This is the seventh article in the "Silenced Palestinian Voices" series, a subseries of the broader "Quiet Abandonment" project, which explores the world's retreat from the Palestinian cause.
"Israel is in the midst of a war thrust upon it by the atrocious massacre of Israelis by Arabs from Gaza on October 7, 2023. Some anti-Israel media reports have tried to justify the barbarism by arguing that Gaza was a “large open-air prison”. Despite the irrelevance, as nothing can justify these hideous acts, it may be interesting to examine this assertion about Gaza.
The Gaza Strip is a small, narrow piece of land on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, a mere 365 square kilometers (half the size of NYC), with a population that has exploded over the last century to approximately 2 million people, 2 million people whom absolutely no one wants, and who have been used as pawns by the Arab leadership.
Conditions in the Gaza Strip
The 1947 UN Partition Plan of the Land of Israel would have made Gaza part of the proposed Arab state west of the Jordan River. However, the Arabs rejected the partition plan, launching the 1948 War of Independence.
At the conclusion of the war Gaza was occupied by Egypt, which refused to annex it or offer its residents Egyptian citizenship, i.e. Gaza was part of no country. That was the situation until 1967.
Thus, from 1948 to 1967, conditions in the Gaza Strip were harsh. Egypt essentially isolated itself, refusing to integrate either the locals or the 200,000 refugees, leading to severe economic conditions.
In 1955, a member of the United Nations Secretariat, James Baster, wrote in the Middle East Journal that “For all practical purposes it would be true to say that for the last six years in Gaza over 300,000 poverty-stricken people have been physically confined to an area the size of a large city park.”
Israel decisively prevailed in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Furthermore, thousands upon thousands of Arab refugees were now setting up camp along Israel's porous borders. The refugees were placed under martial law by Egypt and forced to live in filth. Seeing the unhappiness of the refugees, Arab regimes, took advantage of the situation to incite resentful Palestinians to take up arms against Israel.
Initially, the border violations and infiltrations manifested as small-scale theft and banditry. But by 1954, Egyptian military intelligence was actively supporting Palestinian fedayeen activities in several ways.
The ongoing Hamas belligerence has indeed led to an attempt by Egypt and Israel to control what comes into Gaza.
Does that make it an open-air prison?
As will be seen, if it is a blockade, it is not a very successful one.
One of the arguments is that Israel and Egypt restrict movement of the Gazan residents in and out of the territory. On September 19, 2023, Palestinian TV broadcast a program called Emigration from Gaza – what no one talks about, which claimed that in the past 15 years, about a quarter of a million young Gazans had left for abroad.
The bottleneck that has prevented more people from leaving is Hamas bureaucracy and the hesitancy of other countries to accept them.
Just last month (Sept 2023) there were violent clashes involving hundreds of young Gazans outside the sole travel agency in Gaza City authorized to issue visas to Turkey.
In a prison, people might try to leave, but it is usually not possible; and if they do, do they return to visit?
According to news reports, in July 2022, over 15,000 expatriates returned to the Gaza Strip for the feast of Eid al-Adha. They were excited to visit and reported that the markets were full with plenty of livestock for the festival. There seems to be an awful lot of traffic for a prison!
The medical situation is often discussed, with claims that the “blockade” leaves Gazans with poor medical care and lack of supplies. Yet drugs that Hamas wants, it is apparently quite capable of getting.
On Oct 7, thousands of terrorists streamed into southern Israel, many of them high on Captagon, colloquially known as “the drug of Jihad,” or “the drug of ISIS”, popular among ISIS terrorists for its leading to hyper-arousal and hyper-stimulation.
Additionally, the medical stats in general are quite surprising. The maternal mortality rate is 20 deaths/100,000 live births, better than Ethiopia (267), South Africa (127), Cyprus (68) and even the US (21). Infant mortality is 14.87 deaths/1,000 live births, far better than Nigeria (55) or India (30), and comparable to Egypt (17) and Venezuela (14).
