Trigger Warning: Contains references to displacement, environmental collapse, and gender-based violence.

The arithmetic of heat

One in three. That’s the average number of women who experience gender-based violence at least once in their lives.

That figure assumes clinics that function, water that runs, and land that can still be cultivated. It assumes that violence occurs within a world stable enough to count it.

In Palestine, that assumption had already begun to fail long before October 2023.

Rising temperatures, declining rainfall, and repeated drought cycles have placed Gaza and the West Bank among the most climate-stressed regions in the world. Heatwaves are longer and more frequent; dry seasons stretch further into the year; fertile land grows increasingly saline. Aquifers that once sustained entire communities have been infiltrated by seawater. Crops ripen unevenly or not at all. Olive harvests yield less oil. Rain, when it comes, is erratic and insufficient.

These are not future projections. They are lived conditions. And they form the backdrop against which war unfolded.

A land already overheated

Climate vulnerability alone does not explain Palestine’s precarity. Many regions face heat, drought, and water scarcity. What distinguishes Palestine is not exposure, but constraint.

Climate adaptation requires space: to build reservoirs, expand treatment plants, install solar arrays, move water from where it is abundant to where it is scarce. It requires the ability to plan centrally, invest long-term, and maintain infrastructure across regions.

In Palestine, those conditions do not exist.

For decades, Israeli control over borders, land use, and construction has functioned as a form of climate policy by other means. Permits for water infrastructure are routinely denied. Rainwater harvesting is restricted. Wells cannot be deepened. Dams cannot be built. Solar installations are confined to rooftops because open land is inaccessible or vulnerable to demolition. Movement between regions is fragmented by checkpoints and military zones, making national planning impossible (source).

Even basic climate adaptation measures—water storage, wastewater reuse, renewable energy at scale—often remain out of reach. Gaza entered the current war with more than ninety percent of its water already undrinkable, desalination plants dependent on fragile fuel supplies, and sewage systems operating at the edge of collapse.

By the time the bombing began, the ecosystem it struck was already overstressed.

Occupation as climate policy

War then served to accelerate Palestine’s environmental fragility.

Israel’s bombs towards Gaza alone exceeded the climate footprint for 36 countries and territories. Gaza relies on solar panels for almost 25% of its electricity needs, yet most of which have been destroyed.

And the kicker — Israel’s bombing left Gaza with an estimated 60 million tons of toxic rubble. The carbon cost of removing the debris and rebuilding reconstruction is set to be over 15 times the emissions from the bombing alone. Together, the total environmental footprint of the last two years is greater than over 100 countries (source).

Even for those who deny the value of Palestinian lives, the ecological cost of the war is unmistakable. Genocide is literally killing the rest of the planet.

From displacement to exposure

What does all of this mean for women and girls?

Like the rest of Palestine’s infrastructure (including reproductive facilities), its gender-based violence response system has been crippled. Women targeted during the war have fewer shelters to turn to, weakened psychosocial services to rely on.

But climate fragility also produces a new pathway to violence. Resource constraints breed conflict and displacement. Long after the enemy is gone, survivors are left with a society prone to festering feuds.

Families become displaced. In overcrowded shelters, privacy disappears. Climate-driven displacement consistently correlates with rising rates of gender-based violence. Girls are assaulted while fetching water. Women exchange sex for food or fuel. Early marriage becomes a survival strategy.

A new cycle is born. Without safe walkways to schools or access to menstrual products, female school drop-out rates spike. Lower educational rates result in reduced earning power and oftentimes, increased rates of intimate partner violence.

When response systems are bombed

War isn’t just an immediate backdrop for gender-based violence. It twists its knife in already-fragile climate resilience systems and tears away protection services for women.

Climate infrastructure and gender-based violence response infrastructure are deeply intertwined. When water systems, energy grids, and healthcare facilities are targeted, the violence extends beyond the moment of impact. It settles into the long aftermath, where harm continues without witnesses.

These are not parallel crises. They are feedback loops.

Preventing gender-based violence must begin with climate action, which in turn requires stopping wars.

But prevention alone is the thinnest kind of mercy. True response demands precision: a microscope held steady over grief, tracing how heat, hunger, and violence converge on the same bodies.

The one-in-three statistic was always a mirror.

War has shattered it, but the reflection remains unchanged. Women are still paying the highest cost of living.

Trigger Warning: Contains descriptions of online harassment and threats of sexual violence.

The arithmetic of harm

One in three women experience gender-based violence in their lifetimes.

That violence isn’t confined to back alleys or bedrooms. It creeps into WhatsApp threads, comment sections, and search bars — ordinary spaces, made extraordinary by what hostility can accumulate there.

This series looks at gender-based violence in wartime settings, with Israel’s assault on Gaza under the microscope.

In this series’ previous article, the violence was physical — the strip searches, forced undressing, and sexualized assaults carried out during Israeli raids on Gaza. But violence rarely stays in one theatre. It migrates. It adapts. And for Palestinian women, the digital realm has long been yet another frontline of violence.

Before October 7: A battlefield already online

Years before the war, Palestinian women lived inside a digital climate thick with misogyny, surveillance, and political punishment.

A UN study found that 62% of Palestinian women human rights defenders had received insulting or threatening messages online, and 70% had been sent sexualized images they never asked for. Women spoke of accounts mass-reported after documenting harassment at checkpoints; of anonymous messages warning them not to post; of smear campaigns framing them as immoral or traitorous.

Another report describes this same pattern: women in Gaza and the West Bank targeted through impersonation accounts, doctored photos, coordinated “character assassinations,” and fabricated allegations around their honor — a tactic designed to weaponize patriarchy against them.

No bombs were needed for this violence; a username sufficed.

This was the pre-war terrain — a digital landscape shaped not by sudden conflict, but by the daily, grinding logistics of patriarchy under occupation.

After October 7: the digital assault widens

When the violence on the ground escalated, so did the violence online.

Between October and December 2023, the Palestinian digital rights group 7amleh documented 1,009 digital rights violations: sexualized hate speech, death threats, mass reporting of accounts, content takedowns, and doxxing of Palestinian journalists and activists (source).

Instagram removed videos from Gaza for “violence” even when they depicted damaged hospitals. TikTok buried posts from Palestinian women describing displacement. Meanwhile, Hebrew-language calls for punishment — some explicitly sexualized — circulated with minimal moderation.

During arrests, Israeli forces routinely seized women’s phones and scrolled through private conversations. Online identity became another checkpoint to be passed through — or punished for.

At the same moment, digital hostility leapt across borders.

In the United States, Egyptian-American student Layla Sayed discovered her image on Canary Mission, a blacklist site (source). A photo from a campus rally was reposted with red arrows pointing to her, alongside her name, the two cities she lives in, details of her studies, and links to her social media accounts (source – Reuters). Canary Mission later shared her photo on X and Instagram, stamped with the label “Hamas War Crimes Apologist”. Comments flooded in: “No future for that c*nt,” wrote one user. “Candidate for deportation to Gaza,” wrote another.

Sayed had attended one pro-Palestinian demonstration. Afterward, she removed the keffiyeh from her backpack because it felt like “a target on my back”, avoided walking alone, and hibernated her LinkedIn account.

She was not alone. Since October 7, Canary Mission has profiled more than 250 students and academics, many of them women, accusing them of supporting terrorism or spreading antisemitism. Most reported a wave of hate messages — some calling for their deportation or expulsion, others suggesting they should be raped or killed. The digital battlefield is borderless: it recruits anyone willing to type.

The digital battlefield is borderless: it recruits anyone willing to type.

Opening the curtain

It is tempting to see this online eruption as a reaction to October 7. But the violence predates it.

Palestinian women have long been punished online for speaking, posting, existing. The war merely thrust that reality into public consciousness — amplifying old tactics with new rage, and extending them to women who dared to express solidarity.

What emerges is not a new pattern, but a widening one. Where physical violence cannot reach, digital violence tries. Where digital violence begins, physical danger often follows.

The final equation

The one-in-three statistic once measured physical harm. That figure is cracking under the weight of a new wave of technology-facilitated violence.

What bombs do to bodies, algorithms now do to identities: expose, strip, degrade.

If war turns homes into ruins, the internet turns identities into spectacle. The moral imperative to stop violence must now include the servers that host it.

If the people one day desire life,

Then fate must answer.

The night must clear.

The chains must break.

Over the next few months, similar protests erupted across Egypt, Libya, Syria and Yemen. Citizens confronted decades of authoritarian regimes that, as some revolutionaries described, had merely replaced foreign colonialism with internal colonialism. Despite the difference in context between these countries, the main drivers of the Arab Spring were largely similar.

They shared authoritarian regimes that lacked legitimacy due to pervasive corruption and severe political repression, which pushed youth to pressure the government for a more secure and dignified future. The events of early 2011 were just not temporary outbreaks of anger; they constituted a major political and social rupture whose effects continue to shape the region.

With what later came to be known as the “Arab Fall,” that phase has formally closed following the Syrian revolution’s victory and the collapse of the Ba’athist socialist regime led by Bashar al-Assad. As we close the chapter of the Arab Spring fifteen years later, some are now asking: why did uprisings outside of Tunisia fail to achieve their goals—and why did Egypt, in particular, end up replacing one dictator with another? The answer is a combination of the opposition’s lack of political strategy, resistance from inside the government, and pressure from citizens that grew as the failures of the democratically elected administration compounded over the course of a year.

Glimmers of democracy in Egypt

On January 25, 2011, millions gathered in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in Egypt, chanting peaceful slogans such as “freedom, dignity, and social justice” to challenge the authoritarian Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who had held office for almost thirty years. After eighteen days of protests, Mubarak finally stepped down. Despite this massive victory for freedom seekers, the newly elected president faced immediate challenges in building a new political order.

This is largely because Egypt’s political landscape had been largely dominated by the military, who opposed the revolution. The Egyptian military wielded incredible domestic power. At the time, it was the country’s single largest land-owner and it controlled a considerable share of Egypt’s economy. Its main challenger was the Muslim Brotherhood, a conservative group that advocated for a return to Islamism. Their ideology can be summarized in their most prominent slogan, which states that “Islam is the solution”. Widely considered the world’s most influential Islamist organization, they have given rise to militant groups such as Hamas and violently clashed with dictatorial regimes, such as in Syria during the 1980s.

Over the course of nearly a century, their strategy has changed considerably, alternating between non-violence and militancy to advance their goals. The Brotherhood assassinated several Egyptian officials and almost succeeded in killing President Gamal Nasser, who retained power for fourteen years in the mid-1900s. It wasn’t until the Arab Spring that the Muslim Brotherhood secured their first-ever political victory in 2012—led by the politician and engineer Mohamed Morsi.

Several problems immediately began to eat at Morsi’s grip on the Egyptian government. According to scholars Amr Hamzawy and Nathan J. Brown, the Muslim Brotherhood lacked clear governance mechanisms or a coherent policy platform—as they had merely existed as an oppositional movement for years. Mohamed Mahsoub, who served as the Minister of Legal Affairs under Morsi, explained why the Muslim Brotherhood did not have a clear political roadmap:

The Egyptian political forces opposing Mubarak succeeded in toppling Mubarak’s regime through the 25 January Revolution, which was led by the youth, and then these political forces joined it. But these political forces did not have a vision; tools of governance were not clear to them because of the long political stagnation that Mubarak practiced.

Morsi faced immense pressure from the existing government as well. From the moment that he took office, the remaining Egyptian governance attempted to sway citizens into regretting their choice of president. For example, the police intentionally failed to perform their duties as an act of defiance.

“[Consider] the police. They abandon their posts,” said Abdullah Al-Arian, an assistant professor at Georgetown University in Qatar, in a talk. “They make Egyptians make a very critical choice between their support for the revolution and their own personal security and safety.”

Infrastructure also deteriorated rapidly under Morsi’s rule. Blackouts and fuel shortages became commonplace, which caused public outrage and fueled arguments between supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood and their opponents. Muslim Brotherhood supporters argued that this deterioration was sabotage by the Egyptian military, while its critics stated that fuel shortages could be explained by a sharp uptick in demand from consumers frightened by Morsi’s incumbency. It is worth noting that these services were restored almost immediately after Morsi was ousted.

