Food Pack 2024, by Mariam Salah (oil pastel on paper). Salah posted this picture to Facebook on March 1, a day after the “Flour Massacre,” one of the deadliest mass-casualty events to take place in Gaza since the start of Israel’s military response to Hamas’s October 7 attacks on civilians and soldiers. As people gathered in Gaza City to receive food from aid trucks, Israeli troops fired on the crowd, killing more than 100 Palestinians. Image courtesy of Mariam Salah
An artist and teacher living in Gaza describes the past year of death and displacement, the daily hunt for food and firewood, and the limited power of art amid unending war.
What is life like in Gaza, more than a year since Israel began its military assault there? I spoke to Mariam Salah, a twenty-nine-year-old artist and teacher who lives there, for a personal perspective on the war. Salah has lost six family members and eight friends since Israeli forces swept into the Gaza Strip in response to a Hamas-led series of attacks on October 7, 2023. They are among the tens of thousands of Palestinians reported to have been killed during the ongoing conflict, which shows no sign of ending. An estimated 1.9 million out of Gaza’s 2.2 million residents have been displaced, while the fates of dozens of hostages taken by Hamas are still unknown.
When the Israeli military assault began, Salah was living in Gaza City. She and her family have been forced to flee their homes several times since then. Currently, they are camping out in Khan Yunis in the south—“seeking shelter amid the rubble we’re surrounded by,” as she puts it.
A painter and sculptor, Salah had her work exhibited in galleries throughout Palestine before the war. She designed costumes, masks, and puppets for a local company called Theater Days. Salah also worked with children as an art teacher and art facilitator at schools run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the main U.N. aid group in Gaza. She graduated in 2017 with a bachelor’s degree in art education from Palestine’s Al-Aqsa University—since flattened by Israeli strikes. “Every single place I used to study or work has been turned into rubble.”
I had come to Jerusalem to remember my grandmother’s life and mourn my marriage’s demise. As I made my way to the Wailing Wall, a shopkeeper stopped me with a question.
Visitors to the Wailing Wall take part in the centuries-old Jewish tradition of placing slips of paper with prayers into the cracks of the wall’s broken stones.
The hot white wind whistled quietly as I walked through the rows of Jerusalem’s labyrinthine cemetery, built on a mountainside.
I would have never found my grandmother’s grave here if it weren’t for Inna, her lifelong friend. They had met in college back in the Soviet Union, where we all had once lived. I had called Inna as soon as I landed in Israel, the last stop on my solo journey around the world.
Inna led me past a wall of tombs until we arrived at one bearing the black granite letters of my grandmother’s name.
The last time I had seen my grandmother was more than two decades earlier, before she bought a one-way ticket to Israel in hopes of curing her Alzheimer’s. It was a tumultuous time. The Soviet Union was collapsing, and many were heading abroad. My grandmother, a literature professor, had started to notice early symptoms of her condition. Rumor had it that in Israel they knew a cure. My grandmother decided to leave everything behind and make the move, joining Inna in Jerusalem.
There was no one else in this section of the cemetery, and in the morning stillness I felt my grandmother beside me. The warmth of her skin. Her round, tanned face. Reddish curls that bounced when she moved. A laugh that rang like wind chimes.
I didn’t want to leave her, but the taxi was waiting.
As our car weaved through the cemetery and back toward the city, Inna said, “I’m really glad you came to visit your grandmother. I see a lot of similarities in you.”
I felt the same way. My grandmother and I had shared a sense of independence that had propelled us to leave one life in search of another. Twenty years after my grandmother made her life-changing decision, I also bought a one-way ticket, leaving behind family, friends, and a marriage that no longer worked.
Now, on the final lap of a journey meant to help me put myself back together, I wished I could ask my grandmother about her life and gain a little wisdom to live my own. But she was gone. I wanted to ask her friend more about her, but there was no time. Inna had to rush home for the Jewish holidays, and I had to meet my brother at the Wailing Wall.
When I entered Jerusalem’s Old City through the ancient Jaffa Gate, the scene was dizzying. A boiling river of tourists flowed down the alleys of the street market. I was running late, so I hurried past the shopkeepers doggedly hawking their wares. Red carpets. Wooden crosses. Miniature chess sets. Green carpets. Gooey baklava. Silver jewelry. Evil-eye charms. More carpets.
