This is a tribute to my dear friend, Yousef, whom I memorialize below these tributes from WE ARE NOT NUMBERS
— Susan Gutwill
Tributes to Yousef Maher Dawas, killed Oct. 14, 2023
We Are Not Numbers mourns the death of a beloved friend, colleague, and family member.
The WANN Family
October 16, 2023
Yousef Maher Dawas
On Oct. 14, 2023, the WANN family lost Yousef Maher Dawas. He was killed by an Israeli missile strike on his family’s home in the northern town of Beit Lahia. Several other members of his family were also killed.
May Yousef and his family rest in peace.
Yousef was studying to be a psychoanalyst. In January 2023, Yousef published an essay at the WANN website, Who will pay for the 20 years we lost? In this essay, he recounts the destruction of his family’s orchard by an Israeli missile strike in May 2022. The orchard trees produced olives, oranges, clementines, loquat, guavas, lemons and pomegranates, and its loss “destroyed an important piece of our past. Our family’s history. Our heritage.”
Yousef took some solace in the hope of replanting. WANNers take some solace in the knowledge that Yousef is planted in our hearts forever.
Yousef was a contributing writer for Palestine Chronicle, which also published a tribute to him. This article includes a video in which the young man talks about his desire to visit other cities in Palestine “more than Paris or the Maldives Islands.” Yousef’s last article for Palestine Chronicle is Kidney Transplant and Rebirth: A Palestinian Love Story.
Yousef’s colleagues have contributed the following tributes.
Ahmed Dremly
I want to talk about Yousef, I want hours to talk about him — even hours would not be enough. Yousef was one of the most helpful guys, not only with We Are Not Numbers but generally. All the people who met him loved him! Because he was funny, he was a joyful guy.
He used to talk about positive things — about his dreams of traveling, his love of nature. He was always arranging for us to hang out together. He loved to be with people, with journalists. He was a contribute to WANN, Palestine Deep Dive, and Palestine Chronicle. Before the war, he was the volunteer cameraman of WANN. He loved photography and he used to take good photos for us on the team.
On the first days of the attacks on Gaza, he sent me messages asking if I could join him to go to document all of the massacres that happened in Gaza. But I told him I wouldn’t go, because they attack journalists. So if I want to be honest, Yousef was one of the most sensitive, helpful, and interesting guys I’ve ever met in my life.
Tala Albanna
My beloved Yousef, Joe as he used to be named, or my therapist as I [was] accustomed to call him. My way to the university was full of our talks about his cats and his favorite author, Ahlam Mosteghanemi.
He was a great supporter to me besides a study partner during all the exams period.
Rahaf Abu Zarifa
I’ve known Yousef for two years now, from WANN and a lot of other subactivities.
A great guy with a lot of dreams. He always supported my skills in photography, in writing, which he was passionate about too.
We were working together on a photography project the last time I saw him. Wednesday, 20th of September. This is the second day of him not being a part of this earth. May he rest in peace.
Hamza Ibrahim
My friendship with Yousef warmed my heart in a way that was like the sun’s final kiss to the sea. He resembled the stars in the sky, embellishing my darkness. He left me without saying goodbye. Later, in heaven, I will see you.
I’ve known Yousef for the past two years, and his memory will forever be etched in my heart. A radiant smile was his constant companion, a reflection of his kind, understanding, and loving nature. Yousef was not just a friend; he was a beacon of light, a selfless soul who poured his heart into caring for his friends and community.
Mahmoud Yazgy
He was not only kind but remarkably [full of] initiative, always the first to lend a hand, the first to champion a cause, and the first to sacrifice for the well-being of his community. Yousef’s dedication was unwavering, and his commitment to his people was an inspiration to us all.
The Israeli air strike buried his smile under the rubbles of his house. Recollections of our long walks together after our “We Are Not Numbers” classes flood my thoughts, my heart racing and hands trembling with sorrow. We shared stories, dreams, and aspirations on those walks.
I remember one day when we were out with our group of friends, and I arrived a little late. Spotting an empty chair beside Yousef, I immediately relocated, and when asked why, I simply replied, “Because he’s Yousef.” He was this friend who would understand the hints without saying anything. Today, Yousef may be a martyr, but his legacy lives on in our hearts.