Other branches of the government also made it extremely difficult for Morsi to execute any significant legislative changes. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) dissolved the parliament before Morsi was sworn in, which meant that the eighty-percent majority that the Muslim Brotherhood had won in the Egyptian parliament vanished overnight. This put legislative control back into the hands of SCAF, who decided when to hold the next election.

The dissolution of the parliament represented an especially large blow to the Muslim Brotherhood since the government had just drafted a new constitution, which critically reduced the influence of the all-powerful presidency and granted more power to the parliament. Political scientist Holger Albrecht argued that, contrary to popular opinion, the constitution did not make Egypt’s legal system much more Islamic than it previously had been. Instead, its pitfall was in its inconsistent construction—an issue that would have been apparent to politicians regardless of party or religious affiliation. Albrecht stated that:

The weakness of the [2012] Egyptian constitution does not lie in its vagueness, but rather in the juxtaposition of extremely detailed provisions and, on the other hand, vague announcements. Obviously the authors of the document had a clear understanding of some aspects of political life while not interested in, or competent of, others.

The 2012 constitution reflected two major flaws with the Muslim Brotherhood’s political approach: inconsistency and an emphasis on cosmetic changes rather than legitimate progress. As an example, while presidential power was somewhat diminished in the new constitution, military generals were restored the high level of power that they possessed during the reign of autocrat Hosni Mubarak. On the surface, the constitution was a step towards democracy, but in reality, it represented a step backwards, as the military was one of the main entities responsible for maintaining previous autocratic regimes.

Morsi himself chose to avoid confrontations with the military, instead attempting to carry out reform through careful appeasement. According to Professor Al-Alrian, the Muslim Brotherhood granted the military “immunity from prosecution from the abuses committed during the protests”, in which over 800 people were killed, in addition to protecting the military’s economic interests. Minister of Legal Affairs Mohamed Mahsoub also argued that Morsi’s government was ineffective because of its tendency to ignore experts for important decisions. Mahsoub pointed to the government’s failures in developing infrastructure, saying:

The great projects in Egyptian history—like the major projects of the 1960s, for example—were not carried out personally by Abdel Nasser; they were carried out by highly creative ministers in their own fields who proposed these ideas, and he appointed them and told them: “Work.” That kind of creativity was absent.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s lack of political vision combined with opposition from the Egyptian military as well as secular and left-leaning groups amounted to a speedy deposition. After only one year in office, Morsi faced significant pressure from the public to resign—first from widespread protests, then from a military coup led by Egypt’s current president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Under Sisi, Egypt returned to its former authoritarian status and signed into law a constitution that furthered the powers of the military and the presidency. In the words of Professor Al-Alrian:

This is what you get when a state that’s been living under dictatorship for sixty years all of a sudden opens the way for political participation on the part of its citizens, who have neither the vision nor the experience to put forward … The revolutionary moment was certainly lost.

View our sources for this piece here.

In 2023, Bassam Shaherly, 55, sold his house in Homs, Syria valued at $35,000 for a mere $7,000 to cope with the rising costs of living in Tripoli, Lebanon. He fled to this northern Mediterranean city, closer to Homs than to Beirut at the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011.

In the early months of 2024, Abdelqader Hamzah, 67, was on the brink of finishing a cultural orientation course before resettling to the United States. He and his wife packed their suitcases to the brim and set them aside in their modest apartment in Hashmi Shamali, a refugee-dense neighborhood in the Eastern suburbs of Amman, Jordan where he settled after fleeing from Homs twelve years prior.

Then, in early December 2024, HTS rebels pushed from Aleppo into Hama, then Homs, and finally Damascus, deposing the Assad family’s fifty-year dictatorship. Shaherly and Hamzah watched on from Tripoli and Amman. The trajectory for the rest of their lives had just taken a sharp and sudden turn towards the possibility of returning home.

“Around a year ago, our hope [for return] was broken. We thought that we had become like the Palestinians—forced out of their country and never able to return,” said Shaherly. “We told ourselves we will die here. We will never see our country again…That’s why—when we saw what was happening, we didn’t hesitate at all to return.”

Today, Syrians are coming back home, despite the instability and unpredictability that cloud the certainty of a safer and more prosperous life out of exile. Shaherly and Hamzah reminisce about their 14 years in exile as refugees, the past 8 months since returning home to Syria, and the few days in between that changed the trajectory of their lives.

These are two stories out of over a million that illustrate both the Syrian plight over the past 14 years and hopes for the future, however fragile. While the situation in Syria remains difficult at the level of both daily life and political matters, many Syrians are still enthusiastic to return, drawn to the possibility of a homeland that can now be fully theirs.

The homecoming

From his home in Tripoli, Shaherly watched WhatsApp videos and pictures of family and friends pouring out into the streets of Homs, celebrating the fall of the regime. The images confirmed the reports he was following on the news on a minute-to-minute basis.

Then, his decision to return to Syria was made in an instant.

“We didn’t plan anything at all,” said Shaherly. “We just said: ‘It’s open now, and there’s no more danger.” The very evening after the fall of the regime, he drove to the Lebanon-Syria border, a mere two hours from Tripoli.

Within the first month of the regime’s fall, an estimated 200,000 Syrian refugees returned from Lebanon to Syria. Shaherly suggested that many U.N. numbers are deflated. They do not account for unofficial border crossings, like the one he used, which provide discreet passage for individuals to travel between Syria and Lebanon without a record. Lebanese authorities would otherwise impose a ban on Syrians returning once they set foot over the border.

At the Syria-Lebanon border, Shaherly found no guards waiting to stop him and record his name. Once he slipped into Syria, he witnessed scenes fresh from the recent collapse of Assad’s regime. “There were corpses on the ground, dead bodies, people killed. The scenes were very painful,” Shaherly recounted.

But, with the old regime gone and the deep and cruel reach of its intelligence apparatus collapsed, many no longer feared setting foot into Syria and the prospects of disappearance and torture a return once carried. Shaherly has traveled between Syria and Lebanon twice since the regime fell, balancing his time between surveying the damage in Homs, beginning to rebuild, and checking on his family in Tripoli. Even amongst the Syrians around him in Lebanon, he said that many took advantage of the cracks in the borders to travel back to Syria even for one day just to “breathe the scent of the homeland … to kiss the ground and return.”

From Amman, Hamzah and his family also watched on the night of HTS’s advance into Damascus. While his older son had left from Jordan to Sweden, where he now holds a citizenship, his younger son was still with him in Amman, but was set to depart to the United States in just a few days.

Hamzah and his wife were set to follow after completing their cultural orientation course. He recounted their conversation on the night of Syria’s liberation. His son contemplated, “Should I go to America, with Syria now liberated?” Hamzah responded, “My son, go, Build your future, educate your children. Life is ahead of you … As for me … I’m going back to Syria. At this age, I just want to live in my country.” Their suitcases filled with clothes and essential items they intended to bring with them to the US came with them to Syria instead.

Upon their return to Homs, Hamzah and Shaherly were met with scenes of abject destruction in the neighborhoods they grew up in. Shaherly recounted that his neighborhood, which he once knew “inch by inch,” was destroyed so extensively and he could no longer navigate his way through entire swaths of the area.

“Rebuilding felt almost impossible,” thought Hamzah, when he first returned to his neighborhood.

Their first order of business was rendering their homes—razed to rubble—once again livable. With financial support from his sons, Hamzah started to renovate the third-floor flat of his apartment where he and his wife would live. Shaherly stayed with relatives in Syria for the first few days, then started fixing up a home with the help of a $1,500 loan from a colleague.

With limited financial means, compromises had to be made. Blankets were used to cover shattered windows and cracks in the walls, while makeshift materials stood in for front doors. Some Syrians with fewer financial means fixed only one room in their homes while leaving the rest to lay in rubble.

A strong boost of hope came in May when U.S. President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. would end its bevy of sanctions on Syria. Throughout various Syrian cities, crowds poured out into the streets, celebrating a measure that would end Syria’s economic isolation and aid development and reconstruction efforts. Shaherly attested that the mere optimism following the announcement seemed to lead to a drop in food prices and increase in the availability of building materials.

“You can’t imagine how joyful people were when they heard about the lifting of sanctions,” said Shaherly. “People started gaining confidence and saying ‘This is our country, we’re back, and things just need a little time to improve.’”

Shaherly also explained that the rising cost of living in Lebanon convinced him that life in Syria would be preferable. “We had nothing to lose in Lebanon … life there was suffocating,” he said. A mere sense that a semblance of safety had returned to Syria was enough to convince him to return.

However, the practicalities of daily life remain difficult.

“The Syrians who returned were used to certain ‘luxuries’ like internet, electricity, water, clean streets,” Shaherly explained. “Then they came back to Syria, where none of that exists.”

Electricity trickles in for up to two hours at every six-hour interval, and Hamzah recounted that he had gone up to a week without access to water, which is unreliable. Reminders of loss are abound. The three apartments next to Hamzah’s home now lie in ruins, absent of his siblings, who passed away in the war or were killed by Assad’s forces.

But signs of life were also abound. One afternoon in June, Hamzah strolled past the courtyard of the Khalid Ibn Al-Waleed mosque, distinguished by its Ottoman architecture and regarded as a central landmark of Homs. The courtyard of the mosque was densely packed with people seeking a bout of fresh air and a day out with their families.

Hamzah attested that there was a greater sense of safety in Homs, with people out and about even after the sunsets. On that afternoon, Hamzah sparked a conversation with a man at the courtyard, commenting on the crowd that had gathered. The man said, “It’s enough that we can sit here unafraid that a car might pass by and shoot at us.”

While peace has generally been maintained, tensions between religious sects have periodically flared up. On November 23rd, a married couple in Homs who belonged to an indigenous Bedouin tribe were killed. This prompted members of the tribe to set fire to properties in a town primarily occupied by Alawites, who are a distinct minority group characterized as an offshoot of Shia Islam.

For Hamzah and Shaherly, it is the connection to home that keeps regret of returning at bay despite the harsh reality of life in Syria.“Back in the diaspora, I didn’t have an identity, only known as the Syrian guy,” said Hamzah. “Here, people know who I am.”

The exile

Reminders of the Assad regime are scattered around Homs. “Silly sectarian slogans,”—as Hamzah described them—stained the walls of a school that lay in rubble near his home. “Let your God fall, but not Bashar” was scrawled in Arabic on one wall in bright red graffiti. Written on another, the phrase “We overthrow God but not Bashar” served as a reminder of the authoritarian grip that Assad’s forces held on the country and its people.

“There is no type of misery the Syrian people did not endure,” said Hamzah.

He recounted the “humiliation” and “terror” the regime subjected its people to, from the cruel contraptions of Sednaya prison to arbitrary kidnappings by regime forces. Even the simple details of daily life were interrupted by the regime’s corruption. Before the war, Hamzah worked as a school secretary at a girls’ preparatory school in Homs, where he oversaw the administration of exams and a range of student affairs.

Hamzah recounted the monthly check-ins of intelligence officers visiting the school, collecting information on the teacher’s political affiliations, with anyone hinting at dissatisfaction with the regime and its Ba’athist alignments called in for investigation. Free meals offered to students through a U.N. aid program would be recirculated in local markets and sold for a profit, with party loyalists appointed to administrative positions of power to ensure matters were kept under wraps and subdue anyone who might dare to oppose. Outside, bribes were required for everything from building a new home to merely crossing a checkpoint.

For Hamzah’s family, the final push out of Syria came after his brother defected from the army. As members of his family became wanted by the regime, some of his siblings were killed, and others forcibly disappeared to this day. His older son stopped attending university, where he studied Arabic literature, for fear of being detained at a checkpoint along the way. Then, cluster bombs targeted their village and the farm three kilometers away, devastating everything from livestock to the irrigation systems.

Shaherly shared a similar story, of a lingering shadow of death pushing his family from one town to the next. After being displaced internally four times, his family was finally forced out of Syria and into Lebanon.

But life in exile introduced a new set of challenges.

“It might seem surprising that we returned [to Syria] so quickly, but we’ve lived for fourteen years in oppression,” remarked Shaherly. “When we first came to Lebanon, we thought that in a short period, we would return, by the coming Friday, two Fridays, a month, two months, a year.”

