Amid Israel-Hamas war, some still see a path to coexistence

By Marc Champion

A minor incident on Jerusalem's posh, pedestrianized Ben Yehuda Street more than a decade ago helped crystalize Israel's challenge for me. It was Yom HaShoah, a holiday to honor the six million victims of the Holocaust, and a siren went off to start two minutes of silence. The entire street froze in stillness, except for a single Palestinian family that carved a boisterous path through the bowed heads. Their message was unmistakable: You don't recognize our pain, and we won’t recognize yours.

Never has this mutual blindness been more in evidence than today. It is fueled by a dark suspicion on the side of many in Israel that Palestinians delighted in the Hamas terrorist attack of Oct. 7, with all its warped brutality, and the suspicion, equally dark, on the Palestinian side that the intensity of Israel’s military response in Gaza is a form of deliberate collective punishment that’s endorsed by the wider population. These are gross distortions, but depressingly, there is also some truth to both. (Nor are those views limited to the Middle East.)

There will be no escape from the cycle of violence until this starts to change. That is impossible now, as an enraged Israel escalates its attack in Gaza, cutting communications and promising a long war. Yet I met enough people in Israel in recent days to see room for a new path after this latest round of bloodletting, if the right leadership can emerge. Admittedly, a very big if.

Tarek Abu Arar is a 32-year-old Arab Israeli doctor who practices internal medicine less than 20 kilometers (12 miles) from Gaza, at the hospital in Ashkelon where more than 500 Oct. 7 casualties were treated. When I met him at his apartment in Ar’ara ba-Negev, about 100 kilometers south of Jerusalem, he hobbled over to shake hands in evident pain, his crutch tapping heavily into the marble floor.

Arar was driving to work on Oct. 7 when he saw a stopped car with someone lying beside it. He got out to help but was waved forward by someone in army fatigues and pushed into a yard. There, about a dozen Hamas gunmen debated what to do with him. They tied his hands behind his back and made him recite verses from the Koran, to prove his Muslim credentials. “They didn’t care,” he says.

The Hamas fighters kept him tied up in the open as a human shield. For two-and-a-half hours, he watched as they shot at every car that approached the intersection, killing more than 70 people. He was certain he would never see his wife or two-month-old daughter again. When Israeli forces finally arrived, they overwhelmed the Hamas unit in a firefight, but not before the last of them had shot at Arar, shattering his knee.

Arar is as horrified as any Jewish Israeli by what happened that day and has, quite literally, shared their pain. “I understand there is a war, but you have to focus on soldiers,” he says. “If you want to take revenge, you cannot do it like this, not on children and women.” But at Ashkelon he also regularly treats patients from Gaza, and he holds the IDF to the same standard. “I see their pain,’’ he says. He’s desperate to get back to work.

David Lehrer is a teacher and former executive director of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, close to Eilat at Israel’s southern tip. It’s a small satellite campus of Ben Gurion University that teaches 50 to 60 Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians and international students per year, with a view to fostering the cross-border cooperation needed to fight climate change. It isn’t clear talking to Lehrer whether the primary goal is to benefit the environment or Israeli-Palestinian cooperation. Maybe that’s the point.

“It isn’t always easy, to put it mildly,’’ says Lehrer, whose successor as the campus head is a Palestinian from East Jerusalem. A weekly student session dedicated to talking politics often ends in shouting matches, but he says students also often end up life-long friends. Since Oct 7, some Palestinian students have become stuck in the West Bank, while some Israeli students have gone to fight Hamas. Meanwhile, one of his colleagues sends them recordings of the bombs falling outside her home in Gaza.

Lehrer said he hears a growing recognition among his Palestinian counterparts that the violence is getting them nowhere. Among Israelis, he believes “that people are starting to understand there is a heavy price to pay for occupation. We cannot defend ourselves on our southern border, our northern border, our Syrian border and against Iran while keeping millions of people imprisoned.’’

I never had a chance to meet Awad Musa Darawshe. He was an Arab-Israeli medic assigned to help with the usual sunburns and drug excesses of the Supernova festival, which on Oct. 7 was celebrating the Jewish holiday of Sukkot with psychedelic trance music. An estimated 260 people were killed there and others were taken hostage. Darawshe and the other medics in his team of six began treating the wounded when shooting broke out, but as the gunmen drew close they decided to evacuate.

“He refused,’’ says Awad’s older cousin, Mohammed Darawshe. “He told them I speak Arabic; I think I will manage.’’ As the others left, they looked back to see him shot twice as he continued bandaging patients. He was 23.

Israeli media has estimated a turnout of 20,000 Arabs and Jews at Awad’s funeral. Ten ambulances and 40 motorcycle medics rode in procession, says Mohammed Darawshe. That isn’t to say Arab and Jewish Israelis make a big happy family. There’s a lot of tension and separation — especially now when Arabs, some of whom call themselves Palestinians — risk arrest if they criticize the the military operation in Gaza.

Darashwe has been working on integration a long time. He is director of strategy at the Givat Haviva Center for Shared Society, a Jewish-Arab non-profit that works to move pupils and teachers into the other community’s schools. He isn’t optimistic about the two sides starting to recognize each other’s pain or positions any time soon. Emotions are simply too high and the government’s policies and rhetoric aren’t helping. “As civilians, we are hostages to our leaderships,’’ he says.

In the longer term, though, he does see a path to coexistence. “What we need between Israelis and Palestinians is a divorce agreement,’’ he says, suggesting a long, internationally policed transition period to ensure both communities feel safe from attack. “You need to split the house and leave some doors for the children, but you need to show where the doors are, where should Jews feel completely safe, and where should Palestinians feel completely safe.’’

The final character is Asya Gershgoren, who left Russia to live on Ketura Kibbutz on the Jordanian border more than 30 years ago. Ketura has suddenly doubled its normal population as it takes in refugees from emptied Kibbutzes around Gaza. Everyone here knows someone who was killed. There’s the boy called Rainbow (Kibbutz members get nicknames) who went to school with Gershorgen’s 27-year-old daughter Alisa. The body of another of Alisa’s friends wasn’t found until Oct. 24, so she and a large group from Ketura were on their way to the funeral the next day. The youngest son of Asya’s boss was still missing, presumed dead or captured.

Gershgoren is chief accountant for the company that handles the agricultural sales, waterworks and finances for 10 local Kibbutzes. She says she’s unusually right wing for a Kibbutz member, but is incandescent about Netanyahu and his ultra-right government, whose disdain for the law and obsession with aggressive settler expansion in the West Bank she sees as responsible for the spectacular security lapse of Oct. 7. And like virtually everyone I met in Israel, she does not believe the same government capable of handling the crisis.

“Maybe all this pain is to make him leave and to give us the right to destroy Hamas, which is the good goal, even though it will not solve the problem,’’ says Gershgoren, 57. ``We need a whole new strategy, and this government can’t be the one to go there.’’

Hamas alone is responsible for what Hamas did. But Netanyahu’s government is the most ideologically driven and divisive in Israeli history, and its policies both fostered Hamas’s growth and destroyed hope and trust among ordinary Palestinians and their more moderate leaders. The prime minister should listen to people like Arar, Darawshe, Lehrer and Gershgoren. If he did, Israel just might be able to turn this tragedy into a pivot that breaks the cycle of war.

That could well involve the divorce Mohammed Darawshe spoke about, and if it does I have a small proposal. Part of the two-state agreement he is talking about should include a clause governing what is taught in schools about the other state. Israeli children should be taught the history and pain of the Nakba by Palestinian teachers, beginning with 1948, when about 700,000 Arabs were expelled from their homes to make way for Israel, and continuing to the occupations that followed. Palestinian kids, for their part, should be taught the history and pain of the Jewish Holocaust by Israeli teachers, and the expulsions and pogroms that preceded it. Write it into the treaty and make it compulsory.