And life expectancy at birth (75.66 years) is comparable to its neighbors – Egypt (74.7), Syria (74.5), and Saudi Arabia (76.9). They have more physicians per capita (2.71 physicians/1,000 population) than Lebanon (2.21), Egypt (0.75), or even the US (2.61) and similar to Saudi Arabia (2.74).
What Gazans are particularly good at is reproducing. Over 13% of girls are married by age 18. In 2000, a New York Times article said it well: “Gaza’s extremely high fertility rate… is comparable to... Uganda’s. But unlike those countries, almost all of the babies survive… .”
In other words, the birth rate, which has somewhat moderated in recent years, is like the third world, but the health care is far better. Indeed, it has been said that Gazans view the demographic route as a way to settle the score with Israelis. This has resulted in a staggering 40% of the population under age 14, among the highest in the world, and only 3% over 65.
AN IMPORTANT civilian asset is concrete. Is that getting into the “jail?” In 2021, Hamas claimed to have built 500 kilometers (311 miles) worth of tunnels under Gaza, almost half the size of the NYC subway system. It is sophisticated and wired with electricity and reinforced by concrete. Building supplies thus seem to be entering this “jail”, and workers are busy.
Unfortunately, it is not a civilian transport system but a terror network. The claimed shortage of housing has nothing to do with a blockade – the quantity of building materials, the cost of manpower and capital that Hamas invested could have built many new sports facilities.
And, unlike a jail, there are nice neighborhoods. Gazan CNN journalist Ibrahim Dahman describes where he works:
in a “beautiful, upscale neighborhood in which all press offices and foreign and international institutions are located.”
Does not sound jail-like.
On some issues there is nuance and two sides. In the current conflict between Israel and Hamas, there is only good and evil. Some of those who want to introduce nuance claim that Israel has created an open-air prison. It is simply not true. Despite there being some degree of blockade by Egypt and Israel, and the claim that this has led to shortages in food and medicine, within that small area of Gaza there are thousands of rockets, unlimited machine guns and ammo, and enough cement for miles of underground tunnels.
There seems to be no scarcity of weapons. If that money had been spent on the needs of the people it could have been used to purchase MRI machines, computers for schools, and more than enough food for the entire population.
Any problems in Gaza are not because it is some sort of open-air prison but rather because of the hatred of the Hamas leadership for both Jews and the Arab residents of Gaza.
Is Gaza an open-air prison?
In a way it is. There are many restrictions placed on the residents – what they can wear, who they can associate with, what they can think, etc. However, this is not because of Israel or any other external element but rather because of the oppressive, evil, Hamas regime that has been strangling all life in Gaza for 16 years.
The writer is a professor of neuroscience at Bar-IIan University."
"On Saturday’s (7.Oct.23) barbaric Palestinian Hamas surprise pogrom in which at over 1200 Israelis were murdered, with babies and the elderly among those who were butchered, beheaded and burned alive and around 240 kidnapped into Gaza as hostages, these demonstrations were beyond obscene.
The pro-Palestinian mob displayed not one placard protesting against the depravity of Hamas; no revulsion at the murder of children, rape of women and decapitation of babies; no horror at the fate of the hostages."
"He who can make you believe in absurdities, can make you commit atrocities" - Voltaire.
Lack of recognition of the other since the 1920s from the "Peace Covenant" to "Peace Now". We are experiencing ignorant ethnocentric arrogance, "banalization" and devaluation of the "other" which are the source of all the "unpleasant surprises" we have experienced... It started in 1925.
Perhaps in order to defeat the enemy we must first defeat our ignorance and hubris.
Lack of recognition of the "other" due to which we have been immersed for over a hundred years in...."an orgy of peace" which unfortunately has always been And there remains an orgy without a partner, and an orgy without a partner has a simple onanistic meaning.
To summarize this point:
Those who fund and initiate wars of aggression or terror campaigns against their neighbors should be ready to pay for the consequences.
Why not just quote the young Gazan woman, in her own words:
“Before October 7th, Riwaa lived what she describes as a full life. A 2017 graduate with a bachelor's degree in English language and teaching methods, she worked from home for an international company, balancing digital marketing with one-on-one English tutoring. Her days included gym visits, family gatherings with her five sisters, and time with friends at restaurants and the beach.