As the war ground on with no sign of relent, the savings that many Syrian families came with withered out, and a discontent took root amongst the Lebanese public against the influx of Syrians into the country.

Shaherly, a lawyer in Syria, found work at a legal firm during the first few years of life in Lebanon. He recounted the cases he dealt with, from divorces due to stress and child marriages due to financial necessity that revealed the deep toll of societal and economic pressures weighing on Syrian families.

As Lebanon introduced work permit regulations for Syrians, he was unable to continue his work in the legal field. He sought work wherever else it was available, from factories to grocery stores. Between the web of legal restrictions on Syrians, financial instability, and anti-refugee sentiments, “we were choking,” said Shaherly.

The return

One evening in June, just as the sun had set and a pleasantly light breeze filled the air in Homs, Hamzah stepped onto the terrace of his apartment, seeking the relief of a breath of fresh air. Surveying the modest skyline of the Al-Bayada neighborhood, he noticed the flicker of torch lamps, which once intermittently dotted the landscape but had come to spread wide, lighting up the horizon. It was not just a sign that the electricity had gone out—it was a sign of life. People were coming back to occupy their homes that once lay abandoned, breathing life anew into a neighborhood that long stood as a wasteland of rubble.

Now, after the initial acclimation of life back in Syria, Hamzah and Shaherly tussled with how to stabilize their new lives in the long term.

For Shaherly, this meant untangling property disputes that developed in the crosshairs of transitioning governments. He found another family living inside a family home and was forced to negotiate with them against their claims that the Assad government had entrusted them with the property. Eventually, they agreed to leave. “[The occupants] were selling and buying, forging papers, and dealing as if it were theirs,” he said. With legal expertise, he has been helping to address various property rights disputes amongst his peers.

For Hamzah, ensuring a stable life hinges on receiving the pension payments he is due for his years of service in the education sector before he fled the country. For younger families, he attests that a major obstacle is finding a functioning school to send their children to. Fourteen years of conflict have left over 7,000 schools across Syria damaged and forced two million children out of school, according to UNICEF. The shortage of schools has left many Syrian families unsure about how to educate their children.

The mayor of Homs told Shaherly that the remaining schools were overcrowded, meaning that an influx from additional Syrian refugees returning would strain schools far beyond their original capacity. In his words, there could be up to “80 to 90 students per class” unless repairs were accelerated.

Regardless of the challenges that persist, Hamzah and Shaherly expressed hope for what comes next. Hamzah spends his days visiting groves of olive trees near his home and old school buildings that have yet to come back to life. Shaherly fixes up his home, preparing it for the day his children in Lebanon reunite with him in Homs. “I want to show my daughter that she is not just a refugee. That she too has a country … and that our country has returned to us,” said Shaherly.

Every major player in the American arms landscape had a seat at the table. Lockheed Corporation, Martin Marietta, Northrop, Raytheon, and a plethora of other companies were in attendance. Although these corporations had become intimately acquainted with each other through decades of competition over multibillion-dollar contracts, none of them knew that out of the fifty-one American defense companies at the time, the 1990s would be the final decade for forty-six of them.

The drastic defense budget cuts unveiled at this dinner would leave only five main defense contractors standing today: Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Raytheon, and General Dynamics. It would come to be known as the “Last Supper”, a name coined by Lockheed Martin’s former CEO Norman Augustine. Due to the immediate financial pressure, some companies merged and birthed new conglomerates worth billions of dollars, while others died off, leaving thousands of employees to search for jobs in other industries.

Lockheed and Martin Marietta became Lockheed Martin, while Northrop and Grumman formed Northrop Grumman. In the government’s eyes, this level of consolidation was an unprecedented but necessary money-saving move due to the sheer lack of federal funding. In any other context, the majority of these mergers would have been blocked by antitrust laws to prevent monopolies from forming. But in 1993, the government acted to the contrary—providing “a great deal of encouragement” to most defense contractors who wished to merge, according to Augustine.

This decision represented a rise in efficiency for the U.S. government, combining pieces of a cluttered industry into a handful of well-oiled machines. To others, it represented the death of competition and enabled a select few corporations to exert powerful influence over governmental spending through lobbying. Though lobbying had been part of the country’s political fabric for nearly two centuries, it now became key to these corporations’ survival.

This was because there were two main paths to economic sustainability for defense contractors past the 1990s: pivoting to manufacturing goods for the civil sector or merging with other firms to focus on developing products for the military. The first option was an immensely difficult transition from a logistical standpoint, but the latter would require heavy governmental lobbying to secure funding for expensive projects, like building fighter jets or aircraft carriers. William A. Anders, then chairman of General Dynamics, articulated this dilemma in 1991—two years before the infamous “Last Supper”. His words would soon appear in the New York Times:

It is not just that conversion [to serving the civil sector] cannot work, Mr. Anders said; it should not work. Making plowshares is not so easy for a military contractor, and not as profitable as simply making fewer swords. What contractors should do is lobby for every military dollar that can be squeezed from Congress and the Administration, and from foreign sales.

The defense industry’s intensified focus on lobbying was especially concerning given that the U.S. would invade Iraq and Afghanistan in the next ten years, thus encouraging these firms to invest heavily to influence the government’s war efforts. From 2001 to 2021, the top five firms in the defense sector would cumulatively spend a stunning $1 billion on lobbying the U.S. government.

This billion-dollar investment paid off well. In the same period of time, it’s estimated that these five companies received over $2 trillion worth of contracts from Congress. The 1993 Pentagon dinner symbolized a new era of U.S. military spending, one in which taxpayer funding provided by the many would fuel the interests of fewer than ever before; the consequences of which would be felt by countries thousands of miles away from American shores.

The defense lobby, NATO, and the Middle East

In the years leading up to the invasion of Iraq, a state dinner in Washington D.C. would again mark a turning point for the United States—but this time, regarding its foreign policy. Diplomats from ten Eastern European countries met with U.S. officials to coordinate their next moves as part of NATO, specifically to align their stances on Iraq. At the time, NATO’s latest prospective members included Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, among others. Each country was pending approval from the United States Senate to join, which made it in their interest to demonstrate a commitment to realizing American foreign policy.

This is precisely what these countries elected to do, albeit to the dismay of other EU countries. One month before the U.S. declared war on Iraq, these diplomats published a declaration of support for its invasion. The letter notably stated:

Our countries understand the dangers posed by tyranny and the special responsibility of democracies to defend our shared values.

This line was penned by Bruce Jackson, head of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq and the U.S. Committee on NATO. These groups respectively advocated for the replacement of Saddam Hussein and for the expansion of NATO. The striking piece of context was that only a year earlier, he had served as the vice president for strategy and planning at Lockheed Martin.

The conflict of interest was clear. Not only had Jackson been employed by a defense contractor while lobbying for political changes that could significantly benefit the company he represented, this overlap lasted seven years, beginning in 1995 and ending in 2002. Jackson disputed this conflict of interest in an interview, stating:

I have no contracts with Lockheed, nor have they funded any of the NGOs I work for. The left argument that this whole NATO process is driven by the desire to sell munitions doesn’t stand up to empirical examination. If you add up all the actual defence spending in eastern Europe, it’s a tiny market compared with the likes of Singapore or Israel. Defence spending is actually down in the region.

Contrary to Jackson’s claim, arms maker Joel L. Johnson stated in a 1997 New York Times interview that “the potential market for fighter jets alone is $10 billion” in Europe. For comparison, Israel’s annual defense budget in the same time period hovered around $8 billion. Furthermore, European countries joining NATO would imply wider support for a war in Iraq, which would lead to a massive uptick in defense sales at companies like Lockheed Martin. When asked about the role of defense companies in the expansion of NATO, the Romanian ambassador to the U.S. at the time plainly stated:

The most interested corporations are the defense corporations, because they have a direct interest in the issue.

At best, Jackson’s dual career demonstrates the unchallenged avenues that defense corporations have at their disposal to exert influence on the government. Journalist Richard Cummings argued that Lockheed Martin would also use its heightened leverage after the “Last Supper” to encourage the UK to continue supporting the Iraq War, renegotiating a contract with the U.S. government to supply billions of dollars more to UK-based defense company BAE Systems. The 1993 “Last Supper” had left an indelible mark on the American defense industry and foreign policy, but it raises a question: why didn’t this consolidation happen sooner?

Periodic changes in defense spending, domestic subsidies for civil manufacturing, and fluctuations in the world economy can help explain why the defense sector only condensed in the early 1990s. We can look at the graph below to track how the U.S. defense budget has changed between 1948 and 2020.

Although the defense budget has generally trended upwards, it has followed a cyclical pattern through times of conflict and peace. During wars, defense spending increases; afterwards, funds are cut and reallocated to other parts of the federal budget. Manufacturers have long followed this ebb and flow of military demand even if it meant abruptly switching from producing civilian goods to battlefield weapons and tools.

For example, the Lionel Corporation halted their production of toy trains during World War II to make compasses and other instruments for warships. Ford opened up a factory dedicated to the construction of bomber planes. Engineers at Chrysler welded their car engines together to create thirty-cylinder juggernauts capable of powering the treads of beastly M4 Sherman tanks.

This war-induced boom began to fade after Allies secured their victory in the spring of 1945. Military-focused factories shuttered and corporations shifted back to creating consumer products. The Lionel Corporation began a new line of toy train sets, while Ford and Chrysler returned to building cars. The problem was that treating defense production like a simple on-off switch failed to account for the immense inertia that accompanied this transition. Just five years later, the Korean War put this issue on full display as the private sector initially struggled to meet the U.S. government’s rapidly soaring defense demands. In the words of policy expert Margaret Mullins, “American leaders quickly realized that the industrial base could not be turned back on overnight.”

The need for an ever-present defense production line became clear. Companies such as Ford and General Electric set up dedicated aerospace divisions, which set the stage for the rise of standalone defense companies, and in turn, their eventual consolidation into the gargantuan corporations that we know today. Year after year, the economy continued to tighten the relationship between these manufacturers and the government.

The recession of the early 1970s, for example, squeezed the commercial market and encouraged defense contractors to rely increasingly on government contracts for revenue. Overseas competition from countries like Japan steadily grew. Some federal subsidies for American manufacturers also disappeared—such as from Reagan’s reduction of funding for American shipbuilders in the 1980s. Defense contractors expanded by absorbing smaller companies, and talks of merging began between the largest companies in the industry.

By 1993, the defense sector was heavily primed for consolidation. The “Last Supper” was merely the grain of sand that tipped the scale. Since the Cold War had ended only two years prior, defense companies were especially concerned about the resultant fall in government spending. Under presidents H.W. Bush and Clinton, defense funding was slashed, antitrust scrutiny was eased, and mergers were encouraged in the interest of increasing efficiency. The journalist Meghna Chakrabarti put the impact of this decades-long consolidation succinctly:

If 60% of that [2022 Department of Defense funding] goes to contractors, that means almost a third, 30% of federal dollars budgeted in this country ends up in the coffers of defense contractors who are led by just five companies.

In other words, somewhere between one-quarter and one-third of every U.S. tax dollar allotted in discretionary spending goes to Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Raytheon, and General Dynamics. With this perspective, it is evident how much power each of these companies holds in shaping how the United States approaches its economy, its legislation, and its involvement in foreign conflicts.

View our sources for this piece here.

Trigger Warning: Contains descriptions of gender-based and sexual violence.

The arithmetic of harm

Every ten minutes.

Every ten minutes, a woman or girl is killed by an intimate partner or family member (source). Consider that. By the time you finish reading this article, another woman will likely have been killed — not by a stranger, but by someone she trusted most.

More broadly, one in three women will experience some form of gender-based violence in their lifetime (source).

These numbers have long anchored policies and advocacy. They are ammunition against inattentive policymakers, the scaffolding of funding requests, the crystal ball for what may come next. Yet, they are also aggregations — peacetime and wartime folded into one global denominator. They assume a functioning clinic, a visible justice system, a neighborhood with doors that close.

What happens to that ratio when the world itself collapses — when safety becomes contraband?

