The untold story of Arab Jews — and their solidarity with Palestinians

Sigal Samuel

April 11, 2024

Jews from the Arab and Muslim world had a radical vision for Israeli-Palestinian peace.

 

“This is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a speech last October, days into the Israel-Hamas war.

Netanyahu has voiced that idea repeatedly, both before and after the Hamas attack on October 7 — the idea that Israel is a bastion of Western civilization in an uncivilized, backward, and barbarous region.

His mention of “the jungle” recalls a popular Israeli expression, attributed to former Prime Minister Ehud Barak three decades ago, that Israel is “a villa in the jungle.” The jungle, in this case, is the Arab world, and the Palestinians in it are the “beasts” par excellence.

But the idea goes back even further, to the early Zionist thinkers. Theodor Herzl, the Austro-Hungarian father of modern Zionism, wanted to establish a state where Jews could be safe from the violent antisemitism they’d long faced in Europe. He painted a vision of a Jewish state in Palestine that would grant civil rights to the Arabs who remained there (in his diary, he toyed with the idea of transferring some outside the borders). He argued that by bringing Western civilization to the region, Jews would be benefiting the local Arabs economically and culturally — and that the Jewish state would “constitute part of the wall of defense against Asia; we would serve as an outpost of civilization against barbarism.”

This “outpost of civilization” ideology is key to understanding how Israel justified Palestinian dispossession to Israelis and to the world as Jews seeking refuge from persecution settled in Palestine in the 19th and 20th centuries. When Israel was founded in 1948, more than 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or forced to flee their homes in what is now the Jewish state.

But from the early days of the state, there was a group that didn’t buy the justification: Jews with roots in the Arab and Muslim world.

Called Mizrahim in Israel, these Jews today make up the largest ethnic group in the country. They mostly immigrated to Israel after 1948, and for much of the country’s history, they’ve been victims of the same kind of anti-Arab ideology that is wielded against the Palestinians.

For centuries, Mizrahi Jews had enjoyed high status in their countries of origin in the Middle East and North Africa, which ranged from Iraq to Egypt to Morocco. But when they landed in Israel, they found that the new state was ruled by European Jews, called Ashkenazim, who overwhelmingly viewed them as primitive and culturally backward.

Mizrahi intellectuals at the time were quick to link the discrimination against them to the discrimination against Palestinians. Orientalism — Palestinian scholar Edward Said’s term for a European tendency to portray “the East” as exotic, irrational, and uncivilized — was being used to cast both groups as inferior and deny them equal rights. Their struggle was one and the same. And so, starting in the 1950s, Mizrahim and Palestinians formed a solidarity movement, producing everything from joint magazines to joint street protests.

This movement offers a counterpoint to the “villa in the jungle” view of Israel — an alternative vision for how Jews and Palestinians can live together on the land. It also offers a more nuanced way to think about contemporary debates on the meaning of indigeneity, nationhood, and colonialism in Israel-Palestine.

The vision of Mizrahi-Palestinian solidarity seems even more important in light of what has actually happened in more recent decades: Mizrahim drastically moved to the political right, and solidarity with Palestinians became Israel’s road not taken. Understanding that swerve is key to understanding what went wrong in Israel’s history that made it unable to imagine coexistence with an Arab people. And it may be key to building a better future for all.

Who are Mizrahi Jews?

Mizrahi Jews came to Israel from the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia, often from Arab countries. (Although they’re sometimes lumped together with Sephardic Jews, with whom they share some religious customs, the term “Sephardic” technically refers to Jews from Spain and Portugal.) But before emigrating to Israel, they would not have thought of themselves as Mizrahi; that term, meaning “Eastern” or “Oriental” in Hebrew, was coined in 20th-century Israel.

Most would have simply thought of themselves as “Jewish Iraqis,” say, or “Moroccan Jews,” depending on their country of origin. But some described themselves as “al-yahud al-arab,” or “Arab Jews” — and their Muslim neighbors occasionally used that term to describe them, too.

Nowadays, it’s so common to hear about animosity between Jews and Arabs that many people may think the relationship was always a hostile one, and the term “Arab Jew” sounds almost like an oxymoron. But for centuries, Jews were deeply integrated into Arab society, serving as musicians, merchants, and even government ministers. They consumed and produced culture in Arabic. Their philosophy and theology was profoundly influenced by Islamic thought and vice versa. There were Arab Jews as surely as there are Arab Christians.

That said, “Arab Jew” is a contested identity today. Many Jews with roots in the Arab and Muslim world, disillusioned by how that world treated Jews — particularly after Israel’s founding — prefer terms like “Mizrahi.” Still, some scholars refer to them as Arab Jews to emphasize how much they identified with Arab culture before the creation of Israel.

Take my family, for example. My father’s side is from Baghdad, Iraq. A century ago, Jews like us made up one-third of Baghdad’s population. They were prominent in the Iraqi parliament and in the judicial system. They were all the rage in the music scene. In the 1920s, King Faisal I of Iraq affirmed their integral role, declaring, “There is no meaning for words like Jews, Muslims, and Christians within the concept of nationalism. This is simply a country called Iraq and all are Iraqis.”

The story is similar in Morocco, where my mother’s side is from. During World War II, when the French Vichy regime tried to impose Nazi persecution in Morocco, King Mohammed V refused: “There are no Jews in Morocco,” he said. “There are only Moroccans.” There, too, Jews held top positions in government. They cultivated deep friendships with their Muslim neighbors — so deep that, when I visited Morocco and found a 90-year-old man who’d known my family 70 years ago, he got so excited that he shouted my grandfather’s name over and over with glee.

