of so many Palestinians.
In early November, while I was trying to escape Gaza with my family, I wrote a poem in response to Refaat. I wrote that if I die, I hope that no rubble, no broken dishes or glasses, will cover my corpse. On December 3rd, I was able to cross into Egypt with my wife and three kids. Days later, an Israeli air strike killed Refaat and many members of his family. I didn’t want to believe it.
On my phone, I have a photo of Refaat from the spring of 2022. He is standing in a green field, wearing a blazer and glasses that make him look like the professor he was. Behind him is a blue sky filled with white clouds. He is holding a large wooden box, which is filled with more strawberries than anyone could eat in one sitting. Refaat loved strawberries. We used to pick them together. That day, Refaat filled two boxes, one for his family and one for his parents. In the photo, he is gingerly taking one out of the box, smiling. ♦
Mosab Abu Toha is a poet from Gaza. He is the author of “Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear” and “Forest of Noise.”
Israel’s Paradox of Defeat
A tribute to Israelis killed and taken captive at a music festival on October 7th, 2023, Reim, Israel, August 2024 Florian Goga / Reuters
https://reader.foreignaffairs.com/2024/10/04/israels-paradox-of-defeat/content.html
‘Last October 7, Hamas surprised Israel’s famed military and intelligence agencies. Both had known, for years, about the Palestinian armed group’s preparations to invade Israel and kill and kidnap its soldiers and citizens. But they failed to believe that it would dare or succeed to execute such an unprecedented operation. The Israeli military and intelligence services; Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu; and the wider Israeli public all believed that their country’s fortified southern border was so impenetrable, and the balance of power so favorable to Israel, that Hamas would never challenge the status quo.
But Hamas did challenge it. In the days and weeks after it launched its devastating attack, a common refrain among Israelis was that “everything has changed.” And for a time, it appeared that everything had: the assault shattered Israelis’ fundamental self-confidence, upending long-held beliefs about the country’s security, politics, and societal norms. The leadership of the Israel Defense Forces lost its prestige almost overnight as details emerged about how it failed to prevent the attack and then arrived too late to save border communities, military outposts, and defenseless attendees at a music festival.
The political drama that had gripped Israel over the nine months leading up to October 7—Netanyahu’s attempt at a sweeping overhaul of the judiciary, aimed at curbing the independence of state institutions such as the Supreme Court, the office of the attorney general, and the technocratic civil service to direct more power toward his right-wing and religious allies—vanished from view. The overhaul’s main architect, Justice Minister Yariv Levin, all but disappeared, presumably eaten up by remorse for his contribution to Israel’s distraction ahead of Hamas’s assault. Netanyahu assembled a unity war cabinet representing different—and normally bitterly opposed—political factions and, within days, called up about 250,000 reservists to launch a counteroffensive into Gaza.
Overcoming its initial shock, the IDF then fought back with a vengeance. Charged with dismantling Hamas’s military and governance capabilities, it reduced large swaths of Gaza to rubble, made nearly two million Gazans internal refugees, and killed more than 40,000 Palestinians—about a third of them Hamas militants, according to official Israeli assessments. The IDF effectively stopped Hamas’s rocket fire into Israel and dismantled much of its Gazan tunnel system; it says it has shattered the formerly well-organized terror group into scattered guerrilla teams.
But even with the IDF occupying about a third of Gaza’s territory, to many Israelis, the current situation feels like defeat. Despite full mobilization and the near-unwavering support of the U.S. government, the IDF—still under the same command as it was on October 7—has failed to win. Hamas’s leader, Yahya Sinwar, has not surrendered. And around 100 Israeli hostages remain missing in Gaza, about half of them still alive, according to Netanyahu’s public statements.
This calamitous stasis, coupled with Israel’s growing global isolation and increasingly gloomy economic outlook, contribute to a national sense of hopelessness and despair. In fact, paradoxically, important facets of Israeli politics and society have changed surprisingly little since the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s attack. Citizens of border communities in the north and the south remain unable to return to their homes. Rather than uniting Jewish Israelis against a common external enemy, Israel’s now multifront fight against its external enemies has only widened preexisting social and political fissures between Netanyahu’s opponents and his supporters. Beating the expectations of his foes and his friends alike, Netanyahu continues to act as the center of gravity in Israeli politics. The right-wing coalition that keeps him in power has amped up its quest to crush the Palestinian statehood movement and “replace the Israeli elite,” a euphemism for demolishing Israel’s democratic and liberal institutions.
