Till death do us part: Gaza, Israel and the end of my life

In 2023 life took a dramatic turn. I was diagnosed with a rare terminal condition. It is a matter, I was told, not of whether I will die from it, but when.

For all of the insecurities I have faced in coming to terms with this, there is little I lack to hold terminality maximally at bay.

I have employment I deeply appreciate.

I have state of the art health care that is both technically sophisticated and emotionally supportive.

I live in enormously comfortable circumstances, eating well, with access to almost anything I might want or need.

I can travel wherever and whenever I choose, walk where and when I please, exercise when I must.

I am surrounded, physically and emotionally, by wonderfully supportive family, friends, and colleagues, close at hand and globally dispersed. We communicate — by phone, by email, on social media—whenever the calling rings out. They have driven down or flown in to see and be with me, to share time together. I too have travel in the making.

Though I live in America, I could also be describing much of life in Israel.

*  *  *

For all the challenges I face, I will outlive far too many people in Gaza, from babies to those of my generation. But perhaps, too, the way things are going, I will outlive Gaza itself.

My damaged body is treatable, my life extendable. Most who die in Gaza are designated as collateral damage, lives snuffed out not by their own doing or choosing, nor by a condition over which they can exercise even the remotest control. They may be buried beneath the rubble of a bomb, lost to a lack of medicine or treatment, wrecked by starvation and thirst. They are, mostly through no doing of their own, positioned on the wrong side of warring machines’ political cost-benefit ledgers.

Nearly 90 percent of Gaza residents have lost the sort of roof over their heads I can take for granted. A population roughly equivalent to the combined total of Dallas and Indianapolis has been rendered homeless for the foreseeable future, in an area about the size of Las Vegas or Philadelphia.

I have paid employment until I can no longer work or no longer care to. Most people in Gaza have little other than scratching bare-handed through the ruins of rubbled homes. They spend their days burying the bodies and body parts of loved ones, neighbors and fellow civilians, when not searching for the next meal.

I have all the food I need and then some. More than 2 million people in Gaza have next to nothing but occasional aid-agency handouts or whatever they can scrounge. There is nothing else to see their children through to the next, unpredictable truckloads of aid.

While I can look forward to a life well lived until I am no longer able to continue living, they have nothing but the prospect of death circling vulture-like overhead.

Is there not something disturbingly perverse, then, about Israeli couples, unable to conceive, flying to countries in Eastern Europe to adopt babies while their government leaves children in Gaza lifeless or without parents?

Each day I attend to what I must, in order to ensure I am among the 30 percent of patients with my condition who make it through the first year. I will last as long as my will to live in dignity and by my own choice holds out. 

No matter what they do or what precautions they take, no one in Gaza can be sure they will make it through the next day. The kind of hospitals I rely on to keep me going have mostly been destroyed or compromised for Gaza’s residents.

My death will be marked and memorialized. Many Gazans who die today, tomorrow or the day after that will be anonymous, some buried in mass graves.

*  *  *

A brother of mine, who recently retired as a medical doctor, has lived in Israel for the past half century. He and his family have access there to the same comforts of my life here. And yet, having given little thought to the lives of occupied Palestinians before the terrifying events of Oct. 7, he is, like most Jewish Israelis, and for different reasons many Arab and Palestinian Israelis as well, feeling existentially threatened. 

Many grieving Israelis have demanded retribution for the approximately 1,200 people murdered and 240 hostages taken on that fateful day. Hamas and its partners have blood dripping thickly from their hands. And yet, in retribution, for each of Samson’s eyes Israel’s warring logic would demand the taking of 20 “Philistine” eyes. 

The current Israeli regime seems to think its survival requires Gaza’s termination. Gazans have averaged something like 300-plus deaths, largely from IDF bombs, every single day of the war’s 10 weeks to date. More than 8,000 of those wiped away have been infants and young people, with an incalculably larger number left without parents.

Don’t October’s fateful events ultimately prove that Israel’s weaponization of security, with more or less unqualified American support, has hardly made that nation “the safest place for Jews in the world”? Or or anyone, actually, including Palestinians in Israel or the occupied territories? Multiplying enemies hardly inspires safety. Won’t this spiral of death only harden feelings of bitterness and hatred?

Perhaps affording free and dignified lives to occupied Palestinians would prove a more liberating alternative. Do not these irresolvable contestations between “from the river to the sea” freedom and “Judea and Samaria” settlement, between partial liberation and absolutizing possession, result endlessly in the ongoing anxiety and vengefulness driven by debilitation and demise? 

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Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Kaddish” rings with melancholic truth as a mourning for the maternal religion from which he felt alienated by the Israeli state's abandonment of its principles as much as an incantation of Yisgadal for his mother.

Israelis and Palestinians will die apart until they can bring themselves to live together. Until they realize that living together, as messy as it is likely to be, is far preferable to the existential fear of foreshortened, forestalled and anxiety-filled lives recycled forever. A small, courageous group of Jews and Palestinians in Jaffa has already created an initiative exhibiting the challenges of neighborliness in the face of prolific national anger.

Living as literal neighbors on a broader scale would no doubt be extraordinarily difficult to realize. It demands small initial steps worked out by those with far-reaching vision. 

When people have dignified lives to reach and live for, aren’t they much less likely to see themselves fueled endlessly by a hopeless fight against?

In the face of terminality, that is as much a political aspiration as it is a personal one. An abiding dream, whether or not I am here to witness it: Next year in Jerusalem, together.