'It seemed as if we were fleeing from one death to another.' Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty Images
I have lived in Gaza all my life, and for 30 years have been a journalist, which means I have witnessed a lot of violent conflict. But when I woke up to the booms of rockets being fired towards Israel on October 7 last year, this attack felt different. I went on to the roof of my house in Al-Bureij, in the middle of the Gaza Strip. From there, I could see armed men riding motorbikes through the wrecked security fence and entering Israel.
Immediately, I felt afraid. This was the first time that a Palestinian force had invaded our neighbour to kidnap and kill, and I expected Israel would respond very strongly. Ever since, I have known I could die at any time: walking on the street, sitting in my house, visiting my relatives. You can be talking to someone in the morning, and then you hear in the evening they are dead. Every day we pay the price for October 7, and this has a terrible psychological impact.
At first, many people here were happy about the attack: because of Israel’s siege of Gaza and its control of the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, as well as previous conflicts. However, many have changed their minds. Even those who once voted for Hamas have turned against them, because they blame them for the disaster we have experienced.
I believe Hamas thought the war would end after one or two months, and that after that, the international community would intervene and stop it: they never imagined it would still be going on after a year. At the same time, Israel has not won the war. It has not destroyed Hamas or killed all its members. Its fighters are still here, refusing to run up the white flag, still making statements saying they intend to resist.
Hamas members aren’t seen very much in the streets, because there they risk being spotted from the air and targeted. But they appear, sometimes at night, and then they disappear: some are living in the tunnels, some in houses, others in tents. They come out to beat people they say are thieves with sticks and iron bars, and they punish their enemies, sometimes by killing them. They are still killing Israelis.
They conceal every piece of information. They never confirm the names of those who have been martyred, and they don’t say whether any of their leaders have been killed.
As for myself, I was a Leftist before I became a journalist. I have never supported Hamas, nor any kind of violence between Palestinians and Israelis. I have said all my life we should go for coexistence: I believe this land can absorb all its people, and that we can live with each other, side by side. Unfortunately, believing we need peace does not make it happen.
Two days after the attack began, my wife, our three children and I left our house because the neighbourhood was being shelled. We went to stay with one of my brothers, but after another two days it became too dangerous there, so at 2am one morning we took shelter in a UN school. It was extremely overcrowded and random shells were falling into the yard. When it got light we moved again, to a relative’s house in the Nuseirat refugee camp, where we stayed for 47 days, until the truce began in November and we returned home.
After the ceasefire, the war restarted even more violently than before. We always monitor the website of Israel’s civilian coordinators, and on 23 December, they issued a map of the areas they said people had to leave. Our house was on it, and we were told we had to evacuate immediately. We stayed four days with some relatives before the Israelis issued a revised map, forcing us to flee yet again.
This time, along with countless thousands of other displaced persons, we went to Rafah, in the south. It’s not very far, but the journey took four hours, and all that time we were scared of possible airstrikes. My brother and I rented two small rooms for ourselves and our families — 12 people in all, with no bathroom or kitchen. Rafah was supposed to be safe, but the area we were in was bombed several times. The weather was wet and cold and the roof dilapidated. It did not block the rain, and the walls were cracked and damp. But we had no choice, and it was better than living in tents. We found wood to make a fire and that became our kitchen.
We had been there nearly two months when we heard the Israelis were withdrawing from Al-Bureij, so we felt safe enough to go home. But it wasn’t long before the Israelis again declared it a “red zone” — so once more we fled, this time back to Nuseirat. There we heard violent explosions nearby and Israeli tanks on the move. We were very afraid, but there was nothing we could do. Everywhere had become unsafe. It seemed as if we were fleeing from one death to another. In July, we returned to our house one final time and stayed there. Somewhat miraculously, it had not been damaged. I would guess that by now, fewer than 30% of Gaza’s buildings remain standing.