The point is not that Jews were always safe under Arab or Muslim rule — they weren’t. It depended on the time, on the place, and on which empire was in power. For example, Jews experienced persecution in medieval Yemen, and in 1656 they were expelled from Isfahan, Iran.

But if you were a Jew living in the vast and long-lasting Ottoman Empire, you had it relatively good. Muslim rulers viewed Jews as “People of the Book” — fellow monotheists who, though they ranked below Muslims, nevertheless were entitled to respect and protection so long as they paid a special tax.

It was very unlike what was happening in Christian Europe, where Jews were blamed for everything from the death of Jesus to the bubonic plague. On the whole, in the Muslim world, Jews coexisted with their neighbors to a remarkable degree for two millennia.

“It was a comfortable age in comparison to life in Europe,” said Orit Bashkin, a professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of Chicago. Although there were ups and downs, “in general, the Jews in Muslim lands thrived.”

Yet today, the remaining Jewish communities in the Middle East and North Africa are vanishingly small.

Why did Mizrahi Jews leave Arab countries?

While Middle Eastern Jewish communities survived — and often thrived — under Arab or Muslim rule for over 2,000 years, they ultimately could not survive the founding of the state of Israel.

During and after World War II, hundreds of thousands of Jews fleeing genocide in Europe settled in Palestine. By 1947, amid calls for a state that would serve as a safe haven for Jews after the Holocaust, the United Nations partitioned Palestine, which at the time was controlled by the British Empire, into an Arab state and a Jewish state.

But Egypt’s delegate to the UN warned at the time, “The lives of one million Jews in Muslim countries will be jeopardized by the establishment of a Jewish state.” The fear was that in the Arab world, all Jews would be seen as supporters of Zionism, and that Arab countries would turn on Jews within their borders as a result.

Sadly, that’s exactly what happened.

To understand why this was such a seismic moment, we have to remember that this was also a time in world history when the great world empires were being shaken up amid efforts to decolonize. Tectonic shifts were happening in political ideology — including in the Arab world, where the forces of Arab nationalism had been brewing for years.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Arab countries like Iraq and Transjordan had gained independence from European powers, most notably the British. Arab nationalists in these countries pictured the whole Arab world as a single unified nation. It was a pan-Arab vision that stretched to include Palestine — where tensions were rising between Palestinians and Jews as European Jews began immigrating there in greater numbers.

Even before the state of Israel was founded, this put Jews in the Arab world in a confusing position. Would Arab Jews see themselves as part of the Arab nationalist movement? Would other Arabs perceive them that way? The answer varied. Some Jews felt so much a part of Arab culture that they supported Arab nationalism — including in Palestine.

“We are Arabs before we are Jews,” wrote the Iraqi Jewish educator Ezra Haddad in 1936. In 1938, a group of Iraqi Jewish professionals told the press they were “young Arab Jews” who supported an Arab Palestine.

A Jewish family in Baghdad in 1912. Heritage Images/Getty Images

But many of their non-Jewish neighbors perceived the Jews as supporting the British instead of supporting the Arab countries’ efforts to get out from under colonialism. A rift had opened.

Then, the state of Israel was founded, and the rift turned into a gaping chasm. Now Jews in Arab countries were also suspected of supporting the removal of Palestinian Arabs from their land to make way for a Jewish state.

Across the Arab world, Jews became targets of suspicion, viewed as possible spies for Israel. They were sacked from government positions, arrested, and even executed on the accusation of collaborating with Zionist activities. Anti-Jewish riots erupted. Jews’ property was confiscated, their assets frozen. In many cases, conditions became so hostile that they were effectively forced out.

In other cases, Jews left the Arab world because they wanted to. Some felt a deep religious yearning to return to the Holy Land. Besides, Zionist emissaries had been active in these countries since the early 1940s, trying to inspire Jews to immigrate.

In other words, there was both a push and a pull. The net result was an exodus of Middle Eastern and North African Jews to the fledgling state of Israel.

What was life like for Mizrahi Jews in Israel?

Although Zionist envoys had promised Mizrahim they’d find a better life in Israel, in reality, these Jews were in for a massive disappointment.

It started as soon as they got off the planes. First, they were sprayed with the insecticide DDT to “disinfect” and “delouse” them. Then they were sent to live in transit camps known as ma’abarot — tent cities with no electricity, running water, or basic sanitation.

Later, they were moved to poor towns known as development towns, which offered permanent housing but little infrastructure or economic opportunity. Through the 1950s, Israel struggled to build enough housing for the immigrants flooding in from both the Arab world and Europe, but European Jews were given better housing in more desirable cities.

That’s because, in the eyes of the ruling Ashkenazi elite, their fellow European Jews were already civilized, while Mizrahi Jews were primitives — or, as the Mizrahi intellectual Eliyahu Eliachar put it, the “white man’s burden.”

For a painful example of this attitude in action, consider what came to be known as the “Yemenite Children Affair.”

Between 1948 and 1954, somewhere between 1,500 and 5,000 Mizrahi children — mostly Yemenite children — were disappeared from Israeli hospitals, either immediately after birth or when they were taken to see a doctor for some medical problem. The parents were told that the children had died, but no proof was given. Some Mizrahi Jews believed that the babies were given to childless Ashkenazi couples.

In recent years, these claims have been substantiated with the help of DNA testing. The Israeli government minister charged with investigating the affair publicly acknowledged a few years ago that the abductions did take place.

