Hello, and … well, it’s Friday.
I’ll be keeping the top of this correspondence shorter than last week’s, mostly because I don’t have a lot to say. After three unrelenting weeks of grief and bloodshed, I find myself having more questions than answers—about how long this war will last, about how many people will die, and about how any of us will ever be able to overcome the horror of it all.
In the absence of anything thoughtful to add, I’ll leave you all with this moving poem by the Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye.
Before I Was a Gazan
I was a boy and my homework was missing, paper with numbers on it, stacked and lined, I was looking for my piece of paper, proud of this plus that, then multiplied, not remembering if I had left it on the table after showing to my uncle or the shelf after combing my hair but it was still somewhere and I was going to find it and turn it in, make my teacher happy, make her say my name to the whole class, before everything got subtracted in a minute even my uncle even my teacher even the best math student and his baby sister who couldn’t talk yet. And now I would do anything for a problem I could solve.
What I’ve written
On Wednesday, U.S. President Joe Biden said he had “no confidence” in the death toll figures coming out of Gaza’s health ministry, which—like all the other government ministries in the besieged enclave—falls under Hamas leadership.
The next day, Palestinian officials responded with a 212-page document listing the name, age, sex, and official identification number of each of the 6,747 people that they say have been killed in Gaza since Israel began its airstrikes there on Oct. 7. (The document notes that this list does not include the 281 dead who have yet to be identified.) TIME has not been able to independently verify the list.
I spoke with experts about the reliability of these figures and whether they are in line with the heavy bombardment that we’ve seen thus far:
Although Gaza has been under Hamas’ rule since 2007, this is the first time that the reliability of the enclave’s health ministry has been so prominently called into question. News outlets and international organizations and agencies have long relied on Israeli and Palestinian government sources for casualty figures. While they do so partly because they are unable to independently verify these figures themselves, it’s also because these statistics have proven accurate in the past. “They have access methodologically to sources of information that nobody else has—access to data from morgues, from hospitals—and that’s ultimately going to be the most reliable way to count casualties,” Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch, says of Palestinian health officials in Gaza. He notes that when Human Rights Watch has conducted its own investigations into individual strikes, “there have been no large discrepancies between those numbers and the numbers produced by the Gaza health ministry.” Keep reading here
It’s so difficult to hear from the people in Gaza right now. In this piece, my colleagues and I share the harrowing stories of nine Palestinians in their own words:
I’ve reached a point where I can’t dream of anything but war and destruction. I've started hearing voices, I’ve started seeing things. It feels like we’re just waiting for our turn. It seems like we’re dead, but our death is pending. It’s on pause until an airstrike comes and attacks us. Keep reading here
Finally, I wrote about how, as the world’s eyes remain on Gaza, the situation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is worsening:
In many ways, the war had already reached the other Palestinian territories. At least 100 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers and armed settlers in the West Bank since Oct. 7, according to Palestinian officials, making it the bloodiest period there in at least 15 years. (This year was already on track to be the deadliest year for West Bank residents since the U.N. began monitoring fatalities in 2005.) More than 1,400 Palestinians have also been detained. In East Jerusalem, which Israel occupied in 1967, tensions are flaring in other ways too; Israeli authorities have cracked down on displays of Palestinian solidarity and identity, both on and offline. Keep reading here
What I’ve read
This dispatch from the West Bank, where Israeli settler violence has intensified (The Atlantic)
Then came October 7. Hamas’s level of savagery seems to have licensed a new level of settler aggression. One settler WhatsApp group passed around a threat intended for distribution to Palestinians too stubborn to have left their land yet. I saw the Arabic version. “You started a war, you’ll get a Nakba!” the settler message said, referring to the permanent displacement of Palestinian Arabs during the 1948 war. It invited them to seek refuge elsewhere. “We’re giving you a chance to flee to Jordan now in an organized fashion, because we will exterminate the enemy and expel you by force from our land.” The message ended: “You better get packing quickly. You’ve been warned!”
This fascinating interview with Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi (The Drift)
The other thing I would say to student activists is you have to understand what your political objectives are. If you believe that this is a settler colonial project, then you are in the metropole of that colony, here in the United States or in Western Europe, and national liberation movements have won not only — sometimes not primarily — by winning on the battlefield in the colony. The Vietnamese were at a stalemate with the Americans. The Algerians were actually losing on the battlefield. The IRA was almost at the end of its tether, militarily, in 1921. They won, in part, because they won over the metropole. The English finally said, we just don’t want to fight this war. We can’t fight this war. Same thing happened with the French in Algeria. It wasn’t only the fighters up in the mountains who won the war. I’m not saying that wasn’t a crucial element in the liberation of Algeria, indeed the sine qua non for it, but if the French had continued to want to kill Algerians, the war could have gone on forever. French people didn’t want to continue, because they didn’t want to take more losses. Same thing with South Africa. They did not win only in the townships; the ANC won because in the United States and Britain, they won over public opinion.
If you believe this theoretical construct — the colony and the metropole — then what activists do here in the metropole counts. You have to win people over. You can’t just show that you are the most pure or the most revolutionary or can say the most extreme things and demonstrate your revolutionary credentials. You have to be doing something toward a clear political end.
This op-ed by veteran State Department official Josh Paul on why he recently resigned (The Washington Post)
A basic premise of U.S. military assistance to Israel since the Oslo Accords has been “security for peace” — the notion that if Israel can feel secure, including through the provision of billions of dollars’ worth of U.S.-funded arms transfers each year, it can more readily make the concessions allowing for the emergence of a Palestinian state. (This is also the basic job of the U.S. Security Coordinator, a State Department initiative I worked for in Ramallah for a year.)
But the track record shows that U.S.-provided arms have not led Israel to peace. Rather, in the West Bank, they have facilitated the growth of a settlement infrastructure that now makes a Palestinian state increasingly unlikely, while in the densely populated Gaza Strip, bombings have inflicted mass trauma and casualties, contributing nothing to Israeli security.
What I’m thinking about
The Frasier reboot, which I recently discussed with my fellow Frasier fanatics on the Oh God, What Now? pod. Tune in for my verdict.
Until next time,
Yasmeen