"I was living my life. Literally, when someone says that I'm living my life and this is me. I was living my life," she reflects. "I had my own job. I was working from home. And you can imagine how nice and comfortable it is to work from home."
And then she goes on to talk about living in an “open air prison” for 20 years.
The enormous human capacity for self delusion never ceases to amaze….
It sounds to me as though you — or at least the way this piece frames her words — don’t fully grasp or respect what it means to face life or death, an existential crisis, or even the true weight of your own words. It feels as if this is painting a story, a crafted narrative.
You say she is not political, yet only a few lines later she gives a highly political answer to a very direct and human question. That kind of answer — measured, careful, almost detached — usually comes only from someone who is not in the middle of personal ruin, terror, or imminent loss.
If someone were genuinely on the edge of life or death, grieving everything, they would not typically have the energy or presence of mind to respond like that — as if speaking from the comfort of a safe porch somewhere far from danger.
Either she is deeply conditioned (perhaps even indoctrinated) or she is not as close to the brink as this article makes out. Because when you’ve truly lost everything — material security, your home, your sense of self — and someone offered you safety and an end to all suffering simply in exchange for a piece of information, you wouldn’t hesitate. You’d say it, instantly. That is what it means to still have a moral compass in the midst of collapse.
So either she isn’t facing the complete annihilation described here, or she believes in something she holds even higher than her own survival.
But her answer came across not like someone in the throes of ruin, but like someone still clear-headed enough to hold grudges and take sides. That isn’t loss — that’s clinging to ideology even at the expense of one’s own survival.
If a shark had already taken half your body and you were moments from death, and someone said, “Tell me X, Y, Z and I will give you your life and everything you’ve lost back,” you would tell them X, Y, Z. Instantly.
And as a side note: jailed prisoners are not the same as hostages — that is a separate political matter, and I suspect this article has drawn me into that very argument.
So, enough. Goodbye, Ms. Oz — and enough of your carefully chosen “victims.”
Are you mad at the messenger or agreeing that they are entitled self victimizing ideologically deranged thus fully focused that I recognize them as in addition to being bloodthirsty vindictive regressive and anti-civilizational?
yes!! They are "they are entitled self victimizing ideologically deranged " !! 100%!! well said. 100% exactly.
& no , im totally with you alan ! and sherri!! its just that I dont have too much time reading these (at work in the morning ! barely awake too, but yeh, i thought just to let it all out and let you guys decide / relise ! now i relise sherri was is exposing (aka columbo! lol! when he get them by their own words! lol love that show). anyway good stuff. its evening now and im more me. stil have so much on. so no my friend. (p.s. im not made for substack. [or fb and hate x lol). just when if i do see try soemthing i to grabe it all and say something important if somethng important can be said. so in that way too i am messenger too. thank you sherri & alan. Peace, )
but in 1st thing in a cold damp workday morning even substack can trigger the best minds! lol! :0 :) ;)
I let her speak and you got it, ST. From your comment, I see that letting her own words speak for themselves is stronger than any op-ed or editorializing I could have written. Thank you.
It sounds to me as though you — or at least the way this piece frames her words — don’t fully grasp or respect what it means to face life or death, an existential crisis, or even the true weight of your own words. It feels as if this is painting a story, a crafted narrative.
You say she is not political, yet only a few lines later she gives a highly political answer to a very direct and human question. That kind of answer — measured, careful, almost detached — usually comes only from someone who is not in the middle of personal ruin, terror, or imminent loss.
If someone were genuinely on the edge of life or death, grieving everything, they would not typically have the energy or presence of mind to respond like that — as if speaking from the comfort of a safe porch somewhere far from danger.
Either she is deeply conditioned (perhaps even indoctrinated) or she is not as close to the brink as this article makes out. Because when you’ve truly lost everything — material security, your home, your sense of self — and someone offered you safety and an end to all suffering simply in exchange for a piece of information, you wouldn’t hesitate. You’d say it, instantly. That is what it means to still have a moral compass in the midst of collapse.