Then, on September 17, the Israeli military began to mount a series of increasingly daring counterattacks against its most formidable neighboring adversary, the Lebanese militia Hezbollah—which opened a second front in the north a day after Hamas attacked in the south. Israel assassinated Hezbollah’s longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and launched a ground offensive into southern Lebanon. Much of mainstream Israel’s media commentary has presented the expanding hostilities to Israel’s north as an opportunity: not only for Israel to crush Hezbollah but for the country to prove to itself that it has finally turned the corner on its year of terrifying trauma and fragility, to prove that it has become its familiar clever, powerful, technologically awe-inspiring, and world-celebrated self again. But just as the war in Gaza did not change as many of Israel’s menacing underlying realities as Israelis had anticipated, neither will this new front—not unless Israel faces the deeper changes it must make to its policy toward Palestinians and its own domestic politics.
PARADOXICAL MOTION
A week after the October 7 attack, if you had told an ordinary Israeli—even a Netanyahu fan—that “Bibi” would still be prime minister a year later, his power undergirded by the same right-wing coalition—that Israeli probably would not have believed you. Throughout Israeli history, after the country’s worst security disasters, the civilian government has eventually fallen. After the military’s failures during the 1973 Yom Kippur War and its 1982 invasion of Lebanon, angry reservists returned from the front to protest and drove Prime Ministers Golda Meir and Menachem Begin to resign. In both cases, within months, the government launched far-reaching inquiries into what went wrong.
It was reasonable to imagine Netanyahu would fare even worse. Over the course of decades in politics, he has presented himself as “Mr. Security.” He claimed that he understood how to keep the country safe better than Israel’s generals, whom he viewed as timid, unimaginative, and too attentive to the United States’ wishes. His fiercest political rivals have been former military commanders who have also served as Israel’s prime minister or minister of defense—men such as Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, Benny Gantz, and Yoav Gallant, the current defense minister. Traditionally, the highest echelons of the IDF and Israel’s intelligence services have been occupied by liberal Ashkenazis, an establishment that Netanyahu long vowed to usurp. It was this establishment that led the popular uprising against Netanyahu’s early 2023 proposal to overhaul Israel’s judiciary.
Yet Netanyahu’s persistence in power represents perhaps the past year’s greatest break with the status quo of Israeli history. To this day, Netanyahu has refused to admit any responsibility for the deaths of 1,200 Israelis; the rape and wounding of many others; the kidnapping of 250 hostages; the wholesale destruction, in a single day, of thriving border communities; and the ensuing evacuation of communities in Israel’s north. Netanyahu’s approval ratings did crater in late 2023; although they have steadily improved since then, his popularity still lags behind opposition figures such as former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. A poll conducted after Nasrallah’s assassination by Keshet 12, Israel’s main news channel, found that if an election was held in Israel today, Netanyahu’s coalition—which currently holds 68 seats in the Knesset—would win only 46. An avid reader of opinion surveys, Netanyahu knows the Israeli public is angry, and he has pursued a many-faceted strategy to stay in power. For a year, Netanyahu and his supporters have steadfastly maintained that the blame for October 7 lies squarely with the IDF and the Shin Bet, the security service charged with monitoring the Palestinians, as well as with the Israelis who protested his judicial overhaul efforts, especially the reservists who threatened to fail to appear for their voluntary duties.
Netanyahu’s persistence in power represents a break with Israeli history.
By shrugging off responsibility and carefully maneuvering to maintain his political bloc, Netanyahu has staved off a potentially devastating inquiry into his policy of coexistence with Hamas, his dismissal of the military’s and the intelligence agencies’ repeated warnings about an impending attack on Israel, and his efforts to weaken the Palestinian Authority, Israel’s former peace partner. Fearing defeat at the ballot box—and seeking a way to postpone his ongoing corruption trial—Netanyahu has also managed to avoid an early election. A key component of his strategy has been to prolong the war in Gaza, extend it to Lebanon, and avoid a cease-fire deal with Hamas—even at the price of abandoning the remaining hostages in Gaza, who are being tortured, starved, and murdered in Gaza’s remaining tunnels.
