I will not be engaging directly with this poster, but for others who are reading, I wanted to push back on this false narrative that Israel created Hamas. There’s no question that Hamas has received money from a wide variety of sources, including Israel, and it’s possible to discuss how much Israel’s actions have influenced Hamas and its trajectory, but Israel did not “create” Hamas. That’s a huge oversimplification of Hamas’s origins. It is not necessary or right to denigrate everything about Israel to show support for Palestinians.

I started to count, then I saw that the poll only went to 15+, so I stopped counting and chose that one. I grew up in a house full of board games and we have a lot now.

We’ve started on pies, but that’s because we want to eat them now. We had a sour cream apple pie last week (dd’s favorite) and there’s a carrot pie in the oven now. I’ve had the recipe for years and dd and I decided to make it today. We’ll make several more pies through the week. I’ll do the roll dough on Wednesday, and the cranberries (is it a chutney? A salad? A relish? There’s not a good word in English for it). We made peach-strawberry jam today too, for the rolls.

A person in my life who’s having a rough time went with me to an event where they could do something helpful for others and for their own mental health. A friend from another country is in town and we’re going to dinner. The last few weeks have been unbelievably challenging for him because of his very unique relationship to current events in the world, so the conversation will often be hard, but it will be so good to see him again.

I’ve only made injera with teff a couple of times, but I don’t know any secrets since I didn’t have trouble with it. Are you using teff or another grain? This site has tons of info about making injera. https://teffco.com/traditional-injera/tips-tricks/

Thank you for updating. So glad they are in Canada now.

There are so many people in Lewiston who were refugees. I cannot imagine the additional trauma this has caused them, and everyone there.

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Here are some of the many Palestinian and Palestinian-Israeli NGOs that are working for peace. Hamas dominates too much of the media about Palestine, but there are many, many Palestinians who want peace and are doing hard work to try to make it happen. تغيير Taghyeer Women of the Sun (partners with Women Wage Peace) A Land for All Israelis and Palestinians for Peace Combatants for Peace A New Dawn in the Negev Humans without Borders Together Beyond Words Umm el-Fahem Art Gallery

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I’m sure many of you know this, but if you’re not familiar with how fraught the concept of the right of return for Palestinian refugees has been for the last 75 years, this Wikipedia article is a reasonably good summary of the issue. Often the media focuses on questions about land and settlements, but the right of return specifically along with the broader question of what will happen to Palestinian refugees in a final negotiated agreement is in my opinion as difficult an issue as what will happen to Jerusalem. This PBS article does a good job in my opinion of laying out why allowing/asking/forcing Palestinians to leave Gaza is so complicated, no matter where they go. For what it’s worth, Jordan already hosts the second highest number of refugees per capita in the world (Lebanon hosts the most per capita). Egyptian claims that they host 9 million refugees and immigrants may technically be true (but honestly, that number seems high to me, although more people from sub-Saharan have been arriving in Egypt for better schooling and work opportunities), but fewer than a million are UN-registered refugees. If the US hosted refugees at the same per capita rate as Lebanon, we’d have 40 million refugees here. At the Jordan rate, we’d have 23 million. Currently, we accept 125,000/year and the number has been much lower in recent years.

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I long to live in a few different cities. We were able to live in one for four years, but there are still three more to go. I lived in one of those three for about 9 months in the 90s and I've briefly visited the other two, but it wasn't enough. I don't know why those specific cities have such a pull on me, but they do.

Exercised. Finished some schoolwork yesterday so I don’t have to think about it today. Going to my local mosque tomorrow to help at their food bank. Its hard for me to get out the door every Thursday morning for this, but I always come home feeling peaceful.

I didn’t think you meant any judgment there, and it’s an important question. I do think it would be a very interesting conversation to talk about nonviolent ways to move forward that actively promote peace building, because I believe there are solutions.

