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My family’s 1948 Israeli trauma has me torn between anger and compassion right now
(JTA) — The projectile landed when the kids were playing in the courtyard.
Well, most of the kids. The 9-year-old was watching from the porch of the ramshackle Jerusalem home, tentative but curious. Suddenly he saw them stop playing.
His older brother fell first. A second later his younger sister dropped. And then his mother was on the ground.
The boy ran down the porch steps. The brother and sister were nearly motionless, blood leeching out. He prodded them — nothing. But his mother was alive. He could see her writhing, grabbing her leg, and he could see the giant metallic fragments protruding from it. “Ezra, ezra,” the boy screamed in Hebrew, “help, help.” But this was a back-alley in a poor neighborhood. No one was rushing to help.
The time was June 1948. The conflict in which the shell was lobbed — from just outside the courtyard — was the first Israeli Arab War. And the boy was my father.
His brother and sister were dead before the paramedics could arrive. But his mother was alive. Sort of. Just two months later, she would die in a Jerusalem hospital from all that lodged shrapnel — on the day before Tisha B’Av, the national Jewish day of mourning. All tragedies come at strange times, but this was the strangest. Every Jew in Jerusalem that summer was experiencing the ecstasy of a new state, the fulfillment of a 2,000-year-old dream. My father was experiencing becoming an orphan.
And my grandfather, off at his milk-delivery job when the attack happened, was experiencing overwhelming uncertainty, widowhood, single-fatherhood. As a teenager two decades earlier he had fled to Mandatory Palestine to escape pogrom-filled White Russia, hoping to avoid the antisemitic violence befalling everyone around him. Now here he was, just one more victim of it. The setting changes. The pain, he might say (if he could ever bring himself to talk about it), stays the same.
Three other siblings survived the attack — my father’s 4-year-old sister and 12-year-old brother, both wounded while playing in the courtyard, along with a baby sleeping inside.
All of them had their existence turned upside down — shaken and deposited at the side of life’s road by an event whose causes they barely understood and whose consequences they couldn’t begin to grip. But the 9-year-old suffered in the unique way 9-year-olds suffer, old enough to register but too young to fathom. He didn’t know he’d never be the same. He just wondered if he could ever again be anything.
More than 50 people were killed and 88 wounded in a blast in the Jewish section of Jerusalem, Feb. 22, 1948. (Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)
We were sitting in his Brooklyn apartment recently watching the news — I and my father, now 84 and long a naturalized middle-class American, the accent and most visible traces of his Israeli roots scrubbed away. He had arrived in this country with what remained of his family two years after the attack and tried to put it behind him. Like trying to put the backseat of the car behind you.
“Thousands of wounded, alive but carrying with them the bullet holes and the shrapnel wounds and the memory of what they endured,” President Biden was saying from the TV about the Oct 7 attacks. I stole a sidelong glance at my father; I didn’t need to see the tears welling up in his eyes to know they were there.
“You all know these traumas never go away,” Biden finished from the screen.
In all the decades I’ve known my father, the memory of that day has never been more than a minute’s distance from his consciousness. How could it? Like an at-ease soldier, it lingers just out of frame, waiting for the order to snap to attention and make a march on your soul.
But this time was different. As the Internet and television overflowed with images of blood-soaked cribs, children stolen from their homes, parents burned to death in their safe rooms, grandparents executed on their front lawns, his mind appeared to be filling with a new kind of horror.
This wasn’t the abstraction of Israeli soldiers slain in war or even the vivid images of Jewish civilians dying in terrorist attacks on buses, as they did in droves in the second intifada of the early 2000’s. This was people murdered by terrorists in the one place they were sure violence would never visit — their own homes.
A home on Kibbutz Kfar Aza, reduced to rubble on Oct. 7, is seen one month after Hamas’ attack on Israel. (Deborah Danan)
When my father goes online to see young Israelis watching their parents die in front of them — or to hear of the trauma the recently released 9-year-old Irish-Israeli hostage Emily Hand has been experiencing — he isn’t just absorbing the general pain of human suffering. He is watching a YouTube video of his own past.