Dear Yousef, you may not be present with us today, but I believe you’ve found peace in a better place. Your spirit continues to inspire us, and your memory will forever serve as a guiding light, a reminder of the profound impact one person can have on the world.
Kate Casa (mentor)
It was such an honor to work with Yousef. He was motivated and open-minded. Like all of the young WANN writers I have worked with, he was anxious to tell his stories so that we in the West could better understand their lives in Gaza. These efforts to make their stories fit our westernized versions of how a narrative should read can sometimes feel like ongoing colonization. It’s difficult for me to imagine writing in a different language, with a different set of rules and structures, especially when it is about something so personal as life under occupation. But Yousef willingly and enthusiastically took this on.
Nick Appleyard (mentor)
He was such a bright and positive young man! It was a pleasure to work with him on his essay — I won’t ever forget that great big smile.
I AM NOT AFRAID TO DIE
by: Susan Gutwill MS, LCSW
The last time I was able to talk to Yousef on Oct 8, 2023, my dear Gazan friend told me, “I am not afraid to die.” He sent me a photo of the lights of Israeli warplanes coming towards his house at night. He knew the IDF was about to collectively punish all Gazans, whether they were part of Hamas or not. Two days later we lost contact, as Yousef had told me would happen. It is unlikely he and his family are living and if so, they are wounded with nowhere to go. I am angry and grieving. Four days ago, I saw the notice of his death, in “We Are Not Numbers.”
I met Yousef after I had been to the West Bank with the US Palestine Mental Health Network on a study visit to 30 organizations working with social justice and trauma. Upon my return, I was able to do further work to help Palestinians, in this case having a direct relationship to a Gazan. We became very close friends over the past two years. We spoke at length on Zoom at least every week and texted about what we each learned and he experienced about the 75-year-old Occupation of Palestine and particularly about the 17-year-old siege on Gaza, which is known as an Open Air Prison. We spoke about what he endured growing up in Gaza. His family, he and his friends, all lived through Israel’s attacks on Gaza in 2008, 2012, 2014, 2021 ending in 2022, and now Oct 7, 2023.
I spoke with him many times each day after Hamas attacked Southern Israel and we both knew Zionists would begin another full-scale war on Gaza. Neither he nor I wanted Hamas to have bombed innocent civilians in Israel; we also knew that a disproportionately greater number of innocent civilians in Gaza would pay yet again. Now over 18,000 Gazans have been killed, over a million have been displaced are homeless with nowhere to go, just roaming in rubble and dead or wounded bodies. At least 51 thousand are wounded. (Health Ministry, UN)
Israeli and Western leadership, especially the US, teaches citizens through its media and pundits to think, on the one hand, that “those animals,” the Palestinians deserve what they get and, on the other hand, they purposely remove these civilians from our minds by just not reporting on them.
Yousef had previously told me that he was not afraid to die in discussing his experience of the earlier attacks by Israeli rockets, and other terrorizing repressive acts. Sometimes, Yousef told me, he had to express rage and helplessness through wild laughter. Gazans have no rights and no opportunities! They are prisoners of an Occupation. They have no say in how they are treated. Their reality is entirely left out of the major news networks in Israel and the US. The last election they had was in 2006, Hamas got 44% and they were funded by Zionists.
From the beginning of my talks with Yousef, it seemed so easy to be together and talk. His very life was always in danger, while I was horrified the more I learned and listened, I was in my safe apartment. As a child of the Nazi Holocaust, I felt deeply empathic and connected. I have fought against imperialist colonization, mass murder, and political repression all my adult life. It is rare that people in my world realize Nazism was imperialist occupation including genocide. And, of course, that is what US and Israeli policy is about: armaments and racist ideology, and an ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
I gave Yousef friendship and eventually love, as I got to know him better and I witnessed him and his people. My being his witness outside of the open-air prison of his home in mid Gaza gave him both hope of reaching the outside world as well as knowing a Westerner and a Jew, who cared about him and his people.
He gave me something major and significant too. Our friendship was based on deep mutual concern about what Zionists have cynically called “mowing the grass,” (Washington Post, strikes targeting rockets and tunnels, the Israeli tactic of ‘mowing the grass’ returns to Gaza By Adam Taylor May 14, 2021, at 4:49 p.m. which refers to the reality of Zionist on-going ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. We both knew the Occupation was supported by American Imperialism along with other western nations like Britain and France. Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and Rashid Khalidi’s One Hundred Years of War in Palestine each deeply shocked me when I read them around my trip to the West Bank. It was so painful to learn the reality in comparison to the Zionist stories I grew up with and systematically informed the organizations and culture within which I developed as a young person.