Occupation of the body

In April 2025, the UN released a report describing how sexual and gender-based violence became a recurring method of control in Gaza. (source)

Women were detained during raids, subjected to invasive searches, and forced to undress in front of male soldiers. Some were kept for hours or days in states of partial or complete undress. One 14-year-old girl on the way to school was dragged away from cameras, before she was stripped and sexually assaulted by male soldiers. When she asked for a female soldier to do the search, she was beaten.

“Shall he make our sister into a whore? [Our battalion] will bring honor back to the people of Israel.” - Graffiti by Israeli soldiers in Beit Lahia in Gaza

Amidst war, assault and emasculation are two sides of the same coin. In Gaza, men were forced to undress their own female relatives in public and then mocked for not being able to intervene. Male detainees were stripped, piled on top of each other, before being subjected to attempted rape. One soldier took off his trousers, pressed his crotch into a detainee’s face, saying: “You are my bitch. Suck my dick.”

Occupation of the body mirrors occupation of the land, sovereignty seared onto flesh.

Reproductive violence

The assault extends beyond the body to the capacity to reproduce. The al-Basma IVF Centre—which stored the embryos and sperm of thousands of couples—was destroyed by shelling, erasing 4,000 embryos and 1,000 sperm samples.

The UN noted that the attack was launched by a ground assault that had a clear view of the clinic’s name and purpose. The clinic was a standalone building and had no military purposes.

There are no other assisted reproductive services in Gaza, as of January 2025.

This is reproductive violence: the systematic destruction of a people’s ability to bear and raise children in safety. It is masculinity, nationalism, and militarization, wrapped around a heaving sword, aiming for a people’s lineage.

Genocide is never accidental.

The final equation

The moral imperative to stop wars needs no repetition. And yet, its appeal towards feminists all but flickers.

In Gaza, the cost of living is measured in bodies made into battlegrounds. The one in three statistic was always a mirror; under occupation, it fractures beyond recognition.

Death and displacement are undoubtedly the cost of war. But for women and girls besieged by a regime desperate to unfurl its bloodlust onto them, the cost of living goes far beyond that.

On January 15th, 2025, Hamas and Israel signed a ceasefire meant to end months of devastating warfare in Gaza. The deal, mediated by the United States, Qatar, and Egypt, held for a brief two months. At the dawn of March 18th, 2025, Israel launched a wave of “extensive” airstrikes across the Gaza Strip, declaring the full resumption of combat. According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, more than 400 Palestinians were killed that day alone, making it one of the deadliest days of the war.

Seven months later, Trump stood proudly on a stage in Sharm Al Sheikh, Egypt, announcing a three phase, 20-point new ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, with its first phase already signed. Indeed, much diplomatic heavy lifting was needed to get to this point, with an increasingly belligerent Israel on one end and a steadfast Hamas on the other. World leaders lined up behind Trump and took turns praising him for his diplomatic tact.

“At long last we have peace in the Middle East,” Trump said.

But the story on the ground is more complicated. The three-phase peace plan Trump brokered follows a long lineage of ceasefires and peace plans that purported to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict—only to crumble under geopolitical pressures. So now, one question looms: what is truly different this time?

While the new deal has reduced large-scale fighting and enabled hostage exchanges and aid deliveries, its next steps are far less clear. The International Stabilization Force (ISF), which is a proposed peacekeeping mission composed of Arab and European troops to maintain security and oversee Gaza’s political transition and reconstruction, has yet to define its structure, and Gaza’s fragile political environment risks undermining the transition. The proposed technocratic governance and economic recovery plans depend on cooperation between rival factions, consistent funding, and sustained international oversight, all of which remain uncertain, leaving the long-term prospects of peace fragile.

Since the Gaza war erupted in October 2023, nearly every ceasefire or armistice involving Israel has unraveled under Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Across Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria, the pattern has been strikingly consistent: truces collapse not through diplomatic breakdowns at negotiating tables but through renewed Israeli use of force.

Tracing previous Israeli-Arab ceasefires

1. Gaza Ceasefire – January 19th to March 18th, 2025

The Gaza ceasefire brokered by Washington, Doha, and Cairo outlined a three-phase framework: an immediate halt to fighting, a hostage-prisoner exchange, a staged Israeli withdrawal, and a reconstruction roadmap, all codified in UN Security Council Resolution 2735. The truce formally took effect on January 19th, 2025, offering a brief and fragile respite.

That pause ended abruptly less than two months later. On March 18th, Israel initiated large-scale air operations across Gaza, saying the campaign targeted “terrorist infrastructure.” The attacks flattened neighborhoods, killing over 400 people in 24 hours, according to independent tallies. International observers and media outlets confirmed that the ceasefire collapsed through the Israeli first use of force, not a mutual withdrawal from the agreement.

2. Israel–Lebanon Ceasefire Agreement – November 2024 to February 2025

On Israel’s northern border, a truce aimed to contain cross-front escalation with Lebanon. Backed by Washington, the deal began on November 27th, 2024, halting hostilities and mandating an Israeli pullback from parts of southern Lebanon under UN supervision. The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), along with humanitarian agencies, was tasked with monitoring compliance.

Violations occurred swiftly. On January 4th, 2025, UNIFIL observers documented an Israeli bulldozer demolishing a Blue Line border marker and a Lebanese Army observation tower, a direct breach of UN Security Council Resolution 1701. Later that month, as civilians returned to their homes under the truce, Israeli shelling killed dozens and injured more than 100, according to UN and aid-agency figures.

The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) urged Israel to adhere to the ceasefire and protect returning civilians. OCHA confirmed the truce’s extension despite rising casualties. These incidents remain recorded as Israeli violations of the ceasefire framework and of the UN monitoring mandate meant to uphold it.

3. Syrian Front – Breaches of the 1974 Disengagement Agreement

The Syrian border has witnessed a quieter but equally consequential erosion of long-standing agreements. The 1974 Israel–Syria Disengagement of Forces Agreement, monitored by the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF), bans any military activity or cross-line strikes within the buffer zone separating the two countries.

Since December 8th, 2024, Israel has expanded well beyond that line, occupying an estimated 370 to 460 square kilometers of Syrian territory. The incursion stretches from the Golan Heights into the Quneitra and Daraa governorates. Independent monitors, including the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), the Harmoon Center, and the Syrian Center for Contemporary Studies, document roughly 900 Israeli air and drone strikes in Syria since December, killing at least 80–100 people and injuring about 100 more.

Despite the scale of these operations, Syria has not retaliated militarily. Instead, the caretaker government has sought legal recourse through international courts and the United Nations, accusing Israel of violating the 1974 accord and engaging in aggression against sovereign Syrian territory.

Across these three fronts, a pattern emerges. Ceasefires and disengagement regimes have not failed through diplomatic drift or mutual exhaustion, but rather through Israeli first strikes that reignite conflict.

Mowing the grass

This pattern reflects what analysts call Israel’s “mowing the grass” strategy. Rather than pursuing diplomacy, the doctrine aims to maintain an upper hand through pre-emptive force to cripple an adversary’s defences and gain leverage before negotiations. An agreement is valid until Israel decides to “mow the grass.”

With a new Trump-brokered peace initiative now underway, history offers a warning: unless future accords are backed by strong verification mechanisms, enforceable oversight, and real accountability, they may prove as fragile as those that came before, collapsing the moment force is once again used first.

To answer the question of what is truly different this time, the evidence so far suggests very little has changed. According to Palestinian officials, the IDF has already committed over 80 violations of the current ceasefire since it took effect, resulting in the deaths of 97 Palestinians and injuries to 230 others. The pattern of sporadic strikes and civilian casualties mirrors the dynamics that derailed earlier truces.

At the same time, statements from inside Israel’s leadership have deepened doubts about the government’s intentions. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has declared that “there will be Jewish settlements in Gaza.” His remarks came only days after the ceasefire agreement with Hamas.

Not long after, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, another prominent figure in Netanyahu’s far-right coalition, publicly urged the prime minister to resume military operations. In a post on X, he called on the Prime Minister “to order the IDF to fully resume fighting in the Gaza Strip at full strength,” arguing that any expectation Hamas would abandon its objectives was dangerously naive and insisting the group must be destroyed. His call coincided with Israeli media reports of new air raids across Gaza that morning. Smotrich echoed the sentiment in a terse one-word post: “War.”

Given that senior Israeli ministers have openly advocated for settlement construction and renewed offensives even under an active ceasefire, it becomes difficult to argue that the October 9th peace deal is meaningfully different from the agreements that collapsed before it.

Filling the power vacuum: Gaza’s clan wars

Aside from foreign aggression, the ongoing conflicts between familial clans in the Gaza Strip pose one of the largest obstacles to lasting peace. Violence between Hamas and these clans has been rapidly escalating in the weeks surrounding the ceasefire. Six days before the peace agreement was announced, Hamas launched a massive 100-person attack on a rival clan only to be fired at by an IDF drone. Ten days later, users on X posted videos of Hamas publicly executing blindfolded members of other prominent clans in Gaza City.

Dr. Martin Kear, a lecturer in the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney wrote that familial clans have long been part of the fabric of Gazan society. They have historically risen to prominence during power vacuums, such as when the official government has been weakened by war. The Second Intifada in 2000 was one such example in which clans rose to power in the absence of the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, which presided over the Gaza Strip prior to Hamas. The Intifada devastated much of the infrastructure of the Gaza Strip and killed thousands of Israelis and Palestinians. Because the uprising severely crippled the Palestinian Authority’s ability to protect and provide for Gazans, citizens became increasingly reliant on clans for help, which took advantage of the opportunity to arm themselves and transform into militant groups.

Many of these clans opposed Hamas when it took control of the Gaza Strip in 2006. This meant that to secure the region, Hamas not only had to defeat the Palestinian Authority but several armed factions as well. While the Palestinian Authority was relegated to governing solely the West Bank, it took over a year for Hamas to quell dissident groups in Gaza after it won the 2006 election. Today, there are estimated to be thousands of fighters distributed amongst these clans. Each clan is referred to by the family name of its patriarch: the Doghmosh clan, the Abu Shabab clan, the Majayda, and many more. They reside everywhere in the Gaza Strip—from small suburbs nestled in the middle of Gaza City to the southern tip bordering Egypt.

The Oct. 9th ceasefire presented a similar opportunity for clans to seize power from Hamas. In response, Hamas shifted its strategy: instead of continuing to fight Israel, it would allocate resources towards eliminating rivals in an attempt to stay in power after the ceasefire, contrary to the terms of the three-phase peace plan. According to an interview that the Washington Post conducted with former IDF intelligence official Shlomo Mofaz, Hamas stopped fighting the IDF in recent months and instead focused on “saving weapons, preserving manpower and planning reprisals against clans who either coordinated with Israel or threatened Hamas during the war”. This strategy is reminiscent of when Hamas first came to power in 2006, excepting the fact that relations between Hamas and other factions in Gaza have only gotten more complex as time has passed.

It is difficult to fully understand the dynamics between Hamas and these clans, partially because political beliefs vary widely within each group. As an example, the Doghmosh and Majayda clans were reported to have members originally from both Fatah and Hamas: the very two parties that fought a war for control of Gaza nearly twenty years ago. According to Reuters, it is also “unknown” whether or not members of the Abu Shabab clan from southern Gaza even share the same ideology. Part of the reason for this may be that the leader, Yasser Abu Shabab, was reported to entice recruits by offering them generous financial compensation. In an economically strained region where flour costs almost $30 a pound, high salaries are especially likely to attract fighters of many political backgrounds and potentially lead to internal conflict.

To gain financial support, these clans tend to practice realpolitik, allying with any group that will support in their pursuit of power. Many clans have received money and arms from the Israeli government due to their generally anti-Hamas stance, which has been widely reported on and verified by Israeli officials. In an interview in June 2025, Netanyahu stated:

On the advice of security officials, we activated clans in Gaza that oppose Hamas. What’s wrong with that?

However, Yasser Abu Shabab denied that Israel had provided aid to his group. This can be interpreted as political posturing to avoid being seen as a collaborator with Israel, which has already endangered him; Hamas accused Shabab of being a “traitor” and made two unsuccessful attempts to assassinate Shabab. Shabab’s group has also been accused of stealing supplies from humanitarian aid trucks. With dozens of clans battling for control of resources and power in Gaza, civilians are ultimately the ones who will be harmed the most. Despite both internal and and external conflict, many Palestinians continue to hope for a better future.

“We hope that the ceasefire will stop conflict in [the] West Bank and Gaza,” said Azam Ayash-Salfit, an insurance consultant in the West Bank interviewed by the BBC. “You cannot separate between Gaza and [the] West Bank … we are one people.”

View our sources for this piece here.

In 1948, Ali Al-Otlah’s family fled from Yafa to Gaza after the Nakba. Following the Six-Day War in 1967, they emigrated once again, this time to Jordan. Three years later, Ali was born in Amman, Jordan specifically in Jabal al-Hussain Refugee Camp, and from the moment of his birth, his life was marked by hardship. Because his parents came from Gaza, they were denied Jordanian citizenship. As Ali grew older and eventually married, his struggles only deepened. The sole reason behind these challenges is his identity as a Gazan. Today, Ali and his family of six hold only temporary Jordanian passports without national IDs. Moreover, these passports must be renewed every two years, at a cost of 100 JD, whereas a regular Jordanian passport can be renewed every five years for only 50 JD. This lack of proper legal documentation makes their lives terribly complicated, restricting their ability to access basic rights and opportunities.

Working in Jordan is not an easy task for Gazans. “If any of us want to seek a job, we are asked for a work permit. This is the only thing that distinguishes us from other refugees, as we pay 60 JD to obtain it, whereas others pay approximately 800 JD,” he explained. Furthermore, Gazans are not allowed to work in all professions; there is a list of allowed professions set by the Amman Chamber of Industry. “Not having permanent work affects my daily life greatly, and we are going through a very hard economic situation that even affects our mental health,” he added.Unfortunately, his daughter Lobna had studied nursing, fulfilling a lifelong dream, but they later discovered that she could not work in her field or obtain a Health Professional License because she does not hold national IDs. Her father tried tirelessly to apply for the license, but the result was that she could only be contracted with a hospital or clinic, and the license would need to be renewed yearly at a cost of approximately 3,000 JD. Due to these restrictions, her dream was devastated, and she ultimately decided to do nothing until she got married.

Since 2007, Ali has been struggling to find a permanent job, and as a result, he and his family are facing many obstacles. Among the most pressing are paying the rent for their small apartment and their limited access to private healthcare, as Ali suffers from heart disease, which makes him completely unable to work. “The only sources of income that me and my family rely on are financial aid and support from philanthropists,” he explained. Moreover, the rising prices in Jordan today have made life even harder, placing heavy financial obligations and debts on Ali. This has subjected him to intense emotional pressure and left him deeply disappointed. “I wish we were in Gaza and got murdered instead of living this life,” he said. At one point, Ali considered taking out a loan to cover his expenses, but he was unable to do so because he does not have a fixed income.

The financial aid that Ali’s family receives is far from enough to cover their needs. For instance, UNRWA provides them with assistance every three months, amounting to 22.15 JD per family member. This means that for a five-member family, the total aid comes to only about 37 JD per month. In addition, a few charities offer limited support, such as the Green Crescent Charity, which provides 40 JD monthly for the entire family, along with small contributions from other organizations. “The total income that I have is around 140 JD, while our actual needs are nearly 600 JD each month to cover rent, groceries, bills, and university tuition fees. This gap has left me with nearly 8,000 JD of debt,” he added.

As mentioned previously, Ali unfortunately suffers from heart disease as well as cardiomyopathy, which is one of the heaviest burdens he carries. Moreover, he needs a cardiac catheterization to determine the specific nature of his condition. The cost of this procedure ranges from 500 to 800 JD, an amount Ali cannot afford, so he began looking for alternatives. One of these options was applying for medical exemption through Prince Ghazi’s Office. He submitted his application in January 2025 and only received the exemption in July 2025, after facing numerous hardships, whereas Jordanians can obtain the same exemption in just one day. Nowadays, Ali is receiving treatment in public hospitals, which have very long waiting periods between appointments due to the large number of patients. This delay has caused his health to deteriorate further. “There are huge differences between Gazans and Jordanians in treatment costs. Gazans pay around 500–800 JD for cardiac catheterization without an exemption, while Jordanians pay only 100 JD,” he explained. These differences also apply to all other medical procedures.

These economic hardships do not only affect Ali’s daily life but also have damaged his children’s academic opportunities. Mohammad, one of Ali’s two sons, was forced to leave high school and instead enrolled at the Wadi Seer Training Centerrun by UNRWA, which offers free vocational training for Palestinians who hold a relief card. Ibrahim, Ali’s oldest son, was a bit more fortunate than his younger brother. He graduated from high school, and since he is a distinguished volleyball player on the national volleyball team, he received a full scholarship to study at Applied Science University. However, this scholarship covers only tuition credits, so Ali must still pay 540 JD each term in registration fees. “Collecting this amount of money is outrageous for us,” Ali said.

The situation Ali’s family is facing is not unique; it reflects the struggles of thousands of Gazan families living in Jordan—many of whom endure even harsher conditions. What these families seek is simply the recognition of their basic civil rights. Over the years, the Jordanian government has shown great generosity in hosting refugees and offering them safety and stability. It has always been recognized as a country that upholds human dignity and stands with those in need. The noble Jordanian government can continue this tradition by finding practical solutions for Gazan families and ensuring that they are granted the basic rights and opportunities that every human being deserves.

Abd Alrahman M. Abu Attieh is an English student, educator, and freelance journalist based in Jordan.

Today’s article is a little bit different.

We’ve been wanting to do a data visualization piece about the IDF’s airstrikes on the Gaza Strip — but to do this, we had to host it on our own website (since Substack doesn’t support interactive graphs and animations). It took us a bit, but you can finally read the article here.

Here’s a screenshot so you know what to expect:

We wanted to write this piece to very clearly summarize the impact of Israel’s airstrikes on Gazans. Oftentimes, news articles tend to focus on specific events in Gaza, which makes it hard to get a general sense of what’s going on. Our article features data from the ACLED (Armed Conflict and Location Event Data) that thas been collected since 2023, which we used to put together interactive maps that let you explore the impact that airstrikes have had on the Gaza Strip in a chronological and easy-to-follow manner.

As always, we welcome any feedback — so please let us know if the website is readable and if the article is at all informative. Thank you!

-Sequoyah

In 2021, Bill and Melinda Gates announced their divorce. For most, this news read as unremarkable — offensive, almost, that this development might be attention-worthy. In development circles, rumours grew. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation had been one of the world’s largest funders of health and gender work. Would her divorce settlement fund ‘big bets’ to advance gender equality? I wondered: What if the boldest bet started with a single word?"

Half a world away, in an Indonesian village, my friend Fatima* whispered a different kind of gamble: “Kakak (meaning older brother), if I pass the blood test, I’ll marry him next week.”

“When?” I asked, as I stifled my shock. 

“Maybe next week. My grandmother already agreed to it. As long as I pass the test, I will drop out of high school and get married.” 

Even after six years of disaster relief work in Indonesia, I was still unnerved by the nonchalance here. She reassured me that he wouldn’t go through with the bride kidnapping (a not-distant-enough tradition on the island). Plus, she didn’t need to finish high school since “he wouldn’t allow me to work or go to university anyway”.

I buried my comments and poked at the blood test. Why would a soon-to-be bride need a blood test? This line of questioning would soon unravel a potential idea. 

As it turns out, some women — girls, more often — were required to do blood tests as part of their marriage agreement. Almost 50% of Indonesian women in general, and over 80% of pregnant women aged 18-24, suffer from anemia. This condition risks delayed fetal development and delivery complications during pregnancy. Underlying this statistic, of course, is the presumption that a wife must be of child-bearing material.

Global health’s solution was textbook — distribute iron supplements through clinics. Proven. Cheap. Unthreatening to the sticky business of behavior and nutrition change. 

Further digging served up a rude awakening. In pockets of Indonesia, 90% of women eligible for the iron supplement program collected their tablets. Yet only 30% of them were known to consume them. Starting with Fatima’s friends, I asked, “If the tablets are free and you already have them, why not just eat them?”

The problem begins with language. In Indonesia, the term for anemia is kurang darah, or “lack of blood”. Not a lack of iron, vitamins, or any of the other anemia variants. Blood. This etymological oddity translates into the belief that taking supplements will lead to more blood, instead of iron, in the system. 

Blood, of course, goes beyond biology. In communities where women bathe communally and menstruating girls skip prayers, blood can be public, primal, and shameful. As one of Fatima’s friends said, “I can’t risk others hearing about the sight and smell of my blood”. 

I kept prying. “Why collect the tablets at all?” One of the women shrugged, pointing out that the tablets were free. “Do your friends share this belief?” Responses were split. “Do the doctors know about this?” They murmured sheepishly, before coughing up a ‘maybe’. 

And then my favorite: “So what do you do with the tablets?” One lady scooped a chicken into her arms, cooing as she said, “We feed it to the chickens! Hopefully that will give us more eggs.” Somehow, the image of iron-pumped chickens slurping up healthcare funding while women stressed over their marriage eligibility amused her more than it did for me. 

This isn’t Indonesia’s flaw. It’s baked into the word “anemia” itself – in Greek, an-haima means “without blood”. Over 20 languages — Arabic (فقر الدم), Hindi (रक्ताल्पता), Mandarin (贫血) — take on this misnomer as well. Ironically, it’s the languages that retain the original Greek term that get to hide behind perceived jargon. 

Doctors measure iron. Women hear blood. 

Gates’ fortune could fund linguists to rethink kurang darah. It could rebrand iron supplements as explicitly that — iron, not blood, add-ons. These solutions aren’t elegant and will need a heavy dose of contextualizing. But they point to a broader issue — there are swaths of programs that break down because of a linguistic quirk, unbeknownst to funders.

Diction as a means of revolution is not new. Many have tried; some have succeeded: pronouns have become protest, while “climate crisis” wobbles along, seeking to replace “climate change”. Still, should we not try?

The tragedy here isn’t (simply) the discontinued education or health concerns. It’s that language is the silent killer that few funders diagnose. Philanthropists chase moonshots, while on the ground, women feed pills to poultry. Until we fix the words, Fatima’s monster chickens will keep clucking, gorging on the carcasses of solutions that never stood a chance.

* Names have been anonymized.

View our sources for this piece here.

In the early hours of the morning, Mohammed, a young Syrian refugee, shuffles to load his suitcases into the storage compartment of a coach bus, one of many lined up in the newly expanded parking lot in Amman, Jordan. This morning, he is headed back home to Syria, which he fled in 2013 as the brutality of civil war and dictatorship engulfed the nation. Waiting for him on the other end of this three-hour journey between Amman and Damascus is his mother, lingering between them a twelve-year separation.

Working a day job in the housing renovation sector, Mohammed has built up his life in Jordan over the course of more than a decade. He says that his journey today is just a trip; that he hopes to come back to Jordan next month and continue his life here until he is prepared to return permanently. But as a Syrian refugee, exiting Jordan’s borders risks his legal status inside the Kingdom. His trip to Syria may become a one-way journey, with his life in Jordan no longer his to return to.

“It’s a big risk,” he says. “I don't have a job [in Syria], but I have to return to see my mother.”

As one of the 650,000 Syrian refugees in Jordan, Mohammed, like many other Syrians in the country, must pay a steep price for his desire to catch a glimpse of home and the family he once left behind — the risk of being permanently barred from re-entering Jordan on the precarious chance that he can build a life in Syria. In the nascence of a post-Assad Syria, which has landed on its feet yet is still finding its balance, many Syrians express concerns over the battered economy and a fragile political and security landscape. Yet, over seventy thousand Syrian refugees in Jordan have already made up their minds, choosing to permanently return home.

Not all Syrians are subject to the same policies governing movement across Jordanian borders. The Jordanian Ministry of Interior issued a statement in April outlining that, on the basis of Jordan’s economic and security interests, investors, students enrolled in Jordanian universities, and spouses of Jordanians are allowed to travel between Syria and Jordan freely. For Syrians like Mohammed who do not fit into the outlined categories, the only option is a one-way trip.

