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.”
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.
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