So either she isn’t facing the complete annihilation described here, or she believes in something she holds even higher than her own survival.
But her answer came across not like someone in the throes of ruin, but like someone still clear-headed enough to hold grudges and take sides. That isn’t loss — that’s clinging to ideology even at the expense of one’s own survival.
If a shark had already taken half your body and you were moments from death, and someone said, “Tell me X, Y, Z and I will give you your life and everything you’ve lost back,” you would tell them X, Y, Z. Instantly.
And as a side note: jailed prisoners are not the same as hostages — that is a separate political matter, and I suspect this article has drawn me into that very argument.
So, enough. Goodbye, Ms. Oz — and enough of your carefully chosen “victims.”
You posted this comment twice so I will answer again:
I let her speak and you got it, ST. From your comment, I see that letting her own words speak for themselves is stronger than any op-ed or editorializing I could have written. Thank you.
As I have read it quite a few times and from different sources arabs countries do not want them not really because these "people" are dangerous - all these arabs' states are not a democracy but a dictatorships and have a big security apparatus which can definitely subjugate their portions of gazans and arabs from Judea and Samaria and E Jerusalem - not. the reason is that continuing and keeping the "problem" of "palestinians' refugees" open give them the tool to press the Israel diplomatically and by all other means available.
$45,000 for the family to cross into Egypt?! Stunning. I have heard this before--$5,000 per person. I call it extortion. And I gather, all that money is gone because there is no one to process the paperwork? And as an aside--and it is a rhetorical question--how did they come up with that kind of money? I do pity them. Even though she speaks--or refuses to say certain things--like a good Hamanik--I pity her.
All this young lady is concerned with is the disruption caused to her, her comfortable life, and her career. The reference to stopping treatment for her disabled sister sounds like an attempt to prove that she is a little less egocentric than one might think. She points out that the special medical treatment was supposed to be provided in an Israeli hospital, in the Israeli health system, and she has the audacity or the impudence to complain, when it was "her own people" who brutally and murderously attacked Israel. As if there was no cause and effect here, but a kind of casualness: every few years, "there's a war going on," and that it has nothing to do with the actions of the Palestinians, some natural force. To the Palestinians, it seems understandable and natural that this is how things will be: they will receive medical care, electricity, water, and livelihood from Israel, which in turn will absorb murderous attacks from the Gazans. None of the fighting in the years leading up to the current war was initiated by Israel; in all cases, the fighting was carried out in response to an attack that came from within Gaza and on their initiative. But the lady-she does not see any circumstantiality, despite being educated and seemingly aware of reality. Every soldier who fought in Gaza knows how weapons, ammunition and explosives were found in every house and apartment, as well as in every hospital, school, clinic, mosque... All the "professionals" - social workers, doctors, nurses, journalists, teachers - all had a part in operating the monstrous mechanism of Hamas and the other Gaza terrorist organisations. Likewise, the mob that cheered and beat and spat on the Israeli hostages who were brought in handcuffed, badly wounded, was exactly "innocent civilians", detached from the crimes, of brutality. The enthusiastic, ecstatic ascension in the face of the bizarre "victory show" of the display of the small coffins of the Bibas family children, or in the "shows" of the release of the kidnapped... all of it was made up of those masses of Gazans who are "not the government." Just like her. It is impossible to connect and identify with a person who does not express any concern and a clear human moral position towards atrocities, which, even if he is not directly responsible for them, were committed in his name and with his knowledge.
Ask Hamas why they led you into an unwinnable war as they have many times before. Time for a visionary Palestinian to acknowledge Israel is a permanent nation that will continue to beat you like a drum.
Is Gaza actually an open-air prison?
"Israel is in the midst of a war thrust upon it by the atrocious massacre of Israelis by Arabs from Gaza on October 7, 2023. Some anti-Israel media reports have tried to justify the barbarism by arguing that Gaza was a “large open-air prison”. Despite the irrelevance, as nothing can justify these hideous acts, it may be interesting to examine this assertion about Gaza.
