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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.
—
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Harvard Faculty Oppose Deal With Trump, Distancing From Hamas Apologists: Crimson Poll
Harvard University president Alan Garber attending the 373rd Commencement Exercises at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, May 23, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder
A recently published Harvard Crimson poll of over 1,400 Harvard faculty revealed sweeping opposition to interim university President Alan Garber’s efforts to strike a deal with the federal government to restore $3 billion in research grants and contracts it froze during the first 100 days of the second Trump administration.
In the survey, conducted from April 23 to May 12, 71 percent of arts and sciences faculty oppose negotiating a settlement with the administration, which may include concessions conservatives have long sought from elite higher education, such as meritocratic admissions, viewpoint diversity, and severe disciplinary sanctions imposed on students who stage unauthorized protests that disrupt academic life.
Additionally, 64 percent “strongly disagree” with shuttering diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, 73 percent oppose rejecting foreign applicants who hold anti-American beliefs which are “hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence,” and 70 percent strongly disagree with revoking school recognition from pro-Hamas groups such as the Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC).
“More than 98 percent of faculty who responded to the survey supported the university’s decision to sue the White House,” The Crimson reported. “The same percentage backed Harvard’s public rejection of the sweeping conditions that the administration set for maintaining the funds — terms that included external audits of Harvard’s hiring practices and the disciplining of student protesters.”
Alyza Lewin of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law told The Algemeiner that the poll results indicate that Harvard University will continue to struggle to address campus antisemitism on campus, as there is now data showing that its faculty reject the notion of excising intellectualized antisemitism from the university.
“If you, for example, have faculty teaching courses that are regularly denying that the Jews are a people and erasing the Jewish people’s history in the land of Israel, that’s going to undermine your efforts to address the antisemitism on your campus,” Lewin explained. “When Israel is being treated as the ‘collective Jew,’ when the conversation is not about Israel’s policies, when the criticism is not what the [International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism] would call criticism of Israel similar to that against any other country, they have to understand that it is the demonization, delegitimization, and applying a double standard to Jews as individuals or to Israel.”
She added, “Faculty must recognize … the demonization, vilification, the shunning, and the marginalizing of Israelis, Jews, and Zionists, when it happens, as violations of the anti-discrimination policies they are legally and contractually obligated to observe.”
The Crimson survey results were published amid reports that Garber was working to reach a deal with the Trump administration that is palatable to all interested parties, including the university’s left-wing social milieu.
According to a June 26 report published by The Crimson, Garber held a phone call with major donors in which he “confirmed in response to a question from [Harvard Corporation Fellow David M. Rubenstein] that talks had resumed” but “declined to share specifics of how Harvard expected to settle with the White House.”
On June 30, the Trump administration issued Harvard a “notice of violation” of civil rights law following an investigation which examined how it responded to dozens of antisemitic incidents reported by Jewish students since the 2023-2024 academic year.
The correspondence, sent by the Joint Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, charged that Harvard willfully exposed Jewish students to a torrent of racist and antisemitic abuse following the Hamas-led Oct. 7 massacre, which precipitated a surge in anti-Zionist activity on the campus, both in the classroom and out of it.
“Failure to institute adequate changes immediately will result in the loss of all federal financial resources and continue to affect Harvard’s relationship with the federal government,” wrote the four federal officials comprising the multiagency Task Force. “Harvard may of course continue to operate free of federal privileges, and perhaps such an opportunity will spur a commitment to excellence that will help Harvard thrive once again.”
The Trump administration ratcheted up pressure on Harvard again on Wednesday, reporting the institution to its accreditor for alleged civil rights violations resulting from its weak response to reports of antisemitic bullying, discrimination, and harassment following the Oct. 7, 2023 massacre.
Citing Harvard’s failure to treat antisemitism as seriously as it treated other forms of hatred in the past, The US Department of Educationthe called on the New England Commission of Higher Education to review and, potentially, revoke its accreditation — a designation which qualifies Harvard for federal funding and attests to the quality of the educational services its provides.
“Accrediting bodies play a significant role in preserving academic integrity and a campus culture conducive to truth seeking and learning,” said Secretary of Education Linda McMahon. “Part of that is ensuring students are safe on campus and abiding by federal laws that guarantee educational opportunities to all students. By allowing anti-Semitic harassment and discrimination to persist unchecked on its campus, Harvard University has failed in its obligation to students, educators, and American taxpayers.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Balancing Act: Lebanese President Aoun Affirms Hope for Peace with Israel, Balks At Normalization
Lebanese President Joseph Aoun attends a joint press conference with French President Emmanuel Macron at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, March 28, 2025. REUTERS/Sarah Meyssonnier/Pool
Lebanese President Joseph Aoun on Friday carefully affirmed his country’s desire for peace with Israel while cautioning that Beirut is not ready to normalize relations with its southern neighbor.
Aoun called for a full Israeli withdrawal from Lebanese territory, according to a statement from his office, while reaffirming his government’s efforts to uphold a state monopoly on arms amid mounting international pressure on the Iran-backed terror group Hezbollah to disarm.
“The decision to restrict arms is final and there is no turning back on it,” Aoun said.
The Lebanese leader drew a clear distinction between pursuing peace and establishing formal normalization in his country’s relationship with the Jewish state.
“Peace is the lack of a state of war, and this is what matters to us in Lebanon at the moment,” Aoun said in a statement. “As for the issue of normalization, it is not currently part of Lebanese foreign policy.”
Aoun’s latest comments come after Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar expressed interest last month in normalizing ties with Lebanon and Syria — an effort Jerusalem says cannot proceed until Hezbollah is fully disarmed.
