Hello, and for the final time this year, happy Friday.
This correspondence took a bit of a hiatus while I worked on a special project, which I can finally share with you all.
Over the past few weeks, my TIME colleague Karl Vick and I spoke with the Israelis and Palestinians who have been driving the societal response to the horrors that began on Oct. 7. (Yes, life in Gaza was horrific long before then; I’m referring to the latest horrors, which are the worst to befall the Strip in living memory.) They are the people who pulled others out of rubble, or out of hiding, who sheltered strangers, who bent to heal wounds seen and unseen.
They are, as we’ve dubbed them, “The Nation Builders.”
I interviewed more than a dozen people in Gaza for this project. Although not all of them were able to be included in the final package, each and every one left me in awe of the steadfastness and resilience that Gaza’s Palestinians have shown in the most perilous and hopeless of circumstances.
If I’m being honest, I’m not sure how long that resilience can last. But what I do know is that when this war ends and the scale of the death and destruction is fully realized, many will come to wonder how those who survived did. As far as I’m concerned, it’s because Palestinian society banded together to protect themselves when they knew that no other help was coming.
What I’ve written
One of the most awe-inspiring people I interviewed for the Nation Builders was Rida Thabet, who leads an UNRWA shelter of some 40,000 people in the southern city of Khan Yunis:
For most people in Gaza, the war is a saga of exodus into smaller and smaller spaces. More than 1.6 million of its 2.3 million residents have been forced from their homes, first into the southern half of the Strip, then into the cramped lots where 1.4 million have sought refuge under the blue flag of the U.N. Some 40,000 are camped in the vocational college run by Rida Thabet.
Their hardship is more than a humanitarian challenge for Thabet; it is a personal one. “I’m displaced myself,” she says. She hails from Gaza City, from which people still arrive, sometimes wounded, always stressed. “They see us as management,” Thabet says. “They come with anger, and they throw that anger on your face.” The face is sympathetic. Thabet comforts not only her 15-year-old daughter, traumatized by the cascades of bombing, but also her guests. On Nov. 24 the oldest was the 95-year-old woman who asked, as she does daily, “Where am I? Who are you?” The youngest was just hours old.
“You want to help but you feel helpless,” says Thabet. Her answer is action: finding mattresses for those at risk of bedsores, tarpaulins for people sleeping in the open, common ground for feuding spouses, and support groups for children who have seen too much. As an employee of UNRWA, which in peacetime provides schools, medical services, and aid to the 74% of Gazans who are registered refugees, Thabet is both an anchor of Gaza’s middle class, and a conduit for the trickle of assistance reaching them. More than 100 of her colleagues have been killed, including a friend who died “giving training on how to keep safe.” “We have some unique stories,” Thabet says. “Some of them are very sad ones. And some can give hope.” Read the rest of the “The Nation Builders” and watch the accompanying video here
I’ve been wanting to write about Gaza’s journalists—who are simultaneously covering and living this war—for a while now. This week, I had my chance:
The fate of journalists like Azaiza matters—not only for Gaza’s Palestinians, many of whom have come to rely on their local press to report what is happening to a world that increasingly feels out of reach, but for the wider international press, which has no means of independently reporting what is happening on the ground in Gaza themselves. For both, they have become a vital source of first-hand information amid what is the worst war to befall the Strip in living memory. Raw and unfiltered, their coverage offers a rare glimpse into life in Gaza that numbers alone—17,000 dead, 100,000 buildings destroyed, 1.9 million displaced—simply can’t capture. Keep reading here
Plus:
‘They Are Behaving in a Fascist Way:’ An Israeli-Arab Lawmaker on the Stifling of Anti-War Voices
What a Hard-Right Victory in the Netherlands Means for Europe
What I’ve read
This excerpt from Tim Alberta’s forthcoming book on American evangelicals and political extremism (The Atlantic)
For much of American history, white Christians have enjoyed tremendous wealth and influence and security. Given that reality—and given the miraculous nature of America’s defeat of Great Britain, its rise to superpower status, and its legacy of spreading freedom and democracy (and, yes, Christianity) across the globe—it’s easy to see why so many evangelicals believe that our country is divinely blessed. The problem is, blessings often become indistinguishable from entitlements. Once we become convinced that God has blessed something, that something can become an object of jealousy, obsession—even worship.
This explainer on how the keffiyeh became a symbol of the Palestinian cause (Vox)
For Palestinians, the keffiyeh has served many different purposes over the decades. It protected farmers from the sun and galvanized support for the Palestinian struggle. And through the years, the patterned cloth absorbed a variety of meanings: an ode to freedom, a nod to heritage, and a symbol of national identity. That’s why the attempts to appropriate it are taken as such an affront. They’re not only viewed as an attempt to profit off of Palestinian culture, but an intentional effort to undermine the Palestinian narrative that the keffiyeh represents — an erasure of Palestinian identity.
TIME’s Person of the Year: Taylor Swift (TIME)
Swift knows firsthand that fame is a seesaw. “Nothing is permanent,” she says. “So I’m very careful to be grateful every second that I get to be doing this at this level, because I’ve had it taken away from me before. There is one thing I’ve learned: My response to anything that happens, good or bad, is to keep making things. Keep making art.” She considers. “But I’ve also learned there’s no point in actively trying to quote unquote defeat your enemies,” she says. “Trash takes itself out every single time.”
What I’m thinking about
2023 marked my first full year at TIME, and it was an absolute whirlwind. Some of the highlights included publishing my first profile of Britain’s Labour Party leader (and the man seen by many as the U.K.’s Prime-Minister-in-waiting) Keir Starmer and my first solo cover story of Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf. My reporting took me around the world, from Davos and Dubai to Geneva and Manchester. Seventy-eight stories and 22 correspondences later, here we are.
Thank you all for following along and for making this correspondence a treat to write. I hope you all have a happy holidays, and an even better 2024.
Until next year,
Yasmeen