The life we lead now is inhuman. I suppose we are lucky: in some areas, there is only running water for a short time every 10 days, whereas we usually get it one day in three. But we have to delay everything until it comes. Having enough water to be able to wash or take a shower is bliss. There are things you don’t realise how much you need until they are unavailable: like shampoo. We have no electricity, so after dark we depend on battery lights, and to charge our phones I have to pay a neighbour who has a solar panel. It is very hard to get gas in order to cook.
Hamas may not have been eliminated, but it is dangerous for their police to be on the streets, so there is anarchy. The distribution of most kinds of food is controlled by criminal gangs. They have guns, and steal imported food from those who receive it, mostly from charitable donors in places such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Because there are no police to stop them, they hijack trucks and steal their contents, and two or three days later it appears in the markets at inflated prices. The price of many items, such as vegetables and eggs, has roughly tripled.
Meanwhile, there are no working banks or ATMs. I am still a journalist, working for a newspaper based in the West Bank, although I cannot travel anywhere to report. I am still receiving a salary, but the only way I can get cash is from money changers, profiteers who take more than 20% as their commission.
Yet set beside the fate of others, these are merely inconveniences. We lost my nephew, Muntezar, in Rafah: when we left he stayed on because of his job with the electricity company, which had promised him an increased salary if he remained. He wasn’t a fighter but an ordinary worker who had two little boys. I was close to him, and he had no interest in politics, but his house was hit and he was killed, alongside two of his wife’s brothers. My wife’s sister was killed with four of her children and her grandson, in a strike on an apartment building that killed more than 30 people in Nuseirat near the beginning of the war.
One of my wife’s brothers perished from an airstrike along with his two sons; another with his wife, two sons and three grandsons. You expect you may lose someone all the time: any time your phone rings you rush to answer it, in case it is someone telling you another relative has been killed.
One afternoon three weeks ago, there was an airstrike on the building opposite our house, which is just eight metres away. We were sitting in our downstairs living room when there was an enormous blast. All our windows were destroyed, and we were covered in smoke, broken glass, and thick, black dust. I couldn’t see, I could only hear, and my family were screaming and crying. At last, some neighbours came and took us outside and we sat in the open air in order to breathe.
We’ve been trying to fix the damage ever since, but we have no glass to replace the windows. We don’t know what will happen during the winter, when the nights begin to get cold. We had to throw away lots of food because it had been polluted by dust and chemicals from the rockets.
Like most people in Gaza, we long for the war to stop, and try to return to normality. But no one seems to be applying any pressure to make this happen. Israel doesn’t want to finish this war, because that would mean its Prime Minister would have to go to court to face charges of corruption, and his government would collapse. The fanatical Right-wing politicians in his cabinet would also lose power.
But Hamas will not surrender. Their religion means they believe that if they are killed, they will go to paradise, and all the time they say they will not stop. They are waiting, hoping that something will change. For a long time they waited for Hezbollah to enter the war, and now they have; they were waiting for Nasrallah, though now he is dead. They are waiting for help from Iran and from Yemen, though no one has any idea what will happen when it comes.
All I know is that while Hamas waits, we continue to pay the price.
Fascinating essay.
In the contemporary sense, perhaps the wall we Americans have erected is there to avoid hearing the screams of the allies we’ve abandoned being murdered.
Be specific. Are you referring to Israel and Ukraine or just one of the two?
Saigon and Kabul and Kiev and Tel Aviv and Riga and Warsaw and Taipei…
We’ll be OK with any or all of these going away, behind our wall that drowns out the screaming.
I had no Scorsese had become so pathetic and self-hating. These people have been hanging around Hollywood for too long. It has driven them mad.
I thought movies were for entertainment. What happened? Have I been asleep??
That’s a silly comment.
