Today is not a fact but a story. I went to a meeting today about how to be in spaces with people after 10/7 when those people and you don’t agree on things. While there was a lot of good advice I might share in another post, one idea, an old idea, was that stories, personal stories, matter more than facts. It hasn’t really felt that way. But I’m working through a lot of anger, so not everything is as clear as it could be. We are all grieving in different ways the tempest of our current age.

The first time I went to Israel I was 12, and it was at the height of the second intifada in the late 90s. This was before any embargo, before any walls, before the right wing settler violence. Hamas hadn’t changed their charter yet. They hadn’t come to power in Gaza. Their main goal as they said in their charter was “to kill Jews.” And lest anyone think this is because they wanted peace and never got it so they had no other option, they clarify that “Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement.”

Israel is approximately the size of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Here are two maps for comparison.

The summer I spent in Israel was the summer of the schoolbus full of dead children. Hamas soldiers had gone undercover in schools, in malls, at churches and bombed public spaces. Over 700 people died in mass bombings. I remember the Sbarro at the mall in Israel looked like the Sbarro in Gaza but the one I had visited became a crater of smoke and glass and concrete. The smell of burnt skin. The black and white ash and concrete that powders every pore and you can’t hear any sound — not the dad with two slices of pizza who had been right behind you, not the EMTs, not the keening employees, and you won’t hear anything really for a day, and then after your ear will always ring a little, feel full when it shouldn’t.

This was before Oct 7th, before the barbarity and then the senseless bombing and destruction. They say it didn’t begin on Oct 7, but Oct 7 brought a level of brutality and then mass punishment that we haven’t seen before on quite this scale.

I left Israel at the end of the summer. I was able to leave when millions in Israel and Gaza couldn’t.

Last night, Penny showed me the gas canister for his gas mask — we noticed it comes from Israel. I could read that it said it was a regular size because the government issues the masks for adults and kids for free. Just like they do the safe rooms and the bomb shelters.

Before the border crossings went up, people stopped going out in public. Hamas took the joy of living out of everyone. The wall that was supposed to be a border crossing has only made Israel and Palestine less safe.

Then when Hamas took power — you can imagine if the town right next to you, that had been invading you with the backing of surrounding countries for over fifty years, you can imagine if the elected government you’d hope to broker peace with were instead the ones whose charter settled for nothing short than your total destruction to free palestine. Not my words. Not my emphasis. They hate Jews. Not for anything we did or didn’t do — they hated us long before any formal Israel or partition, before the Ottoman Empire fell.

When people in the west say Free Palestine, there is nuance that doesn’t exist when Hamas says it. When you’re a peace worker on the border partnering with Gazans and Hamas who hates peace workers reserves their harshest torture for you even if you are Palestinian, when you live in a region drunk on its own toxic masculinity, the individuals cease being people, and you band together with your community to survive because not only has the country beside you demanded you dead since before you existed, the rest of the world has taken up this narrative, too.

Freedom does not come at the expense of another’s oppression, and we will never have a free palestine or free Israel until those with the guns and the power want peace more than land.

*Hamas charter: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp

A reminder: Deligitimizing Jewish or Palestinian connections to the homeland is a bad look. Peace is the right look. Let’s focus on that.