While teaching English at Bethlehem Bible College in the occupied West Bank two years ago, I had the chance to meet a Palestinian family living in a refugee camp just south of campus. Reem and her two young boys, 11-year-old Jad and 6-year-old Eid, were receiving assistance from the college while they waited for the release of Ali, Reem’s husband and father of their children, from an Israeli prison.
Ali had been arrested 10 months before, on Christmas Eve 2021, long after Ali’s business as a street-corner juice vendor had died with the pandemic and the loss of tourism in Bethlehem. So he crossed the checkpoint from Bethlehem and began looking for work, any kind of work, in Israel’s healthier job market. There he was spotted by Israeli soldiers, who confiscated his phone, cable-tied his wrists, and sacked his head for the trip to the local military installation.
I asked Reem what message she wanted to send Americans when I returned home to Cincinnati. “If you want to tell the story,” she said, “just say that we don’t have rights, that we don’t have stability here, and that things are getting worse and worse.”
Things have gotten much worse in both Palestine and Israel since Oct. 7 of last year when Hamas militants somehow broke through Israel’s formidable defenses and rampaged through several villages, killing some 1,200 people and taking 250 hostages. The brutal attack can’t be justified, but the massive Israeli military response has been “over the top” in the minds of many observers, including President Joe Biden.
As of Feb. 14, some 28,400 people have died in Gaza, including more than 12,000 children. Thousands more victims lie dead under the widespread rubble. According to Oxfam, the Israeli military is killing 250 Palestinians per day, with many more at risk from hunger, disease and cold.
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Israel is suffering, too. While more than 100 hostages were released in exchange last year for 240 Palestinian prisoners, 134 hostages still remain in captivity. Israel’s army confirms 18 are now dead and probably more than 30 in all. The loss of hostages won’t stop as long as the Israeli bombing continues.
The suffering on both sides is why thousands of people in Cincinnati who harbor no ill will toward the Israelis or the Palestinians are deeply disappointed that Mayor Aftab Pureval and Cincinnati City Council could not support a non-violent, non-partisan resolution “calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, unrestricted humanitarian aid to Gaza, and a swift end to the war.”
Mayor Pureval, who told the Feb. 14 hearing that “consensus language doesn’t exist for an issue that is among the most nuanced and complicated in international affairs,” misses the point of the resolution. As long as the killing continues, neither side “wins” nor breaks the generations-long cycle of revenge. What’s more likely is that the slaughter in Gaza will metastasize into a wider, deeper, and riskier conflict in the nuclear tinder box of the Middle East.
Letters to the editor:Cincinnati mayor got it right on Gaza ceasefire resolution
Waging war is always more “complicated” than seeking peace. No region on Earth better illustrates that point than the Middle East, where the fighting has gone on for 75 years and will continue to go on for generations to come unless both sides say enough is enough.
While Cincinnati residents safely debate the “complicated and nuanced” history of the never-ending Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they should keep in mind the thousands more who will die without a voice in that debate as the war rages on.
Jim DeBrosse, a veteran journalist, is a former resident of Oakley and Over-the-Rhine. He now lives in Indianapolis.