Latest news with #IsraelGazaConflict
The Guardian
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘A moral crisis': how the Sydney writers' festival grappled with the Israel-Gaza war
The Israel-Gaza conflict loomed over the Sydney writers' festival long before it opened its doors at Carriageworks last week. In February, the chair of the festival board, Kathy Shand, resigned over her concerns about some of the programming related to Gaza and Israel. Robert Watkins, who replaced Shand as chair, promised the festival would present 'a plurality of voices [and] a diversity of thought' including 'both Jewish and Palestinian writers and thought leaders'. Guardian Australia attended a number of events related to the conflict to see how the writers' festival covered the ongoing death and destruction, antisemitism, Islamophobia and the feelings of different communities being rejected and sidelined. Raja Shehadeh – described by the Guardian as Palestine's greatest prose writer – was one of a few writers joining the festival by video link from the region, Zooming in from his home in Ramallah, in the West Bank. Shehadeh, a human rights lawyer turned writer, has written a number of acclaimed books, including the Orwell prize-winning Palestinian Walks. He was at the festival speaking about his book What Does Israel Fear from Palestine? – a question he answers succinctly in his panel. 'The very existence of Palestine is what Israel fears.' Describing his daily life, Shehadeh told the audience how Israeli settlers had attacked a nearby Palestinian village, firebombing houses and cars 'with the help of the Israeli army'. IDF checkpoints made the hill walking he loves difficult but, he said, 'this is nothing compared to what's happening in Gaza'. 'We hear the planes, the jet fighters … they streak through the sky on the way to Gaza to kill more people,' he told Australian writer Abbas El-Zein, who moderated the session. 'And so we cannot complain.' Ittay Flescher, an Australian Jewish writer, joined the festival via video link from Jerusalem, where he moved with his family from Melbourne in 2018. The audience was warned before the session began that earlier in the evening Flescher had had to evacuate his home because of incoming rockets from Yemen. Flescher, who is the education director at Kids4Peace Jerusalem, an interfaith movement for Israelis and Palestinians, said a key element in working towards peace was combating the dehumanisation of the other side that has occurred in the region. 'I don't think Hamas could have carried out October 7 without extensive dehumanisation of Jews and Israelis … And what Israel has done in Gaza, not just killing Hamas, but killing so so many innocent men, women and children that were not connected to Hamas … and now the limiting of food into Gaza and the starvation, that can't happen without extensive dehumanisation.' Peter Beinart, an Jewish-American political commentator, echoed the need for humanisation of the other, and listening to voices across the divides of the conflict in his sold-out event on Sunday. 'Palestinians lack permission to narrate,' he said, echoing the literary great Edward Said. 'There is this process in which, as a Jew, from the moment you can remember you've been talking about Palestinians, but you're never listening to Palestinians or actually meeting with Palestinians. And I think this is a recipe for both ignorance and dehumanisation,' Beinart told Debbie Whitmont. Beinart said he wrote his recent book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, to try to offer 'a voice that my mind comes from … from love and from Jewish solidarity, to say to the people in my life that I love that I think something has gone horribly, horribly wrong'. 'When I look at what's happening in Gaza, a place where most of the buildings and the schools and the universities and the mosques and the churches and the bakeries and the agriculture have been destroyed, and people have been displaced from their homes … every person I know from Gaza has lost count of the number of people who've been killed,' he said. 'It seems to me this is the most profound chillul hashem, desecration of God's name, that I have witnessed in my entire life, and it will constitute not just a moral crisis for the Jewish people but for those of us who take Judaism seriously.' At a packed – and occasionally tense – session on Friday morning, the British Jewish barrister and author Philippe Sands and Michael Gawenda, the former editor of the Age, spoke about antisemitism and xenophobia. Gawenda argued that many Jewish Australians working in the arts had been refused work because of their political stance on Israel. 'They feel like they are being rejected on the basis that they are Jews, Jews of a particular kind. And I think that there's evidence that this is widespread in Australia ... It's widespread in the arts, I'm absolutely convinced of that.' Gawenda's comments prompted a heated question from an audience member about the experience of Arab-Australians who had missed out on opportunities due to their pro-Palestinian stance, naming Khaled Sabsabi and Antoinette Lattouf as examples. Sabsabi had been selected as Australia's representative at the 2026 Venice Biennale but was dumped by Creative Australia over past works that involved imagery of Hassan Nasrallah, the now-dead Hezbollah leader, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Of Sabsabi, Gawenda said: 'With his cancellation, there was a huge uproar ... Letters were signed, petitions were signed calling it out, including by Jews who would have been opposed to his views. There were no letters or petitions supporting these young Jewish artists, none. They got no support at all. Lattouf got heaps of support, as she should have. I think it was a mistake what the ABC did.' Sands, who is a king's counsel, spoke about the risks of a sense of competition between marginalised groups, and of antisemitism being weaponised by politicians for their own political ends. 