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Ideas are not tied to specific individuals, and resilience and resistance are a culture, not a job title.
The killing of seven Palestinian journalists and media workers in Gaza on August 10 has prompted verbal condemnations, yet has inspired little to no substantive action. This has become the predictable and horrifying trajectory of the international community's response to the ongoing Israeli genocide.
By eliminating Palestinian journalists like Anas al-Sharif and Mohammed Qraiqeh, Israel has made a sinister statement that the genocide will spare no one. According to the monitoring website Shireen.ps, Israel has killed nearly 270 journalists since October 2023.
More journalists are likely to die covering the genocide of their own people in Gaza, especially since Israel has manufactured a convenient and easily deployed narrative that every Gazan journalist is simply a "terrorist." This is the same cruel logic offered by numerous Israeli officials in the past, including Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who declared that "an entire nation" in Gaza "is responsible" for not having rebelled against Hamas, effectively stating that there are no innocent people in Gaza.
This Israeli discourse, which dehumanizes entire populations based on a vicious logic, is frequently repeated by officials who fear no accountability. Even Israeli diplomats, whose job in theory is to improve their country's image internationally, frequently engage in this brutal ritual. In comments made in January 2024, Israeli ambassador to the United Kingdom, Tzipi Hotovely, callously argued that "every school, every mosque, every second house has access to tunnels," implying that all of Gaza is a valid military target.
With foreign media forbidden from operating in the strip per Israeli orders, the Gazan intellectual rose to the occasion and, in the course of two years, managed to reverse most of Zionism's gains over the past century.
This cruelty of language would be easily dismissed as mere rhetoric, except that Israel has, in fact, according to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reports, destroyed over 70% of Gaza's infrastructure.
While extremist language is often used by politicians around the world, it is rare for the extremism of the language to so precisely mirror the extremism of the action itself. This makes Israeli political discourse a uniquely dangerous phenomenon.
There can be no military justification for the wholesale annihilation of an entire region. Yet again, the Israelis are not shying away from providing the political discourse that explains this unprecedented destruction. Former Knesset member Moshe Feiglin chillingly said, last May, that "every child, every baby in Gaza is an enemy… not a single Gazan child will be left there."
But for the systematic destruction of a whole nation to succeed, it must include the deliberate targeting of its scientists, doctors, intellectuals, journalists, artists, and poets. While children and women remain the largest categories of victims, many of those killed in deliberate assassinations appear to be targeted specifically to disorient Palestinian society, deprive it of societal leadership, and render the process of rebuilding Gaza impossible.
These figures powerfully illustrate this point: According to a report released by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, based on the latest satellite damage assessment conducted in July, 97% of Gaza's educational facilities have been affected, with 91% in need of major repairs or full reconstruction. Additionally, hundreds of teachers and thousands of students have been killed.
But why is Israel so intent on killing those responsible for intellectual production? The answer is twofold: one unique to Gaza, and the other unique to the nature of Israel's founding ideology, Zionism.
First, regarding Gaza: Since the Nakba in 1948, Palestinian society in Gaza has invested heavily in education, seeing it as a crucial tool for liberation and self-determination. Early footage shows classrooms being held in tents and open spaces, a testament to this community's tenacious pursuit of knowledge. This focus on education transformed the strip into a regional hub for intellectual and cultural production, despite poorly funded UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East schools. Israel's campaign of destruction is a deliberate attempt to erase this generational achievement, a practice known as scholasticide, and Gaza is the most deliberate example of this horrific act.
Second, regarding Zionism: For many years, we were led to believe that Zionism was winning the intellectual war due to the cleverness and refinement of Israeli propaganda, or hasbara. The prevailing narrative, particularly in the Arab world, was that Palestinians and Arabs were simply no match for the savvy Israeli and pro-Israeli public relations machine in Western media. This created a sense of intellectual inferiority, masking the true reason for the imbalance.
Israel was able to "win" in mainstream media discourse due to the intentional marginalization and demonization of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices. The latter had no chance of fighting back simply because they were not allowed to, and were instead labeled as "terrorist sympathizers" and the like. Even the late, world-renowned Palestinian scholar Edward Said was called a "Nazi" by the extremist, now-banned Jewish Defense League, who went so far as to set the beloved professor's university office on fire.
Gaza, however, represented a major problem. With foreign media forbidden from operating in the strip per Israeli orders, the Gazan intellectual rose to the occasion and, in the course of two years, managed to reverse most of Zionism's gains over the past century. This forced Israel into a desperate race against time to remove as many Palestinian journalists, intellectuals, academics, and even social media influencers from the scene as quickly as possible—thus, the war on the Palestinian thinker.
The Israeli logic, however, is destined to fail, as ideas are not tied to specific individuals, and resilience and resistance are a culture, not a job title. Gaza shall once more emerge, not only as the culturally thriving place it has always been, but as the cornerstone of a new liberation discourse that is set to inspire the globe regarding the power of intellect to stand firm, to fight for what is right, and to live with purpose for a higher cause.
