A spiral of worry: Local voices on the Israel-Hamas war

Lamia Faruki hasn’t turned on her TV in more than two weeks.

“I can’t watch it,” she said. “I read the papers. What’s scary for me is that the vengeance and the violence will spread, and again without any call for an end to the violence for both sides, there’s no real solution. There’s no military solution for this conflict. It has to come from higher minds, from a higher consciousness.”

Faruki is a native New Mexican with Palestinian parents. She and other New Mexicans with ties to the region are worried for the safety of their loved ones, and the fate of the people living in Israel and Gaza.

Faruki’s mother’s family left in 1948, so her mother was born in Egypt, while Faruki’s father was born in Palestine. She still has cousins who live in East Jerusalem and Haifa, for whom she worries as the war between Israel and Hamas continues.

Faruki has reached out to young women she worked with when she was involved with Tomorrow’s Women, a Santa Fe-based nonprofit that tries to bring together Israeli and Palestinian teenage girls. One of those women lives in Gaza, and Faruki has yet to hear back from her.

“I try to maintain hope. They don’t have electricity most of the time,” she said.

The women she has been able to reach are scared.

“They’re sick and tired of being under these power regimes that continue to use force, knowing that it’s futile. It’s absolutely futile,” Faruki said.

What sets this conflict apart from previous ones in the area is the brutality, Faruki said.

“I have to say that there’s absolutely no justification for it, but there also needs to be a conversation about human rights and justice for all peoples there. Not for one side or the other, for everyone to be able to live feeling safe with their human rights intact. And freedom of movement, freedom of religion, all of it.”

Afraid to leave home

Albuquerque’s Iris Keltz is also worried about friends living through the war who are scared to leave their homes.

“When I was young, I was part of the Palestinian community, living with them and I still have friends and people there,” Keltz said. “What they’ve told me, and they live outside the old city of Jerusalem in a little Palestinian village on the outskirts, they are afraid to leave the house. They are afraid to go shopping.”

Keltz has been writing about Israel and Palestine since 1967, after a transformational experience she had as a young Jewish woman. She was planning to live in a kibbutz in Israel.

“I came overland through Jordan to enter Israel and I had no idea, I was kind of ignorant, that Jerusalem was a divided city, and so I ended up in East Jerusalem, Jordan, and I had to wait three days to get a visa, to go where I planned on living in Israel,” she said.

During the three days of waiting, she met a Palestinian family who offered to host her.

“I always tell people, a Palestinian’s secret weapon is their hospitality. If you have ever been the recipient of Palestinian hospitality, it’s like you are treated royally. Guests are so welcomed into their homes. It made me weep sometimes at how generous they were with me and the gifts they gave me,” Keltz said.

She married into the family and experienced the Six-Day War in 1967 with them. They survived the war together and watched the onset of occupation.

“I hid in Ramallah with them. I remember the moment right after the war, and the Israeli soldiers were entering the streets and all my friends were really scared of them, and I wasn’t as scared of them because I was Jewish. I didn’t think I should be afraid of Israeli soldiers, and they said to me, ‘You tell them that you’re an American, that you’re Jewish and that we’re friends.’ And that was the mission that was given to me when I was quite young and that’s still my mission. Palestinians are not my enemy,” Keltz said.

Keltz mentors young women writers in Gaza, trying to share their voices and help them get their stories out into the world.

“One of them wrote me on WhatsApp and she said, ‘I have 2% battery left,’ — I’ve gotten really attached to this girl — and she said, ‘I want to thank you. I love you. Thank you for helping me get my voice out and goodbye. I don’t think I’m going to survive this, what’s happening now.’

“And I haven’t heard from her since.”

Worried for hospitals

Albuquerque Quaker Dr. Sara Thorp is worried for the hospitals in Gaza. Thorp spent a month in 2009 working at a hospital in East Jerusalem, where she saw firsthand the difficulties of caring for people living in an occupied territory.

“Sometimes my colleagues couldn’t get to work because of the checkpoints,” Thorp said. “We had patients who waited years to get permission to leave Gaza to come to the hospital where we were, which was in East Jerusalem, the West Bank area.”

One of her patients was a boy with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, a condition which can be treated with methotrexate, an affordable medication to prevent long-term joint damage.