Movies have always been made for lots of reasons,a component of necessity naturally is their appeal for people to watch them,as the technology and the standard of the technicians from cameraman’s work to researchers has improved dramatically it has become possible to give the impression of revisiting history,however as we move further to this goal and the outcome becomes more convincing all the more will it be that in say 20 years time the same movies that impress now will look contrived
I don’t think it’s a silly comment. Movies like Oppenheimer are incredibly self-important, the movie (the cinematography, the acting, the scary sound effects, the sex scenes that are supposed to shock the viewer, the suffering of the characters getting hammered into your head by the bombastic style) becomes more important than the message. And it was all done before, the juxtaposition that is supposed to grab us all in here, deep down… And, of course, all women are beautiful, and the breasts have to be perfectly shaped.
I thought the mammary glands on display somewhat diminutive by today’s standards, otherwise I completely agree with you.
Standard by your memories of youth, perhaps? And mine! I always prefer balance between said glands and the rest of the figure. Some of today’s enhancements just look stupid.
It will be many more decades, if not centuries of experience, before we can make a conclusive judgment about nuclear bombs. But at the time, their limited use saved hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives (far more Asian than American, though Truman’s main motivation was Americans). The A-bomb was available because Americans and Britons feared the consequence of Hitler getting it first, but once it existed, it was a tool in the arsenal, as it were. In the shadows of Saipan, Peleliu, Manila, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, and the intel on what invading the Japanese Home Islands would entail, their use was inevitable. The alternative to the A-bombs and invasion, continued blockade and “conventional” bombing, would have cost millions, perhaps tens of millions, of Japanese lives starved in the winter of 1945-46, and such was the ruling mentality in Tokyo that even that catastrophe may not have led to surrender. Arguments to the contrary are either misinformed or dishonest.
In the decades since, the existence of nuclear weapons created a terrible psychological burden, and may as the author suggests have made small-scale wars more likely, but they have certainly helped avoid full scale wars between great powers, including the effects of those on smaller powers caught in the crossfire. Even today, their existence has likely kept the Russo-Ukraine War contained, as they did in Korea and Vietnam, and perhaps Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, and elsewhere. World War I killed about 15 million people, 20 million if you include its immediate aftermath in the Russian Civil War and Turkish-Greek conflict. World War II more like 70 million. What would a non-nuclear World War III have cost in the late 20th Century? It is speculation, but not unreasonable to think that such a conflict would have dwarfed the cost in lives and treasure of all the wars that did occur in that period.
I should also note that Oppenheimer’s biggest regret was less the A-bomb than that it enabled the far more powerful and terrifying H-bomb. His political and security problems were not because of the Manhattan Project, but his opposing developing Teller’s dream of “The Super,” especially after it was learned that the USSR had developed the A-bomb.
It is possible to be horrified by the carnage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and still understand that this appeared at the time, and may actually have bene, the least bad of the terrible choices available.
It could be argued that the A bombs were used as a caveat to the Soviets.
Odd how the Soviets developed the BOMB so quickly even with the help of Fuchs, the Rosenbergs etc.
The US certainly needed a credible enemy and before 1949 the Soviet Union didn’t “cut the mustard”.
Perhaps the answer lies with the newly (1947) formed CIA?
Stalin knew more about the atomic bomb than Truman did when he took office. All the secrets had been betrayed by spies.
That’s a hypothesis but there is no significant documentation in reports or even meeting notes that is was a major factor. Byrnes may have mentioned it once.
In hindsight it makes more sense than it did at the time, as the Soviet attack on Manchukuo on August 8 was far more successful than even the Soviet planners expected. In that context, the idea of using the Bomb to deter future Soviet adventurism makes sense, but that was unknown when the decision to drop the first two bombs was made.
The essential historical texts on all this are Richard Frank’s “Downfall” and D.M. Giangreco’s “Hell to Pay.” And the essential literary text is Paul Fussell’s “Thank God For the Atom Bomb,” which can be found for free on the internet.