Testimonials show that hospital staff kidnapped the children because of a belief that Mizrahi Jews were unfit parents with too many babies. Giving the kids to Ashkenazi couples would be doing everybody a favor, in their view — including the young state of Israel, which would get a new generation of citizens short of the “backward” Mizrahi influence.

 

Yona Musa, 76, of Yemeni descent, poses with a portrait of her and her husband at her home in Israel in 2016. Musa is one of thousands of Israelis who say their babies were abducted. AFP via Getty Images

It wasn’t just the old European Orientalist ideology that demanded Mizrahi Jews be “civilized” and shed their cultures. It was also a political fact that was distinctly Israeli. In the 1948 war that led to the creation of Israel — which Israelis know as the War of Independence but which Palestinians know as the Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe” — neighboring Arab countries had attacked Israel. “Arab” became synonymous with “enemy,” and anything that threatened to blur the boundary between Jews and Arabs had to be excised.

In the quest to de-Arabize the Arab Jews, Israel invented “Mizrahi” as a social category. Now these Jews would have no use for unacceptable identifiers like “Arab” or “Lebanese” or “Syrian” — they would all just be Mizrahi. (Persians, Turks, and Indians who were not Arab were also included in the umbrella category of Mizrahim because they were perceived as “Oriental” or “Eastern.”)

The repulsion for all things Arab also meant that Mizrahim had to give up their mother tongue, Arabic, which had previously united them with neighbors in their countries of origin and which Israel now viewed as the language of the enemy. It was a painful rupture perhaps best captured in the words of Moroccan-Israeli author Sara Shilo: “Along came the knife of Hebrew and cut us in two.”

The fascinating, little-known history of Mizrahi-Palestinian solidarity

Mizrahis faced such intense discrimination that some came to see themselves as victims of Zionism and warned remaining family members back home not to emigrate to Israel. In fact, thousands of Jews from North Africa and Asia actually left Israel and returned to their former countries.

In one memorable protest in 1951, Indian Jews announced a hunger strike to the death and made a single demand of Israel: “You brought us here — we want you to send us back.” Israel ended up flying them back to Bombay.

Most Mizrahi Jews, however, stayed put in Israel. They did what immigrants do: They tried to assimilate. If that meant shedding their Arabness to buy social capital, so be it.

But there were resisters, too. Mizrahi intellectuals analyzed Zionist ideology and argued that it grew out of 19th-century European nationalist thinking, where colonialism was seen as noble and Orientalism was de rigueur.

After all, in the early 1900s, Herzl had turned to the British for support in creating a Jewish state because, as he said, “the Zionist idea, which is a colonial idea, must be understood in England easily and quickly” given that England was “the first to recognize the necessity of colonial expansion in the modern world.” Colonialism was portrayed as a way to “civilize” the world. Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, unabashedly said, “We do not want Israelis to become Arabs. We are in duty bound to fight against the spirit of the Levant, which corrupts individuals and societies.”

Given this ideology, it was no surprise that Zionism would cast Arabs as uncivilized brutes — whether they were Jewish or Palestinian. The very same ideology was oppressing both groups, Mizrahi intellectuals realized. And so they formed a solidarity movement.

In 1953, Arabic-speaking intellectuals created a magazine called al-Jadid, which published poetry and fiction written by Mizrahi Jews and Palestinians. The editors said they wanted to shine a light on anti-Mizrahi and anti-Arab discrimination “out of the spirit of [establishing] Arab-Jewish solidarity,” according to Bryan K. Roby’s book The Mizrahi Era of Rebellion.

This solidarity extended into the streets. When Mizrahim and Palestinians joined together in grassroots protests, carrying signs that stated “Bread — Work — Peace” and “For a united and persistent struggle,” the Israeli police responded with heavy force.

Even just talking to each other was risky business. As Roby documents, one officer told a Bedouin Arab who had been speaking to Mizrahim in the southern city of Beersheba, “For you it is permitted to visit the city, but it is not right for you to talk to the population.”

Despite what Roby describes as “the government’s divide-and-conquer efforts to plant the seeds of mutual hatred between Palestinian and Mizrahi citizens,” Mizrahim like the Iraqi-born writer Latif Dori urged the creation of a joint socialist youth movement for Mizrahi and Palestinian teens to cement “a bridge of understanding” between the Jewish and Arab peoples. Dori wrote that “our common struggle” is the only way to create a positive future for “the two brotherly peoples” standing “hand in hand in front of the nationalist waves.”

“The real original sin of the Zionist movement was the fact that, in returning to our Homeland, which is part and parcel of the Orient, we did everything we could to estrange ourselves from the Middle East in which we wanted to live,” Mizrahi intellectual Eliyahu Eliachar said in an interview in 1975. Elsewhere, he wrote, “Ultimately, the [Mizrahi] problem is closely bound up with the Arab problem: for it is only when Israel is able to acknowledge to itself that it is, among other things, an Oriental country, that Israelis will be able to prepare themselves for a constructive encounter with the Arabs.”

Charlie Biton (left), head of the Israeli delegation for peace talks with senior Palestine Liberation Organization officials in Budapest, receives a hug from Latif Dori on June 14, 1987, upon his arrival in Tel Aviv. AFP via Getty Images

Mizrahim in those days also felt an affinity with another oppressed group: African Americans. The Ashkenazim for whom they did menial labor often derogatorily referred to Mizrahim as “shvartse khaye,” or black animals. So they reclaimed their “blackness” and found inspiration in the US civil rights struggle.

