1.

The news is so awful. 10,328 Palestinians killed since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war a month ago.¹ And 1,400 Israelis.²

I remember in the 2-3 days after the Hamas attack on October 7, when we all were starting to digest the shock of that attack and realize what was about to happen in retaliation, I said to Raja, “I mainly feel fear. So many people that are alive now are going to be dead. And there is nothing we can do about it.”

Fast forward a month, and it’s true. And I feel that same thing today. 10,328 is not where this will stop. So many people are alive right now – breathing, walking, grieving, trying to survive – who will soon be dead.

2.

It is stomach-twisting watching this unfold and knowing that our taxpayer dollars help pay for Israel’s massive bombing campaign on, and now ground invasion into, the Gaza strip. Raja has friends who have lost many relatives in Gaza, and another friend who lost two cousins in the West Bank – shot by Israeli settlers while harvesting olives.

3.

Every day, a grim new milestone. As of this writing, the Israeli government has killed 10,328 in Gaza, so I can see we have passed the unfathomably large number of 10,000 killed. I was wondering which day that would happen.

Now we can all wait for it to go up to 11,000. 12,000. This is madness. Are we living in a dream? Have we all gone mad?

I think it’s important to use active voice here.

Hamas killed 1,400 Israelis in its October 7 attack.

The Israeli government has killed 10,328 people in Gaza since that attack.

Meanwhile, Congress people are saying that we in the US must not be “distracted” by the rising death toll of Palestinian people. That was from House Rep. Ritchie Torres, a Democrat from New York. This language strikes me as casually cruel.

Don’t be distracted by the Israeli government’s killing of 10,328 people? And wounding of 25,900 more?

I’d say that’s so distracting I can hardly focus on anything else these days.

With the strong pro-Israeli bias in our government and media, it feels to me like America is asking Americans to hold more space in our hearts and heads for the 1,400 Israelis brutally killed by Hamas than the 10,328 Palestinians brutally killed by the Israeli government.

Why, though?

All of this killing was and is horrifying – even to witness from afar. I cannot imagine witnessing it up close.

I feel so sad for all the Israelis Hamas killed, all the Palestinians the Israeli government has killed / will soon kill, and their families now left to grieve while also watching the horror unfold around them and fearing more death to come.

Why should we dismiss the killing of 10,328 Palestinian people as a ‘distraction’?

4.

Since marrying Raja, I’ve found myself to be part of this lovely community of Americans and Arabs and Arab-Americans that I was never part of before when it was just me.

Last weekend Raja and I attended his cousin’s wedding in Wheaton, Illinois. This same cousin had come to our wedding and brought the dance floor to life by jubilantly shouting the lyrics to the Arab songs and dancing with Raja while twirling a huge scarf around. Now Raja had come to do the same for him on his wedding night.

I, meanwhile, had come to do what I always do when Arab dancing is involved – stand at the edge of the dance floor and clap on the beat while hoping no one expects any more of me.

We had a wonderful time visiting with Raja’s friends and family at the wedding. We helped with last minute wedding details, attended the rehearsal dinner, and danced to hatgawaz (“I’m getting married”), a favorite Egyptian wedding song.

It was a small but tight knit wedding, and everyone there so clearly wanted to celebrate Jess and Daniel – they are so lovely, so cute together.

The conversation over dinner at the reception turned to Israel and Gaza. Our table was a mix of Americans and Egyptian-Americans. Raja’s friend, an American, spent the last twenty years living as an expat in Cairo. She recently left expat life behind and moved to North Carolina with her Egyptian husband.

This always strikes me about dual passport couples, me and Raja included. When one’s expat life ends, the other’s begins.

She told us about two women she knows who regularly travel in and out of Gaza from Egypt to work at a school there. They had gone into Gaza, business as usual, before the Hamas attack and are now stuck there. They are sheltering in a school and just waiting to die.

She talked about driving down the road last week, crying and praying over and over again, God please save these people. God please save these people. God please save these people.

And, she said, the women are okay up until now. “Some concrete slabs fell in the area where we were sheltering,” they told her, “but we are okay.”

Raja’s cousin, seated on the other side of him, quietly wept a few tears for Gaza. She pulled out her phone and showed Raja the email she received from her senators in Arkansas after she wrote to ask them to support a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war.

Both senators are “standing unequivocally with Israel”. It’s not surprising. One of her senators is Tom Cotton, the one who said, “As far as I’m concerned, Israel can bounce the rubble in Gaza.”

Then we all stood up, ate lemon tart and blueberry pie, and danced. It was Jess and Daniel’s day, after all, and we wanted to celebrate them.  

Raja’s been glued to the news since October 7, and his news and social media feeds are a mix of Arabic and English in a way that mine are not. He’s plugged in to something I’m not plugged into much anymore, ever since leaving Jordan last year: the pulse of Jordanian daily life.

So he was the one who told me about the mass disenfranchisement that is happening with the West in the Arab world, which seems to be a direct result of the West’s support of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.

“You should see what people are posting now. They’re writing how they used to idolize Western culture. ‘We wanted to be like the west. We idolized their clothes, their TV shows, their way of life.’” I thought of my Jordanian colleague who spoke perfect English and told me he learned it while watching every single episode of Friends. “Now,” he said, “This infatuation with the West has completely come crashing down.”

I don’t think that Westerners necessarily realize this right now. I hadn’t really been thinking about it. I felt a sense of foreboding. The Israel-Hamas war has made the whole world less safe, less stable, I thought. Not just Gaza. And not just Israel. Everywhere. Even us, here.

Is it selfish to worry about us, here, when Gazans are in so much immediate danger? Maybe. But all I know is that these bombs are not making anyone safer. Not now. Not in the future.

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¹ I wrote this a few days ago. As of today, it’s over 11,000.

² The estimate was recently revised to 1,200.