The Armenian War: Restoring the Legacy of the October 7 Synod in Light of the Israeli-Palestinian War and the Israel-Israel-Palestine War
The savagery Hamas committed on Oct. 7 has made reversing this monstrous cycle much harder. It could take a generation. It will require sharing commitment in ways that respect the immense value of every human life. Palestinians will have to oppose attacks on Jewish civilians in order to be supported by Jews, even if they are pariahs among their own people. It will need new types of political community, built around the democratic vision of the world, in Israel-Palestine and around the world. The effort may fail. It has failed before. There is an alternative to descend and wave flags into hell.
I am now going to defend my country against enemies who want to kill my people. Islamic extremists are controlling terrorist organizations and they are the main enemies of ours.
Palestinians aren’t the enemy. The millions of Palestinians who live right here next to us, between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan, are not our enemy. Just like the majority of Israelis want to live a calm, peaceful and dignified life, so do Palestinians. Israelis and Palestinians alike have been in the grip of a religious minority for decades. Both sides have been dragged into violence by the intractable positions of a small group. It doesn’t matter who is more cruel, or more ruthless. The deaths of innocent civilians due to the ideology of both have fueled this conflict.
This war, like others before it, will end sooner or later. I am not sure I will come back from it alive, but I do know that a minute after the war is over, both Israelis and Palestinians will have to reckon with the leaders who led them to this moment. We must wake up and not let the extremists rule. Palestinians and Israelis must denounce the extremists who are driven by religious fanaticism. The Israelis will have to oust National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and their far-right circle from power, and the Palestinians will have to oust the leadership of Hamas.
I spent hours talking to people whose lives have been ruined by war while I was in Armenia last week. In September, thousands of people from Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian-populated enclave inside Azerbaijan, were driven out by Azerbaijan’s lightning military assault. In a crumbling, Soviet-era kindergarten hastily repurposed as a shelter, people told me about their overwhelming sense of loss. A man is repeating, “Homeless, homeless, homeless.”
One could be forgiven for asking, what international system? Money, oil, arms, and interests are things that run the world, and the global institutions seem to be no match for them. The international community has been silent in the face of the nine-month blockade on Nagorno-Karabangh that has left 120,000 people without enough food, medicine or fuel. The United Nations sent its first mission to the enclave in 30 years only after most Armenians had been driven out by the violence. Azerbaijan, too, was frustrated for nearly 30 years by the impotence of international law, as seven additional areas of its sovereign territory conquered by Armenia during the 1990s war over Nagorno-Karabakh remained under control of Armenians.
Israel has ignored international law over the course of a century, expanding settlements, annexing territory conquered in war, and suffocating the population of Gaza with a 16-year blockade. Countries that don’t like international courts — including the United States — largely ignore them. Vladimir Putin will probably avoid prosecution for his invasion of Ukraine. Hamas did not care about the fate of the liberal rules based world order, or for international prosecution, when it slaughtered over 1,300 Israelis. Much of the world will view Israel’s unfolding and brutal retaliation — so far, more than 400 Palestinian children have been killed, according to the Palestinian health ministry — as justified.
The mother of four is caught in Gaza with her family, including a young grandson, and says she feels like she has been abandoned by her country. We are American citizens and we aren’t being treated that way.
Duaa Abufares, 24, a psychology student from Clifton, N.J., has been anxiously awaiting word from her father, Fares, each day this week. He had gone back to Gaza to visit relatives in early September.
Now, Mr. Abufares, who is a U.S. citizen, is sheltering with relatives amid the sounds of nonstop bombing, and calling his five children back in New Jersey during brief periods when he can access electricity. During a video call with them on Thursday, Mr. Abufares, 50, described seeing the bodies of dozens of women and children killed in an airstrike blocks from his family home.
For American citizens stuck in Gaza, there is no arrangement yet. Many said American officials had asked them to fill out forms and wait. They said they were worried about bombs and crossfire hitting them because they didn’t know when they would be able to come home.
John Kirby told reporters that the American government is not allowed to transport citizens out of Gaza due to Israel’s blockade. He said that the White House was in talks with Israel and Egypt about the safe passage of civilians out of Gaza, including Americans, but that no breakthrough had been reached.
