Suzanne: What is your connection to Israel or Palestine?

Female Speaker 1: My grandparents had to leave Palestine in 1948 to escape to Jordan from the Israeli occupation.

Female Speaker 2: I went on birthright like 10 years ago, and I just kept going back, and I ended up making Aliyah. I adore the country.

Male Speaker 1: As Americans, we are against all the violence. We seek for peace, and we want peace for these people. They are human, and we cannot just do this genocide for all of them.

Female Speaker 3: My grandparents were born in Palestine. I don't expect any of the first world big countries to side with us.

Male Speaker 2: I am for peace.

Female Speaker 4: As a rabbi, I have so much love for so many Israelis and so many Palestinians in my life. That love and this grief is not available to be weaponized for a mass destruction of life in Gaza.

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Kai Wright: It's Notes from America. I'm Kai Wright. Welcome to the show. We talk about a lot of hard stuff on this show. We do have fun, too, but as a show that is essentially asking how the United States can become the country we say we are, that means a lot of difficult conversations. I try not to exceptionalize any of these conversations, all of them are deeply personal and challenging for somebody listening. It'd just be a lie to say the one we need to have this week isn't uniquely emotional.

The news over the past week since Hamas launched its attack in southern Israel has been filled with death and destruction. Each story tallies the lives lost by nationality, like some kind of macabre scorekeeping of atrocities, and each time I read the tally, I shudder as I think about the people for whom one of those lives is a loved one. Which is to say that the stakes here are life and death, and they have been for a long time.

Let me briefly lay out what I hope to do in this hour. We're not here as reporters. Our producers are, of course, keeping our eye on breaking news, and will update you if something demands it, but we're not covering the news right now. We're also not promising some sort of two-side conversation about something that has unimaginable numbers of so-called sides. As of right now, the world is waiting for Israel's expected ground invasion of Gaza with the goal of ending Hamas's leadership and taking control of at least some of the territory around Gaza City. Over a million Gaza residents have been warned to flee south, food and water are running out, and the US government has moved two warships into the region.

My questions today are, what do these developments mean for the people living in Gaza, and what do they mean for the security of people living in Israel, and for Jewish people around the world? I'm joined by two guests who have great personal stakes in these questions. Laila El-Haddad is an award-winning Palestinian author and journalist based in Clarksville, Maryland. Her most recent book is Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything in Between. Anna Baltzer is a leader in the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, and a member of Jewish Voice for Peace. She is a Jewish American granddaughter of Holocaust refugees, which is an important part of her story, and author of Witness in Palestine: A Jewish Woman in Occupied Territories. Ana and Laila, welcome to the show.

Anna Baltzer: Thanks so much for having us.

Kai Wright: As I said, this has been a horrific week, and news is developing quickly, but Laila, to start, I understand you still have family in Gaza right now. Do you know if your family is okay?

Laila El-Haddad: I do. I have my entire father's side and my entire mother's side of the family in different parts of the strip right now. Literally seconds before I hopped on the program, my cousin just told me that there's the heaviest shelling they've experienced yet by Israeli fighter jets, just adjacent to where they live in Gaza City. I haven't heard back from her since, but I'm just hoping for the best. This has been what it's like for the past week.

Every hour, my phone is going off. The last thing I do before I go to sleep is check if they're alive. The first thing I do in the morning is, again, scroll through my WhatsApp and make sure my phone is-- Notifications are on all night long. So far, they've been safe. A couple of them have had their houses destroyed. Several of them have had to relocate three or four separate times to whatever they deem to be a safer location, of course, within the Gaza strip, with the understanding that there is no real safe space. There are no bomb shelters, and there is no exit or entry right now. All the borders are closed.

Kai Wright: How do they, and I'm sorry, I won't dwell on it, but how do they process this question of safer space? How do they make that choice?

