In Minneapolis, where I am, the eclipse begins around 12:50 pm and last until about 2 pm. When it reaches its peak about 74% of the sun will be obscured. That is also New Moon, at 1:20 pm. It is cloudy here. Hope the clouds part where you are.
Don’t forget to protect your eyes!
Eclipses only happen with a New Moon phase. They both occur when the path of the moon’s orbit comes in between the Earth and Sun. And today, for us in the United States, the path lines up perfectly, and at the juncture between the end of one lunation and the beginning of the next, we will be in the shadow of the moon.
The following post is collecting links about the narratives around Israel-Palistinian conflict. When I first wrote after the October 7 Hamas Attack, Satyagraha was where I started, Gandhi’s name for nonviolence. Read more about it in my original post.
So let’s start here with this quote from MLK which I encountered this week.
My study of Gandhi convinced me that pacifism is not non-resistance to evil, but nonviolent resistance to evil. Between the two positions, there is a world of difference. Gandhi resisted evil with as much vigor and power as the violent resister, but he resisted with love instead of hate. True pacifism is not unrealistic submission to evil power….It is rather a courageous confrontation of evil by the power of love….
-Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
global attention and changing views
This week the world got news of the Israel Defense Forces’(IDF) strike on World Central Kitchen’s (WCK) aid team to Gaza, challenging the long held assumptions of IDF competency. The vans’ of WCK were targeted as they traveled through IDF controlled Gaza to their destination, despite having made a plan with Israel’s military and after receiving assurances of their protection. Chef (and founder) Jose Andres has been outspoken in response and has detailed the targeting - “after the IDF attacked the first armored car, the team was able to escape and move to a second car which was then attacked, forcing them to move to the third car” in which all remaining workers were killed - in an interview with Reuters published April 3. Andres has been understandably emotional in his response, calling for outside investigations from home countries of killed aid workers: Australia, United Kingdom, Canada, Poland, and United States. Another article from the New York Intelligencer notes that “Andre’s opinion of the war has changed significantly since the beginning of the war in Gaza.” This horrific error on the part of the Israeli Forces, call attention to the significant concerns about what has been left un-investigated in situations without the renown of WCK and without a powerful advocate like Andre. This mistake is a significant demonstration of how wrong assumptions lead to the death of innocent civilians. Read about Israel’s determination of what happened here. It will be important to watch as outside investigations are produced.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_720,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa7eeaf5f-dc17-45b2-8738-bb425e0cf2d9.heic)
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_720,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa41c80db-8340-4982-ab7a-5fcb781ae928.heic)
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_720,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Facca049e-a2cf-4f15-ad67-96e69e169f3a.heic)
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_720,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2e9899d9-ffdb-496c-801f-09f09b7e9af0.heic)
Narrative 1: impacts of terrorist violence over time
To the Jewish Israelis that I know, the October 7th attack was a larger and even more horrific layer added to an accumulation of attacks and horrors that had been going on forever.
A story from the kibbutz where my sister and brother-in-law live, where their children have grown up, where I have gone to visit many times, illustrates the effect of civilian attacks on communities. The kibbutz saw its beginning in the late ‘90s. And those first years, they were close with their nearby Palestinian neighbors. This relationship they cultivated intentionally and found it to be reciprocated. They shared meals and exchanged employment opportunities and stayed in communication. Until a young girl, a daughter of the small, close-knit community, was killed by a sniper who was known to have been sheltered in the village.
This event breeched their trust and magnified any trepidation that existed in the kibbutz and cemented the idea that it was not safe to develop relationships with Palestinian villages. All ties were cut.
The sniper was not from the village but had infiltrated its fabric in order to get close and make the attack. Many argued it wasn’t the villages fault, and many others blamed the villagers. But regardless of differences of opinion, further relationship ended for all.
Similarly, shortly after the October 7th attack, I read criticism of the ties that Jewish Israelis had been developing with Palestinians within Gaza prior to the October 7th attack. In the writers’ opinion, those loose boundaries that had allowed Hamas to infiltrate and subsequently allowed the attack to happen. layers and layers of experiences like this one.
Narrative 2: how two world views work in tandem
I can’t claim to know the second narrative. And I ask forgiveness in the process to fully trying to represent either. I can’t know what it is like to live either life. Instead I use this recent article from the New York Times about their journalists’ visit to Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza accompanied by Israeli Soldiers (that was the only way they were allowed into Gaza). The article attempts to show the divide between viewpoints, as much as the destruction of the hospital. The reporter who wrote the article had visited Gaza and the hospital before the war and now offers a view on the destruction of the hospital after IDFs return to it last month. From the Israeli point-of-view, they were given no choice but to respond after a brutal attack on their citizens by Hamas, an organization who’s strategy is to embed themselves in essential civilian infrastructure. For the other side, Palestinians see it as the ongoing destruction of the lives and homes of their people. The reporter takes care to share how things were reported by the Israeli army and what were accounts from Gazan officials and the difficulty in verifying claims. The story is an account of what happened during those two weeks in March that the IDF returned, the Gazan heath ministry saying it happened one way and Israeli military claiming the opposite, with the reporter’s note that neither could be independently verified. This article uses the hospital as a way to illustrate how the two narratives cycle with claims and denials.
the 3rd narrative
The Unapologetic Podcast (here they are on YouTube) is Amira Mohammed and Ibrahim Ahmad, Israeli citizens who “see themselves as Palestinians and share a culture and history with the Arab Palestinians in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. They also see themselves as Israelis, as people who live, work and participate in civil society in the state of Israel.” (a quote from this source) They are part of the Israeli population who are commonly referred to as Arab-Israelis, '“making up a population of over 2 million, more than 20 percent of all citizens of the state of Israel. Some among the Arab community in Israel see their identity as only ‘Palestinian,’ ‘Palestinian citizens of Israel’ or ‘48-Arabs,’ referring to the population who remained in the present state of Israel during the 1947-1948 war and became citizens afterward, distinct from the Palestinians who were from the West Bank and Gaza, or who were refugees to other countries during the war.’
Mohammed and Ahmed prefer to be called “Palestinian-Israeli.”
Here are some articles about this initiative that I have been enjoying.
This reddit conversation gives a liberal American Jewish perspective of the podcast with links.
This article is titled: “Were sick and tired of the West telling us what to do” and it includes a definition of what it means to be a 48 Palestinian (Ahmed is from that background) and a 68 Palestinian(Mohammed’s background)."
Below is a couple of their Instagram posts as it relates to my above sharing: