Upper Valley residents reflect on Oct. 7 anniversary
Published: 10-04-2024 5:32 PM
Modified: 10-07-2024 9:21 AM |
Susannah Heschel was at home in Boston when her husband returned from the dog park and told her there had been a wide-scale surprise attack in Israel by Hamas, the Gaza Strip-based militant organization.
It was the Sabbath, a Saturday. In shock, Heschel, chairwoman of the Jewish Studies Program at Dartmouth College, went to the synagogue she frequents.
“I was very agitated, I couldn’t sit still, I was upset. There were a few people in the room who knew what had happened, but most people didn’t know yet,” she said. “I looked at everybody and I remember thinking, you don’t know that everything is over. That’s the feeling I had — everything’s over.”
What the Oct. 7, 2023 attack demonstrated is that the idea and fact of a Jewish state that would protect Jews was “shattered,” Heschel said in a recent interview. “If you’re not even safe in Israel, then really you have no safe place in the world. That was the feeling.”
As the anniversary approaches, falling this year between the Jewish High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, people in the Upper Valley are joining others around the world in the reflecting on the events of a year ago, and the expanding conflict in the Middle East.
Unsurprisingly, individuals scrutinize Israeli and Palestinian history and politics through their personal lens. And although there are a multiplicity of “sides,” what emerges in interviews with Upper Valley residents is a horror at the ongoing violence and rising death toll.
Estimates put the number of Israelis murdered on Oct. 7 at 1,200. Hamas abducted 240 Israelis, civilians and soldiers both; it is thought that 97 remain held, which includes perhaps 37 dead, the Wall Street Journal reports. Current data from the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry estimates that at least 40,000 Palestinians have been killed as a result of the subsequent Israeli bombing campaign and siege. More than 700 members of the Israeli Defense Forces have been killed, according to the Jerusalem Post.
With such grim numbers, and no end in sight, the mark of Oct.7 is indelible.
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To 31-year-old Palestinian American Ahlam Abuawad, talking only about what Israel can or should do, and what Israel has endured, is to willfully ignore the scale of suffering experienced by the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, before and after Oct. 7, 2023. The history goes back decades, and did not begin only within the past year, she said. American media, she said, tend to look at the Middle East through the narrow perspectives of American interests, whether that is the federal government’s largely unwavering political, financial and military support for Israel; or the pressure of such lobbies as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
“By framing everything about Oct. 7, you are dehumanizing Palestinians in and of itself,” said Abuawad, a postdoctoral public health researcher in the Geisel School of Medicine’s Department of Epidemiology and a member of the coalition Upper Valley for Palestine. She initiated a fundraiser, the proceeds from which were used to help family in Gaza buy food and water, and to help some of them get to Egypt. There is still extended family remaining in both Gaza and the West Bank, she said.
“Half the population are children and people seem to forget that. The International Court of Justice (in The Hague) deemed what was happening a probable genocide, and still the focus is on Oct. 7 almost a year later,” Abuawad said.
In a letter to faculty colleagues this spring Gil Raz, who teaches at Dartmouth in both the departments of Religion, and Asian societies, Cultures and Languages, with a focus on Chinese religion, wrote that he felt like the “walking dead.”
In a recent interview Raz, who is Israeli, said that he has not slept much in the past year: “Your body gets used to it, but I’m still barely sleeping, and it’s just horrific. Despite all the horrific deaths in Gaza, now it’s going to start in Lebanon, and our hostages are still not even back.”
His parents live in Israel and he has returned twice in the past year to visit them and other family and friends; he also has Palestinian friends in Gaza. He feels acutely the division between life here and life there. “I feel sort of caught between murderous terrorists and an unworthy government. And here many people don’t quite understand what’s at stake and what is really happening. People take up all kinds of extreme positions but they have no stake in this. They have little understanding, and it’s very, very difficult to explain.” Americans, he said, tend to see things in black or white. Nuance is often ignored or lost.
Events of the past year in the U.S. have demonstrated that emotions and rhetoric around the subject are highly charged, and can mutate into violence.
In November 2023 three young Palestinian students attending American colleges were shot in Burlington. Last spring, numerous U.S. college campuses were the sites of pro-Palestinian sit-ins and demonstrations, some of which were broken up by police using force.
At Dartmouth two students were arrested for trespassing at the office of President Sian Leah Beilock in October, 2023; and nearly 90 people were arrested in a demonstration on the Dartmouth Green in May of this year.
In the months after Oct. 7, students at campuses across the country filed complaints of antisemitism and anti-Muslim harassment, according to the New York Times.
Activists with varied perspectives have raised the issues of free speech: when do you speak out and what happens when you do? What is protected speech? Is it possible to tease apart the intricacies to have a reasoned discussion?
“There are people who want to express themselves emotionally on political issues but that isn’t necessarily good political analysis,” said Heschel, who, in the aftermath of the attacks, organized with her colleagues a series of public dialogues intended to illuminate the long history and politics of the Middle East, and American involvement there.
Rabbi Mark Melamut leads the non-denominational Upper Valley Jewish Community (UVJC) in Hanover, which he views as “a sanctuary for all points of view. I meet with members who take completely opposite points of view, but we’re doing our best to be a place for everyone.”
The issues raised by the current war, however, can strain at the boundaries of respectful discourse, he said. “Israel needs support but how much is the question. People advocate for or against.” It can be difficult to have a civil conversation, he said.
To that end the UVJC has started a speaker series which includes people of all stripes who discuss the issues so that “people have a better sense of the conflict. It helps to have that in the community,” Melamut said.