Laila El-Haddad: I think they process-- they approximate normality and safety, is the best way to put it. My cousin sent me a picture of all of the cousins huddled together, the younger ones, the children in the very narrow entryway of the home between two cement walls, and all of them, 10 of them were just there, and that was the safest place that they could find during that particular bout of shelling. There's a list, actually, there's a checklist that they showed me that they said you want to make sure these are the things you need to have if there's active bombing or if you have to leave. Make sure that you have your phone with you or your passport, your identity document, some money and some water. They have a checklist, and they just keep moving around from one place to another.

Several of them have lost access to any water because the power will go off. They're charging their phones using these really kind of oversized batteries, but the electricity is required to operate the pumps that fill the water tanks, the municipal water. It's not as though they can just open the tap like we can in the US here at any moment and have an endless supply of water, or like they can, of course, in a lot of the Israeli settlements. They ran out of water. Their sister-in-law had a little bit left, so they went over there to satiate themselves, to bathe and so on.

Kai Wright: I wanted to ask each of you about your lifelong connections to the region. Laila, you've implied some of it here in talking about your family, but I'm thinking about going back a bit to your childhood, if you can help folks. Give a sense of what your connection growing up to Gaza was. Part of your work also has been writing about life in Gaza beyond the trauma and the challenges. I just want to prompt you to introduce people to your relationship to the place.

Laila El-Haddad: I really appreciate that. It's an important part of humanizing Palestinians. I myself was born in Kuwait to Palestinian parents from Gaza, who were born and raised there. They were both physicians. I divided my time between Gaza and the Gulf States, namely Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. All of our summers and our winters would be spent in Gaza, and the rest of the time in Saudi Arabia, and then eventually moved to the United States to study in the '90s, and then back to Gaza in the early 2000s to raise my young son and to work there as a journalist.

My husband whom I met while I was in graduate school in Boston, is also Palestinian, but he grew up in a refugee camp in Lebanon's Beqaa Valley, and was the descendants of Palestinian refugees who were displaced and forced from their homes in Northern historic Palestine surrounding Haifa. He was never able to join our son and I when we would travel to Gaza during those years in and out of Gaza through the Rafah crossing, because he lacked the Israeli issued paperwork that was required as a Palestinian to be able to return and visit our own land.

The irony was that many of our Jewish friends in Boston could travel to Israel in a moment's notice, could become citizens, and he himself lacked the right of return to his own ancestral homeland. The years I spent covering Gaza in the 2000s through the Israeli disengagement, the process during which it dismantled the settlements and then retained effective control over Gaza through the elections in 2006, made me realize that I needed to do more than just cover the news in order to be able to convey the reality of what was going on, and help people really connect on a human level with what was happening to the Palestinians, and so I began to blog about my experience.

This is before Facebook, before social media. Even hard to remember a time when that was the case before iPhone was even invented. I had a blog I was keeping called Raising Yousuf: Diary of a Palestinian Mother that eventually turned into the book that you cited, Gaza Mom. I remember thinking at the time, for a long time, that it was unnecessary or even frivolous to be able to document my life as a mother, and to bring the personal into this. It was just so drilled into me that I'm a professional, I'm a journalist. That's what people need to hear about, the numbers, the fatalities, the atrocities.

I was surprised to see how impactful my blog entries were, even a lot of Israelis were reading them and saying, this is the first time that they even thought about a Palestinian in Gaza as a human being with a child looking for diapers or whatever to feed them. It made me realize that that human connection is what was needed. Then from there, I began to also utilize the intersection-- right about the intersection of food culture and politics in the context of Palestine as well.

Kai Wright: Anna, I want to begin your story as well. We're getting close to a break, so we're going to have to get started just to start it off, and then we'll pick it up after the break. Part of your activism and your scholarship has been your own journey and your family's relationship to Israel, correct?

Anna Baltzer: That's right. Yes, I think like a lot of American Jews, I grew up with a notion that Israel was there to keep us safe, that it was really the only hope Jews had to be safe after so many generations of horrible antisemitism, including what my own family faced in the Holocaust. There was this very simplistic narrative, and that whatever Israel did, it was attacked. I simply hadn't challenged that until I met Palestinian families in Lebanon and was taken in and heard a narrative I have never heard before.