And so, in a sense, am I. As someone who was told this story from the earliest age – who still tearfully recalls my father taking me, as a 9-year-old boy myself, to the courtyard in Jerusalem where everything happened so he could describe it in whispered tones — I’ve eternally been under the toxic spell of that June 1948 day. Angry thoughts would sometimes follow me, and I would stew with retributive feelings. These were faceless devils come to steal our lives. And they deserved a devil’s fate in return.
I carried feelings of that day with me into a post-high school gap year in Israel, as a frequent returnee to the country to see friends and family, and even as a journalist occasionally doing stories from the Middle East. Carried it with me as trauma; carried it with me as a source of so many ambivalences.
My internalization of that tragic day is in a tug, constantly, with the progressive views I hold elsewhere. I chose to do that gap year at a politically left-leaning school – in the West Bank. I became a solid two-stater and Yitzhak Rabin acolyte who nonetheless could feel an ineffable comfort when hearing family talk hawkishly about jihadism and the remedies it requires.
I hear cable-news pundits speculate about the conflict’s root causes, and am filled with ire and victimhood; what do root causes have to do with your family being killed in their own home? What possible rights can these armchair people — who will never experience a minute of political violence in their lives – possibly hold that allows them to tell me how to feel, to make so much empty noise? Rancor is the privilege of the unaffected.
And then I go the opposite way. I watch the bombardment of Gaza and I am drawn inexorably to the parallels; that Palestinian boy in the photograph losing a parent is not at all different from him. I hear a rabbi preach about the Jewish respect for sanctity of life and wonder how the young Gazan doppelganger would feel about that statement. It can make me double down on grievance, but my family’s history also makes me attuned to political suffering broadly; my grasp of what an enemy’s violence can do to you equips my radar to detect what my side’s violence has done to them.
A boy plays in the rubble of destroyed houses and buildings in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on Dec. 18, 2023. (Mohammed Abed/AFP via Getty Images)
Knowing that so much of my family has drowned in this infinity pool of violence has a paradoxical effect: It makes me at once more angry on behalf of my people and more sympathetic to those arrayed against them.
“I am too progressive for the Zionists and too Zionist for the progressives,” I tell a close confidante, and she hears and smiles sympathetically. Perhaps that is my place, tilted between trauma and empathy. Perhaps that is the curse of the survivor’s son. You are destined to live in the lonely middle — haunted by everything, aligned with no one.
My father, on the other hand, can live unburdened by such complexities, a firsthand victim free to dig into the anger and pain.
And he does. As we watch the news he tells me plaintively of the Jewish suffering he sees, stopping himself not because he doesn’t want to finish but because he can’t, tears choking away what’s left of his dispassion. All of these Jewish survivors are him, and he knows with a prophet’s clarity what awaits them in the lost and wandering years ahead. I listen to him and say nothing, hoping in the silence there is comfort.
A militancy is animating him — to aggressively attack Hamas until every last hint of a threat is wiped off the earth. He doesn’t shout it from the rooftops, and he doesn’t explicate it in detail. But his emotions are clear every time his eyes get puffy and in all the moments his voice drops to a hush, every night and every morning since the weekend of Oct. 7, no end in sight. The Israeli army needs to entrench themselves in Gaza, or Lebanon, or Iran, or anywhere else they need to go to decisively wipe out anyone who had a hand in this, who could ever have a hand in something like this.
His anger isn’t revenge. It isn’t even anger in the way any human, invoking ethnic pride or historical specters, might feel anger. His anger is of the most personal sort — of the most personal mission.
I might disagree with his hawkishness or lack of pragmatism. But how could I ever judge it? It comes from a place of bottomless hurt, of wanting to do anything possible to reverse that hurt for him. And if not for him, then for the next him – for all the Jews who have not yet known his pain, and who should never know his pain. If his mother died for anything, it is this: to prevent future mothers from dying.
It is his deeply understandable impulse that makes me sad – not for my father but for a region. Because it is this deeply understandable impulse that will ensure the violence never stops; it is this deeply understandable impulse that is the reason the problem may never be solved.
Not inept, corrupt, self-interested leaders, though those don’t help. Not depraved terrorists or zealous ideologies, though those always make things worse. No, it might never stop because of all the people who make the work of those types possible — who give them both incentive and means.