Yousef was also quite sensitive to me; he also seemed to know when something in my personal life was difficult just by looking at my face. Knowing about Gaza through our friendship, he made me feel less alone in my own despair, as a Jew, about Zionist genocide in Palestine.
Yousef was an adult at 20 and I was 76 when we first met as part of my work with Gazan support groups. This was a year or two after I had gone on an intensive trip to the West Bank, an unforgettable, painful, and powerful experience. The U.S. Palestine Mental Health Network organized and facilitated our group of mental health workers who specialized in trauma. We went to lend support and learn from Palestinians who all have experienced horrible personal and collective trauma. The 18 members of our delegation met with 30 organizations and their staff who were trying to help themselves and Palestinians like themselves under the dire trauma of occupation. I learned so much that was done in the name of Jews and the Zionist State. The Zionist rules prohibited us from visiting Gaza. I kept shaking my head, “No, not in my name or any name. No!’’
I counted on Yousef to allow me to witness hidden truths about social reality in Gaza and in so doing, I got to know his rich adult humanity and his manhood. He wanted to marry only when he could support a family. His were traditional but upright values. Caring for family, especially for children who are over 40 percent of the population of Gaza, is the heart of life in Palestine.
Each time his mother or father sweetly brought him tea, I was moved and would say hello to them. When his toddler nephew wanted to play with his uncle, it provided another context in which I came to know him. Seeing him respond to his young nephew made me happy; the two of them were sweet. I felt happy when the little one waved at me. Yousef and I both needed the light that children bring. Having grown up in a warm Jewish extended family made it comfortable for me to feel at home with him and his family. When I shared that I had a new grandchild, he wanted to see the pictures. We were visiting at so many levels of love and pain. But the politics and passion of working together through writing for social justice and talking about his college classes in psychology was the strongest bond between us.
Twenty miles long and 5 miles across, Israel has made Gaza into an open-air prison, controlling the limited water, food, medicines, and electricity all of which came from Israel at high prices. And Gazans cannot leave. They have no freedom of movement out of Gaza. They are fully occupied and imprisoned. And now Israel has cut off all the minimal water, food, medicine, and electricity that was allowed to them entirely. All while bombing endlessly, including ambulances, clinics, and especially hospitals. I follow Al Jazeera News and daily shows on Democracy Now every day in addition to many other non-corporate news services. The entire Gazan population is traumatized yet again because of the regular day and night non-stop Israeli bombings and killings and if they are alive, they suffer from extreme thirst, hunger, disease, and panic.
More than 5000 powerful bombs fell on Gaza in the first week, which is as much as the US bombed Afghanistan in a year. (Democracy Now) Over 18,000 Gazans have already been killed, many uncounted are still under giant mounds of rubble and wounded or dead. Since Israel insists Hamas hides under hospitals, the hospitals have not only been cut off from electricity, but also bombed and intruded upon by the IDF. Thus there are no real medical facilities left. (Democracy Now)
Previously, close to 2.3 million people were living with each other peacefully in an area as large as Philadelphia. Palestinians are not Hamas! In fact, The Zionist Israeli government, unlike American citizens, is not naive. And it has known from the beginning of the occupation which created the State of Israel, that there would, of course, be resistance to occupation. Therefore Netanyahu and other right-wing leaders actually funded and empowered Hamas because they wanted to weaken the Palestinian Authority. Why? The PA wanted a two-state solution. Netanyahu and his group want all the land for Israel. An important new article by Adam Raz, put out in November 2023 presents a brief history of the Netanyahu-Hamas Alliance. Netanyahu’s policy has been to keep Hamas in power and to turn it from a purely terror organization into a funded state body. And as the article asserts is far more important to Netanyahu, than as he stated, the lives of a “few dead Kibbutzniks.” (Reader Supported News.org. November 5, 2023.)