Kai Wright: That was when you were 24-

Anna Baltzer: That's right.

Kai Wright: -that you began to see something new. I'm going to take a little break, and then we're going to come back and hear more about that story, Anna. I'm talking with Palestinian author and journalist, Laila El-Haddad and Anna Baltzer from the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, and a member of Jewish Voice for Peace about the impending ground invasion of Gaza in reaction to the Hamas attack in Southern Israel last week. About how we in the US even talk to one another about what is happening there. We'll take your calls a little later in the show as well, so stay with us. I'm Kai Wright, this is Notes from America.

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Welcome back. It's Notes from America, I'm Kai Wright. As we watch headlines about the impending ground invasion of Gaza reaction to attacks from Hamas last weekend in Southern Israel, we're talking about what this means for not only the people of Gaza, but for Israelis and for all of us. I'm joined by Laila El-Haddad, who is an award-winning Palestinian author and journalist based in Clarksville, Maryland. She's the author of Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything In Between, and by Anna Baltze, who is a member of Jewish Voice for Peace. She is author of Witness in Palestine: A Jewish American Woman in the Occupied Territories. Anna, you were, before the break, giving us some of your family's story and your relationship to the region. You mentioned how important-- the way you were taught to think about safety, and it being rooted in your grandmother's life story. Can you just say more about that understanding in your childhood?

Anna Baltzer: Yes. There was a narrative that Jews would always be targeted, and that somehow safety would come from creating a Jewish state. It was when I visited Palestinians in Southern Lebanon that I heard for the first time a very different story, a story of families being violently pushed out of their homes and lands, of hundreds of Palestinian villages destroyed. My first reaction was disbelief, because like I was saying, it just completely contradicted this narrative I'd had for my whole life of Israel being a place of securing Jews. I couldn't believe it, but I did.

I was motivated enough to go and see with my own eyes, and it became very clear that the entire promise of creating Israel as a Jewish state, that you can't have a Jewish state without a Jewish majority, and Palestine does not have a Jewish majority. Creating Israel required for creating an artificial Jewish majority, was the violent expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who became refugees, the ongoing apartheid and oppressive occupation of Palestinian lands.

As Laila said, the vast majority of Palestinians inside Gaza are refugees who-- Israel would pay me to leave my home here, my comfortable life here in California to go and live on those Gaza families lands whereas they can't even visit. This is the reality of what it means to have a Jewish state, which of course, could never secure-- would never be what ensures safety for Jews. If that were the only thing that mattered, which of course it isn't, that Jewish safety can never come through the oppression of another people, that we will always see resistance when any population is oppressed, and so it was a myth.

Kai Wright: You said that you got a Fulbright scholarship, I think at 24 you said it, where you started traveling. What was it like for you to encounter the reality of that which you're calling a myth? I ask this question just because, again, so many people-- There are many people, and I'm going to be frank, there are many of us who chose a long time ago to just turn away from this story because it is very difficult.

It is full of misunderstanding, even the words we choose are pointedly political choices. For those of us who don't have a personal stake, it is very easy to simply say, "Ah, I'll stay out of this." That is why I'm pursuing this line of questioning, and so I'm wondering, the moment where you as a young person start to say, "Oh, I have to challenge the receive narrative in my family and my community." Just take me to that moment and what that was like for you.

Anna Baltzer: At first, it was, obviously, very upsetting to have this foundational understanding challenge, but the truth is that, ultimately, understanding the way that Israel was violently oppressing Palestinians, which-- understanding that it wasn't the case that our safety could come through violent oppression of people, but rather that Palestinians who welcomed me. I don't mean just in Lebanon, I mean all over Palestine of all political persuasions.