A street market in Jerusalem.
“Can I ask you a question, miss? Excuse me, miss! I just wanted to ask you …”
I flew by them, weaving my way through the tourists haggling over souvenirs, ducking under giant trays of fresh sesame-seed bread carried by deft young men.
Then, something stopped me.
I was in front of a shop selling unpolished silver antiques—oil lamps, samovars, menorahs. But what caught my attention wasn’t the merchandise. It was the old shopkeeper.
His eyes matched the deep blue of his simple work shirt. They exuded the calm of someone who belonged under the shade of an oak tree in a peaceful meadow, not in the madness of an urban bazaar.
There was something entrancing about this Middle Eastern Buddha who smiled at me and said, “Come, take five minutes inside.”
“But I’m in a hurry, someone is waiting for me,” I said skittishly, without moving.
“Our whole life passes as we hurry,” he replied. “When we are kids, we hurry to grow up. Then, we grow up and hurry to …”
“Yes, I know,” I interrupted, remembering the hectic life I had left behind. “Everyone always hurries. But actually, I’ve been traveling and haven’t felt hurried this whole year.”
“And? Did you find yourself?” he asked, as if he knew exactly what had sent me away from home and brought me to his doorstep.
“I think so,” I said. “That’s what I’ve been trying to do, anyway.”
He considered me quietly. “You keep a guard, but you shouldn’t. You’re beautiful, intelligent, sensitive, and a little stubborn. Come,” he gestured toward the depths of his silver cave. “I want to talk to you.”
I could have said no and left for the Wailing Wall, where my brother was probably already waiting. Instead, I walked to the back of his store and sat on a soft cushion. He sat in front of me, his small figure framed by rows of ivory bracelets. An antique clock slept above his head.
“Are you in love with yourself?” he asked.
Wait, what?
I considered his strange question. It seemed that I’d been able to leave my marriage precisely because I loved myself enough to save what remained of me. And yet the experience of the divorce had made me feel like a failure.
The most truthful answer I could give was, “Sometimes.”
“Why sometimes?”
I paused again, my eyes focused on the bracelets hanging in front of me. “Can you love yourself even though you feel that no one else loves you?”
The Wailing Wall and the Dome of the Rock in the distance.
To my embarrassment, I felt a tear roll down my cheek as I said the words. I despise self-pity, so I turned away and pretended to look around the store. Trying to find something else to talk about, I made a comment about an old samovar on one of his shelves. But the shopkeeper made no reply. When I finally turned to face him again, he was looking at me with curiosity, not pity.
“To love yourself doesn’t mean to be selfish,” he said. “To love yourself means to be at peace with your body, your soul, with who you are. I see that you’re hiding yourself because you feel ashamed of your tears, but even with tears you are beautiful.”
My tears now started streaming down my face.
“Love is simple,” he said, pressing his hand to his heart. “I know I haven’t known you for very long, but … I love you.”
He said it so naturally. Looking into his serene eyes, I believed him.
Who said that love is the lifelong emotion that wives feel toward their husbands and mothers toward their children? Why can’t love be a sudden burst of sunshine in a dusty shop in Old Jerusalem?
The two of us sat there. I could hear the clamor of the market, just steps away.
Three women walked into the store, and the moment passed. I looked at my watch. I was now an hour late.
Wiping away my tears, I rejoined the crowds in the street, making my way to the Wailing Wall.
Sasha Vasilyuk Sasha Vasilyuk is a writer based in New York City. She was born during a cold Russian winter and grew up in the golden hills of the San Francisco Bay Area. Her essays and articles on art, culture, business, travel, and love have been published in the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Russian Newsweek, Oakland Tribune, and Flower magazine. She received the 2013 North American Travel Journalists Association silver medal for her Los Angeles Times cover photo "Barra De Valizas." She is currently working on a collection of essays about her year-long solo journey around the world.
Dear Reader,In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
Dare we dream? After seeing his conservative party alliance shrink from forty-two to thirty-one seats in last month’s elections, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now trying to put together a parliamentary majority. Did these losses chasten him? Will they lead to a real change in his policies? He has certainly made a splash with his first move. His selection of long-time political foe Tzipi Livni as justice minister and, more importantly, as head of the government’s official negotiating team (should negotiations ever resume) with the Palestinians, is being praised by some as a potentially important shift and dismissed by others as window dressing.