Because of all of those with bottomless hurt, with deep grievance, with a hawkishness I could never judge. So many of them, over a period of 75 years, on so many religious and political and ethnic sides. So many more being created on every single one of these dark days.
A woman wounded in the bombing of the Jewish Agency building in Jerusalem is ferried to a hospital, March 15, 1948. (Getty Images Archive)
Every time I hear about a civilian killed I don’t see one more number ticking up on some kind of military or moral odometer. I see that person’s children, and all of their children’s children, now themselves laden with irremediable grievance — with a reason to encourage violence that surely, this time, will prevent future violence. I see clusters of permanently tormented survivors, multiplying and metastasizing like some kind of biology educational video, and soon I can no longer count each one or apprehend their number. I see my father, and me.
The conflict may play out with weapons and rhetoric, on a board of land and geopolitics. But it is powered by people who feel they have lost something. And these losses, by definition, can never be diminished; these losses, by their very painful nature, continue to pile on top of each other until there is no longer just a mass of traumatized people like my father, crying in their apartments, but entire cities of them, shouting to the heavens, and to their leaders.
You would think feeling referred pain from a victimized father would make a person less understanding of an enemy’s experience. And sometimes it does; I’d be lying if I said in the past two months I haven’t had flashbacks to those childhood revenge fantasies. But then I remember the thousands of people like my father multiplying everywhere, and I go the other way. Toward carrying the trauma of my people, but because of that trauma also feeling empathy for the other. The lonely middle, alienating as it is, is large and accommodating.
In the face of this, all I could do is to keep broadcasting the pain of my father and his kind, to tell the stories of all those people who have lost and don’t deserve to lose anymore, in the hope it finally slows down the grisly momentum.
In the hope no son ever again has to sit watching the news with his father and know, without looking, the tears welling up in his eyes.
—
The post My family’s 1948 Israeli trauma has me torn between anger and compassion right now appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Trump Proposes Resettlement of Gazans as Netanyahu Visits White House
US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meet at the White House in Washington, DC, US, Feb. 4, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz
US President Donald Trump on Tuesday proposed the resettlement of Palestinians from Gaza to neighboring countries, calling the enclave a “demolition site” and saying residents have “no alternative” as he held critical talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House.
“[The Palestinians] have no alternative right now” but to leave Gaza, Trump told reporters before Netanyahu arrived. “I mean, they’re there because they have no alternative. What do they have? It is a big pile of rubble right now.”
Trump repeated his call for Egypt, Jordan, and other Arab states in the region to take in Palestinians from Gaza after nearly 16 months of war there between Israel and the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, which ruled the enclave before the war and remains the dominant faction.
Arab leaders have adamantly rejected Trump’s proposal. However, Trump argued on Tuesday that Palestinians would benefit from leaving Gaza and expressed astonishment at the notion that they would want to remain.
“Look, the Gaza thing has not worked. It’s never worked. And I feel very differently about Gaza than a lot of people. I think they should get a good, fresh, beautiful piece of land. We’ll get some people to put up the money to build it and make it nice and make it habitable and enjoyable,” Trump said.
Referring to Gaza as a “pure demolition site,” the president said he doesn’t “know how they [Palestinians] could want to stay” when asked about the reaction of Palestinian and Arab leaders to his proposal.
“If we could find the right piece of land, or numerous pieces of land, and build them some really nice places, there’s plenty of money in the area, that’s for sure,” Trump continued. “I think that would be a lot better than going back to Gaza, which has had decades and decades of death.”
However, Trump clarified that he does “not necessarily” support Israel permanently annexing and resettling Gaza.
Trump later made similar remarks with Netanyahu at his side in the Oval Office, suggesting that Palestinians should leave Gaza for good “in nice homes and where they can be happy and not be shot, not be killed.”
“They are not going to want to go back to Gaza,” he said.
Trump did not offer any specifics about how a resettlement process could be implemented.
The post-war future of Palestinians in Gaza has loomed as a major point of contention within both the United States and Israel. The former Biden administration emphatically rejected the notion of relocating Gaza civilians, demanding a humanitarian aid “surge” into the beleaguered enclave.
Trump has previously hinted at support for relocating Gaza civilians. Last month, the president said he would like to “just clean out” Gaza and resettle residents in Jordan or Egypt.