So much so that by the 1970s, Mizrahim had formed the Israeli Black Panther movement to fight for social justice. Despite then-Prime Minister Golda Meir famously complaining that “they are not nice people,” the Panthers got the government to shift resources toward Mizrahi communities to fight poverty and inadequate housing, at least for a time. Panther leader Charlie Biton — who named his daughter Angela after political activist Angela Davis — met with members of the Palestinian Liberation Organization to rally together those victimized by Israeli policies.

Colonialism, indigeneity, and nationhood — from a Mizrahi perspective

Yet for many Mizrahim, the goal was not to fight the idea of a Jewish homeland per se but to fight Ashkenazi Zionism, which they saw as intrinsically colonial and racist. They recognized that there’s a difference between migrating and colonizing, and they had no problem with Jews returning to live on their ancestral land so long as they did not dispossess or exploit the Palestinians who already lived there.

This view stood in stark contrast to an early Zionist slogan that described Palestine before Jewish settlement as “a land without a people for a people without a land.”

It’s worth taking a moment to understand what that slogan really means. It’s not that early Zionists literally thought Palestine was an uninhabited desert — when Herzl visited, he saw the local Arabs with his own eyes and called them “the indigenous population.”

In fact, European Jews who settled in the land in the early 1900s romanticized the locals as emblems of native authenticity, to the point that it was trendy for young Zionists to dress in Bedouin shepherd garb and sprinkle their Hebrew with Arabic phrases. As one later wrote, “we were dying to be like them … to talk like them, to walk like them, we imitated them in everything … We regarded them as the model of the native.”

Clearly, there were already people on this land. But in the view of many early Zionists, there wasn’t a people. Herzl called them “a mixed multitude,” a hodgepodge of different populations rather than one coherent ethnic group. According to the 19th-century European logic of nation-state building, only a unified nation could stake a nationalist claim, so the local Arabs’ heterogeneity invalidated any rights to the land that they might have on the basis of their indigeneity.

Ashkenazi Zionists were happy to view Arabs as romantic ideals while they lacked power but would reconstruct them as the “other” when they became too much of a threat by opposing Jewish statehood in Palestine. So it was that Zionists went from cosplaying as Arabs before the founding of Israel to discriminating against them afterwards.

A Zionist guard in Bedouin shepherd garb protecting a small settlement in Palestine in the early 1900s. Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Meanwhile, the Ashkenazi Zionist movement was trying to produce a unified Jewish people in order to stake a nationalist claim. To achieve that, it had to strip Mizrahim of any markers of Arab identity, which challenged the picture of unity. Yet this paradoxically showed that peoplehood was not a fixed essence but a manufactured construct, with pieces that could be removed at will. Indigeneity and nationhood were socially constructed categories, constantly shifting depending on the political needs of the day.

Mizrahi intellectuals refused to lift up Jewishness while denigrating Arabness. Instead of agreeing to a form of Zionism that would build a nation-state with one nation at the top, they pushed for a reformulation that would grant equal rights to all inhabitants of the land. The only route to that kind of a universalist vision would be to give up Herzl’s idea that Jews were there to be “an outpost of civilization against barbarism.”

But by the 1970s, historical events had narrowed the space for imagining a version of Israel that could offer everyone equal rights. In the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan, Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria, massively expanding the territory under its control. Roughly 300,000 Palestinians were displaced from the newly occupied territories, and millions came under Israeli military occupation. Though Israel later gave back Sinai, it maintained varying degrees of power over the other areas.

Can Jewish-Palestinian solidarity be more than a romantic vision today?

You might expect, based on their history, that Mizrahi Jews would be associated with the Israeli left today. Yet that’s not the case: Many Mizrahim are now right-wing. In fact, it’s impossible to understand Israel’s lurch to the right and the rise of the hawkish Likud party without understanding the trajectory of the Mizrahim. So, what happened?

For starters, the experience of being kicked out of Arab countries post-1948 naturally soured many Jews’ feelings toward the Arab world. Plus, from the moment they arrived in Israel, the experience of discrimination taught Mizrahim that gaining social status was contingent on rejecting Arabness.

And what better way to reject it than to become the most nationalist and the most anti-Arab of all?

As Smadar Lavie, a Mizrahi anthropologist and author of Wrapped in the Flag of Israel, put it to me, “If your only choice is to wag your racial purity — you need to prove that you’re a good Jew, which means you’re a nationalist Jew — then that’s what you’ll do.”

But there was another factor at play. For the first three decades of Israel’s existence, it was ruled by the Labor Party, which was rooted in both socialism and Ashkenazi Zionism. In practice, that meant building up leftist institutions like the kibbutz — a kind of utopian agricultural commune that stretches back to Zionism’s early days — even while pushing Palestinians off their land and discriminating against Mizrahim (who were more likely to be hired as cheap laborers on a kibbutz than to gain membership in it).

This was the version of “leftism” that Mizrahim encountered. For many, continuing to support the Labor Party when it represented the Ashkenazi Zionists who oppressed them was an extremely unappealing prospect.

Meanwhile, the Israeli right, which favored an even more hardline approach toward the Palestinians, strategically used the left’s discrimination against Mizrahim to its own advantage. From the 1950s to the 1970s, it invested in courting Mizrahim by promising them concrete benefits and upward mobility.

This culminated in a historic election upset in 1977, when Mizrahim helped unseat the governing Labor Party by voting for the right-wing Likud Party led by Menachem Begin. As Mizrahim formed an attachment to Likud, they adopted some of its political views.

Today, Netanyahu, who opposes the idea of a Palestinian state and has presided over the mushrooming of Israeli settlements that undercut the viability of creating one, leads Likud. Mizrahim — who remain economically disadvantaged compared to Ashkenazim — are a crucial part of his base.