The Gaza Strip is a small, narrow piece of land on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, a mere 365 square kilometers (half the size of NYC), with a population that has exploded over the last century to approximately 2 million people, 2 million people whom absolutely no one wants, and who have been used as pawns by the Arab leadership.
Conditions in the Gaza Strip
The 1947 UN Partition Plan of the Land of Israel would have made Gaza part of the proposed Arab state west of the Jordan River. However, the Arabs rejected the partition plan, launching the 1948 War of Independence.
At the conclusion of the war Gaza was occupied by Egypt, which refused to annex it or offer its residents Egyptian citizenship, i.e. Gaza was part of no country. That was the situation until 1967.
Thus, from 1948 to 1967, conditions in the Gaza Strip were harsh. Egypt essentially isolated itself, refusing to integrate either the locals or the 200,000 refugees, leading to severe economic conditions.
In 1955, a member of the United Nations Secretariat, James Baster, wrote in the Middle East Journal that “For all practical purposes it would be true to say that for the last six years in Gaza over 300,000 poverty-stricken people have been physically confined to an area the size of a large city park.”
Israel decisively prevailed in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Furthermore, thousands upon thousands of Arab refugees were now setting up camp along Israel's porous borders. The refugees were placed under martial law by Egypt and forced to live in filth. Seeing the unhappiness of the refugees, Arab regimes, took advantage of the situation to incite resentful Palestinians to take up arms against Israel.
Initially, the border violations and infiltrations manifested as small-scale theft and banditry. But by 1954, Egyptian military intelligence was actively supporting Palestinian fedayeen activities in several ways.
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/egyptian-fedayeen-attacks-summer-1955
The ongoing Hamas belligerence has indeed led to an attempt by Egypt and Israel to control what comes into Gaza.
Does that make it an open-air prison?
As will be seen, if it is a blockade, it is not a very successful one.
One of the arguments is that Israel and Egypt restrict movement of the Gazan residents in and out of the territory. On September 19, 2023, Palestinian TV broadcast a program called Emigration from Gaza – what no one talks about, which claimed that in the past 15 years, about a quarter of a million young Gazans had left for abroad.
The bottleneck that has prevented more people from leaving is Hamas bureaucracy and the hesitancy of other countries to accept them.
Just last month (Sept 2023) there were violent clashes involving hundreds of young Gazans outside the sole travel agency in Gaza City authorized to issue visas to Turkey.
In a prison, people might try to leave, but it is usually not possible; and if they do, do they return to visit?
According to news reports, in July 2022, over 15,000 expatriates returned to the Gaza Strip for the feast of Eid al-Adha. They were excited to visit and reported that the markets were full with plenty of livestock for the festival. There seems to be an awful lot of traffic for a prison!
The medical situation is often discussed, with claims that the “blockade” leaves Gazans with poor medical care and lack of supplies. Yet drugs that Hamas wants, it is apparently quite capable of getting.
On Oct 7, thousands of terrorists streamed into southern Israel, many of them high on Captagon, colloquially known as “the drug of Jihad,” or “the drug of ISIS”, popular among ISIS terrorists for its leading to hyper-arousal and hyper-stimulation.
Additionally, the medical stats in general are quite surprising. The maternal mortality rate is 20 deaths/100,000 live births, better than Ethiopia (267), South Africa (127), Cyprus (68) and even the US (21). Infant mortality is 14.87 deaths/1,000 live births, far better than Nigeria (55) or India (30), and comparable to Egypt (17) and Venezuela (14).
And life expectancy at birth (75.66 years) is comparable to its neighbors – Egypt (74.7), Syria (74.5), and Saudi Arabia (76.9). They have more physicians per capita (2.71 physicians/1,000 population) than Lebanon (2.21), Egypt (0.75), or even the US (2.61) and similar to Saudi Arabia (2.74).
What Gazans are particularly good at is reproducing. Over 13% of girls are married by age 18. In 2000, a New York Times article said it well: “Gaza’s extremely high fertility rate… is comparable to... Uganda’s. But unlike those countries, almost all of the babies survive… .”
