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(Greater Miami Jewish Federation/Facebook)

Jewish and community leaders rallied in support of Israel on Oct. 10 near the Holocaust Memorial in Miami Beach.

Turmoil at Home and Abroad

Calls for peace rise from the ashes of tragedy

The escalation of the Israel-Palestine conflict last month has been felt globally, including here at home. As the ground and sky shake in the Middle East under constant threat of air raids, the spirits of South Floridians tremble with them. At times like this, fear knows no bounds.

On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas militants bombed and killed more than 1,400 Israelis and took an estimated 222 people hostage after a breach at the Gaza border. The Israeli military has since launched its own barrage of airstrikes on the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, killing more than 6,000 Palestinians and counting.

Meanwhile, local activists and community leaders have protested and made varying demands, including the release of all Israeli and American hostages, a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to hostilities that have run for decades. At the same time, accusations of and concerns over anti-Semitism and Islamophobia run amok, with Arabs and Jews alike living in fear over polarizing rhetoric.

The Biscayne Times reached out to several local synagogues, Jewish community leaders and the Anti-Defamation League for comment, but nearly all refused or did not respond. Attempts to speak to members of the Palestinian community were similarly met with fear and hesitation, and were ultimately unsuccessful.

A South Florida native who has been in Israel since the days leading up to the Hamas-led attacks has agreed to share her story in exchange for anonymity. From here on out, she will be referred to as “Sara” to protect her identity.

Living in Terror

Sara, the daughter of Israeli immigrants, was visiting family to celebrate the final days of the Jewish holiday Sukkot and attend a relative’s wedding when her trip took a twisted turn. She was awoken during the early morning hours of Oct. 7 by sirens signaling imminent bombing in South-Central Israel. She had only 90 seconds to reach the residency’s built-in shelter, a legal requirement for homes in certain parts of the country.

“I had been sleeping and awoke immediately, although initially I thought it was an ambulance because I didn’t want to believe it was the bomb siren,” said Sara, who had heard it before during a 2021 visit to Israel amid heightened tensions regarding land disputes in Jerusalem.

As the threats continued, she quickly lost sense of time, only having had one change of clothes on hand. The five days she spent feeling too afraid to leave the house began to blur into one long period of uncertainty. She spent those days in and out of the bomb shelter, with eyes glued to her TV and phone screens.

“We watch as families plead and beg to learn where their loved ones are as videos being released show people being captured, many times clearly injured and bloody, or videos of dead bodies being paraded in the streets of Gaza,” Sara said. “Moms who look and sound just like mine pleading on TV for their daughter to be returned, it touches on primal feelings.”

Meanwhile, Sara’s parents in South Florida made futile attempts to bring their daughter back home to safety. Even once operations at the Israeli airport she’d normally travel from resumed, Sara chose not to fly in the very sky where war was being waged, and would later double down on that decision after seeing how her American peers were reacting to the attacks online.  

Incomplete or Rejected Narratives

Sara said individuals she once considered friends took to social media to justify – even celebrate – the Hamas attacks, coining them as a new chapter in Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation. She felt disillusioned by the sentiments.

“How are the deaths of my people – good and loving, regular, innocent Jewish people being slaughtered on a holy day – how was this scene the liberation of Palestinians?” Sara asked herself.

Sara perceives but rejects a narrative that Muslim Palestinians are the only indigenous people of the Israeli-Palestinian land, her own grandparents having been considered Palestinian Jews under the British Mandate for Palestine that ended in 1948 with the creation of Israel.

But Sara is not the only person who is dissatisfied with the various forms of speech that have arisen from the conflict. Alan Levine, a civil rights lawyer and member of the anti-Zionist organization Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), is one of many who believe that the mainstream narrative is woefully one-sided, favoring Israelis while ignoring the Palestinian plight.

“It doesn’t justify the killing of Israeli civilians to point out that in fact Israel has killed thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza over the past several years, with their various aerial bombardments in which they’ve targeted residential areas … but it is also more than a little hypocritical for those who simply mourn Israeli civilians to ignore the suffering and deaths of Palestinian civilians in Gaza at the hands of Israel over the past decades,” Levine said.

Likewise, Wilfredo Ruiz, media and outreach director of The Council on American-Islamic Relations Florida (CAIR), believes the story is incomplete if it does not mention the long history of conflict between Israel and Palestine.

“For 75 years, Palestinians have not only lived in inhumane conditions under the brutality of military occupation, they have seen hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers take their land,” Ruiz said. “That’s the reality and why our community keeps asking why they’re not hearing the facts.”

As the largest Muslim civil liberty rights organization in the state, CAIR Florida hears many of the community’s concerns. The organization is currently investigating excessive police force during pro-Palestinian rallies, but it is also hearing about the isolating effect a partial narrative has on everyday Palestinian Americans.

“The community feels the disregard and that double standard from the highest offices in the nation or in the state … You have children with families in the Palestinian territories being asked in their classrooms to stand for Israel, and some of them have already lost members of their own families,” Ruiz said.

Calls for a Ceasefire

The South Florida chapter of JVP held a rally in front of Sen. Rick Scott’s office Oct. 17 prompting him to introduce a resolution calling for the U.S. government to demand a ceasefire in Israel and Palestine and support humanitarian aid for people living in the Gaza strip, of which the death toll over the past weeks is at least three times as high and still growing. A similar resolution was introduced by the House of Representatives.