I was not once discriminated against as a Jew, it became very clear that Jewish safety would never come from oppressing Palestinians, and in fact, that our liberation is intertwined. In many ways, that was a feeling of hope that truly this isn't some cycle of violence that is inevitable, that it is very clear the origin of any violence, and that is Israel's oppression of Palestinians. That gives us an opportunity to come together and fight against oppression. Yes, we have seen what it takes to stop Israel's oppression, and it means all of us coming together and saying no.

Kai Wright: Laila, you were nodding when I was talking about pulling out of the conversation about this for those of us who don't have stakes. What do you say when you encounter people in the United States like myself who said a while ago, "On some level, whether we admit to or not, I'm going to just turn off from this."

Laila El-Haddad: I think that we can't afford to turn off from this because we're complicit. I could almost understand it if it was anywhere else in the world, but because we as American taxpayers are complicit in the crimes that are being committed, we pay more money, more of our tax dollars go to assisting the Israeli military in committing these crimes against humanity, against Palestinians than to any other country in the world. For that fact alone, we should tune in and understand, educate ourselves, seek accurate resources on what's happening, and then reengage.

Kai Wright: One of the basic things I think a lot of people listening will say, and is certainly-- and we're going to have a chance to talk about in detail the history that led to the moment of last week. In the immediate, for those of us, for people who haven't been following and maybe don't know that history, seeing the images of Hamas' attack on civilians in Southern Israel this time last week, a lot of folks just cannot get past that, just would not get past that. It's very difficult to see past that. I guess I should even choose those words differently because we shouldn't see past that. How do you process that moment particularly thinking of people who don't know the broader context?

Laila El-Haddad: Absolutely. Look, the loss of any human life is tragic. This is something that I always emphasize universally. The reality of the fact is Palestinian suffering and violence against Palestinians, structural, systematic, and otherwise, has been ignored for so long, normalized, and we've been so desensitized to it. Due in large part to a deliberate campaign to dehumanize Palestinians to other Palestinians in the words of Edward Said, I encourage everyone to read the question of Palestine, that it doesn't register. I think people, again, this isn't in any way to justify violence or the loss of civilian life in any way, but the fact is we've been so desensitized that we're not alarmed when a Palestinian dies, but we are very alarmed when a Jewish Israeli dies.

This is just a fact of the matter, and we need to recognize that and respond accordingly. I also want to remind people it's also what the media chooses to focus on, to center, and to amplify. This is another fact. Anyone who's been in media will tell you, if you look at the data and the statistics and I'm sure Ana can agree, they have disproportionately covered the loss of Israeli life and the impact on Israelis more than they have on Palestinians. Finally, I'd just like to emphasize that this story doesn't begin and end with Hamas or the recent attacks. This is just a pretext to the continuation of Israeli violence against Palestinians. It's very important to understand that, because if we don't, it's just going to pave the way for continued attacks against Palestine.

Kai Wright: Listeners, we can take your calls. As I have said, perhaps too repeatedly, this is a tough conversation. I have found it tough. There's a lot I feel like I don't understand and the stakes are life and death for many, many people. If you share that feeling and you have questions about how to engage, call us or text us. Laila, a basic level setting question here where, obviously, you've mentioned Hamas. We're, obviously, hearing a lot about Hamas, which the US government classifies as a terrorist organization. It's hard for a lot of people to move past those words and past the acts of violence that we witnessed last weekend, but what exactly is Hamas' role in Gaza?

Laila El-Haddad: Hamas, I just want to be clear here. Obviously, according to the United States and many Western powers, Hamas is a terrorist organization. I do want to remind people, and again, my background is in political science and public policy, so I'm speaking here from that perspective, that is an opinion of many world governments and not a fact. It is a local political movement, and like any local political movement, it has supporters and it has detractors.

In 2006-- Actually, let me backtrack a few years, Hama came onto the scene in 1987. That's when they were founded, many decades after the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, and around the time of the first Palestinian uprising in 1987. They weren't even on the scene decades before, it was many other groups. It was the Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. It was Fatah, then they came on, and they just happened to be the latest bogeyman.