In other words, the birth rate, which has somewhat moderated in recent years, is like the third world, but the health care is far better. Indeed, it has been said that Gazans view the demographic route as a way to settle the score with Israelis. This has resulted in a staggering 40% of the population under age 14, among the highest in the world, and only 3% over 65.
AN IMPORTANT civilian asset is concrete. Is that getting into the “jail?” In 2021, Hamas claimed to have built 500 kilometers (311 miles) worth of tunnels under Gaza, almost half the size of the NYC subway system. It is sophisticated and wired with electricity and reinforced by concrete. Building supplies thus seem to be entering this “jail”, and workers are busy.
Unfortunately, it is not a civilian transport system but a terror network. The claimed shortage of housing has nothing to do with a blockade – the quantity of building materials, the cost of manpower and capital that Hamas invested could have built many new sports facilities.
And, unlike a jail, there are nice neighborhoods. Gazan CNN journalist Ibrahim Dahman describes where he works:
in a “beautiful, upscale neighborhood in which all press offices and foreign and international institutions are located.”
Does not sound jail-like.
On some issues there is nuance and two sides. In the current conflict between Israel and Hamas, there is only good and evil. Some of those who want to introduce nuance claim that Israel has created an open-air prison. It is simply not true. Despite there being some degree of blockade by Egypt and Israel, and the claim that this has led to shortages in food and medicine, within that small area of Gaza there are thousands of rockets, unlimited machine guns and ammo, and enough cement for miles of underground tunnels.
There seems to be no scarcity of weapons. If that money had been spent on the needs of the people it could have been used to purchase MRI machines, computers for schools, and more than enough food for the entire population.
Any problems in Gaza are not because it is some sort of open-air prison but rather because of the hatred of the Hamas leadership for both Jews and the Arab residents of Gaza.
Is Gaza an open-air prison?
In a way it is. There are many restrictions placed on the residents – what they can wear, who they can associate with, what they can think, etc. However, this is not because of Israel or any other external element but rather because of the oppressive, evil, Hamas regime that has been strangling all life in Gaza for 16 years.
The writer is a professor of neuroscience at Bar-IIan University."
https://m.jpost.com/opinion/article-770411
"On Saturday’s (7.Oct.23) barbaric Palestinian Hamas surprise pogrom in which at over 1200 Israelis were murdered, with babies and the elderly among those who were butchered, beheaded and burned alive and around 240 kidnapped into Gaza as hostages, these demonstrations were beyond obscene.
The pro-Palestinian mob displayed not one placard protesting against the depravity of Hamas; no revulsion at the murder of children, rape of women and decapitation of babies; no horror at the fate of the hostages."
https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/how-britain-lost-itself?utm_source
Israel has allowed Gazan medical treatment in Israel even though terror campaigns were launched at Israeli civilians.
https://jcpa.org/article/israeli-approvals-for-medical-entry-in-the-shadow-of-terror-attacks-at-the-erez-crossing/
What the phenomenon of martyrs looks like by
An Egyptian psychologist
MEMRI TV PROJECT
Prof. Adel Sadeq, Head of Psychiatry, ‘Ein Shams University in Cairo
https://www.memri.org/tv/head-psychiatry-cairos-ein-shams-university-prof-adel-sadeq-psychological-make-suicide-bomber
igra TV (Saudi Arabia) April 25, 2002
Watch the interview with the Egyptian professor
Arabic with English subtitles
"He who can make you believe in absurdities, can make you commit atrocities" - Voltaire.
Lack of recognition of the other since the 1920s from the "Peace Covenant" to "Peace Now". We are experiencing ignorant ethnocentric arrogance, "banalization" and devaluation of the "other" which are the source of all the "unpleasant surprises" we have experienced... It started in 1925.
Perhaps in order to defeat the enemy we must first defeat our ignorance and hubris.
Lack of recognition of the "other" due to which we have been immersed for over a hundred years in...."an orgy of peace" which unfortunately has always been And there remains an orgy without a partner, and an orgy without a partner has a simple onanistic meaning.
To summarize this point:
Those who fund and initiate wars of aggression or terror campaigns against their neighbors should be ready to pay for the consequences.