It is so disturbing to me that Israeli State violence from even earlier than 1948 seems to be either idealized as brave or erased in the Western mind and therefore its collective punishment is accepted by most American Jews. I have seen this in my own dearly beloved extended family when members proudly whispered to me that someone in their temple group had been in the Haganah. Zionist terrorism and violence is justified and rationalized, if it is known at all. The “weaponizing” of the Jewish Holocaust: i.e, “we are the biggest victims,” is the ideological underpinning of this thinking. (Pappe, Khalidi and Layton, Lynne, Nancy Caro Hollander and Susan Gutwill, Psychoanalysis, Class and Politics: Encounters in the Clinical Setting. Rutledge 2006.)
Zionist culture does not even use the term Palestinians (their rightful mantle), but rather refers to them as Arabs who are generally depicted as dirty and sneaky. “We are a people without a land, and here is a land without a people,” was expressed by many who wanted this falsehood to be true so that the State of Israel could just have the entire land of Palestine. (Wikipedia, Jabotinski and Meir used this phrase along with others. ) This amounts to clear imperialist ideology and propaganda. Straight out of any colonial handbook, this early and hidden history of Zionism, argued, at the same time, “the population which is not there,” will nevertheless, learn from our familiar “white know-how and intellectual superiority.” Hence the Jews of Europe became “White,” rather than being the “Blacks” of Europe. (How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America. Karen Brodkin, 1998, Rutgers University Press) Being “civilized” by colonial powers is a line all the European colonizers used to rationalize colonial imperialism in the global south.
With the Western financial and ideological support of Settler Colonial Apartheid, Israel is also said to be the only “Democracy” in the Middle East. Palestinians are not included in this Democracy, because we are meant to forget about them at best and objectify them as animals at worst. (they become “others” with whom we cannot identify. Palestinians have no democracy at all. The recent demonstrations for Israeli Democracy, which did not include democracy for Palestinians, ended with the Hamas attack. War against our enemies united Israeli’s again for a while. Although that is changing.
Israel has violated 28 resolutions of the United Nations Security Council (which are legally binding on member-nations of the U.N. In 2004, an advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice concluded that Israel had breached its obligations under international law by establishing settlements in the West Bank, and that Israel cannot rely on a right of self-defense in order to excuse the wrongfulness of imposing an Apartheid régime. Israeli settlements and outposts (smaller settlements without official Zionist approval) require removing yet more Palestinians off their land, which is contrary to international law. Peace Now and other critics of Colonial Zionism have decried these ways of further taking over the territory and homes from Palestinians.
In 2004 the advisory opinion on the Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory ( paragraph 120, that Article 49(6) “prohibits not only deportations or forced transfers of population…but also any measures taken by an occupying Power in order to organize or encourage transfers of parts of its own population into the occupied territory.” The Court also concluded that the Israeli régime violates the basic human rights of the Palestinians with the huge multi layered wall between Israel and Palestine that impedes the liberty of movement of the inhabitants of the Occupied Palestinian Territory and their exercise of the right to work, to health, to education and to an adequate standard of living.[44] The wall for example separates farmers from their fields and students from the college. It was startling to see it. I was shocked when I saw it and stood next to it continually since it is omnipresent.
And still, many in Israel, under risk of arrest, work for peace not by killing, but by organizing to end the ongoing occupation. Neither American nor Israeli media report on groups like B’Tselem, Peace Now, Women Wage Peace, Combatants for Peace, Eco-Peace, and Hand in Hand. These groups work to expose Israeli Apartheid and work for true Two State or One State peace and equality between Zionist and Palestinian peoples. And now many of these people have been arrested in Israel. I stand with these brave Israeli citizens and critics, in Israel and around the Western world.
Such is the state of their “democracy.” In America too, those who stand against the massive destruction of Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinian groups, Jewish Voice for Peace, and If Not Now, are also being arrested and thrown out of universities.
To Those in Power, Rules Are to Break
The true history of Zionism is not at all like what Leon Uris led us to believe in his beloved book that I read in my youth, Exodus (1958). Instead, the true history of Zionism was written and enacted, then hidden, sometimes under actual huge blocks of stone, in official Israeli archives. This is not just the work of the fascistic Netanyahu. Ben Gurion and other founders of Zionism called “The Consultancy” met in what was then known as “The Red House,” arguing that Zionism had “first of all, to be based on the secret expulsion or murder of Palestinians. The second prong of their plan was to create a Zionist culture and tell the world that it had been the culture of ancient Zionists in that area given to us by God. The songs and dances of “Israel” that I learned, as a young girl and especially as a teenager in The United Synagogue Youth groups, were among these “creation ideology” products. I loved dancing and singing to “Mayim, Mayim” and many more, which were created, then called our ancient culture. (Pappe, Chapter 3 and 4)/ (Tom Segev) These are the ways they sold Zionism. Teaching us that Israel is a democracy is false enough, but saying it was ordained by God feels to me like what religious people call blasphemy. My father believed religion caused wars. I would say it is imperialist arrogance and greed that often uses religion as its cover that thrives on constant warfare.