They weren't a major power broker until the early 2000s. They decided to enter the political scene in 2005 after the Israeli disengagement from Gaza, and they ran for the first major Palestinian elections in 2006, and they won. No one saw it coming. Hillary Clinton in leaked documents had even said that we should have, as an American government, stopped this before it started. Then the CIA pumped millions of dollars of money into an attempt at a coup to overthrow them, and hundreds of thousands of arms entered Gaza as a result.

Again, this has been documented. There's a great article written about it called the Gaza Bombshell. That didn't work either. There was a counter coup by Hamas that ultimately led to the eviction of Fatah, the other rival party, and then their takeover of Gaza. I say all this because the context is important. Again, context, context. If they had been allowed to govern and perhaps fail and perhaps succeed, who knows, like any other political party, and things were allowed to run their course, and they were established into the political spectrum, then things might not have gone so awry as some might see it. In summary, that's what I have to-- Sorry, I even forgot the original question at this point.

Kai Wright: Well, I wanted to know the context of what Hamas' role is in in Gaza's society.

Laila El-Haddad: Sorry, I'll just end briefly by adding. They are a political movement and they were the elected government into 2006 before there was an attempt to overthrow them by the CIA, and then after they won, an immediate comprehensive blockade was imposed on Gaza by Israel, supported by the United States, supported by Europe, and supported even by many Arab countries. That blockade has been 17 years longstanding against the civilian population of Gaza. They, in addition to being a political movement, have a social welfare wing that provides schooling educational orphanages in Gaza in addition to their military wing. This is just giving, again, sheerly political context.

Kai Wright: I'm going to stop you there. I think we've got a full picture of it, or at least partial picture of it. Anna, in this conversation, and our calls are coming in, but in this conversation, if I say Hamas, many people think terrorist. If I talk about violence in the region and I'm speaking to one group of people, they immediately think about Palestinians. If If I talk to violence in the region and I'm talking to another people, they immediately think about Southern Israel or think about Israeli defense forces.

As you try to have a conversation in your community about peace and about how to have a different version of security, how do you deal with the fact that people are looking at actual dead-- A week like this, people are looking at actual killed civilians. I can't imagine that there's an appetite to hear big ideas like the ones that we just heard from Laila about, well, this is what Hamas really is.

Anna Baltzer: It's hard and it's necessary. As Laila was speaking to the context of this, what Palestinians are going through after 75 years of incredible violence, of ethnic cleansing, of being targeted with such brutality, of kidnapping, of murder, what we see in Gaza, being denied food, water, medicine, Gazans can't fish. Gazans are shot when they farm. Gazans are bombed constantly. This is not a reality that anybody would accept. I'm 44 years old, and for the first time in my entire lifetime we saw this kind of violence used against Israelis.

This is not a life anyone would accept. This is not a life that my ancestors in the Warsaw ghetto accepted, or that South Africans accepted under apartheid. After 75 years, after hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been targeted, and if you're someone who quietly watched as Palestinians have been murdered and dispossessed for 75 years, and then after Israelis are brutally killed in one day, and suddenly you're a champion of human rights? That's not morality, it's just racism.

Any form of Palestinian resistance has been repressed. I've seen it with my own eyes. Peaceful marches, people are shot at. People are tear gassed. There's cultural resistance. Palestinian hip hop advocating for themselves in the UN and the International Court of Justice, the everyday resistance of going to school, of carrying on daily life. Every type of resistance is violently oppressed. We cannot expect two million people, half of them children to-- We can't expect Israel to imprison two million people and not pay a heavy price. I am quoting an Israeli journalist. It's not about justifying, it's about being realistic. If we're serious about seeing peace, we have to work for justice and that means ending this brutal siege and apartheid system.

Kai Wright: We need to take a break. I'm talking with Anna Baltzer of Jewish Voice for Peace and with Palestinian author and journalist Laila El-Haddad. We can take your calls, and we will hear from you after a break. Stay with us.