Kissinger’s “History of Diplomacy” is one of many sources establishing the fact he knew NOTHING about the atomic bomb until FDR dropped dead and Truman was let in on the secret.
Nukes are the reason my father’s generation didn’t have to fight the Russians and the reason my son won’t have to fight the Chinese. Thank God for the Manhattan Project.
Of course dropping only two was a great mistake.
The whole of the Far East was waiting for the white man to ‘save face’ after the debacles of Singapore, Pearl Harbour and the Philippines.
Two just wasn’t enough, eight to ten and the virtual destruction of Japan would have been better in the long run, but sadly Truman was a weakling.
There was only one more bomb available, and Truman decided not to use it (scheduled for about Aug. 10 or 11) as there were finally credible rumblings that Tokyo might consider surrender, and Truman was troubled by the reports of the bombs’ effects.
Had Japan not surrendered and the invasion of Kyushu (Operation Olympic) gone ahead on November 1, 1945, you might have got your wish as to the number, as in early August, George Marshall expected to have about 4-6 bombs available by November 1, and was thinking about using them to interdict Japanese supplies and reinforcements to the front. (Production capacity was about 2/month at that time.) Everyone was quite ignorant about radioactive fallout, of course, and that is just one of the many ways things could have turned out much worse than they did.
As for destroying Japan, well— other than Kyoto, which Stimson wanted spared for sentimental and cultural reasons, there were hardly any targets left worth bombing–atomic or otherwise. Which is why LeMay stopped objecting to using his B-29s for minelaying in the waters around Japan and the Inland Sea–otherwise, he was running out of things for them to do.
Oppenheimer’s biggest regret was less the A-bomb than that it enabled the far more powerful and terrifying H-bomb. His political and security problems were not because of the Manhattan Project, but his opposing developing Teller’s dream of “The Super,” especially after it was learned that the USSR had developed the A-bomb.
Yes, the USSR developed the A-bomb, and the USSR developed the H-bomb, and the decision not to develop the H-bomb in order to be on the right side of history is the ultimate idiocy, which has become so popular in our delicate times.
I didn’t say Oppie was right. Maybe 10 years later there could have been a chance, but in 1949-53 Stalin was still in charge and it is inconceivable he would not have pursued the H-Bomb once his people had exploded an A-Bomb and told him the next step was feasible.
” The least bad of the terrible choices”? We are trapped in a human dilemma from which we can’t escape. In order to take the moral stand against fascism and the genocide of the Jews we killed millions. We had to do this or we couldn’t live with ourselves.
When faced with barbarism we have a natural inclination to respond. Hence the clever trick in which the evil, barbaric, death cult that is Hamas has placed Israel. Now there is no moral way out for Israel. All the demos, the slogans the filthy accusations can’t stop Israel doing what any human being would do under the circumstances. When your babies are taken as hostages and your women are brutally raped what do you expect?
Hamas knew exactly what to expect, and to achieve its deathly aims it paved the way for the slaughter of the Palestinians.
“Now there is no moral way out for Israel.” Maybe not for the misguided Left. But for the rest of us it works. It worked in WW2 and it still works today.
Nolan’s films: beautiful to look at; sumptuous to listen to; boring.
Well ok. But I’m currently in the downtown of a moderately large Western city, on a Sunday afternoon with large crowds of pink-haired Palestine kaffiyeh poseurs shouting and stomping around, angrily yelling “genocide” while attempting to bully everyone within earshot into nodding along for an *actual* genocide. With all the LGBTQI kit, they don’t look like movie-screen fascists, but they’re certainly behaving like fascists. That’s where we’re at now. Where’s the movie about that?
Do you not think you could be one of the bystanders referred to in the article?
Physical ugliness has driven many into left-wing activism to find friends in the same pickle.
As often happens, my comment here was suppressed for unclear reasons, no matter how benign. Not sure what word crime I committed this time, but I suspect it was the word “gen***de”. This is getting tedious. I’m paying money to waste my time.