'The concern about creating the league tables of horror is that it leads to an instrumentalisation of what's going on. And what I really worry about right now is that what's going on is instrumentalising antisemitism for other purposes,' he said. Tension among the audience was heightened when the first question from the crowd came from a woman asking about the 'Zionist lobby', which she said had put 'its tentacles into everything' – an antisemitic trope that attracted gasps and furious comments from other members of the audience. The question was shut down by the moderator. For many in Australia with family and cultural ties to the region, art has become a place to express their rage and grief. The Lebanese Australian writer Sara Haddad, the Lebanese Palestinian poet Hasib Hourani and the Palestinian Australian playwright Samah Sabawi discussed with moderator Micaela Sahhar their texts of home and identity against the backdrop of the Israeli bombardment and blockade of Gaza. All three works were published after 7 October 2023. Sabawi started writing Cactus Pear for My Beloved, which tells the story of her family's expulsion from Gaza and settling in Queensland over 100 years, in 2016. It was intended as a celebration of her father and her home. By the time she got to writing the author's note, in December 2023, 'a lot of Gaza was fast turning into rubble'. 'My family was on the run, my grandfather's home destroyed. Much of our neighbourhood was gone. And then my father, watching the news, fell and broke his ribs,' Sabawi said. After her father died in 2024, the book 'became an obituary for both'. Haddad began writing The Sunbird, a novel following a Palestinian woman's memory as a child in the Nakba and then adulthood in Australia, in response to Israel's bombardment of Gaza. She started her novel in December 2023, after seeing the words written by Dr Mahmoud Abu Nujaila on a whiteboard in his hospital in Gaza: 'Whoever stays until the end will tell the story. We did what we could. Remember us.' Haddad finished the book in January and self-published. 'Watching this for many years … I knew that Israel had what it wanted and what it needed, and it wasn't going to stop. They were not going to stop. And so I knew that I had to do everything I possibly could to speak as loudly as I could. 'I wrote the book very quickly. I had a deadline. I knew it was urgent.'
The National
26-05-2025
- General
- The National
Gaza families erased in a new wave of brutal Israeli strikes
Live updates: Follow the latest on Israel-Gaza Israel's war in Gaza has dragged on for 19 months, but the past three days have shown just how relentless it remains. Entire families have been wiped out in a wave of strikes attacking homes, schools, tents and more, despite a global outcry that has so far failed to pressure Israel into halting the war. Among the most harrowing Israeli attacks was the bombing of Fahmi Al Jarjawi school in the Al Daraj neighbourhood of central Gaza city, where hundreds of displaced families had sought shelter. 'The school was supposed to be a place of safety. Instead, it was turned into an inferno,' Mahmoud Basal, spokesman for Gaza's civil defence body, told The National. Medics announced the death of 40 people, mostly children and women. The Israeli missile strike ignited a massive blaze that swept through the school building and the tents pitched inside its grounds. Civil defence teams battled for hours to extinguish the flames. 'We heard desperate cries for help from people trapped alive inside the blaze,' Mr Basal said. 'But the fire was too intense. We couldn't get to them.' Hussein Muhaysin, a paramedic who rushed to the scene, was the first to rescue Ward Al Sheikh Khalil, a young girl pulled from the wreckage just before the flames reached her. 'She was moments away from death,' he told The National. 'When we pulled her out, she was in shock, silent, trembling, unable to comprehend what had just happened.' Little Ward survived. But her family did not. 'We couldn't bring ourselves to tell her that her entire family was killed in the bombing,' said Mr Muhaysin. 'Only her father survived, and he is now in critical condition,' he added. 'We see tragedy every day, but holding a child who has lost everything, who doesn't even know yet, that's a kind of pain no one can explain.' In the northern town of Jabalia, the Abdel Rabbo family suffered a similar fate. At dawn on Monday, Israeli warplanes struck their home with a massive missile, killing 19 people, most of them women and children. 'It was sudden,' Moumen Abdel Rabbo, 28, a relative who rushed to the scene, said. 'The house was completely flattened. Ambulances barely made it through to recover the wounded and the dead. Some bodies are still trapped under the rubble.' Even as family members tried to dig through debris, Israeli drones buzzed overhead, and surrounding areas continued to be shelled. 'How can we search for survivors under fire?' asked the relative. 'These were civilians, mothers, toddlers, elderly people. This wasn't a military target. It was our home.' The Israeli army claimed that it was hitting Hamas targets in both areas. But images and footage of the attacks showed dozens of Palestinian women and children dead or injured. Over the past three days, more than 75 people have been killed across various parts of the besieged territory, cut off from sufficient aid, leaving over two million people trapped between fire and famine. One of the most tragic killings in the past days was the story of Dr Alaa Al Najjar, a physician working at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in the south, who lost nine of her 10 children in a single Israeli air strike on their home while she was saving lives elsewhere. 'The Israeli army hit my uncle's house with one missile that didn't explode,' Suheir Al Najjar, a cousin, told the National. 'Then came a second missile, which reduced the house to ashes.' 'There was no time between the two strikes. They didn't want anyone to escape. It was a deliberate attempt to kill them all at once,' said Ms Al Najjar. 'My uncle and his wife are doctors. They have no links to armed groups. They spent the war treating the wounded, saving lives,' she said. 'This was a family, not a target.' Only the husband and one of the sons survived. Both remain in intensive care. The bodies of two of the nine children are still missing, buried beneath the rubble.
