Activists and religious leaders are reflecting on the war in Gaza as they remember the October 7th Hamas attacks in Israel.
Abby Stein, a rabbi based in Brooklyn and a member of the national advocacy group Jewish Voice for Peace remembers the attacks. Stein, an Israeli, says she knew people who were killed during the massacre.
“Almost all I could think about was trying to figure out what happened to all of my friends, in the end there were a total of four people who I know to different extents, some where I met, some I was closer with, who were killed on October 7th,” Stein said.
That day, roughly 1,200 Israelis perished at a music festival in Israel, and since then, the state has been conducting retaliatory strikes under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
More than 67,000 Palestinians have been killed and almost 170,000 have been wounded since Israel’s repeated strikes following the initial Oct. 7 atrocity, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry.
The war has sparked division within the United States as well, some say Israel’s retaliation is justified, while others say the response has become a genocide.
Even the use of the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s retaliation has also become a point of contention.
Eyad Alkurabi, a Palestinian and member of the Albany-based Palestinian Rights Committee says the attacks are the culmination of decades of occupation.
“When people ask me ‘well what about October 7th?’ I have to respond with ‘well what about October 6th, what about October 5th, or every other day since 1948 and since the 30s, the Israeli entity has been butchering, maiming, genociding Palestinians for the past 100 years,” Alkurabi said.
Alkurabi says Palestinians should be heard and seen and that media coverage of the attacks and resulting conflict has been skewed.
“If people are going to critique Palestinian resistance groups, ya know Hamas and others, they should also critique the state of Israel, who kidnapped Palestinians in the thousands,” Alkurabi said.
Ava Agree, who was raised in a Jewish family and is a member of the Albany Chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, remembers the attacks as well.
The 36-year-old has been involved in “Palestine solidarity activism” since she was a teenager. Agree says the attacks didn’t happen in a vacuum.
“It was a tragedy that happened in the context of a Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu, which for years had a policy of mowing the lawn in Gaza by dropping bombs on it every few years,” Agree said.
She says her initial reaction was “tremendous fear.”
“Because I knew that immediately following that, there was going to be a retaliation and a sense of vengeance that would dwarf anything that had occurred on October 7th,” Agree said.
On Monday, Israeli and Hamas officials met in Egypt for talks regarding a U.S. drafter peace plan, according to the Associated Press. But whether the talks reveal a path to peace in the Gaza Strip remains to be seen.
For now, Stein, the Brooklyn rabbi, hopes Palestinians will be liberated before a third anniversary of the October 7th attacks comes and goes.
“I hope that we can have this conversation in a year from now and we have a truly, truly, liberated Palestine where everyone living between the river and the sea is truly, truly free. Where everyone who has been expelled in their generations can go home and so on. Do I logically think that is going to happen, unfortunately unless something big happens and Israel is forced to do something, I don’t see that happening,” Stein said.