Livni began her career on the right, in Netanyahu’s Likud party, but moved leftward on the Palestinian issue and became one of the founding members of the centrist Kadima party in 2005, serving as foreign minister and deputy prime minister. Under Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, she headed the team that negotiated directly with the Palestinian Authority and, while it did not succeed, her team came far closer to a final peace agreement than Netanyahu’s government has thus far. Later Livni became head of Kadima before being ousted and leaving in 2012.
Last November she formed Hatnuah, another centrist party that included some from Kadima as well as two former leaders of the Labor Party. Hatnuah won six seats in the January election and has now become the first party to join Netanyahu’s coalition government. Upon her selection, Livni said that she wouldn’t be joining the government if she didn’t “trust” that Netanyahu was serious in his “commitment to the peace process.”
There are few issues more gut-wrenching to follow than the matter of Israel-Palestine. As a Jew, I feel a personal stake in Israel’s survival. As a historian (who teaches a class on the topic), I am well aware of the deeply held beliefs, opportunities for peace missed, and, yes, immoral actions taken by both sides. As an American, I know how important it would be for my country’s interests and security if the Israelis and Palestinians could come to a final peace agreement. And as a human being, I want suffering reduced wherever possible, and for people to be able to live their lives with dignity, justice, freedom, and security wherever possible.
Watching events unfold in Israel-Palestine in recent years has not given me much hope. Yet even after the anguish I felt hearing about Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination in 1995, and after the Camp David talks in 2000 failed to produce an agreement, and after countless other disappointments and tragedies, I still can’t give up on the idea that these two peoples can make peace.
So that’s where I’m at when I think about what it means that the ultra-hawkish Netanyahu has turned over the “peace portfolio” to someone like Livni, who most observers see as far more committed to pursuing a peace treaty than the Netanyahu of recent years. Apparently, leaders of the Israeli settler movement think that Livni’s new position in the cabinet is a bad thing for their interests, and for Israel’s, as they define them. The far-right Jewish Home party — which rejects the idea of a Palestinian state — also hates Livni’s appointment. As someone who cares about that country, my thinking is that anything the settler leaders or the hard-right parties think is bad has a pretty good chance of being good for Israel. The reaction from Palestinian leaders to Livni’s appointment has been essentially mute, as they are clearly waiting to see the whole of Netanyahu’s coalition.
In Israel-Palestine, predicting the failure of peace talks has always been a safe bet. My head tells me that this is unlikely to change anytime soon, despite what I believe is Livni’s serious desire for a real deal, a desire I also believe is matched by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and moderate colleagues like Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. As for my heart — well, it’s been broken enough times on this issue that I should know better. But despite this, and despite the fact that Livni joining the Israeli cabinet doesn’t change the fact that the Palestinians also bear responsibility for previous failures as well as the current stalemate, I have some rational basis for my hopes.
Perhaps Netanyahu has enough credibility on the right to actually bring reasonable hawks around to supporting the concessions necessary to make peace, to do what Nixon did in going to China and meeting with Chairman Mao. Netanyahu’s appointment of Livni to lead his negotiating team is at least a signal that he intends to make a serious effort on that front. By no means am I deeply optimistic. But at least I’m less pessimistic than I was before the elections. At this point, that’s real progress.
The stories now featured on the site touch on many issues, but one theme they have in common is the role that religion plays in driving people to get passionately involved politics and activism — and how difficult it is to find secular ways to kindle the same fire. In Saving Souls, Benjamin Gottlieb profiles an enterprising humanitarian group that is busily educating poor children in Delhi’s slums. But the work of COI and other evangelical Christian groups continues to draw controversy in India, a once-colonized nation now booming economically and working mightily to assert its own cultural identity. In Losing Zion, Rob York reviews the book The Crisis of Zionism, which argues that the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is dying, ruined by extremism in Israel and the apathy of the liberal American Jews who could help bring about a broad-based peace movement.
Religious groups have been almost unmatched in their ability to train activists and build social movements. In America, the most obvious recent example is the pro-life movement and the cultural warriors it has drawn from the pews of evangelical, Catholic, and other congregations. But the civil rights movement, too, acquired its power and breadth by filling the streets with churchgoing protesters, and filling its rhetoric with the biblical language of freedom, struggle, and redemption.