Well ok. But I’m currently in the downtown of a moderately large Western city, on a Sunday afternoon with large crowds of p*nk-haired Pal*stine k*ffiyeh poseurs shouting and stomping around, angrily yelling “ge**cide” while attempting to b*lly everyone within earshot into nodding along for an *actual* ge**cide. With all the LGBTQI kit, they don’t look like movie-screen f*sc*sts, but they’re certainly behaving like f*sc*sts. That’s where we’re at now. Where’s the movie about that?
PS: reposted with asterisks to placate UnHerd’s w*ke cens*rbot. H*pe it w*rks. F*ngers cr*ssed. This is getting st*p*d.
Ian, Well said, or rather well written, astricks included, which add a more explosive and therefore accurate picture of what we are suffering here in London at the moment. Couldn’t have put it better.
” suffering in London” I think the suffering in Sudan and Gaza may be even worse.
Betsy, I wasn’t offering a comparison between the ravages of war in Gaza and the insane radicalisation of London streets, which do nothing to help thw war. But. I suppose since you made your point, we might see a connection which would be that of democracy and its demise.
So, more self hating white European angst from the filmmakers, none of whom is giving back the proceeds. Yes, bad things have happened. No, they’re not all the work of white folks.
Anyone recall The Killing Fields? Somehow, that failed to spark ritual self recrimination among Asians. Perhaps I can look forward to a movie about Mao’s atrocities, those of the Aztecs, or Africans selling other Africans into bondage. Or will that spoil the narrative?
But aren’t we fortunate? Thanks to the conscientious productions of an insightful movie industry, we’ll have the solace of knowing, as the West finally falls apart from its endless self flagellation and disappears beneath a landslide of shame, that we’ll have left behind evidence of a full understanding of our unique iniquity, artistically analysed and laid out in technicolour.
Such long, pleasurable handwashing in warm and scented water and patting dry with a fluffy towel so long after the fact is among the noteworthy things about this shallow and superficial age. Nowadays we’re beset with cheap guilt over hurtful words on the internet and ask disbelievingly how could people be so barbaric back then? Especially white people. Well, the answer is human nature. It never changes, not one bit. The grotesque scenes from October 7 and daily somewhere in Africa tell you that. If you are moralizing from afar, it helps to be ignorant of history, as most people are these days. The machine-like savagery of the Third Reich is well documented, but a veil-like amnesia masks the hideousness of the Japanese at war. To them, other people were sub-humans entitled to no more thought or kindness than hogs raised for slaughter. They fought to the finish, believing their martial spirit superior to the bombs and bullets of the other side. The Germans knew they were finished but the Japanese never did. The military fanatics who took Japan to war attacked the Imperial Palace when rumors leaked out that the Emperor pondered surrender. They didn’t believe the atomic bomb at first and then decided it was so awful another was impossible. So the second was dropped and their deluded bellicosity evaporated like the people at ground zero. Up to 170,000 people died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But well-founded estimates about how many would die in the planned invasion ranged up to five million, including American blood shed conquering the islands. Okinawa told planners that was the prospect. Who knows how many millions died when Mao was in power, but the Chinese always seem to get a pass from the hand-wringers in the West. As for the Japanese, the shame and disappointment passed down through the generations is resulting in their disappearance as a race.
Indeed. The Pacific War did have racist elements, but on both sides. No one (save perhaps for the Chinese) seems to care about the Rape of Nanjing, the Bataan Death March, the bestial treatment of allied POWs by the Japanese, or Unit 731, just to name a few of the atrocities committed by Imperial Japanese forces during WW2. An invasion of the home islands in late 1945 would have truly been “genocidal,” and was averted in large part by Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Constant diversions to deflect our eyes and ears from the explosions and screams coming from Gaza and Sudan even if we have to cast back almost a century to when 75 million, mostly Russians and Chinese were slaughtered.