Awdah Hathaleen and his community faced injustices and violence all the time, but simply because he was my friend, I never thought that he would die.
I saw Awdah's text in the morning of July 28. He said that settlers are in his village, Umm Al Khair, and they are trying to cut the main water pipe. "If they cut [it] the community here will literally be without any drop of water," he wrote in his text. Accompanying it was a picture showing settlers armed with rifles, a banal sight.
He often sent updates like these from his Palestinian village in the West Bank to activists and his friends across the world. He would inform us of Israel Defense Forces (IDF) raids, arrests, and demolitions. Or that settlers, who typically came from the flourishing settlement of Carmel next door, were harassing and attacking residents. Over time, I found myself running out of ways to respond meaningfully to such updates, especially as now I was far away in the U.S. I would reply, "This is terrible" or "Stay strong," and each time I felt helpless and thought that my responses were useless.
I did not get the chance to respond to his text that morning. A few hours later, Awdah Hathaleen was dead, shot by a settler.
The lives of Palestinians are extremely precarious. I grasped the gravity of this fact during my time in Israel-Palestine, but subconsciously, I made myself forget it: Awdah and his community faced injustices and violence all the time, but simply because he was my friend, I never thought that he would die.
The heartbreak from this single death, in other words, puts into perspective how the scale of atrocity in Palestine is truly unfathomable.
When I first met Awdah, he was describing life under the Israeli occupation to our group, which was mostly comprised of Jews from the U.S. who were visiting Umm Al Khair. He shared in vivid detail his first sighting of a demolition by the IDF when he was in the fourth grade—how he ran from school, stood shivering in the cold, and watched multiple homes being reduced to rubble, his relatives screaming and weeping. He explained how his uncle Haj Suleiman was run over and killed with a vehicle by the IDF in 2022. The Haj, an elderly man at the time, was a revered figure of nonviolent resistance and a community leader, and thousands came to his funeral. As Awdah spoke that night, the settlement of Carmel was visible behind him, and a mural commemorating the Haj was on the left.
Over time, I noticed that Awdah had unlimited energy to share his stories and political vision with visitors. I also felt that in these conversations, his childhood trauma from the demolition and the recent loss of his uncle always surfaced in one way or another, like wounds that would not heal.
That first night, Awdah shared something that he would say often, "To survive under the occupation, you need two things: patience and hope." Patience because justice would be very slow, and hope because without it, "There is no light." We were sitting on a small basketball court, where perhaps only football was ever played. Awdah would eventually be killed right there.
Alaa Hathaleen, Awdah's cousin, mourns at the spot where Awdah was shot by the settler Yinon Levi in Umm Al Khair, the Occupied West Bank, on July 29, 2025. (Photo: Oren Ziv)
Although Awdah introduced himself as an English teacher and an activist, I also saw in him a remarkable political educator who helped countless visitors understand the occupation. Awdah would say that he wants all humans to have dignity and live in peace; he wants Palestinians to be equal with others; and he wants his three young children to have a better life than his own, free from fear and violence. His words and hospitality helped make his village one of the centers for anti-occupation activism in the region. International and Israeli anti-occupation activists regularly pass through, volunteer, intervene during the incursions from settlers and the IDF, rest, share Iftar meals, and play with children.
He created a community as he resisted. His friends are scattered across the world and are mourning on video calls and group chats. It is difficult to believe that when we visit Umm Al Khair next, Awdah will not be there, saying, "welcome, welcome," addressing us as "friend" or "habibi," and chastising us for visiting Umm Al Khair after so long.
Awdah's death pierces the hearts of so many of us because it is layered with atrocities. First, this is a quintessential case of settler violence and there is unlikely to be justice. Yinon Levi, the settler who killed Awdah, was immediately released on house arrest by Israeli authorities, despite many witnesses and the shooting being filmed. In fact, Levi was telling IDF soldiers who to arrest right after he killed Awdah. Within a week, Levi returned to the village to intimidate residents. The reason for all this is simple: Israel does not prosecute settler violence because it serves the official policy of removing Palestinians from their land.
Further, there was no opportunity to grieve following Awdah's killing. The IDF raided Umm Al Khair over the following days and detained about 15 Palestinians, assaulting many of them. Then, the Israeli authorities refused to return Awdah's body unless the funeral was limited to 15 people and the body was buried miles from the village. In response, around 60 women in Umm Al Khair went on a hunger strike, and there were demonstrations across cities including New York, Boston, Chicago, Toronto, London, and Chicago. Ten days after the killing, the authorities finally felt pressured to return Awdah's body, allow the burial in the village, and release the Palestinian detainees. But many people were still prevented from attending the funeral.