Wherever people congregate, they organize. Social scientists talk about how churches (and other houses of worship) serve as reservoirs of social capital — the web of relationships that connect people and bring about various benefits, including the ability to rally around political causes. Generally speaking, this is great for democracy. And many religious groups have managed to find a balance between doing God’s work and respecting views that diverge from their own. But in America, Israel, and elsewhere, it seems the people getting inspired and engaged come from the extreme, intolerant ends of the political divide, trapped in their own dogma and their own sets of facts.
I used religion as a jumping-off point for my comments, but really the problem is not religion, but fundamentalism of whatever kind — religious or economic or nationalist or otherwise. The Tea Party, for example, is crusading on behalf of an uncompromising economic fundamentalism that verges on religious fanaticism, with its own patron saints in F.A. Hayek, Frédéric Bastiat, and Ayn Rand — ironically, a mirror image of the earlier cult of communism. But religion appears to motivate many of these true believers, too, and may help explain the movement’s success in organizing. On the question of Israel and Palestine, too, the same dynamic seems at work: the more devout and dogmatic speak louder.
Perhaps the recent wave of global protests against corruption and austerity — for example, the indignados demonstrations in Spain, or Occupy Wall Street and its related movements in America — will help balance the scales. Churches and synagogues have been heavily involved in the organizing of the Occupy actions across this country, reminding us that the religious right is not the only voice of faith in the streets and on the megaphone.
That said, younger Americans seem to be turning awayfrom religion, while the secular ways that ordinary people have traditionally gotten involved in politics are in decline. Labor unions have been dwindling away in America for decades — the one bright spot in recent years was public-sector unions, and the recent failed Wisconsin recall election may have been their Waterloo. Political parties rely increasingly on big donors and independently wealthy candidates, while the old political machines that groomed leaders out of local wards are disappearing. Young people continue to rally to various causes on college campuses, but it will be hard to fill in the hole left by these institutions, which could organize in a sustained, concerted fashion and appeal to broad segments of the population.
This is yet another reason that we can expect politics to become more partisan and extreme in the coming years. The hard-liners are hungry for power, while more reasonable men and women stand by and watch. It brings to mind words by the Irish poet W.B. Yeats: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”
The center cannot hold, as Yeats wrote. And things didn’t end too well in that poem.
Conservative inflexibility and liberal apathy have endangered the dream of a democratic, secure Jewish state, a prominent American Zionist argues in a new book. But for all his ideas to salvage the two-state solution, Peter Beinart seems really to be documenting its demise.
The Crisis of Zionism By Peter Beinart
Times Books. 304 pages.
What do Palestinian activists and a Jewish Zionist in Manhattan have in common? The opposition of Israeli hard-line conservatives, as it turns out. Peter Beinart, a former editor of The New Republic who now teaches at the City University of New York, argues that the future of Israel is in grave danger — not from the enemies that have long surrounded it, but from its growing extremism internally and the growing apathy of liberal American Jews toward Israel.
In his new book, The Crisis of Zionism, Beinart makes the case that the dream of a democratic Israel is dying, undermined by West Bank settlements and the marginalization of Palestinians. Within the United States, Israel’s longtime ally, Zionist organizations reflexively support Israel’s policies, while liberal Jews have a fading interest in Israeli issues. In both countries, there has been no significant opposition from liberal Zionists to the bellicose policies that endanger Israel’s founding principles of democracy.
Beinart fears the end of the two-state solution that would grant Palestinians and Jews their own nations, believing that the two groups could not live together harmoniously in one state after decades of acrimony. Breaking with many of his fellow Zionists, however, he identifies Jewish settlements in the proposed Palestinian nation as the greatest threat to this goal. “There are, to be sure, many Palestinians who don’t want two states and seek Israel’s destruction,” he writes. “But the best way to ensure their triumph is to keep eating away at the land on which a Palestinian state may be born.”
"God will surf with the devil, if the waves are good…When a surfer sees another surfer with a board, he can’t help but say something that brings them together." —Dorian Paskowitz, 86, an avid surfer and retired doctor. Dr. Paskowitz crossed the Israel-Gaza border on Tuesday and donated 12 surfboards to surfers in Gaza. Dr. Paskowitz, who is Jewish, is part of a larger Surfing for Peace movement, which seeks to bring together Israeli and Palestinian surfers. He was moved, he says, when he read about two Gazan surfers who shared one board. The beach in Gaza is accessible by Palestinians, but the Israeli military monitors the beach and controls Gazan airspace above it and the coastal waters beyond it in the Mediterranean Sea.