Why not just quote the young Gazan woman, in her own words:
“Before October 7th, Riwaa lived what she describes as a full life. A 2017 graduate with a bachelor's degree in English language and teaching methods, she worked from home for an international company, balancing digital marketing with one-on-one English tutoring. Her days included gym visits, family gatherings with her five sisters, and time with friends at restaurants and the beach.
"I was living my life. Literally, when someone says that I'm living my life and this is me. I was living my life," she reflects. "I had my own job. I was working from home. And you can imagine how nice and comfortable it is to work from home."
And then she goes on to talk about living in an “open air prison” for 20 years.
The enormous human capacity for self delusion never ceases to amaze….
Please publish that succinct summarization
I would restack it if I could
The cognitive dissonance exhibited here by this educated civilian is truly astonishing.
It sounds to me as though you — or at least the way this piece frames her words — don’t fully grasp or respect what it means to face life or death, an existential crisis, or even the true weight of your own words. It feels as if this is painting a story, a crafted narrative.
You say she is not political, yet only a few lines later she gives a highly political answer to a very direct and human question. That kind of answer — measured, careful, almost detached — usually comes only from someone who is not in the middle of personal ruin, terror, or imminent loss.
If someone were genuinely on the edge of life or death, grieving everything, they would not typically have the energy or presence of mind to respond like that — as if speaking from the comfort of a safe porch somewhere far from danger.
Either she is deeply conditioned (perhaps even indoctrinated) or she is not as close to the brink as this article makes out. Because when you’ve truly lost everything — material security, your home, your sense of self — and someone offered you safety and an end to all suffering simply in exchange for a piece of information, you wouldn’t hesitate. You’d say it, instantly. That is what it means to still have a moral compass in the midst of collapse.
So either she isn’t facing the complete annihilation described here, or she believes in something she holds even higher than her own survival.
But her answer came across not like someone in the throes of ruin, but like someone still clear-headed enough to hold grudges and take sides. That isn’t loss — that’s clinging to ideology even at the expense of one’s own survival.
If a shark had already taken half your body and you were moments from death, and someone said, “Tell me X, Y, Z and I will give you your life and everything you’ve lost back,” you would tell them X, Y, Z. Instantly.
And as a side note: jailed prisoners are not the same as hostages — that is a separate political matter, and I suspect this article has drawn me into that very argument.
So, enough. Goodbye, Ms. Oz — and enough of your carefully chosen “victims.”
Are you mad at the messenger or agreeing that they are entitled self victimizing ideologically deranged thus fully focused that I recognize them as in addition to being bloodthirsty vindictive regressive and anti-civilizational?
yes!! They are "they are entitled self victimizing ideologically deranged " !! 100%!! well said. 100% exactly.
& no , im totally with you alan ! and sherri!! its just that I dont have too much time reading these (at work in the morning ! barely awake too, but yeh, i thought just to let it all out and let you guys decide / relise ! now i relise sherri was is exposing (aka columbo! lol! when he get them by their own words! lol love that show). anyway good stuff. its evening now and im more me. stil have so much on. so no my friend. (p.s. im not made for substack. [or fb and hate x lol). just when if i do see try soemthing i to grabe it all and say something important if somethng important can be said. so in that way too i am messenger too. thank you sherri & alan. Peace, )
but in 1st thing in a cold damp workday morning even substack can trigger the best minds! lol! :0 :) ;)
Peace . even to manic people like me.
Glad we now know we are on the same page
I let her speak and you got it, ST. From your comment, I see that letting her own words speak for themselves is stronger than any op-ed or editorializing I could have written. Thank you.
Thank you ms. All the best,
ST
It sounds to me as though you — or at least the way this piece frames her words — don’t fully grasp or respect what it means to face life or death, an existential crisis, or even the true weight of your own words. It feels as if this is painting a story, a crafted narrative.
You say she is not political, yet only a few lines later she gives a highly political answer to a very direct and human question. That kind of answer — measured, careful, almost detached — usually comes only from someone who is not in the middle of personal ruin, terror, or imminent loss.
If someone were genuinely on the edge of life or death, grieving everything, they would not typically have the energy or presence of mind to respond like that — as if speaking from the comfort of a safe porch somewhere far from danger.