Of course, there are some left-wing Mizrahim. They’ve tried to join forces with the Israeli left, which is today Ashkenazi-dominated. But many told me that they’ve come away alienated, feeling Ashkenazim ignore the issues that matter to them — like poverty and housing inequality, which are the legacy of racial discrimination within Israel.

“I really wanted to be part of the peace movement. But I’m not sure the peace movement wanted me,” said Sapir Sluzker-Amran, one of several Mizrahi activists I spoke to who said they’ve felt marginalized, patronized, or tokenized by the left.

These Mizrahim have periodically tried to reboot the old vision of solidarity with Palestinians by founding their own groups, like the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow Coalition in the 1990s, Breaking Walls in 2019, and the Mizrahi Civic Collective in 2023.

Netta Amar-Shiff, a Mizrahi human rights lawyer who helps lead that last group, insists that Israelis’ future is bound up with Palestinians’ future, as the prolonged conflict puts both populations in danger. “I know that if Palestinians are not safe, I won’t be safe. It’s either mutually assured destruction or mutually assured salvation,” she said, sounding a lot like the intellectuals of the 1950s.

Yet now, as then, these Mizrahi bridge-building groups are starved for resources. “There is always a minority that keeps the solidarity alive,” Orit Bashkin told me. “But right now, with very minor exceptions, this solidarity is more or less dead.”

Since Mizrahim make up the largest share of Jews in Israel, that bodes poorly for Israel’s prospects for peace. And it’s not just Mizrahim — over the years, the Israeli public as a whole has been moving to the right.

A few years ago, Sluzker-Amran created a public archive that houses materials related to Mizrahi history, from protest flyers to the writings of bygone intellectuals. She wants people to have a true reckoning with the Mizrahi experience. That experience reveals the particular aspects of Ashkenazi Zionist ideology that made Israel unable to imagine coexistence with an Arab people.

Like a three-sided prism that refracts the light anew, looking at Israel through the triangulated history of Palestinians, Ashkenazim, and Mizrahim allows us to see the problem properly illuminated so we can grope our way toward a solution.

“We always wanted to have the chance to build a movement that pursues justice for all communities — the Palestinians would be a big part of that,” Sluzker-Amran said. “But we’ve never had a chance to really do that experiment. I feel like we’re always sitting in the archive.”

She hopes more people come to see the Mizrahi vision of solidarity like she does: as a grand experiment just waiting to be tried.

 

The ‘Herculean’ Task of Rebuilding a Decimated Gaza Qassam Muaddi

Dima Nazzal / The Conversation

 Palestinians walk through the destruction left by the Israeli air and ground offensive on the Gaza Strip near Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, Monday, April 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Mohammed Hajjar)

Over a decade ago, a United Nations report described the Gaza Strip as virtually unlivable, adding that it would require “Herculean efforts” to change that.

Today, after six months of bombardment, mass displacement and siege by Israel, the task of rebuilding Gaza seems practically unimaginable.

I’m a scholar and a systems engineer who, as research director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems at Georgia Tech, looks at the intersection of public health and education, with a focus on optimizing systems for effective and equitable access to essential services.

I know that in the best of times, designing complex systems that involve people, communities, technologies and limited resources – often with conflicting priorities and impacting multiple segments of society – is an extremely complex challenge. Doing so in the midst of a geopolitical conflict makes the problem seem infeasible.

But what we are dealing with now in Gaza is on a different scale altogether. The enclave is facing cascading crises – a condition in which multiple interrelated crises occur sequentially or simultaneously, each triggering or exacerbating the next. And as hard as it is to look beyond the daily horrors of warfare in Gaza, there will be a time when the world starts to turn to recovery and reconstruction. The concern is that the cascading crises will make this process that much harder and moreover amplify the human costs of this conflict for years to come.

Beyond the death toll

As the 2012 U.N. report questioning Gaza’s “livability” alludes to, the occupied enclave has long faced severe problems relating to providing for the people living in what is one of the most densely populated areas in the world. My mother, who lives in the West Bank, often visited Gaza in her capacity as a member of the Palestinian National Council and the General Secretariat of the General Union of Palestinian Women. She would share tales of its rich culture but also of noticeable issues like the persistent sewage smell and unemployment exceeding 45%.

Of course, after months of Israeli bombardment following the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas, the immediate concern is for people’s lives. Already, the conflict has killed more than 33,000 people in Gaza, according to health authorities in Gaza.

But devastation caused by armed conflicts extends beyond immediate casualties. Causal pathways – that is, chains of events through which the long-term consequences will be felt – mean the current conflict will almost certainly lead to lasting societal and health crises. And these, research has shown, can overshadow the destruction that results from an active conflict both in scope and in severity.

Analysis of 13 recent armed conflicts by the Geneva Declaration Secretariat, a U.N.-backed initiative, found that indirect deaths exceeded direct deaths in 12 of them.

The report places a conservative estimate that for every person directly killed by war, four more are killed by its indirect consequences – things such as waterborne diseases due to the lack of safe, clean water and destruction of water sanitation facilities, or deaths due to birth complications because of health services being disrupted.

Given the scale and scope of destruction of six months of bombing, the consequential impact of war in Gaza may be even worse. And whereas there is usually a lag before these effects are felt, in Gaza they are already occurring. Economic collapse, infrastructure destruction, environmental damage and displacement have created a multidimensional crisis.

Compromised systems

To understand the challenge of overcoming cascading crises in Gaza, it is worth taking a snapshot at the impact of the monthslong conflict.