Syrians who don’t have the privilege of freely re-entering Jordan risk losing their refugee and legal status upon their exit from the Kingdom — only allowed to re-enter if they obtain a one-month tourist visa and registration with an official tourism agency. Jordan’s policy notably differs from Turkey's, which has universally authorized Syrians to embark on “go and see visits,” which permit one member of each Syrian household to travel to Syria and return to Turkey up to three times, enabling families to make more confident decisions about returning home.

A spike in demand for trips to Syria has stemmed from the ease of travel that the Ministry of Interior has enabled for select Syrians. The tour company offices stationed at the Unified Launch Center for International Travel, the common departure and arrival point for buses making cross-border trips from or to Jordan, have experienced a boom in business since the fall of Assad's regime.

Ibrahim, who has been operating a transportation company between Syria and Jordan, says that to accommodate the increase in demand for trips, he has bought three more buses and runs three times as many trips as he used to before December 2024. He explains that during Assad’s era, most of the passengers on the trips were men above the age of 50, given that they were no longer subject to conscription.

Today, the scene at the lot is vastly different. The station buzzes with families, some hugging and kissing goodbye, and others boarding buses together. Some young men linger on the sidelines of the curb, awaiting their bus's departure. Jordan’s policies, which effectively pick and choose who has the privilege to leave and return, shape vastly different realities for Syrians wishing to go home. These differing realities are laid bare at this bus station — where some Syrians can make the decision to return home on their own terms while others are propelled to leave by little more than a massive leap of faith.

Mahmood Sheikh, originally from the city of Homs, Syria, and a current resident of Abdoun, an upscale neighborhood in Amman, sets to depart on his second trip to Syria since the fall of the regime. Owning a clothing retail business in Abdoun, his status as a business owner allows him to freely exit and re-enter Jordan’s borders. While he intends to visit for just one day in order to complete paperwork for his passport, he plans to take his time before contemplating a permanent return.

“The situation today is getting better,” he says, reflecting on his observations from his first trip. “The president is a respectable man … and work opportunities and services are increasing.”

But with his business and family based in Jordan, he explains that he would not consider moving back to Syria for another two to three years. Another Syrian businessman, originally from Damascus and also working in the clothing sector, shares a similar sentiment. Currently living in the Tabarbour neighborhood of Amman with his family, he explains that his trip to Syria today will be a short one.

“For now, I just want to see Syria and then come back,” he says.

But reminiscing about the simplicity and tight-knit community that once defined his life back home, he hopes to return permanently one day in the future. “The situation in the country now is below zero,” he explains, echoing the sentiment held by many trafficking the bus station this morning — that they simply need more time before moving back for good.

Sparsely interspersed throughout the station are also individuals whom the Jordan government restricts from re-entry. They take in their last moments inside Jordan, where they built up their lives over the past decade. A father of two sons who disclosed only his occupation as an electrical engineer during his earlier days in Syria, exchanges heavy goodbyes with his sons, who plan to remain in Jordan for now. Eager to reunite with his family and left without employment in Jordan, he has prepared himself for the one-way journey.

“Our return is not allowed,” he says, acknowledging the risk. “Our house in Syria is completely destroyed… and life will change completely from top to bottom.”

But he insists he is unafraid, charting his journey with no expectation or fear for what awaits him on the other side.

As his bus departs, Mohammed expresses the sadness he feels leaving the country, even knowing a reunion with his mother awaits him on the other side. “I’m really sad to be leaving,” he says, explaining that as he spent the formative years of his life in this country, his identity is split, half Jordanian and half Syrian. But even as he claims Jordan as his own, it is to little avail — his return, if it ever comes, would render him little more than a tourist.

Though I’d only known him for less than a month, he treated me as if he’d known me for years. The first time we’d met, Edris had eagerly shown me Amman’s hidden labyrinth of Sudanese cafes and shops, which I had no idea even existed. Visiting them gave me the most cultural whiplash I’d felt since I’d first arrived in the Middle East — in the best way possible. One second, we were navigating a sea of Jordanians circulating through the bustling city center, and the next it felt as though we had been whisked to a small hole-in-the-wall in Darfur or Khartoum.

Just past the doorway of one shop, a huddle of domino players took turns placing pieces, then promptly yelling and slapping their palms on the table. Puffs of cigarette smoke wafted above them. A pair sitting in the opposite corner had their eyes glued to a flatscreen TV as they played FIFA, somehow unfazed by the commotion behind them. We whizzed from one shop to the next — first a barbershop, then a clothing store, then a small barbecue restaurant and lounge, and at each stop Edris introduced me to four or five of his friends.

“Welcome to Jordan,” one of Edris’s friends had said to me wryly.

It’s a classic phrase that every foreigner hears from locals when they visit, and although I would consider Edris’s friends locals, I’m not sure that they would agree. Although they’ve spent years in Amman, many of them consider Jordan just a temporary stop on their paths to somewhere better, a waypoint between war-torn Sudan and the vague promise of peace and stability abroad. Twelve years ago, Edris fled the conflict in Sudan, leaving his family behind and starting a new life in Jordan as a refugee without having any idea of what would come next. Nothing was the same: not the food, not the people, not even the dialect of Arabic. When I asked Edris what he missed the most about his home in Darfur, his answer was simple: everything.

Edris works at a hotel nine hours out of the day, and after his shifts, he might spend the evening improving his English at a local conversation class. Despite only learning the language for a few years, he speaks with the fluency of someone who’s been studying it for twice as long. There’s rarely a minute when he isn’t practicing. While we talked in front of the ancient Roman Theater downtown, Edris showed me hundreds of text messages he’s exchanged with his language partners over WhatsApp, filled with jokes and questions about each other’s plans for the day. He’s an avid watcher of political commentators like Roland S. Martin on YouTube, and his playlists are filled mostly with American music, with Halsey and Kanye West among his personal favorites.

“You know Kanye?” Edris said, grinning as I nodded. “He’s a crazy guy.”

I laughed. Our conversation wandered, skipping from his music taste to his studies at university to the businesses that he wants to start with a friend in Seattle. The common thread was that each represented a step towards leaving Jordan, each preparing him for a life outside of a country where decent opportunities and equality are almost a fantasy for black refugees. Living as a black refugee in Amman is a constant struggle for acceptance. To many Jordanians, Edris is not seen as the local who everybody knows, or a bright student with a passion for languages, or a creative whose mind is brimming with business ideas. He is not referred to as Edris, or Ibrahim, or Dabouq, as his Sudanese friends call him. He is simply called abu sumrah — a derogatory term that some Arabs use to address black people.

“Why do they say this?” Edris said. “I have a name.”

Abu sumrah stems from the Arabic word asmar, which means brown or tan. When it’s used to label black people, it masks their individuality, robbing people like Edris of one of the few things they retained from their home countries: their identities. The discrimination that black people face in Jordan takes endless forms, from name-calling in the streets to racist language in the products that they buy. One of the most appalling examples is the “Ras al-’Abed” snack: a round biscuit topped with whipped cream and dipped in chocolate that originated in Europe. “Ras al-’Abed” literally translates to “the slave head”, and this name still lingers colloquially across the Arab world despite some manufacturers renaming it.

The “Ras al’-Abed” name is a poignant symbol of how some Jordanians view black refugees, as nothing more than people to be used and exploited for personal gain. Edris told me about a local business owner who had promised him $1,500 for three months of work, but when the three months were up, the owner didn’t uphold their end of the deal. Edris went to the police for help, but to no avail; he was only told that they weren’t able to find the owner.

This was far from a one-off dispute. Khamis, a Sudanese refugee living in Amman, told us just how common this issue is. As we sat underneath a spectacular fireworks show that lit the night sky ablaze on Jordan’s Independence Day, Khamis described how many black refugees in the country are still not free, as they are bound under what is effectively modern slavery. They are not legally permitted to work, and as a result, many of them agree to under-the-table jobs to earn a living. If their employer abuses them or unfairly withholds their salary, there’s almost nothing they can do. Most won’t even bother going to the police for fear of being deported.

In many cases, Khamis said, black refugees aren’t aware of how bad the work conditions are for them in Jordan. In several cities just north of Jordan’s capital, women from countries like Kenya, Uganda, and Ghana are commonly employed as housemaids. The companies that funnel them to Jordan commonly lie to them about the details of their jobs, exaggerating their salary and understating the amount of hard labor that their job entails. If workers run away, Khamis said, they can even be jailed and deported.

I couldn’t help but be reminded of stories of enslaved Africans escaping from plantations in the American Deep South, running from bondage or death at the hands of their captors. It seems unbelievable that conditions not too different can still exist today. The reason why they do is that the Jordanian government doesn’t officially recognize most refugees, which exempts the country from having to provide refugee rights guaranteed under international law, such as protection from discrimination and access to education for children.

What’s more, refugees from different countries aren’t even on equal footing with each other. After thousands of civilians fled Syria in 2011, aid agencies in Jordan reallocated the bulk of their funding towards the rapidly growing Syrian population. Syrians were given priority in many Western resettlement programs, which meant longer wait times and fewer opportunities for non-Syrian refugees. These included refugees from Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea — many of whom arrived in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Syrians who remained in Jordan enjoyed legal protections that African refugees, for example, were not given.

The unfortunate byproduct of the Syrian Revolution was that not only were millions of Syrians displaced, but also that refugees in neighboring countries began to lose more of their rights and support systems. Black refugees in particular began to fade into the background, slowly being forgotten one by one.

“[There is] no equality [in] this country,” Edris said, after he told me about a Sudanese university student he’d known who had been killed by Jordanians. “It was swept under the table. The government [was] silent.”

By 2015, the situation in Jordan had worsened to the point where the government had started deporting black refugees en masse. On December 6th, 2015, dozens of Sudanese refugees in Jordan staged a peaceful protest in front of the UNHCR headquarters in Amman, pleading for better conditions and resettlement. Around 4:00 AM, police arrived, attacked the protesters, rounded them up, and then started forcing them into buses.

Khamis was only thirteen years old at the time. His older sister, curious and concerned, decided to take him to see what was going on.

“We saw people, a lot of them were women, being forced onto buses, zip-tied like criminals,” Khamis said. “There was this man holding his pregnant wife’s hand. They were both begging to be taken to the hospital because she was in pain.”

Authorities allowed the couple to leave, but over eight hundred others were deported to Sudan just days later, despite international criticism. Some refugees later said that the Jordanian security forces promised that they would resettle them. Instead, they took them to the airport and flew them back to the site of a vicious, bloody war against their will.

According to a report by the ACHRS (Amman Center for Human Rights Studies), this mass deportation violated international law. The “Non-Refoulement Principle”, which Jordan accepted in 1998, is a legal concept stating that countries cannot send refugees back to a place where they could be in mortal danger because of their race, religion, politics, and so forth.

The 2015 mass Sudanese deportation is a reminder that the existence of protections in international law for refugees doesn’t always guarantee their safety. Some refugees have taken it into their own hands to make sure that this doesn’t happen again. Among them is the founder of a non-profit organization called Sawiyan, which offers dialogue sessions, education training, and quantitative research on issues that the black refugee community faces. The founder’s name was omitted to protect his identity. Alongside 35 other non-profit organizations, Sawiyan pressured the Jordanian government to stop neglecting its black refugees through protests and talks with the UNHCR, only to face apathy at best and resistance at worst.

“The UNHCR turned their backs on us,” Sawiyan’s founder said. “We are afraid, but we can’t keep silent.”

Although new policies concerning black refugees are regularly passed in Jordan, not much has tangibly improved for them. With each year bringing new regulations and crackdowns, it seems that uncertainty is the only constant in the lives of many black refugees. For example, Sawiyan’s founder had originally planned to move to the U.S., but the recent travel bans imposed by the Trump administration have made this impossible.

For him, Khamis, and Edris, the only solution to the inequality and oppression they feel in Jordan is to leave. The best that they can do in the meantime is to carve out pockets for others like them to feel safe and welcomed, whether in a conversation class hosted in Sawiyan’s office or at a dominoes table in the Sudanese cafes downtown.