At 4 p.m. on a recent Wednesday, a small group of protesters stood on the Ledyard Bridge that spans the Connecticut River, holding up signs expressing their opposition to the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip, and American economic and military support for Israel. “Not Another Bomb.” “War is Not the Answer.” “Ceasefire now.”
Near the end of the hour-long vigil, coordinator Geoffrey Gardner, who lives in Bradford, Vt., reported that he counted 23 people waving or beeping. No middle fingers or people trying to climb out of their cars in counter-protest — this time.
Gardner began organizing the vigils, which also take place weekly in Bradford and on the Dartmouth Green, not long after the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and Israel’s subsequent counterattacks. He attends three vigils weekly.
“Our response to the Oct. 7 attack was that it was horrific and that it was a shock,” Gardner said. He is at pains to say he, and the other protesters on the bridge, do not condone the violence, murder and rapes of Oct. 7. Even so, the scale of the nearly-year-long war “has been astounding. I didn’t think it would go on so long.”
Gardner, 81, said he began researching the long, complex, intertwined history of Palestine and Israel when he was 13 years old. He grew up in Queens, NY, in a secular Jewish family that he said was skeptical of the consequences of the founding of Israel in 1948. After the Holocaust his parents understood why there was a push for an independent Jewish state but, Gardner said, they felt it would “involve a high level of injustice and violence.”
Gardner firmly rejects the charge by some that opposition to Zionism is antisemitic, calling it “the crudest form of propaganda.”
Liz Blum, a Norwich resident who is a member of the Vermont and New Hampshire chapter of the Jewish Voice for Peace, echoes Gardner’s observation. She has been called a “self-hating Jew,” as have other friends and relatives who share her views.
She dismisses the epithets. “I value life, I don’t support genocide or war, those are my Jewish values and those are traditional Jewish values.”
A Zionist state, she said, does not necessarily equate with greater security for Jews in Israel.
But for Sergei Kan, a professor of anthropology at Dartmouth who, with his family, emigrated from Russia to the U.S. in the 1970s because of antisemitism, criticism of Israeli tactics in the Gaza war is misguided, or worse. He calls himself a Zionist. “One can disagree with Zionism but the red line is if you deny the Jewish people the right to have their own state,” Kan said. To say Zionism is fascist or racist, “that’s antisemitism,” he adds.
After the Oct. 7 attack, Kan said he knew that Israel would retaliate and adds that it had the right both to retaliate and to conduct its counterattack as it deemed fit. “Israelis know better what they’re doing. Sitting here in Hanover and giving them advice on what to do I find disingenuous.”
Heschel abhors some of the rhetoric that has arisen around the events of Oct. 7 and afterwards. “Both sides are suffering. We have radicals on both sides and it’s terrible,” she said. What’s hard to take is the skepticism that was shown by some when Israeli women reported being raped during the attacks or when they were held hostage by Hamas.
“I do work on women’s issues, I have all my life. The moment I heard certain feminist theorists talk about the sexual violence that was committed on Oct. 7 as a form of resistance, I felt that feminist theory is over,” she said. To appear to justify the sexual violence, “to my mind is no different than saying a woman was raped because she was wearing a short skirt,” Heschel said.
For Ulrike von Moltke, a Norwich resident who was born in Germany during World War II, taking part in the Ledyard Bridge vigils is not something she does to make herself feel virtuous or to show others that she is virtuous. “It’s more than that,” she said. “I want this to change.”
Her father, who was part of a resistance group, the Kreisau Circle, was murdered by the Nazis. She spent a year in Israel in 1964, carrying with her the onus of German guilt, she said. She opposes American taxpayer money going to fund seemingly never-ending wars. She believes that a permanent ceasefire in the Gaza war depends on the cessation of selling American munitions to Israel.
Although she attends vigils, she dislikes the chant, “From the river to the sea,” which, depending on your perspective, has been framed either as an aspirational call for a Palestinian homeland or an unsubtle call for the eradication of Israel. This is partially rooted in her “German past where people blindly joined the national-socialist masses with their slogans (or felt coerced, lest they be suspected of disloyalty),” she wrote in an email.
The events of the past year have deeply unsettled Betty Lauer, a Holocaust survivor who lives in White River Junction. Born in Germany in 1926 she and her family were rounded up and expelled to Poland. Her older sister was killed during the Holocaust and Lauer eventually made her way to Sweden, and from there to the U.S., where she met her husband-to-be.
“This is a very painful business for me even though I’m here and safe. I really don’t understand why these antisemitic outbreaks are happening. When I read about or hear about it, it brings back all these memories that I didn’t want to experience anymore,” she said.
As a young bride in the late 1950s Roz Caplan moved from Massachusetts to what was then a thriving Jewish community in Claremont. The community and the Jewish-owned businesses have decreased over the decades; the space that most recently served as a synagogue was sold in 2022. Caplan now worships at UVJC.
That what happens in the Middle East has a significant effect here is no surprise but, Caplan said, “I am disappointed in many ways because I think it’s impacting our country hugely, it’s splitting our country into pieces. I think we have enough political problems of our own that we don’t need to have Israel’s problems.”
The situation was horrible, and now it’s more horrible, she said. “It’s not like an eye for an eye. One guy took one eye; the other guy took two eyes.”
She sighs. “Peace has to come some time.”
Nicola Smith can be reached at mail@nicolasmith.org.
CORRECTION: At Dartmouth two students were arrested for trespassing outside the office of President Sian Leah Beilock in October, 2023. A previous version of this story included an incorrect location for the two students' arrests.