The Ezra Klein Show – The Middle Ground Between Jews and Palestinians in the Era of September 11, 2001: A Conversation with David Ackerman
You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts. Here you can view a list of book recommendations from guests.
People are grieving deaths due to war in Gaza and Israel. Martin says there’s no single conversation that can represent the pain accumulated over generations. She found hope in UCLA professor David Myers, who is trying to find a middle ground between Jews and Palestinians on campus.
In an attempt to cover it from many perspectives, I wanted to start with the Jewish left, which has felt particularly tricky in recent weeks, but which I am closest to. Spencer and Peter were invited to join me on the show.
The author of the newsletter FOREVER WARS as well as an award-winning columnist for The Nation, Ackerman is also the author of the book ” Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump”. Peter Beinart teaches at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism and is the author of the Beinart Notebook newsletter. I believe the way that Sept. 11 will inform Israel’s response and the need to empower different kinds of actors and tactics if we want a different future for Israelis and Palestinians alike.
Yocheved Lifshitz and her captors were kidnapped from their home in Kibbutz Nir Oz
Yocheved Lifshitz, the 85-year-old woman who was released after being held hostage by Palestinian militants in Gaza for 17 days, on Tuesday described being beaten while her captors took her away on a motorcycle.
Ms. Lifshitz’s voice at times faltered as she recalled her abduction and the horrors suffered by her neighbors when Hamas attacked her town of Kibbutz Nir Oz. Her daughter Sharone, who was crouched at her side on Tuesday, occasionally translated for foreign journalists.
“I went through hell,” Ms. Lifshitz told reporters the day after her release, sitting in a wheelchair at a hospital in Tel Aviv amid a thicket of microphones.
She and her partner, Nurit Cooper, were freed on Monday and transferred from Hamas custody to Israeli forces via the International Committee for the Red Cross. Both of their husbands are still being held hostage in Gaza.
Her account of the tunnels offered a glimpse of the difficulties facing Israel, as it ponders its next move after the devastating attack against it by Hamas in Gaza.
Military analysts said Hamas built a lot of underground passages for its fighters, complicating Israel’s anticipated ground operation and trying to rescue the hostages.
Ms. Lifshitz said many people broke into her home, beat her, and kidnapped her. It was no different, they kidnapped the old and young.
She claimed that her kidnappers beat her in the ribs and took away her watch while she was on a motorcycle. They walked away from the fields surrounding Nir Oz.
They took her through the network of tunnels until they reached a large hall where about 25 people were, she said. After about two to three hours, they separated five people from her kibbutz into their own room, where they were overseen by guards and a medic, she said.
Ms. Lifshitz said that she and others were relatively well taken care of, given medicine and the same food as their captors. Fearing disease, her captors worked to sanitize the area, she said, and doctors would visit sporadically to check on them. She said they treated them well and fulfilled all of their needs.
Ms. Lifshitz at times criticized the Israeli military, saying that it and the Shin Bet domestic security service had ignored warning signs of the threat to towns near Gaza. The Israeli military’s chief of staff acknowledged after the attack that the military had failed to live up to its mission to protect Israel’s citizens.
The attack on Gaza happened a couple of weeks before because Palestinians rioted and blew up balloons near the fence.
Israeli survivors find solace in a hotel after an ambush: an Israeli man’s experience with a Kibbutz in Tel Aviv
Families are on the lawn. Kids play basketball. A handwritten menu of funerals that keep getting longer is the reason dogs are taken on walks through the hotel lobby.
He and his family moved to Kfar Aza a few months ago. It had palm trees, a plastics factory, a dining hall — the kibbutz ideal of communal living. There was a waiting list to join, even though it’s along the Gaza border, where rocket fire is an occasional part of life.
The survivors of Kibbutz Kfar Aza have left and are now at a hotel north of Tel Aviv, wondering what will happen next.
Geologist Bar Elisha sits on a lawn chair in the hotel courtyard. The 41-year-old and his two young daughters were home when the ambush began. He left his house to get his firearm from where it was being stored, but it jammed.
Israel survivors find solace in a hotel after a kibbutz attack: “What happened when Elisha and Ivan were killed,” recalls Schwartzman
“I was like, oh my God, he’s dead. His whole family’s dead. I was confident they were murdered in cold blood. He said he heard them move to the next house.
The scene that Elisha emerged from was devastating after soldiers rescued him 30 hours later. There were gaping holes in the homes. The buildings that were identified as targets were left behind by the attackers. These are just some of the details that haunt the survivors.
“When we moved there, we thought it was safe,” says Schwartzman, who is 37. We didn’t think that hundreds or even dozens of terrorists would make their way to the kibbutz, and begin slaughtering entire families in their home, in their beds.
One of Schwartzman’s parents was killed in the attack just 500 feet from Schwartzman’s home.