To safeguard himself, Netanyahu has ceded an extraordinary amount of authority to his far-right coalition buddies, who vocally oppose any hostage deal that would entail an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza or the release of Palestinian militants from Israeli prisons. This, too, represents a 180-degree change in the national attitude. Israelis have always prided themselves on their willingness to do everything to bring home hostages and prisoners of war, as epitomized by the 1976 IDF raid in Entebbe, Uganda, to rescue the passengers of a hijacked Air France plane bound from Tel Aviv to Paris—a daring operation during which Netanyahu’s older brother, Yoni, sacrificed his life. Just five years ago, the prime minister flew to Moscow and personally negotiated with Russian President Vladimir Putin to release a young Israeli woman detained for drug trafficking. He has not done the same for the hostages taken on October 7.
Understanding the leverage afforded to them by Netanyahu’s determination to maintain power and his fragile approval rating, members of his coalition have pushed their priorities with renewed vigor, including calls to rebuild Jewish settlements in Gaza that Sharon relinquished in 2005. Although Netanyahu publicly rejects the idea, he may well be tempted to become the first Israeli leader to expand Israel’s territorial claims after decades of withdrawals from Palestinian land. In recent weeks, Levin, the justice minister, returned from the shadows to resume his push for a judicial overhaul; forgoing the legislative route, he switched to engaging in bureaucratic trench warfare, blocking judicial appointments and increasingly ignoring legal advice from Israel’s attorney general, Gali Baharav-Miara.
In the years preceding October 7, some Arab Israeli leaders were mounting a successful push to integrate Palestinian citizens of Israel into society by securing equal rights and more economic opportunities. Following Hamas’s attack, the government has rolled back this campaign by detaining and indicting Arab citizens over their social media posts and preventing Arab antiwar demonstrations. Mainstream media outlets followed suit by avoiding adding Arab voices to their endless commentary panels. In less than two years, Netanyahu’s coalition took political control of the national police force and turned it into a personal tool of Israel’s far-right, populist national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, a disciple of the racist rabbi Meir Kahane. Ben-Gvir embarked on a campaign of bureaucratic warfare, appointing cronies to top jobs, promoting officers who had unlawfully arrested or violently attacked antigovernment protesters, looking the other way as radical Jewish settlers carried out pogroms in Palestinian villages in the West Bank, and ignoring the sharp rise in violent crime in Israel’s Arab communities. For Ben-Gvir, a champion of Jewish supremacy, the fewer Arabs there are, the better it is for the Jews.
Until recently, most Israeli Jews viewed such bigoted positions as disreputable. But by not vocally opposing them, Netanyahu has normalized them. Meanwhile, another far-right official in Netanyahu’s cabinet, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, is leading an effort to grab land in the West Bank and undermine the Palestinian Authority by way of financial starvation. Smotrich and Ben-Gvir have clearly stated their aim: a full Israeli annexation of the West Bank, now compounded by a formal occupation of Gaza.
RANSOM BILL
The multifront war in which Israel is now embroiled is also a war within—a war mounted by the prime minister to change their norms and attitudes. Although he shares many of his right-wing allies’ ideological convictions, Netanyahu has also maneuvered himself into a political position in which he is held hostage by them; now he is seeking to hold the Israeli public hostage.
The October 7 attack thrust secular and cosmopolitan Israelis, in particular, into a bind. Over the course of the three decades after the 1991 Madrid conference and the 1993 Oslo accords, these Israelis came to view their country as a proud and integral part of the West, and its conflict with the Palestinians as a residual problem that could be managed and lived with indefinitely. Managing the conflict while growing Israel’s economy and avoiding major moves toward either war or peace was the approach Netanyahu successfully sold after his 2009 political comeback. And until he turned against them with his judicial overhaul attempt, this strategy facilitated a tacit alliance between the prime minister and Israel’s liberal elites. Even if they would never vote for him, they enjoyed the financial largesse his strategy yielded and thrived on praising Israel as a “developed Western country” and the world’s burgeoning “startup nation.”