“This is a place where we can feel comfortable,” Edris had said while we stood in one of the cafes.

I felt what he was talking about. Even though I’m not a refugee myself, there was something uniquely calming about being in a space where blackness is not just accepted, but the norm. For Edris, the cafes are where he can go to just be “Edris” or “Ibrahim”, not abu sumrah, and a place where he’s known for his warm spirit and easy charm, not simply for the color of his skin.

As one of only a few thousand black refugees in Jordan, Edris knows too well what it means to be ostracized and degraded because of his African heritage. His personal philosophy on race could not be more different. When Edris meets someone new, no matter where they come from or what they look like, his approach is the same: he just gives a smile, a handshake, and a “salamu alaykum, habibi.”

View our sources for this piece here.

“My grandfather was born into a poor family, and 20 or 30 years later, he had what in America we would call the American Dream, but he built it in Damascus as a Jewish man,” Jajati said.

That “Syrian Dream” materialized in the heart of Damascus under the name “The Grand Store," or “Al-Makhzan Al-Kabeer” as it was known in Arabic, which was once one of Damascus’s most renowned clothing shops that Jajati’s grandfather owned. Decades later, the Jajati family name has become iconic in Damascus, often recognized when he visits Syria. Jajati, born in Damascus in the early 1990s, now dreams of opening his kosher kitchen in Damascus to help revive Jewish life in Syria. His goal is to create a welcoming and safe space for Jewish visitors, encouraging them to reconnect with their roots in Syria and possibly return.

“I am not doing it for business,” Jajati said. “I am doing it for Syria."

Syria had a strong economy until 2011, when protests demanding freedom escalated into a brutal civil war in Syria, resulting in devastating humanitarian consequences. Over 13 million people were displaced, and more than 600,000 people were killed. After fourteen years of war, President Bashar Al-Assad fled to Moscow, bringing an end to the violence and the Assad regime.

Today, as Syria opens its doors to the world, a question is being whispered among Syrian Jews in the diaspora: Can they return to their homes? Some Syrian Jews have answered this question by taking the risk of returning after thirty years. In recent months, a small delegation of Syrian-American Jews returned to Damascus, where they visited the old Jewish Quarter and prayed in the Faranj Synagogue for the first time since the 1990s.

As we worked on this article, we noticed how Syrian Jews in the diaspora become deeply emotional when they talk about Syria. Nattan, who left Damascus more than 30 years ago, was in the middle of describing his childhood in Syria when he stopped and said: “You are opening my wounds by talking about Syria.” Although Nattan has not returned to Syria since he left, he still carries his Syrian passport and calls himself a proud Syrian Arab.

While we had hoped to write this piece in Syria, to be on the ground and deliver a closer picture of the situation there, this was not possible due to Alaa's refugee status in Jordan. As a Syrian currently living in Jordan, he cannot return to Jordan if he decides to visit Syria. This is the case for most Syrian refugees here; many want to visit Syria but are not ready for a permanent return.

Despite these limitations, we decided to work on this article to deepen our understanding of Syrian Jews and to help educate others about their history, culture, and heritage. We also wanted to hear directly from Syrian Jews about their hopes and vision for Syria moving forward. While historical records can provide a distant reading, we spoke with those who experienced it to provide a more profound picture of the Syrian Jewish community.

The history of Jews in Syria

The history of Jews in Syria dates back long before Syria was part of any empire, to when it was divided into many states, kingdoms, and tribal territories. Some of the earliest Jewish connections to Syria date back over 3,000 years, and according to many biblical stories, the first Jewish presence in Syria was during King David’s rule in 1000 BCE, when he conquered Aram (Northern Syria) and Aram Zobah (Aleppo), as mentioned in the Bible. From the time of King David, Syria underwent many changes of power, which included the Arameans, Greeks, and eventually the Romans in 64 BCE.

By then, Jewish communities had established themselves across Syria. Many Jews had arrived from Israel and Judah because of exile, trade, or military service. Under each empire, Jews adapted and remained present. They thrived under the stability and protection of Roman law, with some Jews even receiving Roman citizenship. But these privileges did not last long, as Jews in Judea were under tighter control by the Romans, resulting in many Jewish revolts leading to Jewish-Roman wars in Judea, which deeply affected the demographic of the region. Many Jews fled to nearby regions looking for safety, which led to the growth of the Jewish population in Syria.

Since then, many empires have ruled in Syria, starting from the Byzantine Empire, which was the continuation of the Roman Empire in the East in the 4th century. For almost 300 years, Jews were forbidden from entering Jerusalem by the Byzantines, which resulted in a constant tension between Jews and Christians in the area. John Chrysostom, a prominent Church Father, played a central role in shaping the Byzantines’ hostility towards the Jews, portraying them as heretics and "Christ-killers" in his sermons. This conflicted with the Latin Christian tradition, influenced by Augustine of Hippo, which viewed Jews as misguided but necessary for Christian history. However, some scholars argue that Augustine's views still contributed to anti-Semitism in Christianity.

After centuries of persecution under the Byzantine Empire, the situation shifted when Muslim forces defeated the Byzantines in the Battle of Yarmouk, leading to the Muslim conquest of Syria in the 7th century. Under Islamic rule, Jews were allowed to return to Jerusalem and practice their faith freely. Jews were also recognized as people of the book and given protected status, although they had to pay a special tax designated for non-Muslims, known as jizya. Islamic caliphates continued to rule Syria up until the 20th century, including the Umayyad Caliphate, the Ayyubid Dynasty founded by Salah Al-Din, and the Turkish Ottoman Empire. Under each Islamic Caliphate, Jews were treated differently but generally better than in Europe at the time.

The region faced many invasions and wars during Islamic rule, such as the Crusades and the later Mongol invasions. The Crusades caused widespread instability in the Levant, as their primary goal was to capture Jerusalem and the Christian holy places from Muslim rule. Whereas some of the Jewish communities within Palestine experienced immediate persecution and massive taxation from the Crusaders, most Jews sought refuge in the largely Muslim-controlled Syria.

The influx of Jews into Syria increased rapidly in 1492, when Sephardic refugees fled from the Spanish Inquisition and arrived on Syrian shores. These Spanish families soon became Aleppo’s chief rabbis, scholars, and community leaders. In homes across Aleppo and Damascus, one began to hear Judeo-Spanish and Judeo-Arabic alongside the old synagogue chants. This blending of ancient local tradition and Sephardic fervor would define Syrian Jewry for centuries to come.

During this period, Syria was a haven not only for Jews but for their books, Torah scrolls, relics, and amulets. For example, the Aleppo Codex, one of the oldest and most accurate versions of the Old Testament, created in Tiberias, was later moved to Aleppo, Syria, where it remained for centuries. The codex was kept in the city’s central synagogue as a treasured religious and cultural symbol. Although it was damaged during anti-Jewish riots in 1947, the codex was later smuggled to Israel due to instability in Syria.

Under the Ottoman Empire, Jews were still second-class citizens, and their lives varied between times of protection and times of discrimination and persecution. Despite that, they were still able to establish themselves as a resilient community in Syria and work in industries like commerce, with few pogroms or restrictions. While many Jews were forced to convert to Islam, they still enjoyed more religious freedom than in most of Europe pre-emancipation.

Life for Syrian Jews began to get significantly worse during the European colonization of the Levant region. Under the 1920 French Mandate for Syria, Syrian Jews faced increasing restrictions and persecution, which ultimately led to their emigration. Initially, Jews were recognized as an integral part of Syrian society. However, the creation of Israel sparked a rise in anti-Jewish sentiment, which led to pogroms, restrictions on travel and emigration, and economic marginalization, especially with the rise of the Syrian nationalist movement.

Driven by Ashkenazi Jews in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the rise of Zionism led to waves of Jewish immigration to Palestine and the formation of a nationalist settler project aimed at establishing a Jewish homeland. While Zionism was a response to persecution in Europe, its implementation in Palestine resulted in the displacement and marginalization of the Palestinian Arab population.

The Zionist movement negatively affected the lives of local Jewish communities who had coexisted with their Arab neighbors for centuries and were often culturally integrated into the region. As tensions escalated, Jews in Arab countries faced violence and pressure to emigrate, while Palestinians were persecuted by Zionists. Thus, both local Jews and Palestinians became victims of a political project shaped by colonialism.

By the 1930s, the Syrian government had started cutting off Jews' freedom, who at this time numbered roughly 40,000. They experienced extreme economic hardship, with Jewish bank accounts frozen and Jewish members of the government dismissed. Jews were severely restricted in their freedom of movement and were not allowed to acquire a driver's license or to leave the country freely. Syrian Jews were under constant surveillance by the secret service, Al-Mukhabarat, and those who wanted to leave were forced to escape. Anyone who was caught faced forced labor or even death.

Syrian Jews were even identified in state documents by the word “Mousawi”, a name derived from the name of the prophet Moses. Even though Syria was home to many religions and sects, Jews were the only religious group singled out in official government papers, which was largely prompted by the establishment of Israel in 1948.

Nattan, a Syrian Jew born in the early 1970s, mentioned that the “Mousawi” law didn’t significantly affect his daily life because most Syrians were equally oppressed under Assad’s dictatorship, regardless of religion. Despite that, this policy was a form of discrimination that isolated Jews as a distinct and suspect population, similar to the yellow badges that Jews were made to wear in Nazi Germany. Such policies helped justify broader repression and contributed to the narrative that Jews could not belong in Arab society.

Despite all these limitations inherited under the Assad regime, Nattan mentioned that before Hafez Al-Assad came to power, the Jews were much more targeted and persecuted. Nattan recalled a traumatic incident where a grenade was thrown into a synagogue in Damascus, causing his father to lose his legs. The 1949 Menarsha synagogue bombing, the event where Nattan’s father lost his legs, took place on August 5th, 1949, in the Jewish quarter of Damascus, Syria. The grenade attack claimed the lives of 12 civilians and injured about 30. Most of the victims were children. This attack happened at the same time when Syria and other frontline Arab states were conducting armistice talks with Israel in Switzerland. A simultaneous attack was also carried out at the Great Synagogue in Aleppo.

Despite many Syrian Jews living under sanctions and violence, the government tried to paint a different picture of reality. In 1991, Syrian state TV aired a one-hour propaganda video in English that featured interviews with local Jews to portray a peaceful coexistence within Syria. In a surreal moment, Rabbi Hamra claimed that Jews were celebrating two festivals that Monday: a traditional Jewish holiday and the reelection of President Hafez al-Assad, a claim that had little basis in reality.

On the contrary, Syrian Jews suffered under Hafez Al-Assad and were even banned from leaving the country, which led to international pressure, particularly from the United States under H.W. Bush. This resulted in Hafez Al-Assad agreeing to lift the travel ban on Jewish emigration from Syria in 1992. Syria’s Jews immediately started leaving for the United States, which offered them political asylum. The U.S. embassy in Damascus arranged for visas, and the Council for the Rescue of Syrian Jews organized their travel to New York. Nattan was among the Syrians who took advantage of the U.S.'s new open policy. Though he had left Syria at twenty years old in search of a better financial future, he felt that the U.S. deceived him when he arrived.

“I was promised to be given a house and a job in New York, but when I arrived there, the house was a 25-year loan that I had to pay, something that was not told to me before I left,” Nattan said. “I regret leaving Syria. I was not forced to leave, but the promises that were made to us were the reason I decided to move to the States. After I arrived, I couldn't live in the U.S. as a traditional Arab man. I wanted to go back to the Middle East, and when I knew Syria wasn't an option, I came to Israel.”

Nattan described the Syria that he had left behind as simple and peaceful during his childhood. He recalled a time when Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived together in close proximity. The groups often poked fun at each other playfully; for example, Damascene Jews created a dish called "Muslim Harban" (meaning “The Muslim Who Ran Away") as a humorous way to share meals with their Muslim neighbors during Jewish holidays. When Muslims in Damascus learned the recipe from them, they named it "The Traveling Jew" (Yahudi Musafir). It was all in good fun, reflecting the coexistence between Syrians of different religious sects.

“When my mother got sick and could not cook for us, my Palestinian neighbors would come every day bringing food, making sure my mom and I were well fed and being taken care of,” Nattan recalled.