Earlier this week, Aoun sent his government’s response to a US-backed disarmament proposal as Washington and Jerusalem increased pressure on Lebanon to neutralize the terror group.
While the details remain confidential, US Special Envoy Thomas Barrack said he was “unbelievably satisfied” with their response.
This latest proposal, presented to Lebanese officials during Barrack’s visit on June 19, calls for Hezbollah to be fully disarmed within four months in exchange for Israel halting airstrikes and withdrawing troops from its five occupied posts in southern Lebanon.
However, Hezbollah chief Sheikh Naim Qassem vowed in a televised speech to keep the group’s weapons, rejecting Washington’s disarmament proposal.
“How can you expect us not to stand firm while the Israeli enemy continues its aggression, continues to occupy the five points, and continues to enter our territories and kill?” said Qassem, who succeeded longtime terrorist leader Hassan Nasrallah after Israel killed him last year.
“We will not be part of legitimizing the occupation in Lebanon and the region,” the terrorist leader continued. “We will not accept normalization [with Israel].”
Last fall, Israel decimated Hezbollah’s leadership and military capabilities with an air and ground offensive, following the group’s attacks on Jerusalem — which they claimed were a show of solidarity with the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas amid the war in Gaza.
In November, Lebanon and Israel reached a US-brokered ceasefire agreement that ended a year of fighting between the Jewish state and Hezbollah.
Under the agreement, Israel was given 60 days to withdraw from southern Lebanon, allowing the Lebanese army and UN forces to take over security as Hezbollah disarms and moves away from Israel’s northern border.
However, Israel maintained troops at several posts in southern Lebanon beyond the ceasefire deadline, as its leaders aimed to reassure northern residents that it was safe to return home.
Jerusalem has continued carrying out strikes targeting remaining Hezbollah activity, with Israeli leaders accusing the group of maintaining combat infrastructure, including rocket launchers — calling this “blatant violations of understandings between Israel and Lebanon.”
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Peace Meals: Chef José Andrés Says ‘Good People’ On Both Sides of Gaza Conflict Ill-Served By Leaders, Food Can Bridge Divide
Chef and head of World Central Kitchen Jose Andres attends the Milken Institute Global Conference 2025 in Beverly Hills, California, US, May 5, 2025. Photo: Reuters/Mike Blake.
Renowned Spanish chef and World Central Kitchen (WCK) founder José Andrés called the Oct. 7 attack “horrendous” in an interview Wednesday and shared his hopes for reconciliation between the “vast majority” on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide who are “good people that very often are not served well by their leaders”
WCK is a US-based, nonprofit organization that provides fresh meals to people in conflict zones around the world. The charity has been actively serving Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank since the Oct. 7 massacre in southern Israel. Since the Hamas attack, WCK has served more than 133 million meals across Gaza, according to its website.
The restaurateur and humanitarian has been quoted saying in past interviews that “sometimes very big problems have very simple solutions.” On Wednesday’s episode of the Wall Street Journal podcast “Bold Names,” he was asked to elaborate on that thought. He responded by saying he believes good meals and good leaders can help resolve issues between Israelis and Palestinians, who, he believes, genuinely want to live harmoniously with each other.
“I had people in Gaza, mothers, women making bread,” he said. “Moments that you had of closeness they were telling you: ‘What Hamas did was wrong. I wouldn’t [want] anybody to do this to my children.’ And I had Israelis that even lost family members. They say, ‘I would love to go to Gaza to be next to the people to show them that we respect them …’ And this to me is very fascinating because it’s the reality.
“Maybe some people call me naive. [But] the vast majority of the people are good people that very often are not served well by their leaders. And the simple reality of recognizing that many truths can be true at the same time in the same phrase that what happened on October 7th was horrendous and was never supposed to happen. And that’s why World Central Kitchen was there next to the people in Israel feeding in the kibbutz from day one, and at the same time that I defended obviously the right of Israel to defend itself and to try to bring back the hostages. Equally, what is happening in Gaza is not supposed to be happening either.”
Andres noted that he supports Israel’s efforts to target Hamas terrorists but then seemingly accused Israel of “continuously” targeting children and civilians during its military operations against the terror group.
“We need leaders that believe in that, that believe in longer tables,” he concluded. “It’s so simple to invest in peace … It’s so simple to do good. It’s so simple to invest in a better tomorrow. Food is a solution to many of the issues we’re facing. Let’s hope that … one day in the Middle East it’ll be people just celebrating the cultures that sometimes if you look at what they eat, they seem all to eat exactly the same.”
In 2024, WCK fired at least 62 of its staff members in Gaza after Israel said they had ties to terrorist groups. In one case, Israel discovered that a WCK employee named Ahed Azmi Qdeih took part in the deadly Hamas rampage across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Qdeih was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza in November 2024.
In April 2024, the Israel Defense Forces received backlash for carrying out airstrikes on a WCK vehicle convoy which killed seven of the charity’s employees. Israel’s military chief, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, said the airstrikes were “a mistake that followed a misidentification,” and Israel dismissed two senior officers as a result of the mishandled military operation.
The strikes “were not just some unfortunate mistake in the fog of war,” Andrés alleged.
“It was a direct attack on clearly marked vehicles whose movements were known by” the Israeli military, he claimed in an op-ed published by Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot. “It was also the direct result of [the Israeli] government’s policy to squeeze humanitarian aid to desperate levels.”
In a statement on X, Andres accused Israel of “indiscriminate killing,” saying the Jewish state “needs to stop restricting humanitarian aid, stop killing civilians and aid workers, and stop using food as a weapon.”
The post Peace Meals: Chef José Andrés Says ‘Good People’ On Both Sides of Gaza Conflict Ill-Served By Leaders, Food Can Bridge Divide first appeared on Algemeiner.com.