Now Israeli liberals are facing the combined pressures of rejection abroad by the progressive West and, at home, demonization and marginalization by Netanyahu’s base. Although conservative and religious Israeli Jews are also suffering from the devaluing shekel and rising inflation, they can find meaning in the struggle to prosecute the war. This is especially true for diehard West Bank settlers, who feel their opposition to the 2005 pullout from Gaza has been vindicated and sense an opportunity to raise their status within Israeli society, especially given their prominence in the army’s fighting forces.
The most committed and battered liberals have turned to two strategies for survival. One is to emigrate, at least temporarily, or to apply for foreign passports based on ancestry. This phenomenon predated the war in Gaza: since the outset of Netanyahu’s judicial coup, talk of leaving became popular among more affluent and educated Israelis, and it has grown in intensity as the war—and Netanyahu’s rule—drag on. The hottest destinations appear to be Greece, Portugal, and Thailand, alongside more traditional havens such as London and New York. Some emigres have managed to keep their jobs in Israel, working remotely as digital nomads.
Netanyahu’s opponents are hoping that he will somehow run out of luck.
The other survival strategy is to dig in their heels and keep protesting against Netanyahu and his coalition while supporting the military struggle against Hamas and Hezbollah and calling for the remaining hostages’ release. In late August, the hostage crisis reached a horrible climax when Hamas executed six Israelis in a tunnel in Rafah. Agonized and angry that Netanyahu had not concluded a deal to save these six—and that he will not finalize negotiations to release the remaining hostages—hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets in the largest antigovernment protests since October 7.
But so far, street protests have failed to shake the foundations of Netanyahu’s coalition. The demonstrations have been backed by the same figures—including Gallant—who led the protests against Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul, and the prime minister has shrugged them off, having already shrewdly portrayed such protesters as a politicized force that merely seeks his ouster and is now cynically using the plight of the hostages as a pretext.
Netanyahu’s opponents are hoping that he will somehow run out of luck, or that an old fissure will miraculously generate an earthquake. One pressure point Netanyahu faces is the thorny issue of draft exemption for ultra-Orthodox teenagers. For decades, ultra-Orthodox leaders justified this exemption on the grounds that their youth needed shielding from the temptations of secular life that they might encounter in the barracks. The war has freshly exposed the cruel disparity between the ultra-Orthodox Israelis who do not have to serve and the rest of Israel’s youth, now called upon to die for their country.
In June, the Israeli Supreme Court said unanimously that there was no legal basis for the ultra-Orthodox exemption and that the draft must treat both groups of young people equally. The government has dragged its feet in implementing this ruling, however, and the military has been reluctant to recruit by force. This issue will again come to a head soon, when the Israeli legislature votes on next year’s budget. Ultra-Orthodox political leaders have threatened to topple the government unless it simultaneously enacts their coveted draft exemption. To protect his flank, Netanyahu recently lured an old rival—Gideon Saar, Israel’s former justice minister—into his coalition.
SELF-INFLICTED WOUNDS
Despite Israelis’ protests against Netanyahu and their calls to bring home the hostages—and although their government has yet to achieve the “total victory” it promised—true antiwar sentiment is negligible in mainstream Israeli Jewish society. Even many Israelis who hate Netanyahu and his socially conservative base, and who pride themselves on their cosmopolitanism and their belief in secular democracy, would never espouse what they perceive to be the pacifist values of post–World War II liberal Americans and Europeans. They prefer to live by a mantra made famous in the 1966 spaghetti Western The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, which has since achieved the status of a venerated cliché in Israeli commentary: “When you have to shoot, shoot. Don’t talk.” Israelis have long justified this belligerent philosophy by pointing to their position in a tough neighborhood. In orientalist language, Barak characterized this as being “a villa in the jungle.”