Ms. Shehada said her aunt was visiting Gaza now and could not leave. Buildings on either side of where she is staying have already been bombed, Ms. Shehada said, then paused, sighed, and said, “I don’t think they will survive this war.”
Ms. Okal, her children and an adult were at the border when it was bombed. The neighborhood where they were staying was also bombed. Now they have moved into her sister’s apartment, Mr. Okal said.
She said she had the hope that she would make it out alive. “But then once the darkness hits, and the airstrikes get heavier,” she said, she starts to wonder, “is it our turn tonight?”
She said her family had moved south because of the instructions from Israel’s defense forces. She said that they found a family that allowed them in.
Arab citizens of Israel, many of whom want to be identified as Palestinians, make up some 18 percent of the population. They have been caught for years between their loyalty to the state and their desire for an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, the creation of an independent Palestine and a better life for themselves.
Palestinian Americans in the United States were already worried, and were frustrated by recent statements from government officials, universities, and employers that expressed sympathy for Israeli losses of life, but did not mention Palestinian casualties.
Families desperate for their government to step in and help stuck loved ones say the lack of attention has been devastating. More than 1,500 people, including 500 children, have died in Gaza, according to the Gazan Health Ministry.
My parents, who are American citizens, resided in Newark, N.J., where they went to visit my grandmother in Gaza City, where they were trapped for nearly a month.
I hear their voice, and they ask me if I called the embassy. What did they say?’” she said. It’s always a terrible feeling to have to explain to them that the place they’ve lived in for all of their lives isn’t helping them.
She said her parents couldn’t leave on Tuesday because of the border crossing being shut down. The people are moving as they are told to do so.
A nurse based in Milwaukee, Ms. Museitef said she tried to contact the US Embassy in Jerusalem and Cairo, but they did not have any information on when the border would open. Maybe, she said, that what the U.S. State Department does is not what they care about right now.
She claimed that she and her siblings had filled out the forms. My parents are over sixties and they are afraid. She said that she wanted them to come back to her.
Mr. Okal said that he heard from some American authorities on Thursday that they were trying to devise a plan to get U.S. citizens home safely. After being directed to leave south by Israel, his wife made it to a friend’s home near the border.
At the moment, Mr. Okal said his wife and children had lost power and that she was trying to conserve her phone battery. “All I ask her is just text me, tell me you’re still alive,” he said. His 3-year-old daughter is very scared, and has been running a fever, he said. When his 8-week-old son sleeps during the bombings, the child shakes.
She is at the border. He said that they needed to open the door in order to cross over. My wife will die there before they leave, that’s what worries me.
“Just treat us like we’re American,” he said. He said that they are good citizens, too, and that they pay taxes. “I just want the government to treat us equally and care more, a little bit more.”
Gaza’s children are afraid that Israelis will be provoked by the Israeli-Israeli war on 1948–1989: A woman in Israel whose parents and grandparents were evacuated
Mr. Abufares told his children that he does not want to abandon his mother and other relatives as the violence gets worse.
Rania Mustafa, executive director of the Palestinian American Community Center in Clifton, N.J., said she had been frantic all week, fielding requests from people with relatives in Gaza and staying in touch with her own contacts. The scariest moments came when people went dark and it was not known whether they had electricity or not.
Most of Gaza’s residents aren’t from Gaza. They’re the descendants of refugees who were expelled, or fled in fear, during Israel’s war of independence in 1948. Human Rights Watch claims that they live in an “open-air prison” with Israel and Egypt controlling everything from tomatoes to travel documents. The overcrowded cage where the UN declared that it is “unlivable” for many residents because of lack of clean water and electricity is a place where Palestinians can see the land their parents and grandparents called home.
Ms. Shehada is a Palestinian who lives in Israel and is afraid that she may face backlash after the massacre of Israeli civilians by Hamas. She said everyone was in great distress. There is a big fear that there will be a mighty revenge.
Even in more normal times, Lod has deep-seated problems of poverty and crime, with Arab criminal organizations operating with little interference from the Israeli police, people here say. The local government has an Arab and Jewish section.