Source: Attacked by Hamas at home, Israeli survivors find solace in a hotel
Israeli survivors find solace in a hotel after the kibbutz: a story of a Jewish boy from a concentration camp
Shiva, the Jewish ritual of mourning, cannot be done at home. Their home is now uninhabitable. Shiva after shiva is being held in the lobby of a bank on the hotel grounds.
Ofer Baram is there, surrounded by dozens of family members and friends, sitting shiva for his son, Aviv, who was a 33-year-old stage manager for popular artists.
Libby Shmuel, a volunteer therapist, holds sessions in an office of the bank. She helped treat a man from the kibbutz who did not know where his father’s body was.
“He was imagining that his body is … in a bag … with many, many bags of other bodies.” Shmuel says that it made him think of scenes from the Holocaust. “It was awful, like a very bad image, like one of theconcentration camps.”
Shmuel, who is 48, specializes in eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, a type of therapy that uses eye movements, knee tapping and guided imagery to overcome trauma.
“He said, ‘Dad, goodbye. I love you,’” says Shmuel. He could say goodbye to his dad in a dignified way, and he could see his dad. He got peace after that.
Source: Attacked by Hamas at home, Israeli survivors find solace in a hotel
The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and the Shefayim Hotel : A Memories from Said’s First Year in Israel, When a Missile Hit the Hospital
Other attack survivors at the Shefayim Hotel find peace in being among their fellow community members, and those who are volunteering their time to support them.
Schwartzman says there is a strong human spirit here. “You can see that the civilians are taking care of everything.”
Many years ago, when I first started covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I got to know a gifted Palestinian journalist who, for reasons that will become apparent in a moment, I’ll refer to only by his first name, Said.
A missile did not hit the hospital but it did hit the parking lot. Abundant evidence, confirmed by U.S. intelligence and independent analyses, indicates that the explosion was caused by a missile fired from Gaza, which was intended to kill Israelis but malfunctioned and fell to earth. There is no reason to believe more than 500 people died. And the “Gazan health ministry” is not some sort of apolitical body but a Hamas-owned entity, towing and promoting whatever the terrorist organization demands.
The Israeli-Israeli conflict: the case of Hani al-Agha, who was tortured and left behind by Hamas in Gaza Strip
The Palestinian territories are Republics of fear because of the fear of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza. Palestinians are neither more nor less honest than people elsewhere. But, as in any tyrannical or fanatical regime, those who stray from the approved line put themselves at serious risk.
Or take the case of Hani al-Agha, a Palestinian journalist who was jailed for weeks and tortured by Hamas in 2019. In that case, the Palestinian journalists Syndicate condemned al-Agha’s torture as an attempt to intimidate journalists in Gaza Strip, who are subject to repressive police authority. Yet, outside of a few news releases, the story received almost no coverage in the wider media.
The news media still need people who can tell the whole story in war zones. People consuming media should know the risks these journalists face, because we appreciate them being in dangerous situations.
The next time a story about an alleged Israeli atrocity is written, readers need to know who obtained the information and who leaked it. It’s bad enough that Hamas tyrannizes Palestinians and terrorizes Israelis. We don’t need to tell other people what we know.
The legacy of displacement also loomed large inside Israel, said Nathan Thrall, author of “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama,” a book about the lives of Palestinians and Israelis. It played to the deepest of Israeli fears that all the Palestinians on the other side of the wall will come back and try to take back their villages and homes.
Soon after, jets bombed the apartments, blowing out his grandmother’s windows. With his sister, she took off into the night with about 6,000 other people, sleeping on the roadside. Eventually they found shelter at a small hospital run by a relative in southern Gaza.
There is a split in the family group. Even though Israel warned that they risked being considered a terrorist organization if residents stayed, his grandmother continued to defy the order to leave.
But his sister, Doaa, was less sure. Mr. Abujayyab’s siblings debated if she should stay at her grandmother’s apartment. Or risk the short but dangerous journey south?
Mr. Abujayyab’s sister probably did not hear that news. They had no power, limited internet and more bombs were falling, his sister said in a voice message to her family.
So, for now, Daood and Standing Together are working quietly to make connections between neighbors. “After this war is over, the real work begins,” she said.
Standing Together in Israel: a Mission to Help Israel through the Last Major War between Israel and Hamas? Palestinian, Arab, and Israeli
Arabs and Jews live side by side in the mixed community of lod. About 20% of Israel’s population is composed of Arabs — or Palestinian citizens of Israel. The emotional scars from the violent clashes between Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel during the last major confrontation between Israel and Hamas haven’t fully healed. “It is hard for me to share, to be honest with you,” Basel said, “because it brings out bad and painful memories for both communities in the city.”
But when asked about her mission in this moment, as Israel mourns the more than 1,400 people killed in this month’s unprecedented attack by Hamas militants and prepares for a major ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, Basel described something more fundamental: “It’s very important for us to go through this period unharmed and safely.”
Nadav Shofet is an organizing member of the organization Standing Together, a grassroots group of Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel. Shofet, who is Jewish, said that people in Israel are scared and that there’s “this feeling of having to hunt down people who say anything that sympathizes with people in Gaza or strives towards peace.”