Roughly 100 people attended the demonstration. Four were arrested, including Levine, for protesting on the building’s entrance steps. Drivers passing by honked their horns in unison to protesters’ chants, expressing solidarity, while others shouted “We stand with Israel” from within their vehicles.

The U.S. is Israel’s biggest military ally, providing the country with billions of taxpayer dollars – and local governments unequivocally reflect that. On Oct. 17, Miami-Dade County commissioners unanimously approved a resolution supporting Israel and condemning Hamas. Mayor Daniella Levine Cava also announced an additional $25 million investment in Israeli bonds, bringing the county’s total investment to $76 million, according to a press release.

The city of Miami Beach has sent firefighters to help with the war effort in Israel, while municipalities with significant Jewish populations like Surfside and North Miami have expressed solidarity with Israel over the past weeks.

“It seems to me that, at this time, for governments to reflexively support Israel’s genocidal attacks over Gaza is simply indefensible,” Levine said. “We can all be sympathetic, mournful for those killed by the Hamas attacks, but all of us who have any sense of humanity ought to be standing up strongly against (the) indiscriminate slaughter of thousands and thousands of people living in Gaza.”

Martha Schoolman, another JVP member, seriously doubts the effectiveness of Israel’s air strikes on Gaza in bringing back hostages or defeating Hamas.

“The Israeli casualties in the attack on the 7th are horrific ... at the same time, how many Palestinian civilian lives are we taking in retaliation?” she said. “We can’t bomb our way out of this one.”

Rabbi Jeremy Barras of Temple Beth Am in Pinecrest, on the other hand, says the calls for a ceasefire are unprecedented.

“We fought ISIS for years,” said Barras, who also has family in Israel. “We fought Al-Qaeda for 20 years. Israel fights Hamas for one week, and the world says you need to stop. That’s not justice.”

As far as the loss of civilian Palestinian’s lives goes, Barras says Hamas is the real culprit.

“You can’t slaughter people and then hide behind your own civilians and say that Israel is committing genocide,” he said. “The only people who would say that are people who are uninformed or people who are biased against Jews, and there’s no shortage of that.”

Antisemitism & Islamophobia

Although Barras says he believes in the right to criticize any democracy, including Israel, he fears that many are using those criticisms to push antisemitic agendas.

“All of these people who are running around college campuses and yelling, ‘From the river to the sea,’ and then saying they’re not antisemitic, that’s completely absurd,” said Barras. “What they’re really saying is, ‘The fact that you’re Jewish means you don’t have a right to live here.’”

Barras is referring to the slogan, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” a common chant among Palestinian sympathizers. It references the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, which comprise Israel’s and Palestine’s eastern and western borders.

Sara also says the slogan leaves no room for Jewish Israelis to reside on the land.

Glory Jones, an activist who led the chants at JVP’s Oct. 17 rally and included the popular slogan, explained how it is a common misconception that a liberated Palestine equates to the erasure of Jews from the region.

“It doesn’t remotely mean that whatsoever … When we say ‘Free Palestine,’ it means just that. It means liberation of the Palestinian people. It means Palestinian people not under siege. It means everyone in Palestine being able to have equal rights.”

Gov. Ron DeSantis rejected the idea of taking in Palestinian refugees from Gaza last month out of similar fears that they “are all antisemitic.” Ruiz takes issue with such rhetoric, saying it classifies Palestinians – and perhaps more generally, Muslims – as a hateful people.

“When you hear that dangerous statement being made by our governor, that translates into an uptick in the hate incidents that our community has been suffering in these past weeks … I hope not, but I believe it’ll be to levels similar to after September 11th,” he said.

An additional reminder, says Schoolman, is that Israel does not speak for all Jews.

“We are gravely concerned that a genocide against Palestinians is being committed in our name,” she said, “meaning for Jewish safety, for Jewish security, to fight antisemitism, we must bomb more Palestinians and give Israel more arms, and we reject that narrative.”

How to Achieve Peace

Amid heightened emotions and conflicting views, The Biscayne Times asked each interviewee one final, yet crucial, question: What does justice look like to you?

Barras says he was a supporter of the Oslo Accords in the 1990s, which were meant to achieve a traditional two-state solution but failed. His new wish: for “Palestinians (to) just reject terrorism.”

Sara also favors a two-state solution, but similarly believes that Palestine’s demands are unreasonable and negotiations presently impossible.

“Every night I pray for Israelis and Palestinians alike, and wish for more humanity in the world,” she said. “I want this war to end so badly. I also want Hamas to cease to exist. I want Palestinians to have better leadership and achieve their state through diplomatic efforts. I want to live in peace with the surrounding Arab nations and for everyone to have access to their homeland.”

In the meantime, she has just one request: Bring back the hostages.

Levine, who grew up a Zionist but later renounced its ideology, would like instead for the two groups to restore peace in unity.

“My hope for the future is a state in which Jews and Palestinians have equal rights in a single state from the river to the sea,” Levine said, “and that would draw upon the history in which Jews and Arabs lived comfortably side by side in historical Palestine.”

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