The war has devastated the enclave’s economy. The U.N estimated in mid-February that almost half of all cropland had been damaged and that some 70% of Gaza’s fishing fleet had reportedly been destroyed.

In the first few months of bombing, nearly 70% of Gaza’s 439,000 homes and about half of all buildings – including commercial outlets – were damaged or destroyed.

Meanwhile, the destruction of Gaza’s health infrastructure has led to about three-quarters of hospitals and two-thirds of primary health care clinics shutting down, leaving only 10 out of 36 hospitals barely functioning – amputations are carried out without anesthesia, and miscarriages have increased by 300%.

This health crisis has been worsened by a lack of clean water and essential medical supplies. It has contributed to soaring rates of infectious diseases, acute respiratory infections, severe dehydration and diarrhea.

Hospitals and clinics struggle to operate without electricity, and many health care workers have been injured or killed, which drastically affects the capacity of the health care system. And many schools and universities have been destroyed, making education inaccessible. When the war does end, Palestinians in Gaza will emerge from conflict with their education, health, housing and economic systems all deeply compromised.

The cost of rebuilding

These factors are all interconnected. In other words, they worsen one another and create a cascading effect of negative outcomes for Palestinians in Gaza. Take, for example, the issue of mass displacement, with 1.7 million people forced from homes that have been largely destroyed: This impacts people’s ability to make a living, leading to increased poverty and a higher risk of malnutrition.

The conflict’s aftermath necessitates rebuilding multiple facets of society, including social structures, health, infrastructure and education – all of which have been disrupted in profound ways.

Take education as another example: The disruption of schooling for children not only affects individual learning and development but also has long-term implications for the overall well-being of the community. The trauma of war means many children will face severe challenges even when the bombs stop. This education loss will impair employment opportunities, which in turn has an effect on the overall economy.

Addressing this will require an integrated approach that not only focuses on the physical rebuilding of schools but also considers the quality of education and psychological and social support for children. The U.N. projects that 1 million children – almost every single child in Gaza – will need mental health and psychosocial support. Meanwhile, the reconstruction of Gaza’s public health systems will require solutions that are not just about addressing immediate medical needs, but that also consider the broader infrastructure – including mental health services and vaccination programs, as well as the provision of essential medications.

Rebuilding cities facing cascading crises the nature of which Gaza is confronted with is a daunting prospect. And while the task may seem insurmountable at the present, with cooperation, coordination and courage it is not unachievable.

But it is a challenge that becomes that much more difficult with each day that the war in Gaza goes on.

Crimes Against Humanity in Gaza

Mel Gurtov

Among the many brutalities in war prohibited under international humanitarian law are starvation of civilian populations and deliberate attacks on aid workers. Here are some new findings worth considering as we ponder the continued decline of human security in the Gaza fighting.

Starvation

By now we are all familiar with the appalling food situation in all parts of Gaza. Now, a multi-party global initiative known for short as the IPC—which stands for Integrated Food Security Phase Classification—has documented and closely analyzed the matter.

Half the Gaza population, 1.1 million people, now face “catastrophic food insecurity.” Unless a cease-fire can be agreed upon, by July just about the entire population will be in that condition. Moreover, “Famine is imminent in the northern governorates and projected to occur anytime between mid-March and May 2024.”

The report further notes:

“The famine threshold for household acute food insecurity has already been far exceeded and, given the latest data showing a steeply increasing trend in cases of acute malnutrition, it is highly likely that the famine threshold for acute malnutrition has also been exceeded.”

Delivery of food and other basic necessities is a major cause of the famine.

“From a pre-escalation average of 500 trucks a day of which 150 carrying food, in the period between 7 October 2023 to 24 February 2024, only 90 trucks per day, of which only 60 carrying food, entered the Gaza Strip. Consequently, virtually all households are skipping meals every day and adults are reducing their meals so that children can eat. In the northern governorates, in nearly two thirds of the households, people went entire days and nights without eating at least 10 times in the last 30 days. In the southern governorates, this applies to one third of the households.”

We need to remember just how destitute the Gaza Strip was before the war. The IPC report reminds us:

“In 2022, the Gaza Strip faced an unemployment rate of nearly 45 percent1 and, by September 2023, the poverty rate was at 60 percent2, among a population that included nearly 70 percent of refugees. Due to severely constrained livelihood opportunities, in 2022, over half of the population was relying on humanitarian assistance as their main income source and about one-third on casual labour, with 70 percent of the population food insecure.”

As I noted in a podcast on opinion polling of Palestinians, many believe the war had finally focused international attention on Gaza’s desperate conditions.

The Vulnerability of Aid Workers

Adding to the food insecurity in Gaza is the perilous conditions for humanitarian relief workers. That was brought home with the death of seven members of the World Central Kitchen in an Israeli raid that the Israeli Defense Forces has called a “tragic mistake,” but which WCK’s Chef José Andrés has called Israel’s “war against humanity itself.”

Prior to that attack, 196 aid workers had been killed in the war between last October and late March. That’s an astounding figure when, according to a group that tracks humanitarian assistance projects, no aid workers had been killed in all the Occupied Territories in the three previous years. Nor has any conflict zone ever experienced so many deaths of aid workers.

The unprecedented number of aid worker deaths in Gaza has raised accusations that relief organizations are being deliberated targeted. As one writer puts it:

“Israeli forces have targeted healthcare facilities, aid convoys, and ambulances with apparent impunity. Aid groups say they have shared the GPS coordinates of their facilities and convoys with Israeli authorities to avoid unintentional bombing – a strategy known as deconfliction – but aid facilities continue to be hit. ‘There is complete disregard for the norms of modern warfare,’ said Bob Kitchen, vice president for emergencies and humanitarian action at the International Rescue Committee.”