Now, after this unprecedented killing of Israelis inside Israel, when an enraged Israeli Jewish population is calling for revenge, normal tensions have been raised to almost unbearable levels.
The leading Arab politicians in Israel, like Mansour Abbas and Ayman Odeh, both members of the Knesset, have clearly condemned the actions of Hamas, the Palestinian faction that carried out the attack on Israel, and called for calm.
But people are torn in their feelings, Ms. Shehada said, and so they tend to hide them. Young Arabs at first felt pride in the resistance of Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, she said. In the first few moments after the people of Gaza invasion of Israel, people were happy, they felt that someone was doing something about the situation.
But that surge of pride faded quickly, she said. Ms Shehada said that before we saw the images of slaughter, kidnap and rape, this was before they did it. This isn’t a legitimate form of struggle.
On the Security Minister and Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and the Arab Journalist Mohammad Magadli
The national security minister and leader of the Jewish Power party, Itamar Ben-Gvir, is responsible for the police. Mr Ben-Gvir has supported attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank and has also supported tensions with Israel’s Arab population.
He caused a stir in the Muslim world when he led more than 1,000 ultranationalist settlers to the Aqsa Mosque compound in late July, and Hamas stated it is fighting to defend Al Aq.
Mr. Ben-Gvir has spoken this week of renewed Arab-Israeli violence in cities like Lod and ordered the police to prepare for riots, which Ms. Shehada and others view as a dangerous provocation.
The prominent Arab journalist Mohammad Magadli is more positive. The shock of the past week brings a sort of calm to him. Unlike in 2021, he said, in mixed cities, “the Arab and Jewish societies are more aware of each other’s pain and can understand how destructive the consequences can be if they don’t consider each other’s feelings.”
There is greater responsibility between the two societies, even among the leaders who called for calming the situation, says Mr. Magadli.
Mousa Mousa, 23, an Israeli Arab in a Hebrew-language T-shirt, and his juice stall are selling juice in the market in Ramla which was almost empty. “I’m not sleeping,” he said. “I’m afraid of the reaction of the villagers on the road to what Hamas did.”
He said that he had contempt for politicians who spread hate in each community. Mr. Mousa said that they thrive on division. Politics are based on that.
Mahmoud Muna is a Palestinian, not a citizen. Israel and Israel a la Gaza, israel and egypt agreement on safe passage for americans from gaza a us official
In normal times they tend to check out young Arab men. Adham says he is being stopped for the third time on his way from his father’s shop to his home in the Old City. Each time, he is asked to show his ID card, lift his shirt and drop his trousers. His father asked that their last name be withheld for fear of their security in the current environment.
Like many young men here, he has little respect for Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority. He is a traitor because he cooperated with Israel on security in the occupied West Bank.
Most Palestinians in East Jerusalem do not see themselves as being part of Israel and feel less torn between their loyalties. In 1967, when Israel annexed East Jerusalem, it made the Palestinians there legal residents, but not citizens.
Mahmoud Muna runs one of Jerusalem’s finest bookshops, catering to everyone. He favors a unitary state based on democracy and equal rights and is a Palestinian from Jerusalem. He sees himself as a potential example of an integrated state.
Mr. Muna has been stopped twice for checks by the police over the past five days, he always has a lot of arguments with the police. “Being past 40 helps you keep your cool,” he said.
Friends who go to work in West Jerusalem tell him that “everyone is stressed and angry, but everyone is pretending or putting on a face.” Mr. Muna said people should say banalities if they want to say anything at all.
Source: ‘Hundreds of Thousands’ of Gazans Displaced Over 12 Hours, U.N. Says
The New Holocaust: Observations of the First Day of the Israeli-Israel War and the Relics of a New Holocaust, a Memorino
He said that this is a good time to notice things we haven’t noticed before, like the absence of acquaintances who have been called up as reserve soldiers.
Mr. Muna said this week has encapsulated the conflict. “The high level of nationalism, of we and them, cannot be higher than now,” he said. Resistance is considered terrorism and vice versa, as well as civilians and army, all of which are different terms. Palestinians call their mass displacement and dispossession during the 1948 Arab – Israeli war a “Nakba” or catastrophe, which is what one side refers to as a new Holocaust.