It was easy to miss, amid the horrors, what answered them. In the blood-soaked weeks that started on Oct. 7, the most consequential acts in Israel and in Gaza may also have been the least noticed, carried out not by those who claimed leadership but by those whom leaders had failed. The people who pulled others out of rubble, or out of hiding, who sheltered strangers, who bent to heal wounds seen and unseen, they all answered unspeakable violence with a shared humanity. But their selflessness did more than save lives. It illuminated the connection at the heart of a contest that has preoccupied the world for most of a century, the fellow feeling that defines a community and, more broadly, a nation. Amid the negation of war, and in the absence of a state, two nations were affirmed.
In Israel, the absence was temporary but catastrophic. As Hamas terrorists marauded across the country’s south, killing 1,200 people in a day and retreating back to Gaza with hundreds of hostages, the Israeli government was simply not in evidence. Into the void surged the people of Israel. Within hours, a matrix of volunteers mobilized to rescue those stranded in safe rooms, sustain those evacuated from border areas, and address the traumas of survivors.
The effort was instant, intuitive, unrequested. Its leaders were citizens who had spent the prior 10 months organizing weekly protests against an extremist government angling to erase the only check on its power. Pivoting from protest to service, the loose network of citizens dispatched trauma kits and therapists. When it emerged that no one, least of all the authorities, knew who was dead, who was alive, and who had been abducted, computer experts by the hundreds dove into a digital netherworld, sleuthing for clues.
And just as Hamas made no distinction among the people it slaughtered and stole—Jews, Bedouins, the Palestinian citizens once known as Israeli Arabs, Thai guest workers hired to toil in fields—all of Israeli society reached out. A citizenry riven by inequity and political crisis assembled in the collective spirit that defined Israel at its founding. “We see this as a restatement of the country,” said Gigi Levy-Weiss, a tech entrepreneur who helped organize the response at the Tel Aviv convention center, where as many as 15,000 people showed up with strollers, paper towels—everything, really. “There is a new core.”
In the Gaza Strip, the government stayed gone. Palestinians have no state, but in the Strip the Islamic Resistance Movement, better known as Hamas, has held power for the past 16 years. After the Israeli military began its retaliatory strikes, however, the group’s political apparatus proved as elusive as its armed wing.
“There is no police station, there are no municipalities ... There’s almost nothing,” says Amir Hasanain, a 21-year-old student in Rafah who, like uncounted others, responded by assuming the duties of wartime public servant. Organizing themselves into what he describes as “a simulation of government,” the volunteers delivered basic goods to sustain a civilian population suffering bombardment and homelessness. In the first eight weeks of the assault, nearly 16,000 of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents were killed, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Some 1.9 million were forced to flee their homes, the United Nations reported.
The uprooting evoked what Palestinians call the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” that transformed a narrow enclave beside the Mediterranean into one of the world’s most densely populated places, its numbers swollen by refugees from villages lost to Jewish forces in the 1948 war that created Israel. Defending itself in the decades that followed, Israel would occupy and then settle both Gaza and the West Bank (leaving Gaza in 2005). In those same decades, the Palestinian identity took root. Claimed by some 14 million people globally, it is grounded not only in geography and shared experience but also in the aspiration to what the U.N. Charter declares the right of any people: a state of their own.
“What is so inspiring is the communalism,” says Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a British Palestinian physician who hastens from his London practice to Gaza whenever there is a war. If the destruction and death of this one is unprecedented, he says, so is the selflessness. “Everything is being shared,” he says, “and that’s what is keeping society from collapsing. Nobody turns anyone away.”
As entire neighborhoods were flattened by bombs, whole new cities sprang up beneath tarps and blankets. Rida Thabet was the principal at a 500-student vocational college, the Khan Younis Training Centre, built and run by the United Nations Relief Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA). But on Oct. 13, the day the Israeli military ordered the Strip’s northern half emptied, Thabet effectively became a mayor, 40,000 people having crammed into the school grounds. “It’s like a city,” she says.
Thirty babies had been born there by late November. Women who gave birth during daylight hours could find help at the shelter’s three medical posts. At night, Thabet recruits volunteer medics from the tents. Mohammed Bardaweel spent most of his career in emergency rooms but now does what he can with a kit from the World Health Organization. The hardest cases arrive from the north. One woman came by foot a day after a cesarean section. Another arrived with a 6-year-old with sepsis from a wound caused by phosphorus munitions, he says. “I hope that the nations all around the world who believe in peace and human rights will try to end this war,” the physician says. He pauses before adding, “I know that nations are different than governments.” By the evidence at hand in both Israel and Gaza, it’s a distinction that might inspire hope. —With reporting by -Leslie Dickstein/New York •