The reasons people are not leaving Gaza are more about politics rather than Egypt's ability to take care of refugees. Egypt was setting up camps more than a week ago. Even though it would be a major crisis to have 2 million people cross through Rafah, even that situation would pale in comparison to other refugee crises going on. About a million people have fled Sudan in the last 6 months, ending up in countries with far few resources than Egypt to help them and aid agencies are underfunded. Here's one article about refugees in Chad. In addition, 4 million people inside Sudan have been displaced and it is very difficult to help them.

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Most Israeli Arabs/Palestinian Israelis (there can be quite a bit of disagreement about what to call this population, and these are not the only two terms) are descendants of the about 150,000 Palestinians who did not flee from what would become the state of Israel in 1948. There were about 800,000 other Palestinians who did flee. Many of their descendants are still UN-recognized refugees, mostly living in Gaza (administered by Egypt after 1948 but now part of Israel) and the West Bank (administered by Jordan after 1948 but also part of Israel now), plus Lebanon and Jordan. Some left before the partition plan was supposed to be implemented, but most fled as refugees after the creation of the state of Israel. Israeli Arabs/Palestinian Israelis are mostly Muslim, but there is a significant Christian minority and also a Druze population. A significant hurdle to Palestinians requesting Israeli citizenship en masse is that Israel would cease to be a demographically Jewish state. There are about 2 million Israeli Arabs/Palestinian Israelis, about 6 million Palestinian refugees, and a total of about 14 million Palestinians worldwide. The Jewish population of Israel is about 8 million. Israel basically does not allow Palestinians to become citizens of the country - even Palestinians married to Israeli Arab citizens cannot get citizenship. Palestinian residents of Jerusalem have a special status and can more easily apply for citizenship, but most do not apply, and of those who do, about 2/3rds are denied. (My opinions about your final paragraph are likely too political for this main board, but as an underlying goal, I think Palestinians should leverage democratic norms to highlight their lack of rights.)

I am very concerned about the hostages too.

For one comparison about the the feasibility of this process, you might compare New Orleans before Katrina in 2005. There were about half a million people in the city limits and about 1.2 million people in the entire area were under mandated or voluntary evacuation. People who could started to evacuate several days before, and evacuation orders started to be issued at 10am on August 27th outside of the city proper, including a voluntary evacuation in New Orleans. The mandatory evacuation for New Orleans was issued on the 28th at 10 am on the 28th. Katrina made landfall at 6 am on the 29th. We all remember how badly that went, and this was an area with roads to get out to many different places, where many people own cars, and where many people had at least a few resources to help them get out. And too many people in New Orleans had no way to get out. Northern Gaza has 1.1 million people, and 75% of Gazans are already UN-recognized refugees. They have already been dealing with bombings for the last 6 days. Infrastructure in Gaza is very poor. People do not have the resources to deal with daily life, much less pick up yet again and evacuate their families in the face of another war. These are multi-generational refugees. And they are supposed to move to a place where conditions are just as bad and where existing buildings are already too crowded.

There are lots of complicated reasons for that, but the simplest explanation is that Egypt doesn't like Hamas. The Sinai has been pretty unstable for quite a few years now (although it has improved somewhat in the last few years) and Egypt doesn't want to add any more Hamas influence to that mix. Lots of other factors play into the decision to keep that border closed. Israel and Egypt actually do coordinate on controlling the entire border between the two countries, including the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt. A tangential but still related issue is refugees who try to cross the land border from Egypt to Israel. Since 2008, Israel and Egypt agreed to limit irregular crossings from Egypt into Israel, particularly targeting Sudanese (and later South Sudanese) refugees. A South Sudanese friend of mine managed to do that crossing in the 2000s and was lucky to survive. Many fewer people try to make that crossing now, but lots of people were killed in the first 10 years of that policy. In other words, Israel and Egypt both place a high value on limiting border crossings lots of different reasons and they work together to patrol each side. I've crossed between Israel and Egypt overland 7 or 8 times, both at Rafah and Taba, but in the 90s. It's been much less safe to cross there for a while.