Most of Netanyahu’s most vocal opponents, including highly ranked members of the active and retired military and the relatives of the remaining hostages in Gaza, imagine something less final than peace when they call for a cease-fire: a temporary IDF withdrawal from parts of Gaza in return for the release of female, elderly, and sick hostages, followed by an IDF reoccupation and a resumption of war until Hamas is crushed and Sinwar killed—and then, presumably, a return to a harsher version of the prewar status quo, including the seizure of land in Gaza’s north as a so-called security cordon. The new offensive in Lebanon is even less controversial; some leaders who oppose Netanyahu are, like the prime minister, encouraging a temporary reoccupation of the ridges across the border and the eviction of their Lebanese inhabitants. Netanyahu may be unpopular, but he is leading a popular policy.
The governments of the United States and major European countries have offered only token resistance to Israel’s moves in Gaza and the West Bank. Canada, the European Union, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States have levied sanctions on certain violent settlers who have attacked Palestinians, and Germany, the UK, and the United States have stopped selling select munitions, such as 2,000-pound bombs, to Israel. But overall, the West has given Israel a virtually free hand in its operations in Gaza and the West Bank and has so far made no real effort to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, caving to Netanyahu’s assertions that the time is not right. This policy reflects an age-old dynamic in Israel’s relationship with the West and, in particular, with the United States: Western allies agree to follow Israel’s lead on the Palestinian issue so long as Israel respects their concerns in the broader Middle East.
Yet despite Western governments’ support of their war effort, Israelis feel increasingly distant from the rest of the world. Some of this sense of alienation is justified. Most foreign airlines have stopped flying to Tel Aviv. Israel’s credit ratings are at historic lows. But some of the isolation is self-imposed: mainstream Hebrew media outlets highlight the pro-Palestinian protests on Western campuses and in public spaces as well as anti-Semitic incidents, largely accepting Netanyahu’s claim that they represent incarnations of the oldest, most irrational forms of Jew hatred. Similarly, the assertions that Israel has committed war crimes or attempted genocide in Gaza—currently being litigated in two international courts—are generally depicted in Israel as vicious propaganda.
CHANGE OF HEART
Israelis got a boost to their self-confidence in September, when the government accelerated its attacks against Hezbollah. After October 7, Hezbollah had proved itself capable of destroying Israeli towns, airfields, and power stations as it backed Hamas, forcing the IDF to split its ground forces between Israel’s south and north. For Israelis—downtrodden and demoralized since October 7—the IDF’s counteroffensive recalled the 1967 Six-Day War, in which Israel also rapidly prevailed thanks to a superior air force. Netanyahu declared that Israel is “winning” the war and threatened Iran, Hezbollah’s patron, with similar attacks. The Israeli Ministry of Education ordered celebratory dances performed in the public religious schools. Secular, liberal Israeli Jews were not pirouetting in public, but they, too, were joyful, crediting their brave pilots and smart intelligence operatives for a sense of victory.
But the euphoria evaporated quickly after Iran hit back with scores of missiles and terrorists killed six people on the Tel Aviv light rail. The nascent ground operation in Lebanon has already proved costlier, in terms of Israeli military casualties, than the prior air raids and special ops. Obviously, a bigger regional war involving Iran will not offer Israel quick and lasting triumphs. And Israelis’ sense that they are losing is bigger than anything successful missions against Hezbollah and even Iran can fix. It is imperative for them to accept that their broader reality has, indeed, changed since October 7, and that their strategy needs to change along with it.
A year later, the country is still mourning the losses of the massacre, with its scenes replayed constantly in the media. Israel is losing its economic edge and experiencing a significant departure of liberal elites. The government has failed to reinstate any sense of unity among its citizens, sticking instead to its divisive politics. Its military forces, and reservist combat troops in particular, are approaching exhaustion in the country’s longest and most perpetually undecided fight. And even if international courts never issue arrest warrants for its leaders, Israel will have to live with the moral and reputational fallout, in the Middle East and around the world, of the death and destruction it has wrought in Gaza.
After a year of war, the long-term threats to Israel’s democracy are graver than ever.