Steve Witkoff, the US special envoy to the Middle East, defended Trump’s comments in a Tuesday press conference, arguing that Gaza will remain uninhabitable for the foreseeable future.
“When the president talks about ‘cleaning it out,’ he talks about making it habitable,” Witkoff said. “It is unfair to have explained to Palestinians that they might be back in five years. That’s just preposterous.
Trump’s comments were immediately met with backlash, with some observers accusing him of supporting an ethnic cleansing plan. However, proponents of the proposal argue that it could offer Palestinians a better future and would mitigate the threat posed by Hamas.
Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists started the Gaza war on Oct. 7, 2023, when they invaded southern Israel, murdered 1,200 people, and kidnapped 251 hostages back to Gaza while perpetrating widespread sexual violence in what was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.
Israel responded with a military campaign aimed at freeing the hostages and dismantling Hamas’s military and governing capabilities in neighboring Gaza.
Last month, both sides reached a Gaza ceasefire and hostage-release deal brokered by the US, Egypt, and Qatar.
Under phase one of the agreement, Hamas will, over six weeks, free a total of 33 Israeli hostages, eight of whom are deceased, and in exchange, Israel will release over 1,900 Palestinian prisoners, many of whom are serving multiple life sentences for terrorist activity. Meanwhile, fighting in Gaza will stop as negotiators work on agreeing to a second phase of the agreement, which is expected to include Hamas releasing all remaining hostages held in Gaza and the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from the enclave.
The ceasefire and the future of Gaza were expected to be key topics of conversation between Trump and Netanyahu, along with the possibility of Israel and Saudi Arabia normalizing relations and Iran’s nuclear program.
Riyadh has indicated that any normalization agreement with Israel would need to include an end to the Gaza war and the pathway to the formation of a Palestinian state.
However, perhaps the most strategically important subject will be Iran, particularly how to contain its nuclear program and combat its support for terrorist proxies across the Middle East. In recent weeks, many analysts have raised questions over whether Trump would support an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, which both Washington and Jerusalem fear are meant to ultimately develop nuclear weapons.
Netanyahu on Tuesday was the first foreign leader to visit the White House since Trump’s inauguration last month.
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Trump Reimposes ‘Maximum Pressure’ on Iran, Aims to Drive Oil Exports to Zero
US President Donald Trump speaks at the White House, in Washington, DC, Feb. 3, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz
US President Donald Trump on Tuesday restored his “maximum pressure” campaign on Iran that includes efforts to drive its oil exports down to zero in order to stop Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
Ahead of his meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump signed the presidential memorandum reimposing Washington’s tough policy on Iran that was practiced throughout his first term.
As he signed the memo, Trump described it as very tough and said he was torn on whether to make the move. He said he was open to a deal with Iran and expressed a willingness to talk to the Iranian leader.
“With me, it’s very simple: Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said. Asked how close Tehran is to a weapon, Trump said: “They’re too close.”
Iran‘s mission to the United Nations in New York did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump has accused former President Joe Biden of failing to rigorously enforce oil-export sanctions, which Trump says emboldened Tehran by allowing it to sell oil to fund a nuclear weapons program and armed militias in the Middle East.
Iran is “dramatically” accelerating enrichment of uranium to up to 60 percent purity, close to the roughly 90 percent weapons-grade level, the UN nuclear watchdog chief told Reuters in December. Iran has denied wanting to develop a nuclear weapon.
Trump‘s memo, among other things, orders the US Treasury secretary to impose “maximum economic pressure” on Iran, including sanctions and enforcement mechanisms on those violating existing sanctions.
It also directs the Treasury and State Department to implement a campaign aimed at “driving Iran‘s oil exports to zero.” US oil prices pared losses on Tuesday on the news that Trump planned to sign the memo, which offset some weakness from the tariff drama between Washington and Beijing.
Tehran’s oil exports brought in $53 billion in 2023 and $54 billion a year earlier, according to US Energy Information Administration estimates. Output during 2024 was running at its highest level since 2018, based on OPEC data.
Trump had driven Iran‘s oil exports to near-zero during part of his first term after re-imposing sanctions. They rose under Biden’s tenure as Iran succeeded in evading sanctions.