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Kai Wright: Welcome back, it's Notes from America. I'm Kai Wright. We are talking this week about Israel's expected ground invasion of Gaza in reaction to an attack from Hamas last weekend, what it means not only for the people of Gaza, but for Israeli seeking security and for all of us. I'm joined by Anna Baltzer, a member of Jewish Voice for Peace. She is author of Witness in Palestine: A Jewish Woman in the Occupied Territories, and by Laila El-Haddad, who is an award-winning Palestinian author and journalist based in Clarksville, Maryland. Her most recent book is Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything In Between. Anna, one of the things we're hearing an enormous amount of via text message is that this is an incredibly unbalanced conversation, that we are not presenting more than one side of this conversation. I guess I put that to you to start, how would you respond to that?

Anna Baltzer: I would respond that if there is a situation in which one country has complete control of another people, has expelled violently the vast majority of them, and then [unintelligible 00:32:20] and brutalizes them, and is able to cut off water and electricity and food, and has complete control, and is able to bomb any house and hospital in school it wants. In a situation like that, being neutral is not moral. Being neutral only enables the ongoing injustice that is the root of the problem.

There's a word I haven't used yet here and that is genocide. We are talking about an impending genocide that fits the definition of the word genocide, and there's a lot being written about it now. To be neutral in a situation of genocide is unconscionable. Yes, we want peace. We want a world of safety for everybody, but that does not come through brutally bombing one million children.

This prioritization of Jewish feelings over Palestinian lives, the reporting of Israeli deaths and not Palestinian deaths. If you have a situation where thousands of Palestinians are killed, as we've seen over the years, where you'll have a situation where thousands of Palestinians are killed through Israeli bombs and a small number of Israelis are killed, when you see balanced reporting of both of those, is that balance, or is that distortion?

We see distortion when we attempt to be neutral on this issue. There is not a Jewish side or a Palestinian side. The premise that we have sort of the Jewish perspective and feelings, and the Palestinian perspective and feelings. No, this is a situation of grave injustice, and anybody who cares about justice and racial justice and indigenous struggle. Palestine is a racial justice issue. It's a feminist issue. It's a queer issue. It's a reproductive justice issue. If you care about ending genocide and state violence, then you should be with this struggle, and it doesn't matter what religion you come from or background. There are many, many Jews who are part of this movement, and it is the path to liberation for all of us.

Kai Wright: Let's go to Paul Adam in Maplewood, New Jersey. Paul, welcome to the show.

Paul Adam: Yes, hi. Hi, Kai Wright. Excellent to be on in these times. May a miracle happen and peace. Peace-Shalom. [unintelligible 00:35:05]. That means peace in the Holy Land and on the Promised Land in Hebrew. I would say salam alaikum. It's a comment and it's a question tied in. The comment is that, in Jewish law, it's a Jewish law mitzvah, a commandment. In Exodus-- I am Jewish, by the way.

To make this clear also, I disagree with-- I would really like to say bye-bye to Bibi, everyone on and who's listening who would know what I mean, would know what I mean. I disagree with Prime Minister, "Bibi" Netanyahu's policies. They are not the correct response or approach to this situation. We need more pragmatism and more cooperation. In Exodus, it says, "You shall not wrong or mistreat the non-Jewish people who you live with, essentially coexist." This is 3000 years ago we're talking in the land that you inherit.

Kai Wright: Thank you for that, Paul. I'm going to stop you there just to get more calls in, but I hear the point that you are hearing in Jewish law, a maxim that would challenge Israeli policy. That's what I'm hearing. Anna, do you agree that that's what you're hearing from Paul Adam?

Anna Baltzer: Yes, that's what I'm hearing, and there's nothing Jewish about bombing Palestinian children. The way that Israel co-ops the identity and notion of Jewishness is highly offensive. Indeed, there's nothing Jewish about what Israel is doing on the country.

Kai Wright: Let's go to the Nazam in Houston. Nazam, welcome to the show.