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-hccc-worldhistory2/chapter/casualties-of-world-war-ii/#:~:text=Some%2075%20million%20people%20died,bombings%2C%20disease%2C%20and%20starvation.
I am a child of a twice-wounded soldier who was slated to be among the assault landing troops conducting the invasion of the Japanese home islands in WW2. Had that invasion gone ahead, I would not be writing this comment.
Once again the topic of the atomic bombing elicits a righteous progressive condemnation from a member of the leftist victimocracy in the form of Spike Lee.
What’s ignored in all this tiresome indignation are two facts:
Firstly, the alternatives to using the bomb included blockades or land invasion. Both would’ve resulted in millions of Japanese deaths from starvation and disease, or the horrors of conventional bombing and invasion shelling, or both. And the length of time taken to resolve the conflict would thereby extend well into 1946, or even 1947. The awful toll of about 200,000 Japanese citizens who perished at Hiroshima and Nagasaki pales in comparison.
Secondly, the advent of nuclear weapons, whatever their terrible power, succeeded in ending major conflicts between nations. The fact that it’s taken almost eight decades for war to erupt between two European nations is the direct result of the appearance of nuclear weapons that were, essentially, too destructive to use.
For the author to include Oppenheimer in a list of genocidal films is a vile calumny on the men and women who worked to end a terrible conflict with the least loss of life. Had they succeeded in developing the bomb in time to use it against Germany would there still be people declaring its use genocidal? The impression left by the statements of people like Spike Lee that the Japanese people–whose armed forces were directly responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of East Asian people–were somehow innocent victims of white murderers I find also unjust and utterly reprehensible.
It’s remarkable to me that history can be distorted so greatly within the living memory of those who experienced the actual events.
“…. has served to further shield civilian populations from the killing done in their name and the sacrifices that make countries so reluctant to enter into wars in the first place.” Yeah, we were well shielded from covid.
Thank you for this thought provoking article. I watched The Zone of Interest in an Oxford cinema with a handful of other people at the one scheduled showing; obviously not a zone of interest for the average cinema goer. Perhaps indicative of our ability to shield ourselves from the horrors, and be safe with bystanderism; for example, standing by as the ‘Never Again’ antisemitism of the Holocaust is reprised in Israel and around the world by the actions of Hamas. And this is where the film falls down for me. The Director, Glazer, asks us to identify with the perpetrators and not the victims and thereby accept our own potential responsibility. That would be admirable if it weren’t for the fact that the victims are very specifically Jews; and without any reference to why it was Jews who are targeted for extermination on an industrial scale. Yes, Höss is shown as “getting on with the job” and in the most efficient way possible, an example of an administrative number crunching bureaucrat, revealing the dehumanising ‘compartmentalisation’ we are all capable of. However, there is little sense of the greater purpose the Nazis had in mind when they carried out the Holocaust; it was much more than a process of racial hatred and dehumanisation. It was for the purpose of saving the German race from the Jews, on a par with a political religion. Without this acknowledgement of the ‘religious’ view of Jews as the powerful human enemy (a superhuman capability) then there is no real understanding of Höss’s motivation and the likely motivation of a radical Islamist group like Hamas. So once again Jews are being targeted, and no-one seems to really ask the deep dark question why, why Jews?
Movies like this aim to make the audience identify with the aggressor—a concept extensively studied, revealing that we all, in one way or another, possess this tendency. For further insight into this phenomenon, one might consider studying Sándor Ferenczi’s work. Furthermore, the movie “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” has already explored this manipulation of empathy’s darker side in much more depth and original.
This raises the question: Why now? Why are we attempting to encourage society to empathize with the aggressor? Is art imitating life, or is life imitating art?
“The point is that if you create the ultimate destructive power, it will also destroy those who are near and dear to you,” Nolan said. ”
Except of course it didn’t. Here we are three generations later and no-one else on the planet has died from the use of nuclear weapons.