Since the Oct 2023 attack, over 18 thousand Palestinians have died. I do not see Gazans nor Palestinians as dehumanized numbers, nor vermin, nor animals, nor savages, as Israeli officials have recently and publicly claimed. Nor do I see all Israeli civilians as killers, even though they are trained to believe they could be wiped off the face of the Earth by Arabs at any time and better “defend” themselves through endless wars.
It is so painful for me that in my own dear family who are the descendants of such trauma ourselves, finds it is so abhorant that people like me and growing numbers of other American Jews identify with the resistance to Palestinian occupation, even though we never forget the trauma of the Jewish Holocaust, which has been, according to critics, “weaponized.”(Ilan Pappe)
As the daughter of a man who lived through Russian and Polish Pogroms and the Nazi Imperialist trauma, I and many of my generation protested against the US cold war and imperialism all our adult lives. We walked in protest of Racism in the US, to colonial Africa. I went to Nigeria when I was 20 to “help build a democracy.” We learned from the war in Viet Nam, to Chile where the US supported the overthrow of Allende and his democratic and socialist government and supported the Pinochet terrorist killer regime. I lost four dear friends in Chile. We demonstrated for Central and South America, including Guatemala, Nicaragua as well as against the punitive war against Iraq as if they were the ones who had weapons of mass destruction, rather than ourselves.
Now, we see genocide in Palestine where Gaza is being wiped off the face of the map and the West Bank too is being so attacked that it is not what I saw in 2019. All of this bloodshed and horror makes me feel alienated from my American home, the home that my father fought to obtain for our family.
It is in every demonstration I acknowledge that I live in privileged safety in the United States, a settler colonial nation founded on the murders, displacements, and wars against its indigenous people. It is in every demonstration that I bore witness to the truth of what America’s safety and wealth was built on: the backs of enslaved Africans. I demonstrate because I know the truth about slavery and that America will never acknowledge its truth, by giving reparations to the descendants of enslaved African Americans upon whom the wealth of this country was built up enough to start Industrial Capitalism.
Even knowing all this, I was still shocked when I learned that Biden stood up in the Senate in June 1976 saying it plainly: if Israel didn’t exist we would have to create one because we need access to oil in the region, as well as, most importantly, military control over geopolitics, in the Middle East. ( Wikipedia) and many articles. Even when I understand it, the bold reality shocks me anew. (available on UTUBE)
I was so used to the lies and rationalizations, I couldn’t believe he said the truth out loud. Biden’s newest “truth” is to declare he doesn’t have the power to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza, even annually with the 3.8 billion dollars the US gives Israel for weapons and armor, And now more tax dollars will be paid to support Zionist destruction of Palestine life and land.
I have also learned that Israel tests on Palestinians, violent weapons of crowd control as well as techniques on how to use them. Israel then sells its repressive arms and techniques at high prices all over the world. Israel teaches US police how to use crowd control and racist terror against Blacks and immigrants. Baltimore law enforcement officials, along with hundreds of others from Florida, to NJ, to Pennsylvania, to Arizona, California, Massachusetts, Connecticut, NY, Georgia, Washington State and Washington DC, have all traveled to Israel for training. (Youtube, How Israel Trains U.S. Police) Israel also teaches and trains military dictatorships all around the Global South. It was behind racist violence in Ferguson, NC.
Many of these trips are US taxpayer funded while others are privately funded. Since 2002, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee’s Project Interchange and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs have paid for police chiefs, assistant chiefs and captains to train in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.(Amnesty International) Israel has even profitably sold weapons and racist techniques to the apartheid government of South Africa. If you dare to go beyond Western Media, all of this becomes clear.