Nazam: Thank you. I have a question and a comment. I believe, one of the reason why we ignore or even distaste the Palestinians and we totally ignored their death, suffering for last 70 years, has to do also with lot of deep-seated prejudice in American society, more pronounced in American South not surprisingly. I live in American South, so I do see specifically among the evangelicals, and a common very simplistic belief is that whatever is Arab is Muslim, and whatever is Muslim, is Arab. They're violent by nature, so they have to be killed, and they have to be violently treated, and Israel is doing the right thing, and they can totally ignore it.

They totally ignore that there are Palestinian Christians, there are other minorities in whole Arabia, which again, is another form of racism because it totally ignores the minority Arab population. I believe we need to go back and we need to elucidate this long-existing historical prejudice, sometimes conscious, sometimes unconscious, sometimes even subconscious. I have seen educated people, they hold similar views. I hope they invite people--

Kai Wright: I'm going to stop you there, Nazam. Thank you. That makes me think about the fact that we're hearing reports already of at least a crease awareness of or concern about hate crime, both hate crime directed against Jewish Americans and hate crimes directed against people perceived to be Muslim in the United States. Are either of you, Laila or Anna hearing that as well in your communities, and what do you think about it? Go ahead.

Laila El-Haddad: Yes, as a matter of fact, I don't know if Anna you heard the news, but right before we got on this program, there was a six-year-old who was stabbed to death. I want to say, was it in Chicago? By his landlord, a Muslim child, just about an hour ago. I was looking at my messages as we were speaking that a friend of mine, his two daughters had written, "free Gaza" in a sand dune, and I don't know which state they were in, and got assaulted by a man that was walking by. So absolutely. I won't lie. I'm looking over my shoulder. I wear hijab, and so does my daughter. I hike a lot whenever I'm out alone at night. I have a free Palestine sticker on my car, so I'm very nervous.

It makes me feel the way I felt shortly after 9/11. I was in Boston, and I was terrified to walk in the streets by myself. Certainly, I mentioned this earlier in the program, a lot of the policies that we see are fueled by this kind of anti-Arab Islamophobic sentiment and othering of the Palestinians and the Israeli journalists. Gideon Levy has spoken quite a bit about this, Palestinians unhumans. They don't love their children the way we do. They teach their children to hate. They don't love life. We hear these refrains over and over, most famously made by former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, in which she said, "I will never forgive the Palestinians for forcing us to kill their children."

Kai Wright: Anna, are you hearing anything about this in your community as well?

Anna Baltzer: Just to speak to what Laila was just saying that we know what happens when people are called animals. I don't use the word genocide lightly. It's very easy to see this as something happening across the world. The stories that you just told about what's happening here in the US, and moreover, the fact that what Israel's doing is with billions of dollars of US military aid every year. That we're scrambling to send more weapons over there. We are not separate. We are very much a part of this.

We send those billions of dollars while people here in the US do not have their basic needs met, healthcare, schools. We send these weapons to be experimented on Palestinians that are then brought back to this country and used against communities of color here in the US. In so many ways, what's happening over them impacts all of us here in this country. I hope you'll give a chance at some point at the end to talk about what we do about all of this. Because the war did not just begin. The stories we've heard about what's happening in Gaza are everyday occurrences, and Israel has been waging a one-sided war against Palestinians. There is no military solution. We need to act together now, and I'm happy to talk about ways.

Kai Wright: Just for the sake of time, I want to ask what one caller's asking just directly talking about our two guests, can either of them state that Hamas was wrong?

Anna Baltzer: The killing of civilians is completely against international law. Palestinians have the right to break out of an illegal cage that they have been forced to live in for decades and to live in freedom on their own lands. Palestinians even have a right to resist against their military occupiers. Palestinians do not legally have a right to target Israeli civilians, which Hamas, of course, did.