Rather than succumbing to intoxication over the killing of Nasrallah and lurching into a full-scale, devastating regional war against Iran, Israel should take advantage of its current battlefield edge and Hamas’s and Hezbollah’s weakened state. It should finalize a U.S.-brokered cease-fire on both its southern and northern fronts, get back its hostages, facilitate the rehabilitation of war-torn Gaza, and begin a process of national healing. Dragging out the war in a futile quest for “total victory” will entail more casualties and economic damage—even if, as Netanyahu hopes, Donald Trump wins the U.S. presidency in November. Both Gaza and Lebanon have been Israel’s quagmires for decades; it must not repeat old mistakes but, instead, cut its losses and make a deal. A responsible Israeli government, assessing the country’s long-term strategic interests, would already have grabbed the opportunity to relaunch the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and advance a two-state deal with the aging Mahmoud Abbas, just as Begin signed Israel’s historic peace treaty with Egypt after Israel’s military eventually prevailed in the Yom Kippur War. Establishing a credible path toward a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza is the only foundation that can undergird long-term security and regional acceptance for Israel and guarantee the normalization of its relations with Saudi Arabia.
Israel’s tragedy is that its current government is leading the country in the opposite direction. Netanyahu’s lifelong mission has been to defeat the Palestinian national movement and avoid territorial or diplomatic compromise with it. His coalition’s stated goal is to create a Jewish state from the river to the sea, extending limited if necessary but preferably no political rights to non-Jewish subjects, even those who hold Israeli citizenship. The calamity is only exacerbated by the fact that Zionist opposition parties call for Netanyahu’s ouster but do not dare to raise the flag of peace and coexistence with the Palestinians, fearing to appear unpatriotic in wartime or to be smeared by right-wingers as traitors.
Rather than looking at the deeper meaning of October 7—and realizing the unsustainability of the antebellum status quo, acknowledging the self-delusion involved in the effort to “manage” the Palestinian issue while riding the wave of economic growth, and appreciating the perilousness of pretending the Palestinians don’t exist, Israelis are being led to accept deeper institutionalized apartheid in the West Bank, permanent occupation in Gaza and perhaps south Lebanon, and growing autocracy and theocracy at home. Sadly, after a year of war, the long-term threats to Israel’s democracy and liberal values have only become graver.’
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
ALUF BENN is Editor in Chief of Haaretz
Honoring Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela at the Lincoln Center | Templeton Prize
Pumla’s insights into the mechanisms of trauma and forgiveness in post-apartheid South Africa have created a globally recognized model for social healing in the aftermath of conflict, a model she calls “the reparative quest.” — John Templeton Foundation
Pumla is a member of the Human Rights Violations Committee of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission that aimed to address the injustices of apartheid. Her award-winning 2003 book A Human Being Died That Night recounts her conversations with the former commander of state-sanctioned death squads, Eugene de Kock, and argues for the possibility of remorse, accountability, and forgiveness.
Pumla has invited my wife Iris and I to South Africa, and we are discussing ways in which the Trebuchet/Convisero approach might be brought to Stellenbosch University, especially given recent nationwide students’ protests in South Africa.
She recently wrote a reflection on Desmond Tutu’s legacy, which was published in the Daily Maverick in January of 2022.
In 2001 Pumla had written me:
I would like to explore ways in which we could replicate the approach you use at EPIIC. I have always been inspired by your idea of bringing people together from diverse academic, cultural, and political backgrounds to engage in vigorous discussions. I have no doubt getting black and white students at Stellenbosch, where I’ll be based next year to work on intellectually stimulating projects, that also have emotional and political implications would be such an amazing project.
Rachel Svetanoff receives Distinguished Alumna Award
It is with great thanks to Sherman as my nominator for enabling me to join this year’s cohort among a remarkable cadre of innovators, activists, and service leaders doing even more remarkable work.
The Domer Dozen honors outstanding graduates ages 32 and younger for their significant contributions and extraordinary dedication to learning, service, faith, and work — four areas in which the Notre Dame Alumni Association seeks to help alumni thrive. The program is a signature initiative of YoungND, the Alumni Association’s young alumni group. The 2024 honorees were selected for their incredible achievements in education, health care, international relations, religious life, entrepreneurship and public service, among other areas. They were chosen by a selection committee consisting of the YoungND board, University officials, and Alumni Association staff, who considered 91 nominees this summer and evaluated them based on a weighted ranking system and their contributions in their respective fields. Read more at: https://domerdozen.nd.edu/
WP Article and Podcast episode: Vladimir Kara-Murza tells his story
From the Washington Post: Pulitzer Prize winner Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was part of August’s massive prisoner exchange with Russia, sat down to talk with Post Opinions editor David Shipley about his time in jail, the importance of freedom of speech and what the future holds for Putin’s regime.
