Years ago, I was much taken by a story, The Wave by Francisco Goldman, about the journey halfway around the world of the wave that he so tragically encountered in Oaxaca, on the Pacific coast of Mexico. A spur of the moment trip from Boston to Mazunte beach planned by his new wife, the writer Aura Estrada, and her best friend, was as circuitous and uncomfortable as ad hoc trips can be. A third friend declined to join them saying she had work commitments and that the sea there was rough at that time of the year – they argued back that it was a known safe beach. Although less enthusiastic about the trip than the others (Goldman had a doctor’s appointment to cancel and was mindful of unplanned expenditure), once there any residual reluctance he had evaporated and he was as enthusiastic as the rest of the party.
It was on the day after their arrival that tragedy struck. While body surfing, Goldman realised that his wife had not surfaced after catching a wave. It was only after the tide receded that Aura was found, face down and unconscious. I could relate, having had a similar experience on a small scale at the beach at Entebbe, Lake Victoria – one minute you are swimming towards the shore and the next, quite abruptly, you are dumped hard on your face on the lake bed.
What followed was another hectic leg of the journey, this time reliant on the kindness of others for transport, to the nearest health facility an hour away, a rudimentary, ill-equipped affair from where, after a struggle with an unhelpful air ambulance service, they were airlifted to a larger hospital in Mexico. It was all to no avail, the patient was lost, and the spiritual journey of bereavement began.
Goldman meditated on the confluence of events that had led to the tragic accident. The pity of it. Should he have maintained his objections to the timing or the cost? Should he have heeded the mild warning about the end of the calm season? He sought out a specialist who helped him understand that the wave could have begun its journey even before he and Aura started theirs in Brooklyn, travelled over a thousand miles gathering momentum from the wind’s action on small ripples, before cresting and breaking at Mazunte on that fateful day. Aura’s last work found on her laptop was the beginning of a short story titled, “Does Life Give Us Signs?”
The Wave came back to mind after Hersh Goldberg was found dead in a tunnel in Rafah nine months after Hamas abducted him from a music festival at Re’im on the 7th of October 2023. His story is also one of a life extinguished prematurely in inconceivable circumstances, or in circumstances not conceived of. It too began with a long journey; his parents had made Aliyah from the United States and had sixteen years of unalloyed joy before the unthinkable happened. Hersh was abducted in the latest war in the cycle of violence that began even before Israel was created by a unilateral declaration of independence in 1948, the tectonic event that began the wave.
Aliyah is the journey to which Hersh’s people are entitled by Israeli law, a return to what they consider their homeland. The hundreds of thousands of Palestinians expelled from their homes in 1947/48 to make room for the Homeland have no such right. Many still live in the refugee camps into which they were driven. The Palestinian name for the expulsion is Al Nakba, a word as onomatopoeic as the word tsunami. For the actuality of the Nakba and it being the source of the Palestinian Diaspora, the evidence of Professor Benny Morris, an Israeli historian, will cause less disputation than a Palestinian source. This reflection is not about that. It is about whether the outcome at Re’im was unthinkable or simply not thought about.
After 2007, when the Goldberg family arrived in Israel, there were wars on Gaza in 2008/9, 2012, 2014, and 2021 – the “conflict”, it is called. They settled in Jerusalem, not far from East Jerusalem, occupied territory that Israel claims to have annexed. To create the hostile environment thought necessary and sufficient to drive Palestinians out of Jerusalem, Israel celebrates Flag Day when the youth run rampage through East Jerusalem chanting the anthems May Your Village Burn and Death to Arabs. They ransack shops and spit at and beat up their Palestinian owners all the while escorted by the police and military.
There is no basis to doubt that Hersh himself was of the friendly nature his family and friends describe, “Even to Arabs”, his mother is quoted as saying. A sign in his bedroom translates to “Jerusalem is for everyone” and features a mosque, a synagogue and a church. However, Hersh served time in military service, which is compulsory in Israel, although there is a significant and vocal body of conscientious objectors. He was discharged not long before he was captured. The location is not far from the separation Wall, closing Gaza in or protecting Israel – they are not necessarily one and the same thing.
In the area now enclosed behind that wall, every manner of cruelty, degradation, deprivation, and death has been visited on the Palestinian community for over seventy-five years. Again, to avoid distraction by unnecessary and disingenuous denials, one must rely on Israeli sources. The best source is the hundreds of testimonies given by the IDF that were active in the above-mentioned assaults on Gaza and in the West Bank. Their website is www.breakingthesilence.org – search strings should include words like looting, actzia, mapping, humiliate, destroy. Search for phrases like “uprooted olive trees”, “urge to run over a car”, “slapping around Arabs”, “patrol to beat up Arabs”, “deliberately wreck the house”, “shat on the sofa”, “took dumps in pots”, “shattering everything”, “tearing clothes, curtains”, “shooting at water tanks”, “I made him shit his pants”, “her limbs were smeared on the wall”, “bullet in head/knee”, and similar. There are hundreds of testimonies. One veteran of the 2014 war on Gaza describes it this way: “We see a tsunami in Thailand and we’re all very saddened by what happens to all the civilians the day after. You know, they don’t have a home. But we’re carrying out a […] tsunami 70 kilometres from Tel Aviv and we aren’t even aware of it.”