Again, with all I knew, it was appalling while in the West Bank to see with my own eyes, two different sets of roads for Palestinians and Israelis in the West Bank and Israel, as well as different license plates for Israeli and Palestinian cars. The huge multilayered wall hid the realities of life on each side from the other side.( Reference See my original video presentation for actual pictures and a narrative of all of this that I saw with my own eyes.)
In Palestine when we visited 30 social service organizations we listened deeply to Palestinians. These mental health professionals worked day and night to help Palestinian adults and children deal with all the terror, trauma, humiliation and rage they felt about checkpoints, imprisonment without representation, torture of young children in prison, joblessness, hunger, living with current assaults and repeated demolitions of their homes and lives and land. ( see my video and talk after this trip.)
These open-hearted Palestinians, did this work to help their people, despite being forced to go through dangerous checkpoints on their way to work and coming back home. (There are 645 checkpoints according to The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) before the latest violence. Human Rights Watch counted 1,500 temporary checkpoints that came and went in 2019 and 2020.)
Checkpoints are all dominated by Israeli Defense Forces who hold huge guns and vicious dogs. It is a site! Here, many Palestinians like themselves are killed or sent to infamous Israeli prisons where they are held without trial and systematically tortured. We spoke to doctors, nurses, social workers, psychologists, and aides of all types. These organizations gave us contact with the people of Palestine. They had nothing to hide and were so warm and welcoming. I was informed and filled up with loving solidarity. We walked in Jerusalem, East Jerusalem, Nablus, Jenin, Raffa, Ramallah, Jericho, as well as in Israel in Tel Aviv. I was horrified to learn that the periodic rocks on gorgeous beaches in Tel Aviv were actually built on top of Palestinian graves. I have a cousin who made Alliah (move to Israel) who bragged about these gorgeous ocean shores that Israeli’s had made. He had no clue that all this was built on a foundation of Palestinian graves. He was so simply proud.
We also saw the growing numbers of Israeli settlements which are like whole cities and their “national forest preserves,” made of pine and evergreen trees that have been planted in the stead of olive trees that were part of Palestinian land, while making more Palestinian refugees with every settlement. Pines and evergreens are not inherent to the land. We saw house demolitions and the remaining piles of rubble. Talking with Palestinian victims, we learned that Palestinians had to pay to rebuild their homes if and only if, they were allowed to by Israel. We met with folks whose homes had been demolished more than once. Very commonly the IDF force themselves into these homes with their guns and dogs in the middle of the night. They frequently raped residents before taking these innocent Palestinians into Israeli jails under the policy of administrative detainment by which Israel may arbitrarily detain them, even many young children for years. Here they were and are tortured and have no legal rights at all. Many of the folks I met had been imprisoned in this way. And with all this they call Gazans the terrorists!
It was this very hard work of going to the West Bank that brought me to Yousef.
Yousef was/is a wonderful writer, story teller, college student, serious and clever photographer as well as a loving family member and human being. He sent me a powerful piece he had written about the olive tree that he climbed during his childhood in the backyard of his home. This piece was used by the resistance movement called “We Are Not Numbers” for a larger piece of writing, comparing the settlement trees to Yousef’s olive tree. I saw an artist’s painting in a Palestinian museum which depicted rows and rows of decimated olive trees that Palestinians had cultivated by irrigating the arid land way before Zionism. But we Jews were told that the Sabras, a new kind of tough Jew, “irrigated the empty land.” (The new Jew implies contempt for those broken down after the Holocaust.) In fact what is true is that Israel cut and burned down millions of olive trees. (ref) Over 9,000 olive trees have been destroyed in the West Bank just since August 2020, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). See also, Khalidi, Pappe.
Yousef was so frustrated that he could not get out of Gaza. We had many talks about his wish to move within Gaza as well as to be able to leave it to finish his graduate schooling and be able to support a family in Gaza.
Why was this young man’s friendship so important to me?