Read more and listen to the episode here.
I have the privilege of calling Vlad a friend and colleague. We know each other through our work at the Wallenberg Foundation for Human Rights and Human Rights Foundation of which Yuila Navalnaya is now Chair, succeeding Garry Kasparov who succeed Vaclav Havel.
Mobilizing for the 2024 Presidential and Congressional Elections https://cpdaction.org/donate
The Trebuchet hosted a conversation with Steven Kest and Abby Keisa about activism and the current state of the 2024 Presidential and Congressional elections. Among the Trebuchet's Convisero community attending were Barry Bluestone, Ehren Brav, and Michael Maso, as well as Dayna Cunningham, the Pierre and Pamela Omidyar Dean of Tufts' Tisch College.
CPD Action, along with their sister organization Center for Popular Democracy, works to create equity, opportunity, and a dynamic democracy in partnership with high-impact base-building organizations, organizing alliances, and progressive unions. CPD Action works on campaigns that promote a pro-worker, pro-immigrant, racial and economic justice agenda and win victories to improve people’s lives.
How India Can Fix Its Employment Crisis by Convisero mentor Bhaskar Chakravorti
How India Can Fix Its Employment Crisis: Bhaskar Chakravorti
Harvard Business Review
Despite a roaring economy, India is in the middle of an employment crisis: In a country with the world’s largest and youngest workforce, there are very few good jobs to be had. To maintain its economic momentum through consistently high GDP growth, India needs to produce more jobs and move a greater proportion of its workforce into higher productivity sectors. Failure to do so would result not only in depressed incomes and slowdown in consumer demand, it would also add to future political instability, social unrest, and a waste of the country’s much-vaunted “demographic dividend.”
Convisero Mentor Rachel Svetanoff Leads UNA-USA Program
Through the UNA-USA Global Goals Ambassador Network, members can leverage their passion for issues within an SDG and engage local and national communities around programming and other activities. During this yearlong program, the Ambassadors receive training from UNA-USA and United Nations Foundation staff to help support their engagement plans, blog posts, workshops, speaking with various audiences, and all other efforts around their SDG. Rachel Svetanoff takes on the leading role to coordinate, collaborate, and partner with mission-aligned organizations to promote and advocate for achieving the 2030 SDGs. Please refer to this link for more information!
Dr. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Convisero mentor, receives 2024 Templeton Prize
Pumla Joins Past Laureates Desmond Tutu and Jane Goodall to Receive One of the World’s Largest Individual Lifetime Achievement Awards.
We are so proud to share the wonderful news that our dear friend and colleague, Pumla, has received this prestigious award. My wife Iris Adler and I will be with Pumla this year at her invitation conducting workshops at her Stellenbosch University center.
Quick bio: Dr. Gobodo-Madikizela is a professor and South African National Research Foundation’s Chair in Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma and the Director of the Centre for the Study of the Afterlife of Violence and the Reparative Quest at Stellenbosch University.
At home with Convisero mentor Pumla (link to Trebuchet) holding a gacaca reconciliation bowl from Rwanda (2024).
Convisero Mentor Patrick Schmidt wins Kansas Democratic Primary for State Senate
In the November general election upon winning the Democratic Primary, Patrick will face Republican Party nominee Tyler Wible, a Topekan who defeated moderate Cynthia Smith in the primary. He is running for Kansas' 19th State Senate district as a sixth-generation Kansan, coming from a family of farmers, miners, and teachers. Patrick is currently working in the Naval Reserve and returned to Kansas with his wife, Megan, to fight for rights in the Kansas Legislature.
I am also honored to say that I have been awarded the 2024 Moms Demand Action Gun Sense Candidate distinction. MAD has recognized me as a candidate that advocates for gun violence prevention and will govern with gun safety in mind. I'm committed to passing legislation that saves lives.
I have also been endorsed by Sheet Metal Air Rail Transportation (SMART). I am honored to have the endorsement of these union workers!