After eight months in Israel, I’ve crossed through its borders approximately once a month with very little hassle.This past Monday, however, was an exception.Although only flying domestically from Tel Aviv to Eilat, and departing from the local Tel Aviv airport rather than the colossal fortress of Ben Gurion International, security was rigorous.
After thirty minutes of general questioning—where are you from, where are you going, why are you in Israel, what do you teach, why did you choose to teach in Israel, where is the school, do you know anyone in Egypt—I thought I had provided sufficient satisfactory answers.However, the stone-faced security supervisor was called over, and I was subjected to rapid-fire questioning, my answers hardly complete before the next query was delivered.
With twenty minutes remaining before the departure of my flight, I was taken to an outside bunker partitioned with heavy floor-to-ceiling drapery.The contents of my duffel and my tote were unceremoniously dumped into plastic tubs and sent through the industrial x-ray machine.The security officer proceeded to meticulously run her hands over every surface on my body, then passed her metal-detecting device over the same tracks.The wand beeped once at the fly of my pants, and the officer asked me to remove them.
“Am I going to miss my flight?” I asked the security supervisor. She shrugged. “I can’t promise anything.”
My belongings proven to be explosive-free, they were returned to me in a pile resembling the clearance bin in a thrift store.
Seven minutes left until my flight, I was told I could refold, reorganize, repack my bags, then was personally escorted to the plane, a security officer carrying my suspicious duffel all the way from the security bunker to the interior of the cargo space of the plane.I settled into my seat, checked my watch: two minutes to takeoff.
I was relieved that I made my flight, but I was distracted by feelings of humiliation even though my experience was not severe.I certainly understand the need for heightened security in the state of Israel—a lone Jewish island in a vast expanse of Islamic territories.Especially given its international threats: the current tensions with Hezbollah, the open animosity of the Islamic Republic of Iran President Ahmadinejad, the stagnancy of peace efforts with Syria.And locally: a Palestinian suicide bombing in the resort city of Eilat in late January of 2007—the first such attack in nine months and the first to ever hit Israel’s southernmost city, the infighting of the Palestinian factions, the recent capture of suicide bombers in Bat Yam and the Sinai, and last year’s target of the popular Israeli-frequented Sinai resort town of Dahab that killed 24 people during the Passover holiday.
However, as a 22-year-old female of East Asian appearance with an American passport—an American passport with an Israeli government-issued work visa for employment at an international embassy-sponsored school no less—treated with such suspicion and rudeness, I could not fathom the humiliation and rage suffered by a young adult male of Arab appearance and a Palestinian Authority passport.(I’ve been told that Arab-Israelis give themselves a five- to six-hour window before departure time to even allow the possibility of catching their flights.)
In addition, this type of suspicious, inconsiderate treatment of foreigners on the ground in Israel stands in stark contradiction to the Israeli state’s efforts to improve their image abroad and revitalize the tourism industry in this historically, culturally, and religiously rich land that suffers from an exceedingly negative public image given the violence and instability of the intifadas and the recent Israeli-Hezbollah war.
Does Israel’s tangible and justified need for rigorous security stand compatible with its desire for a healthier tourism industry?Does the pervasive suspicion of the non-Israeli, the non-Jew allow, for warm reception of foreigners in this land?Does tight security mandate racial profiling, intensely elevated levels of suspicion, and potentially humiliating treatment of foreign visitors?Can Israel salvage its public image abroad and cultivate an image of friendliness and open arms while maintaining the distrustful, near-paranoiac scrutiny utilized to execute security efforts?
Rigorous security on the ground in Israel is a clear necessity, but I fear that the intense measures utilized to maintain this priority may be detrimental to other aspirations of the Israeli state.
We use cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the site. Cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser, as they are essential for the working of the site’s basic functionality. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this site. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent, and you have the option to opt out of using them.
Necessary cookies are essential for the basic functionality and security features of this website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that are not necessary for the website to function and are used to collect user personal data via analytics or other embedded content are termed non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to using these cookies.