Although his plight was horrific to witness both as a Humanist and a life-long enemy of global injustice, it was more than that. I came to realize that he was so important to me because I identified with him. I am a child of the Jewish Holocaust. I grew up traumatized by my father’s traumas. And like any trauma survivor, my father needed to constantly repeat the trauma by telling me again and again, from the time I was 5 years old onward, what it was like for him as a child growing up hiding from Polish Pogroms. If we had time, he could tell me daily, “We had to stay still and utterly silent.” He would also repeatedly recall how as a teenager, he eventually walked across Europe and finally made it to Cuba with his fellow travelers whom he called, “we Jewish boys.” The captain of the boats tried to kill these young Jews and throw them overboard after they took their money. “ I organized the Jewish boys to rebel,” said my father, “so we got onto the boat.” Then he hid, retching, under dirty laundry, barely breathing the disgusting smells, while inspectors were searching for illegal immigrants to arrest or kill. I heard this again and again. It was hard for me as a very young girl. But I wanted him to be happy and I could not say, if I had felt it, “Stop, Please. I am too young.
Finally they landed in Cuba. And eventually my father and “the Jewish boys,” got to Ellis Island. After he was married and before the Holocaust, he brought his parents to America. But his father, a strong patriarch, refused to stay in America, saying that it wasn’t kosher or orthodox enough here, and therefore returned to Poland. Who knows if my grandmother had anything to say about it. She was the one who worked on the farm, while my grandfather spent his time studying talmud.
When the Nazis were in Poland, they forced my grandfather and grandmother and the family still there, to dig their own mass graves into which they were then shot. My father felt guilty and horrified all his life, crying out and moaning in his sleep most nights.
Absorbing all his pain I began to pray to god by age 7. My father believed all wars were caused by “believers,” even though he was a member and the president of our temple choir. I sat with him there as a little girl, playing with his Tallis. Then, I insisted on having a Bat Mitzvah at 13, although all but one Jewish girl I knew had a Confirmation ceremony, which was a less serious, less formal event. I then, of course, became a young Zionist and joined United Synagogue Youth with whom I went to Zionist culture camps, where I sang and danced to what we were told were “age-old” Zionist music and dance creations. If being a Zionist would keep us safe then I was going to be a good Zionist.
I remember being 4 and my father listening with intensity to the radio on our kitchen table every chance he got. Would we be safe? Would we have a state?
But we knew nothing about the Nakba destroying Palestinians at the same time. We just put coins in our Blue and White Box in order to build trees in Israel. Only later did I learn that these trees were often planted on top of Palestinian graves, a product of the Nakba. I have learned that my suffering, my family and people’s suffering, does not give us the right to pass it on to others.
I feel at home on the Marches to Free Palestine. They are full of people of color, including Palestinians, and, thank goodness, Jews in If Not Now and Jewish Voice for Peace, of which I am a member. I was still in contact with Yousef after the first demonstration and he was so helped to see the many photos and videos I sent him, even one from a Gazan couple wishing him safety for him and his whole family.
But then Israel began dumping 5000 bombs within a week, all the while cutting off Gazans from electricity, safe water, and food. Yousef and I were cut off from each other for good, it seems. He and his family died on Oct 14. That was one week after Yousef said we would probably lose connection. They stayed in their house. Having lived in the open-air prison, they knew Israel would not leave a safe corridor for moving over a million Palestinians. They were right, Israel is starving and bombing all over Gaza. They left no safe corridor and there is no safe place in Gaza.
It is only our opposition that we can offer and herein is a part of my opposition.
Bless you, Yousef, my dear friend. I have loved knowing you.
And thank you Amy Goodman and Democracy Now, you ground me daily along with all non-corporate media.
Resources
Brodkin, Karen. How Jews Became White Folks & What That Says About Race in America. British Cataloging, 1998.
Cook, Jonathan. Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair. Zed Books, 2008.
Gutwill, Susan, Video SlideShow and About My Recent Trip to Palestine and Short History of Palestine (write me for those)
Mehdi Hasan, Dina Sayedahmed “Blowback: How Israel Went From Helping Create Hamas To Bombing It”, The Intercept, February 19, 2018,
Khalidi, Rashid. The Hundred Years’ War on PALESTINE: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017. Metropolitan Books, 2020.
Klein, Naomi, Doppelganger, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NY, 2023
Pappe, Ilan. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oneworld Publications Limited, 2006.
Segev, Tom. A State At Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Guron. Keter Books, 2018.
Taylor, Adam “With strikes targeting rockets and tunnels, the Israeli tactic of ‘mowing the grass’ returns to Gaza,” The Washington Post, May 21, 2021, With strikes targeting rockets and tunnels, the Israeli tactic of ‘mowing the grass’ returns to Gaza
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