I would simply say that the fixation on trapping Palestinians and others into rallying all of our efforts to condemn Hamas at a time when so many more Palestinians are being threatened with genocide. I would just ask, why are Palestinian lives so much less important than Jewish Israeli lives? It's not either/or. It's about understanding the context in which this happens, our complicity in it, and addressing the root issues. Because of course, we want everybody to be able to live in freedom and safety, including Israelis.

Kai Wright: Let's go to Montana in New York. Montana, welcome to the show.

Montana: Hi. Thank you. Like Anna, I'm the Jewish granddaughter of Eastern European Jews who escaped the Holocaust. I'm a college professor in Ohio, and there is enormous pressure to take a stand, to wave a flag and stand with Israel or stand with Palestine in my efforts to educate, but not indoctrinate my students. I actually showed them a video that I found on YouTube by Anna Baltzer just the other day.

I'm very excited that she's on the program. My question is that I'm in this impossible dilemma where it's really not acceptable, as Anna said, to remain neutral when this tragedy is happening and there's an impending genocide. Yet it's hard not to tip into the balance for me. Like I assign my students a bunch of documentaries that show the predicament of the Palestinians, but I'm always under threat of being seen as leaning one side or the other. Yet in Ohio, there's so little awareness of the entire situation. What, as a professor, can I do to stay on the side of empathy for everyone and yet present the reality of what Anna has laid out in her presentation?

Kai Wright: Thanks, Montana. Anna, can you respond?

Anna Baltzer: Well, I also want to give Laila the chance, because I've spoken a lot.

Kai Wright: Well, only because it was a direct question for you. Let's each of you maybe give a quick few seconds response, Anna, and then Laila, you respond as well.

Anna Baltzer: I struggle to put into words how to navigate this. I just got a text from a dear friend last night who said, amazing feminist college professor, "I've spent so many years with a discipline to build an analysis around Palestine and unlearn the story that I heard as a Jewish-American about Israel being a place of safety for us." She said, "It all disappeared, and I went back to this primal fear."

She said, my reptilian brain took over. People are in a state of shock right now. I'm coming to understand that there is a need to understand that people are moving through the emotions of what happened. Ultimately, maybe this isn't directly speaking to your question. I think if we don't stand up, Palestinians are taking all of the heat of what is happening. I think that you do not have to agree with what Hamas did to acknowledge the reality of this context, and to know that when we fight for justice for Palestinians, we are fighting for justice for everybody.

Kai Wright: Laila, unfortunately, we are wrapping up. Can you respond? You get the last word. No, we haven't come to resolve this issue. We've come to start talking about it. Floor is yours, Laila.

Laila El-Haddad: I'm sorry, what did you want me to address, just generally, or?

Kai Wright: Where would you leave us, one, and two, if you had a response to the caller's question about how she can engage?

Laila El-Haddad: How she can engage her students or just more generally?

Kai Wright: Yes.

Laila El-Haddad: I echo everything Anna said. I think that a lot of people are having a knee-jerk reaction. I just plead with people to remember what happens when-- I'm slaughtering a quote here. My apologies. It's been a long day. When good people stay silent. Whether it was the beginning of the war on Iraq, which I remember very clearly. We can go decades before that, Japanese Internment.

We can go to the Asian Exclusion Act and on and on and on. This is a universal issue. This is an anti-colonial struggle. Everything Anna said about this being a feminist struggle, this being an anti-racist struggle echo. I urge people to remember those overriding themes, that this isn't just about Hamas. This isn't even just about Palestinians. This is an anti-apartheid struggle. Most of all, this is a struggle for freedom and for humanity.

Kai Wright: Laila El-Haddad is a Palestinian author and journalist based in Maryland. Anna Baltzer is a member of Jewish Voice for Peace. I thank you both for sitting with us through this difficult conversation. We're going to return to it, listeners. I will say, I hear a number of folks who have said, "Hey, I want to hear another side to this." I think there are multiple sides, so we're going to come at it again. Notes From America is a production of WNYC studios. I'm Kai Wright. We'll be with you again next week. Thanks for listening.

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