There was a protest in support of Gaza last week in the city of Haifa. In a video posted to the Arabic-language TikTok channel, Israel’s police commissioner Kobi Shabtai said he was giving the police precise instructions on how to treat any instances of insinuation. Anyone who sympathizes with the people of Gaza can get on a bus and go there.
After the left-wing journalist Israel Frey recited the Jewish mourner’s prayer for dead civilians in Gaza, he says a right-wing mob attacked his home and threatened his wife and children. In a video released on social media last week, he said he was in hiding. He said that they went after him because of the need for prayer and sympathy for Gaza’s children.
Against that backdrop, Shofet and Standing Together’s national co-director Rula Daood arrived at the community center in Lod with a group of volunteers. The main event was a donation drive for people suffering economically from the war — many shops and restaurants have been closed and tourism has dried up. Some of the people chatting in a mix of Arabic and Hebrew while packing up boxes with basics were wearing modest clothing and some wore open-toed shoes.
The activists also brought a pile of posters to put up in town, if it felt safe to do so. The day before, Standing Together activists in Jerusalem put up a message with Jewish- Arab solidarity, but it didn’t go well. “The police just came in and arrested two of our activists,” said Daood.
Even small gestures of cooperation between Jews and Arabs are potentially fraught in this moment. “My husband doesn’t like me to show up.” said Smadar Tzimmerman, a volunteer. She’s Jewish, and she’s retired now, but used to work in Lod as an art therapist, including in Arab schools.
She had friends who do peace work, but she admitted that most of Israel didn’t share her views. Two weeks after the Hamas attack, the anger is still palpable. “When I go to a funeral where everyone is grieving and says, ‘Let’s kill them,’ I will not speak my mind, you know? I just came to comfort them in their sorrow,” she said.
Even though her husband calls her naive, Tzimmerman still hopes for peace and thinks that relationships between Jews and Arabs will be the only way to achieve it.
“Being kind to each other, to know each other — it’s not such a difficult thing to do, if you are willing to do it,” she said. Our leaders are not willing to do that.
It’s not only Jewish Israelis who view this approach to peace as wishful thinking. Myada Abu Khaled, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, is an educator and volunteers with children at the community center in Lod. She said that there was no need for the word “Let’s do things together” now. It won’t help. We need to be realistic.
Abu Khaled has spent her entire life around Jews — “I speak Hebrew as a mother tongue,” she said — and she has students serving in the Israeli army. She wiped away tears while saying that she was afraid to ask about them.
She was emotional as she recalled a call with a student in one of her classes. Friends of the student were killed at the Nova music festival. “I could feel her hatred upon me,” Abu Khaled said. “I really don’t judge her, and I really understand her. But still, when I finished the Zoom, I just collapsed. I fell apart.”
Abu Khaled said she had given up on the idea of a society of Arab-Jewish cooperation. She said that people don’t care so you are not able to force it.
Concerns over Israel’s war strategy; long COVID origins: The Minnesota Rep. Mike Johnson is the newest Republican nominee for House Speaker
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After Hamas attacks on October 7, Israel bombarded Gaza for more than two weeks. Palestinian officials say more than 6,000 people in Gaza have been killed in Israeli airstrikes. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres called Israel’s strategy a violation of international humanitarian law. Israel says it is ready for a ground invasion. The US is concerned about the possibility of the war spreading.
Louisiana Rep. Mike Johnson is the newest nominee for House Speaker. The Minnesota Representative was nominated by House Republicans yesterday. He dropped out hours later after he couldn’t secure the 217 votes needed to win the full House vote expected today at noon.
Source: Up First briefing: Concerns over Israel’s war strategy; long COVID origins
The Facebook Suspense: Why Teens Should care about the Internet and Other Social Media Sites? The Case of Markovian Zarifeh
Meta and Facebook were sued by more than 40 states yesterday, accusing the companies of violating consumer protection laws by designing products that harm teen mental health. Meta has raised concerns for teen health, but hasn’t addressed the substance of the lawsuit.
Tensions are heightening in the U.S. ahead of next year’s presidential election, according to a new survey. The Public Religion Research Institute says 75% of Americans surveyed agree U.S. democracy is “at risk” and nearly a quarter agree “true American patriots may have to resort to violence” to save the country.
Low levels of serotonin in the blood could predict long COVID symptoms, according to new research. The study traces a possible cause for persistent symptoms like brain fog, memory loss and fatigue all the way from the gut to the brain.
And for Zarifeh—who has lived in Gaza for 55 years and covered its conflicts for 30 of them—the destruction of White Media’s office was not going to put him off.
That first morning, his team set about rebuilding. Israel had begun to cut off Gaza’s electricity. So they got creative, harnessing solar energy, hunting down generators, and sourcing extra large portable batteries for on-the-go charging. The journalists will often travel by foot across Gaza in order to get fuel for their generators.