There is nothing unusual about Awdah's killing or how his village was targeted; such incidents occur regularly in the Occupied West Bank. The heartbreak from this single death, in other words, puts into perspective how the scale of atrocity in Palestine is truly unfathomable. After all, he is but one among the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed since the beginning of the live-streamed genocide.
When those who seek to help resolve a conflict are captive to one side’s definitions and perspective, it’s a recipe for continued tension and ultimately disaster.
Our understanding of an historical event’s meaning is a function of two factors. The first is what we choose to identify as the starting point leading up to the event. The second is the lens through which we view it. This should be obvious, but unfortunately it is not, and the failure to acknowledge or understand it has consequences in everything from public policy to personal relationships.
This truth can be ignored due to thoughtlessness, blindness to one’s biases, or just plain ignorance. On some occasions there can be malign intent, including efforts to deliberately hide what one knows to be an event’s antecedents for political or personal reasons.
Before examining the issue that prompted this column, I want to share an example. The comedian Dick Gregory once noted that despite what we were taught in school, “Columbus didn’t discover America, because it wasn’t lost.” His point seems simple enough, but upon closer examination it reveals deeper truths.
“Columbus discovered America” erases the history, civilization, and contributions of the Indigenous groups who populated the lands that Europeans came to call the New World. Even the term “New World” was a thinly veiled masking of their imperial self-understanding and intent. “We discovered these lands, and they are ours to take, name, and exploit.”
U.S. reporters appear to be required to include a line in their stories that reads, “The hostilities began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas militants attacked Israel killing 1,200 and taking 250 hostages.”
The American history we were taught was an extension of European history. It began with Columbus. Then moved to the Spanish, British, and French colonialists, culminating in the Revolutionary War and the birth of the United States. The native peoples were treated as bit players in the unfolding story—at times, a footnote, at others an inconvenient obstacle.
This story of American history results from choosing Columbus as the starting point and using a lens so Eurocentric that it only sees the Indigenous peoples who populated this land as less than human and therefore less deserving of defining their own history or even remaining on their land. They were removed and massacred, their humanity was ignored, and their treatment was justified because they were of less worth than the Europeans who displaced them.
This reflection was prompted by the way Israel’s war on Gaza continues to be reported in the press and discussed in policy circles. U.S. reporters appear to be required to include a line in their stories that reads, “The hostilities began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas militants attacked Israel killing 1,200 and taking 250 hostages.” It isn’t accidental that this line (or something very close to it) occurs in almost every U.S. print story.
We all must agree that what happened on October 7 was traumatic for Israelis. It was a shock that their security was breached and that some horrible and condemnable atrocities were committed by Hamas and others who joined in their attacks. But history didn’t begin or end on October 7.
Recall that just a few weeks before that the Hamas attack, then-U.S. President Joe Biden’s national security adviser noted that the Middle East was the calmest it had been in years. This statement gave short shrift to the Palestinian reality and made clear the biased lens through which he saw the region. He was ignoring Israel’s continued economic strangulation of Gaza (which made Palestinians increasingly dependent on Israel or Hamas for their livelihood) and the growing threat of settler violence, settlement expansion, and land confiscations in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
A few weeks after October 7, I met with this same individual and listened to him describe the pain and fear of Israelis and how October 7 evoked the traumas of their history. I told him that I completely understood and agreed that Hamas stood rightly condemned for what they had done. I cautioned him, however, not to ignore the trauma of the Palestinians—their pain and fears—and their history of dispossession. He became angry, waving off my comments as “what aboutism.”
As the weeks and months wore on, when I would write a comment about: the growing Palestinian civilian casualty toll; or the bombing of hospitals; or the denial of water, food, medicine, and electricity; or the deliberate destruction of more than 70% of Gaza’s buildings; and the repeated forced expulsions of families—the responses I would receive invariably included “Hamas started it,” “What about the hostages,” or worse. In other words, Israeli lives were all that mattered. And the Israeli narrative became the only acceptable one. In other words, since the story began on October 7, what followed was a justifiable response.
The Israelis’ ability to control the narrative has long characterized the conflict. They would say: “The Balfour Declaration gave Israel a legal right to Palestine”; or “In 1948, tiny Israel was attacked by all surrounding Arab armies”; or “In 1967 Israel was only defending itself.” All of these Israeli-defined “starting points” are fictions that ignore everything that led up to them and the stories they tell are seen only through the biased lens of those who have imposed them.
This problem of false narratives based on biased histories isn’t just a problem for Israel or the U.S. It is unfortunately all too common, especially in conflict situations. When those who seek to help resolve a conflict are captive to one side’s definitions and perspective, it’s a recipe for continued tension and ultimately disaster.
Peacemaking requires that an effort be made to rise above false narratives, self-serving starting points and the biased perceptions of one or another side. That’s not “what-aboutism”—it’s leadership. And it’s been sorely lacking in the U.S.