His family smuggled medication for him into Gaza from Egypt, until those tunnels closed and he couldn’t get medication for the condition anymore. Approval for the boy to go to a hospital outside of Gaza took years. By the time he reached the hospital where Thorp worked, he had permanent joint disfiguration.

“That was completely preventable. And his family had been applying for years to just get him out of Gaza to see specialists because it didn’t have a rheumatologist at the time. And when we saw him, they were so grateful for the care, but as a doctor, blockading medicine from a region is criminal,” Thorp said.

Thorp has been attending protests, advocating for a cease-fire in Santa Fe and Albuquerque.

“As a physician, avoidable injuries are heartbreaking to me, anywhere,” Thorp said. “And we’ve seen more than 10,000 civilian deaths in Palestine, including more than 3,000 children. I take care of newborns, pregnant people, adults all the way to elders, and the deaths that we’re seeing could be stopped.”

‘A lot of suffering on both sides’

Leora Jaeger-Siegel and Malcolm Siegel are worried that people will misunderstand the conflict in Israel and Palestine.

“It’s so deep and there’s so many historical twists and bends in it,” Jaeger-Siegel said. “It’s very hard.”

Jaeger-Siegel lived in Israel until she was 5.

“Half of my family escaped Eastern Europe, Czechoslovakia, in one of the last legal boats out to get to Israel,” Jaeger-Siegel said. The other half of the family was lost to the Nazis. Her parents lived in Israel for 18 years, before moving to the U.S. with Jaeger-Siegel and her sister. Much of her family is still in Israel, and so far they’ve been OK. Many are in the military, while others are in their homes or in bomb shelters.

“We have friends that are now experiencing a lot of PTSD for what they’ve seen, what they’ve experienced,” Jaeger-Siegel said. “And I know obviously, what’s happening in Gaza is, in terms of numbers, the multitude is, it’s very many more. There’s a lot of suffering on both sides.”

Jaeger-Siegel went back to Israel in 1973, as a student at the University of Jerusalem.

“I connected for the first time with my relatives there,” she said. But it was a difficult time to go back, because in 1973 was the Yom Kippur War, which shaped her experience there.

Malcolm Siegel spent some time in Israel as a student and then again as a scientist in the late 1970s.

The couple reconnected with Israel in the last 10 years, co-directing the nonprofit Water Resources Action Project, which builds rainwater harvesting systems in schools in Israel, Palestine and Jordan and connects Arab and Jewish students.

The current war is different from previous ones in the area because it poses an existential threat, Siegel said.

“I think, before, there was danger with missiles, sort of randomly being lobbed over the border, but the Iron Dome protected the Israelis. But now I think the Israelis feel that there’s an existential threat, not only from Hamas, but also from the possibility that Hezbollah could join in and then the West Bank could erupt, and Iran could get involved,” Siegel said.

‘It just has to stop’

Albuquerque’s Alan Wagman is worried about “never again,” meaning “never again to us,” instead of “never again to anybody.” Wagman is a member of Jewish Voice for Peace.

“When I was a child, we had a next door neighbor who had a number tattooed on his arm,” Wagman said. “And I don’t remember ever not knowing what that number was. It’s like I was born knowing what that number was. I know from before I knew, what had been done to us. I’ve known all my life, that we’re lucky in this country, we’re not on the top of any list. There’s probably a few people who have us at the top. But they’ll come for a bunch of other people before they come for us. We’re not on the top of the list, but we’re on everybody’s list. So, there’s never, ever, ever a feeling that we were secure. And Israel was what provided that security.”

Wagman grew up in a very Zionist home, but his experiences over the years have left him disillusioned with Israel.

Back in 2002, Wagman visited Israel, and a bomb went off just a block and a half ahead of Wagman and his wife.

“There’s two reactions to that,” Wagman said. “It’s that was a bomber that might have killed me. Try to kill them. But the other reaction is somehow just find a way to make this stop. Whatever it takes to make this stop. Don’t worry about arguing about right or wrong. It just has to stop.”

Faruki’s says her heart is “in a million pieces,” thinking about people caught in the middle of the war.

“All my life I’ve been raised with this conflict, in the foreground, in the background,” Faruki said. “I know the history, I’ve read the books, I’ve worked with people from all sides, very closely and knowing what I know, the only answer is diplomacy, respect for international law and respect for each other as humans.”