Now, according to a report in The New Humanitarian, Israel has set up a separate, privately contracted aid system that it can protect and control, avoiding reliance on the UN’s relief organization as well as on NGOs.

 

 

As Surgeons, We Have Never Seen Cruelty Like Israel’s Genocide in Gaza

Feroze Sidhwa/ Mark Perlmutter

 

Doctors perform surgery at the European Hospital in Khan Younis, Gaza on March 18, 2024.

(Photo: Doaa Albaz/Anadolu via Getty Images)

We urge anyone who reads this to publicly oppose sending weapons to Israel as long as this onslaught continues.

On March 25 the two of us, an orthopedic surgeon and a trauma surgeon, traveled to the Gaza Strip to work at Gaza European Hospital in Khan Younis. We were immediately overwhelmed by the overflown sewage and the distinct smell of gunpowder in the air. We made the short journey from the Rafah crossing to Khan Younis, where Gaza European Hospital stands as one of the last remaining semi-functional hospitals for the 2.5 million human beings—half of them children—in the Gaza Strip. As humanitarian surgeons we thought we had seen all manner of cruelty in the world, but neither one of us has ever experienced anything like what we found when we arrived in Gaza.

We exited the van into a sea of children, all shorter and thinner than they ought to have been. Even over their screams of joy at meeting new foreigners, the snowmobile-like hum of Israeli drones could be heard overhead. It quickly became background noise, an omnipresent reminder that violence and death can rain down on anyone at any time in this besieged and ransacked territory.

Our limited sleep was constantly interrupted by explosions that shook the hospital’s walls and popped our ears, even well after the United Nations Security Council declared a cease-fire must be implemented. When warplanes screamed overhead, everyone braced for a particularly loud and powerful explosion. The timing of these attacks always coincided with “iftar,” when families in this overwhelmingly Muslim county broke the daily fast of Ramadan and were most vulnerable.

We walked through the wards and immediately found evidence of horrifying violence deliberately directed at civilians and even children. A three-year-old boy shot in the head, a 12-year-old girl shot through the chest, an ICU nurse shot through the abdomen, all by some of the best-trained marksmen in the world. Every square inch of the hospital’s floor is taken up with makeshift tents where displaced families live, desperate to find some semblance of safety. They are the lucky several hundred who get to live indoors, unlike the tens of thousands sheltering outside on the hospital’s grounds.

As we got to work we were shocked by the violence inflicted on people. Incredibly powerful explosives ripped apart rock, floors, and walls and threw them through human bodies, penetrating skin with waves of dirt and debris. With the environment literally embedded in our patients’ bodies we have found infection control to be impossible. No amount of medical care could ever compensate for the damage being inflicted here.

As humanitarian trauma surgeons we have both seen incredible suffering. Collectively, we were present at Ground Zero on 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the Boston Marathon bombing, and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti on the first day of these disasters. We have worked in the deprivation of southern Zimbabwe and the horrors of the war in Ukraine. Together we have worked on more than 40 surgical missions in developing countries on three continents in our combined 57 years of volunteering. This long experience taught us that there was no greater pain as a humanitarian surgeon than being unable to provide needed care to a patient.

But that was before coming to Gaza. Now we know the pain of being unable to treat a child who will slowly die, but also alone, because she is the only surviving member of an entire extended family. We have not had the heart to tell these children how their families died: burned until they resembled blistered hotdogs more than human beings, shredded to pieces such that they can only be buried in mass graves, or simply entombed in their former apartment buildings to die slowly of asphyxia and sepsis.

The United States has heavily funded and overwhelmingly armed what is called “the occupation” of Palestine, but the term is misleading. Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann, declared that the existence of the Palestinians was simply “a matter of no consequence.” Thirty years later, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan told the Israeli cabinet that the Palestinians “would continue to live like dogs…and we will see where this process leads.”

Now we know: This is where it leads. It leads to Gaza European Hospital, and to two surgeons realizing that the blood on the floor of the trauma bay and the operating room is dripping from our own hands. We Americans provide the crucial funding, weapons, and diplomatic support for a genocidal assault on a helpless population.

The two of us continue to hope against hope that American politicians, and especially President Joe Biden, will abandon their support for Israel’s war on the Palestinians. If they do not, then we have learned nothing from the history of the past hundred years. Polish poet Stanislaw Jerzy Lec quipped that “no snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible,” but we as Americans must acknowledge that we are responsible for this crime against humanity, now in its seventh month and unfolding in full view of the entire world.

By December, the Israeli Air Force had dropped so much American ordinance on Gaza that it exceeded the explosive force of two of the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima. Nearly 14,000 children have been killed in Gaza in the past six months, more than were killed in all war zones in the entire world in the past four years combined. No conflict of any size in history has ever been this deadly to journalists, healthcare workers, or paramedics. Indeed, we and our entire team lived in constant fear that Israel would attack Gaza European Hospital directly, as it has with so many others. The complete and utter destruction of al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, along with the killing, kidnapping, and torture of the healthcare staff, only heightened this sense of dread.

We came to Gaza as two individual snowflakes trying to stop this avalanche of death and horror, and yet we also feel responsible for it. We urge anyone who reads this to publicly oppose sending weapons to Israel as long as this genocide continues, until the Israeli siege of Gaza is lifted, and until an end to the occupation can be negotiated.