Re’im is in the Negev Desert which is also where the infamous Sde Teiman prison is located. It is where many of the 9,600 Palestinian men, women and children snatched from the streets in the daytime and from their homes in the middle of the night are detained, 3,379 without trial as at July 2024. Israel detains and tries pre-teens in the military tribunal. This year for the first time, perpetual reports of systemic sexual abuse of abductees by the military have been confirmed by a leaked video. When the perpetrators were arrested for investigation, the Minister of Finance accompanied by a Knesset member (MK) led a demonstration to break into the suspects’ military base and release them. A former MK, Moshe Feiglin continued the campaign and was on the streets leading the chant about the right to rape Palestinian prisoners.
Again, there is absolutely no suggestion that the peace-loving Hersh Goldman took part in any of those atrocities against detainees. The question at hand is, could the existence of such hatred and disdain for Palestinians by Israel have alerted ordinary civilians and junior soldiers to the fact that on the other side of the wall Palestinians were most likely planning their resistance, and what nature that resistance might take? Was October 7th conceivable by anyone planning to emigrate to Israel or by émigrés debating whether to remain there? Were there signs?
There are two universes in parallel existence; one is of exuberant joie de vivre, oblivious of the existence and dynamics of the despair, anger and even desperation building up on the other side of the Wall. Former commander-in-chief of the Israeli navy Ami Ayalon has arrived at the conclusion that as long as the occupation continues, Israel shall not be secure. Elsewhere he states that Israel’s policy of conflict management rather than conflict resolution that drove the 2008–2009, 2012, 2014 and 2021 wars on Gaza was a failure. How many Israelis made Aliyah during that time? Both Ayalon and former Prime Minister Ehud Barak have said on record that if they had found themselves in the same situation as a Palestinian in Gaza, they too would have done what the Palestinian Resistance is doing.
It is now the practice to refute all efforts to locate October 7th in its proper context with the lofty repost, “Nothing justifies the atrocities of October 7th.” As though that isn’t too obvious to need statement. Waves do not need justification, they just are.
The second leg of the journey, to the heart of Israel, involves the ongoing tortuous campaign to free the Israeli hostages. A swelling tide of demonstrators calling for a cessation of hostilities in Gaza has grown from visibly countable numbers of individuals to crowds estimated at over five hundred thousand. Outside Israel, from the Nordic countries to the Global South, across Europe, and the Far East, peace-loving people support the release of all captives including over three hundred Palestinian children.
International volunteers continue to stand witness to the ongoing pogroms designed to ethnically cleanse the West Bank. Between October 2023 and July 2024, 1,285 Palestinians had been displaced from their West Bank homes and 641 structures destroyed, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Fifteen Palestinian farming communities have been expelled from their land in their entirety.
Historically, the presence of international and West Bank observers recording these events on video have sometimes acted as a deterrent. Alas, at the present level of escalation of the pogroms, house burnings, crop burnings, home invasions, livestock rustling, livestock poisoning, rupturing of water supply pipes and physical attacks on Palestinians, even the belated American sanctions against a few of the culprits are being ignored by Israel. Since April, this has been the experience of Palestinians in Jenin, Burin, Qusra, Madama, Sawiya, Beit Furik, Mughayr, Umm Falah, Turmus Ayya, Deir Dibwan, Masafer Yatta, Al-Mazra’a, Beitin, Khirbet Beit Zakariyyah, Aqraba, Turmus Ayya, Jit, and Beit Jala.
In fact, the government has begun an expansion of illegal settlements in the Occupied West Bank. At the time of writing, an American volunteer, Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, was fatally shot by an Israeli sniper. Killed like Rachel Corrie before her.
The final leg of the hostage journey will be spiritual; it will be a time of reflection. Rachel Goldberg, Hersh’s mother, is a sympathetic, self-possessed, articulate speaker whose campaign to rescue her son has taken her from Israel, to the United States and the Vatican. I was struck by one thing this resourceful woman did on the fifty-eighth day of Hersh’s captivity. She appealed to Palestinian women, whom she described as good and innocent people suffering terribly in Gaza, and expressed her hope that there is a mother in Gaza who looks like herself, who is taking care of her son. Apart from the insinuation that he may have been in the custody of a Palestinian family (as released hostages have testified of their own experiences), Rachel Goldberg reminded the mothers that they have motherhood in common, they are the same she and they, that they even look like sisters and are sisters.
The video is too brief to gauge the reaction of the woman shown, or to see who else was present, but there is an alliance between Palestinian and Israeli mothers. Women Wage Peace, an Israeli women’s group and Women of the Sun, their Palestinian counterparts, demand a nonviolent resolution to the cycle of violence. Potentially, it is the beginning of a season of peace.
One of the members, a Canadian émigré, was killed at Kibbutz Be’eri on October Seventh. Thirty of the Palestinian members of the coalition have been killed in the retaliatory genocide.