Asharq Al-Awsat
26-05-2025
- Politics
- Asharq Al-Awsat
US-German Citizen Charged with Trying to Attack US Embassy in Tel Aviv
A dual US-German citizen has been arrested on charges that he traveled to Israel and attempted to firebomb the branch office of the US Embassy in Tel Aviv, officials said Sunday. Federal prosecutors in New York said the man, Joseph Neumeyer, walked up to the embassy building on May 19 with a backpack containing Molotov cocktails, but got into a confrontation with a guard and eventually ran away, dropping his backpack as the guard tried to grab him. Law enforcement then tracked Neumeyer down to a hotel a few blocks away from the embassy and arrested him, according to a criminal complaint filed in the Eastern District of New York. The attack took place against the backdrop of Israel's war in Gaza, now in its 19th month. Neumeyer, 28, who is originally from Colorado and has dual US and German citizenship, had traveled from the US to Canada in early February and then arrived in Israel in late April, according to court records. He had made a series of threatening social media posts before attempting the attack, prosecutors said. Israeli officials deported Neumeyer to New York on Saturday and he had an initial court appearance before a federal judge in Brooklyn on Sunday, the same day his criminal complaint was unsealed. Neumeyer's court-appointed attorney Jeff Dahlberg declined to comment. During his first term, President Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital despite Palestinian objections and moved the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to the contested city.
South China Morning Post
25-05-2025
- Politics
- South China Morning Post
US-German citizen charged with trying to attack US embassy office in Tel Aviv
A dual US and German citizen has been arrested on charges that he travelled to Israel and attempted to firebomb the branch office of the US embassy in Tel Aviv, officials said on Sunday. Federal prosecutors in New York said the man, Joseph Neumeyer, walked up to the embassy building on May 19 with a backpack containing Molotov cocktails but got into a confrontation with a guard and eventually ran away, dropping his backpack as the guard tried to grab him. Police then tracked Neumeyer down to a hotel near the embassy and arrested him, according to a criminal complaint filed in the Eastern District of New York. The attack took place against the backdrop of Israel's war in Gaza , now in its 19th month. Neumeyer, 28, who is originally from Colorado, had travelled from the US to Canada in early February and then arrived in Israel in late April, according to court records. He had made a series of threatening social media posts before attempting the attack, prosecutors said. Israeli officials deported Neumeyer to New York on Saturday and he had an initial court appearance before a federal judge in Brooklyn on Sunday, the same day his criminal complaint was unsealed.
Arab News
25-05-2025
- Politics
- Arab News
Man with US and German citizenship is charged with trying to attack US Embassy in Tel Aviv
NEW YORK: A dual US and German citizen has been arrested on charges that he traveled to Israel and attempted to firebomb the branch office of the US Embassy in Tel Aviv, officials said Sunday. Federal prosecutors in New York said the man, Joseph Neumeyer, walked up to the embassy building on May 19 with a backpack containing Molotov cocktails but got into a confrontation with a guard and eventually ran away, dropping his backpack as the guard tried to grab him. Law enforcement then tracked Neumeyer down to a hotel a few blocks away from the embassy and arrested him, according to a criminal complaint filed in the Eastern District of New York. The attack took place against the backdrop of Israel's war in Gaza, now in its 19th month. Neumeyer, 28, who is originally from Colorado and has dual US and German citizenship, had traveled from the US to Canada in early February and then arrived in Israel in late April, according to court records. He had made a series of threatening social media posts before attempting the attack, prosecutors said. Israeli officials deported Neumeyer to New York on Saturday and he had an initial court appearance before a federal judge in Brooklyn on Sunday. His criminal complaint was unsealed Sunday. Neumeyer's court-appointed attorney, Jeff Dahlberg, declined to comment. During his first term, President Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital despite Palestinian objections and moved the US Embassy from Tel Aviv.