Either she is deeply conditioned (perhaps even indoctrinated) or she is not as close to the brink as this article makes out. Because when you’ve truly lost everything — material security, your home, your sense of self — and someone offered you safety and an end to all suffering simply in exchange for a piece of information, you wouldn’t hesitate. You’d say it, instantly. That is what it means to still have a moral compass in the midst of collapse.
So either she isn’t facing the complete annihilation described here, or she believes in something she holds even higher than her own survival.
But her answer came across not like someone in the throes of ruin, but like someone still clear-headed enough to hold grudges and take sides. That isn’t loss — that’s clinging to ideology even at the expense of one’s own survival.
If a shark had already taken half your body and you were moments from death, and someone said, “Tell me X, Y, Z and I will give you your life and everything you’ve lost back,” you would tell them X, Y, Z. Instantly.
And as a side note: jailed prisoners are not the same as hostages — that is a separate political matter, and I suspect this article has drawn me into that very argument.
So, enough. Goodbye, Ms. Oz — and enough of your carefully chosen “victims.”
You posted this comment twice so I will answer again:
I let her speak and you got it, ST. From your comment, I see that letting her own words speak for themselves is stronger than any op-ed or editorializing I could have written. Thank you.
As I have read it quite a few times and from different sources arabs countries do not want them not really because these "people" are dangerous - all these arabs' states are not a democracy but a dictatorships and have a big security apparatus which can definitely subjugate their portions of gazans and arabs from Judea and Samaria and E Jerusalem - not. the reason is that continuing and keeping the "problem" of "palestinians' refugees" open give them the tool to press the Israel diplomatically and by all other means available.
$45,000 for the family to cross into Egypt?! Stunning. I have heard this before--$5,000 per person. I call it extortion. And I gather, all that money is gone because there is no one to process the paperwork? And as an aside--and it is a rhetorical question--how did they come up with that kind of money? I do pity them. Even though she speaks--or refuses to say certain things--like a good Hamanik--I pity her.
All this young lady is concerned with is the disruption caused to her, her comfortable life, and her career. The reference to stopping treatment for her disabled sister sounds like an attempt to prove that she is a little less egocentric than one might think. She points out that the special medical treatment was supposed to be provided in an Israeli hospital, in the Israeli health system, and she has the audacity or the impudence to complain, when it was "her own people" who brutally and murderously attacked Israel. As if there was no cause and effect here, but a kind of casualness: every few years, "there's a war going on," and that it has nothing to do with the actions of the Palestinians, some natural force. To the Palestinians, it seems understandable and natural that this is how things will be: they will receive medical care, electricity, water, and livelihood from Israel, which in turn will absorb murderous attacks from the Gazans. None of the fighting in the years leading up to the current war was initiated by Israel; in all cases, the fighting was carried out in response to an attack that came from within Gaza and on their initiative. But the lady-she does not see any circumstantiality, despite being educated and seemingly aware of reality. Every soldier who fought in Gaza knows how weapons, ammunition and explosives were found in every house and apartment, as well as in every hospital, school, clinic, mosque... All the "professionals" - social workers, doctors, nurses, journalists, teachers - all had a part in operating the monstrous mechanism of Hamas and the other Gaza terrorist organisations. Likewise, the mob that cheered and beat and spat on the Israeli hostages who were brought in handcuffed, badly wounded, was exactly "innocent civilians", detached from the crimes, of brutality. The enthusiastic, ecstatic ascension in the face of the bizarre "victory show" of the display of the small coffins of the Bibas family children, or in the "shows" of the release of the kidnapped... all of it was made up of those masses of Gazans who are "not the government." Just like her. It is impossible to connect and identify with a person who does not express any concern and a clear human moral position towards atrocities, which, even if he is not directly responsible for them, were committed in his name and with his knowledge.
So "it is not convenient for her." So be it..
Ask Hamas why they led you into an unwinnable war as they have many times before. Time for a visionary Palestinian to acknowledge Israel is a permanent nation that will continue to beat you like a drum.