The Paris-based International Energy Agency believes Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and other OPEC members have spare capacity to make up for any lost exports from Iran, also an OPEC member.
PUSH FOR SANCTIONS SNAPBACK
China does not recognize US sanctions and Chinese firms buy the most Iranian oil. China and Iran have also built a trading system that uses mostly Chinese yuan and a network of middlemen, avoiding the dollar and exposure to US regulators.
Kevin Book, an analyst at ClearView Energy, said the Trump administration could enforce the 2024 Stop Harboring Iranian Petroleum (SHIP) law to curtail some Iranian barrels.
SHIP, which the Biden administration did not enforce strictly, allows measures on foreign ports and refineries that process petroleum exported from Iran in violation of sanctions. Book said a move last month by the Shandong Port Group to ban US-sanctioned tankers from calling into its ports in the eastern Chinese province signals the impact SHIP could have.
Trump also directed his UN ambassador to work with allies to “complete the snapback of international sanctions and restrictions on Iran,” under a 2015 deal between Iran and key world powers that lifted sanctions on Tehran in return for restrictions on its nuclear program.
The US quit the agreement in 2018, during Trump‘s first term, and Iran began moving away from its nuclear-related commitments under the deal. The Trump administration had also tried to trigger a snapback of sanctions under the deal in 2020, but the move was dismissed by the UN Security Council.
Britain, France, and Germany told the United Nations Security Council in December that they are ready — if necessary — to trigger a snapback of all international sanctions on Iran to prevent the country from acquiring a nuclear weapon.
They will lose the ability to take such action on Oct. 18 when a 2015 UN resolution expires. The resolution enshrines Iran‘s deal with Britain, Germany, France, the United States, Russia, and China that lifted sanctions on Tehran in exchange for restrictions on its nuclear program.
Iran‘s UN ambassador, Amir Saeid Iravani, has said that invoking the “snap-back” of sanctions on Tehran would be “unlawful and counterproductive.”
European and Iranian diplomats met in November and January to discuss if they could work to defuse regional tensions, including over Tehran’s nuclear program, before Trump returned.
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Trump Stops US Involvement With UN Rights Body, Extends UNRWA Funding Halt
An UNRWA aid truck at the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip. Photo: Reuters/Amr Abdallah Dalsh
US President Donald Trump on Tuesday ordered an end to US engagement with the United Nations Human Rights Council and continued a halt to funding for the UN Palestinian relief agency UNRWA.
The move coincides with a visit to Washington by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has long been critical of UNRWA, accusing it of anti-Israel incitement and its staff of being “involved in terrorist activities against Israel.”
During Trump‘s first term in office, from 2017-2021, he also cut off funding for UNRWA, questioning its value, saying that Palestinians needed to agree to renew peace talks with Israel, and calling for unspecified reforms.
The first Trump administration also quit the 47-member Human Rights Council halfway through a three-year term over what it called chronic bias against Israel and a lack of reform. The US is not currently a member of the Geneva-based body. Under former President Joe Biden, the US served a 2022-2024 term.
A council working group is due to review the US human rights record later this year, a process all countries undergo every few years. While the council has no legally binding power, its debates carry political weight and criticism can raise global pressure on governments to change course.
Since taking office for a second term on Jan. 20, Trump has ordered that the US withdraw from the World Health Organization and from the Paris climate agreement — also steps he took during his first term in office.
The US was UNRWA’s biggest donor — providing $300 million-$400 million a year — but Biden paused funding in January 2024 after Israel accused about a dozen UNRWA staff of taking part in the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Palestinian terrorist group Hamas that triggered the war in Gaza.
The US Congress then formally suspended contributions to UNRWA until at least March 2025.
The United Nations has said that nine UNRWA staff may have been involved in the Oct. 7, 2023, attack and were fired. A Hamas commander in Lebanon — killed in September by Israel — was also found to have had a UNRWA job.
An Israeli ban went into effect on Jan. 30 that prohibits UNRWA from operating on its territory or communicating with Israeli authorities. UNRWA has said operations in Gaza and West Bank will also suffer.
The post Trump Stops US Involvement With UN Rights Body, Extends UNRWA Funding Halt first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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