 

‘The colors and joy have disappeared’: Gazans return to decimated Khan Younis

Ruwaida Kamal Amer

After the withdrawal of Israeli troops, displaced Palestinians flooded back into the city to see what remained. Many were shocked by what they found.

Thousands of Palestinians have returned to the city of Khan Younis in recent days after the sudden withdrawal of Israeli forces on Sunday. What awaited them was a scene of total devastation, such that many were unable to even recognize their old homes and streets. Entire neighborhoods have been decimated by bombing, shelling, and bulldozing, leaving barely a trace. Khan Younis is now a city of rubble and ash.

Before the war, the city and its surroundings were home to approximately 400,000 people, making it the Gaza Strip’s second largest municipal area after Gaza City. That number more than doubled within the first weeks of the war, as Israel ordered all residents of the northern Strip to evacuate southward, even as it kept bombing Khan Younis. When Israeli troops fully besieged the city in early February, many Palestinians were forced to escape through a so-called “safe corridor,” which entailed abuse and humiliation for those who made the journey.    

With the army vacating Khan Younis in recent days, the city’s former residents were eager to return after two months or more to see what was left of it. Walking the once bustling and now virtually indiscernible streets, many were shocked by what they found.

“I am a son of this city, but I no longer recognize its streets,” Ahmed Suleiman, a 35-year-old from Khan Younis refugee camp, told +972 Magazine. “I arrived at the Bani Suhaila roundabout [one of the city’s main intersections] and saw great destruction, just a pile of sand — it looked like a desert.”

 

Suleiman, who has been seeking refuge in Rafah after fleeing Khan Younis, described what he found when he reached the refugee camp: “All the single-storey houses were entirely gone, leaving only houses with several floors which showed severe damage from shelling and burning. When I arrived at my apartment building, the door had been destroyed and some of the windows were burned and broken. I entered the building and checked one floor after the other. They were all completely charred. My apartment is on the fourth and final floor; looking at it from the street, I hoped that it might be fine. But when I got there, I found a lot of damage.

“I began to remember the moments I had with my children in this house,” he continued. “I searched a lot for my children’s toys so I could bring them back something from home. I found only a few, some of which were burned and others broken. I took what I could and gave them to my children.”

While inspecting his home, Suleiman met with several of his neighbors who had also returned to see the damage. “Many of them were in a state of shock and sadness from the severe destruction,” he said. “We were asking, Whose house is this? Where did that shop go? How do we find that street? When I saw videos of the city on social media, I would say that the destruction was not that bad. But the reality is different. It’s very scary. You feel that you are in a painful nightmare.

“The city has become gray from the destruction and rubble,” Suleiman went on. “The colors and joy of the city have unfortunately disappeared. I don’t know how I will return with my children and live here without a home. My apartment is completely destroyed. There is no infrastructure in the area. I will wait a little until some of the basics of life return to the city, then I will put up a tent next to the house until it is rebuilt.”

 

‘The streets have turned to sand’

“The city looks like a wilderness area now,” Hanadi Al-Astal, 40, told +972 upon her return to the Khan Younis. She fled the city in December, relocating to the nearby European Hospital where she and her husband work, along with their five children.

“Every day I used to say that I would return to my home soon,” she said. “I was waiting for the moment the army withdrew, so I went with great eagerness after they left on Sunday. I was praying that it would be fine, that I would be able to sleep in my home once again. But while walking along the road, I found great destruction. The streets have turned to sand. I could see some remnants of the petrol station, but it has been completely bulldozed.

“When I approached my house, I saw horrific destruction, and I became very afraid of what I would find inside,” Al-Astal continued. “I was shocked. I entered the house and found it burned. There were no rooms left. The kitchen was burned in its entirety. I searched in what was my children’s room for their clothes and anything useful that I might find. I cried a lot. My heart was burning with all this destruction. I couldn’t believe it. Khan Younis has become a nightmare. It is not fit for life at all.”

When Al-Astal returned to the European Hospital with the few items of clothing that she had managed to recover, her daughter was overjoyed. “She was very happy with them, as if they were new clothes that she was seeing for the first time,” she recounted. “They were her clothes that she used to wear a lot, but she was losing hope of ever seeing them again. She asked me to look for some more of her things, but I don’t know if I will be able to go there again. The house is not suitable for living in. 

 

“My head will explode from thinking about the future,” Al-Astal added. “I don’t know what we will do. Will we go back and put a tent there? Will I travel outside Gaza? I need a lot of money to be able to leave. I don’t know what we’re going to do.”

Mamdouh Khader, 33, said that when he returned to Khan Younis after a two-month displacement in Rafah, he walked around for three days in order to see as much as he could of what remained. “I could not believe the destruction I saw,” he told +972. “Many landmarks were removed from the city. My neighborhood was completely destroyed; it was a mountain of rubble. I could not find my house.

“There was a playground opposite our house that had been completely bulldozed and became mountains of sand,” he continued. “I searched for the mosque next to our house, and it was a pile of rubble due to the bombing that hit the area. I walked toward Nasser Hospital along a sandy street, which had been bulldozed, and sand covered the gates of the schools next to the hospital. The cemeteries behind the hospital had also been bulldozed. I was walking around and asking, What is this area? Where is that place?

Despite the vast destruction, Khader is determined to return to live in the neighborhood that was once his home. “I was very tired during my displacement in Rafah, waiting to return to my city at every moment,” he said. “Unfortunately, the occupation has distorted this beautiful city. I do not know how it will rise again and return to its vitality. The destruction is enormous and cannot be described in words. But I will wait for the water lines to be extended in the area, and I will put up a tent and sleep in it with my children.”