While most Syrian Jews left by 1994, not all decided to leave. The Jajati family refused to leave their shop and house, deciding to stay in Syria until they sold their shop in 2001.

“By 2001, everyone was gone, and there was no way for someone to be able to live as a Jew anymore — not because you're not allowed, but because there were no other Jewish families. There were no more rabbis to slaughter animals for [Kosher] food, no one to do the circumcision for kids, no Jewish families to marry from. So all these things basically forced people who stayed till the end to leave,” Jajati explained.

While these testimonies show a different image of what was being painted in the Western media about Arabs, especially Muslims' treatment of Jews, there are still people who were forced to leave Syria because of persecution. These experiences varied largely because of social and economic status, as wealthier families were less likely to be affected by persecution or limitations by the government. Many Syrian Jews, like Nattan’s and Jajati’s families, were fortunate to have a voluntary departure. According to Jajati, this is why Syrian Jews are the only Arab Jews who are still connected to their home country.

Syrian Jews’ conflict of identity

While Jajati and Nattan have different stories, they both agreed that the modern Jewish culture is a result of European colonialism and feels distant from traditional Judaism. Nattan’s decision to go to Israel was based on his desire to live in the Middle East, with Syria not being an option at that time. Nattan faced many cultural shocks in Israel, describing it as European culture.

“As a traditional Arab man, this culture does not represent me,” Nattan said. “It is a European culture.”

Language and cultural differences made integration difficult for many Arab Jews. According to Nattan, Syrian Jews in Israel often experience an identity crisis, torn between their Arab roots and European colonial culture that dominates Israel.

“If I have the chance to go back to Syria, I would go back immediately,” Nattan added. “But my Israeli passport prevents my entry there.”

Jajati had a similar feeling, but his experience was different in its own way.

“I went to a Jewish school in New York, all the kids had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on rye bread, and I showed up with pita and labneh,” Jajati said. “Even though it's a small thing, all these little differences made me feel more connected to my Syrian roots.”

Both Jajati’s and Nattan’s stories reflect the deep cultural gap many Arab Jews felt when they left their homes. Most Syrian Jews emigrated to the United States, especially to Brooklyn, while others went to France, Canada, or Latin America. Many eventually made their way to Israel, using these countries as just a temporary home. Fewer than a hundred Jews were estimated to remain in Syria, mostly elderly individuals who chose not to leave. The once-thriving Jewish life in Damascus and Aleppo had almost entirely disappeared. Synagogues, cemeteries, and homes were often abandoned or fell into disrepair, though some have been preserved.

By 2011, fewer than 20 Jews were estimated to still live in Syria, the majority of them in the Jewish Quarter of Old Damascus. As of 2025, Syria had approximately 71 documented Jewish heritage sites, including synagogues, cemeteries, schools, and other communal buildings. Of these, at least 32 have been destroyed or have deteriorated beyond repair, primarily due to neglect, conflict, and looting during the Syrian Civil War. Syrian Jews, who already have a fractured identity from being Arab and Jewish, had their roots torn down even more by the war. Syria's rebirth with the new regime might give Syrian Jews the chance to restore the few symbols of Jewish heritage they'd lost from their homeland.

The Jewish return to Syria

Today, Syria has the chance to reclaim its former status as a haven for Jews around the world. As we were writing this article, we asked ourselves this question: What would it mean if Syrian Jews returned? Would it upend the long-standing Zionist claim that Jews can never be safe amongst Arabs? If Syria can build a space where Syrian Jews feel welcome again, will it challenge decades of colonial narratives that justified the Israeli settlements at the expense of Palestinians?

While we do not have answers now, it might take us decades to get there with many serious obstacles remaining. Many physical symbols of Jewish heritage, including synagogues, cemeteries, and homes, have decayed or been repurposed. Sectarian divides amongst Syrian Jews are also a barrier to rebuilding.

"Everyone wants to be in charge of the sites, and this is making it difficult for us to unite,” Jajati said.

Additionally, for those with Israeli passports like Nattan, returning remains a legal and political obstacle. Furthermore, Israeli airstrikes have not stopped in Syria even though the Assad regime has fallen.

“When Israel strikes Syria, it doesn’t matter who the targets are or what politics are behind it; it makes me sad because it’s happening in my homeland,” Jajati said. “I want peace, not because I support Israel, but because I want peace for my country, Syria.”

Despite these challenges, there are small but meaningful signs of hope. The return of a historic Torah to the Faranj synagogue or Jewish prayers being heard again in Damascus are historic events that could be the beginning of a new era, building on what Jajati’s grandfather once called “the Syrian dream.” Now, decades later, his grandson is imagining what it would mean to see that dream reborn. Whether through investments like starting a kosher kitchen or regular visits to Jewish sites in Syria, Syrian Jews are slowly reconnecting with a homeland they never truly forgot.

“While I understand that some have different ideologies, I strongly believe that war is awful and should end. Even if I can’t go back, I want to see a safe Syria, for all its people,” Nattan says. “I am not sure if I can go back again, but my dream is to be buried in Damascus, next to my family.”

View our sources for this piece here.

Inside the living room of her small home in a haphazardly built-up neighborhood in Southern Azraq, Bashira sits with her young son. She tries, half successfully, to rein him in as he darts around the room, bursting with energy. Like many other Syrian refugees who have settled in this small desert town, the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime presents Bashira’s family with the possibility of returning home — but it’s not an opportunity she’s eager to embrace. At the forefront of her concerns is the kind of future a life in Syria would offer her son, one she believes would be bleak given a depleted educational system.

However, after a recent round of legislative reforms in Jordan affecting Syrian workers, Bashira wonders if new circumstances will corner her family into making the decision to leave. A recent announcement by the Jordanian government introduced steep price hikes for work permits for Syrians, a legal requirement for all non-Jordanian workers to participate in the kingdom’s economy. The measure, breaking from a nine-year precedent of heavily subsidized work permits for Syrian workers, is mounting economic pressure on this small town already beset by high levels of poverty. Bashira fears that as much as the return to Syria is rife with a laundry list of unknowns, a continuation of life in Jordan may soon become financially untenable.

“My mind is all over the place,” she says. “My thoughts are torn between whether we can manage to live here, get a work permit, and survive, or whether we should go back to Syria.”

At first glance, Southern Azraq is merely a rest stop where truck drivers traversing the Jordan-Saudi Arabia border gather and rest inside the small restaurants and cafes scattered across the otherwise barren landscape. But as the town has absorbed a sizable Syrian refugee population since the Syrian Civil War began in 2011, it has unfolded into more than just a transient stop for passersby. Instead, Azraq has come to offer a haven of long-term stability where Syrian families have settled and built up their lives anew over the span of nearly a decade. It is in one of the small shops where Bashira’s husband works, albeit without a work permit. His situation is common amongst the Syrian refugees in Azraq. Many of the workers staffing and managing the establishments in the area do not have permits, making their employment informal and outside the bounds of the law.

In 2016, Jordan and the European Union, alongside several other international partners, signed the Jordan Compact, a strategic agreement aimed at integrating the Syrian refugee population into the Jordanian economy. One of the highlights of the Compact was Jordan’s commitment to expand legal work opportunities for Syrian refugees. Shortly after the agreement, the number of work permits issued to Syrians rose significantly, from around 4,000 in early 2016 to around 35,000 by January 2017. Subsidized by donor funding, including from the EU, Jordan offered work permits to Syrians at a nominal fee of 10 Jordanian Dinars (14 USD), significantly lower than the standard fees other non-Jordanian groups were subject to at the time. Yet, many workers, especially in isolated towns like Azraq, have continued working without permits. It is easy for them to do so; the rurality of their location tucks them away from the monitoring eye of authorities and consequent enforcement of fines levied on individuals caught in violation of the law.

A shift in policy

Now, the era of fee waivers and subsidized work permits for Syrians is coming to a close, preceded by a trail of funding cuts by the international community and punctuated by the Jordanian Ministry of Labor’s pursuit of “(regulating) the presence of non-Jordanian workers in the Jordanian labor market.“ According to the UNHCR, exemptions to work permit fees and fines must be taken advantage of before June 1st, 2025. After this date, all fees and fines will apply. In order to obtain the right to work inside the Kingdom’s borders, Syrian workers, like the rest of non-Jordanian workers, will be required to pay a fee of 475 JOD (670 USD) and mandatory payments of 113 JOD (160 USD) for two months of a social security subscription. In a statement, the Ministry of Interior pointed to “the weakness of international funding for the Jordanian response plan to the Syrian crisis” as a reason for reduction in support for Syrian refugees residing in the kingdom.

Less obvious in official statements but echoed in the attestations of residents throughout this town is the uptick in inspections and surveillance. Mohammed*, a worker in a tiny dimly lit wholesale store, recounts that prior to the fall of the Assad regime, inspections were a rare occurrence in Azraq. Now, authorities from the Ministry of Labor regularly search the town for workers without permits.

“They were here today, yesterday, and the day before,” he says.

With the uptick in monitoring, it is becoming more difficult for workers to slip into the crevices of the informal economy and sustain their livelihoods.

“If I had the money to pay for a work permit, I would have already returned to Syria,” says Mohammed. But his house in his hometown of Homs is destroyed and he has little savings to rely on. Returning to Syria and starting life anew will be difficult. At the same time, he doesn't know how much longer he can continue working in Jordan while on the run from authorities.

“I can’t stay here,” he says. “Why should I risk getting fined or keep being chased from one place to another? Even if I just want to go somewhere nearby, like Zarqa, I have to get a permit. If they catch me, they ask, where's your permit?’”

He says it is his first time facing such a dilemma since his fifteen years residing in Jordan. Two weeks before the June 1st deadline to obtain a work permit, he is still grappling with the question of whether to stay or leave. Neither option is easier than the other. Many of the residents of Azraq are now caught in this same catch-22. He points outside towards the shops lined across the narrow strip of road in front of his store.

“All these stores are run by Syrians,” he says. “And everyone here is in this same position.”

More changes to follow

The new work permit regulations may not be the last blow dealt to Syrian refugees in Jordan. Bashira fears that next, support allocated for Syrian children’s access to public education will also start to chip away. She cites a rumor in the community that evening classes offered to Syrian children in Jordanian schools will soon be cut. Another claim floats that Syrians may have to start paying for enrollment in public school.

While these claims could not be independently verified and have yet to be addressed in an official statement by the government, the rumors are not completely without basis. Indeed, it is in the 2016 Jordan Compact, which once committed Jordan to expanding Syrian access to the Jordanian labor market that also compelled the Kingdom to provide Syrian students with expanded access to the public education system at no cost. Some promises made by the Jordan Compact have already crumbled, meaning more could fall through in the future.

“The future of [Syrian] children is going to be ruined,” laments Bashira, this time with her son grasped firmly between her arms.

—

*altered name to protect the identity of the individual.

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It’s difficult not to feel a certain sense of awe when you walk into Rami Nablusi’s antique shop in the Old City of Jerusalem. Though quaint and unassuming from the outside, its walls contain a spectacular collection of artifacts from historic Palestine. Many of them date back over a century. Among glass cases sit old maps of Jerusalem, weathered coins from the early 1940s stamped with the name “Palestine,” piles of religious texts, paintings, statues, posters, and an array of gemstone-capped rings crafted by Nablusi himself.

My friends and I, whom I’d met studying Arabic in Jordan, spent several hours in his shop over Eid al-Fitr: the three-day festival that concludes the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. Our Arabic school’s Eid break gave us just enough time to visit Palestine, namely, Nazareth, Bethlehem, and Jerusalem. I was especially excited not only to meet local Palestinians and explore the historic cities, but most of all, to experience Eid alongside my Muslim friends in Jerusalem, which to me was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Every Eid, hundreds of thousands of Muslims from all over the world travel to Jerusalem to pray at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which is believed to be the site where the Prophet Muhammad miraculously ascended to heaven in the early 7th century.

Unfortunately, many Muslims I know cannot make this trip. Most of the teachers at my Arabic school are not allowed to go because of the current Israeli law, which bars descendants of Palestinians expelled in the 1948 Nakba from re-entering the country. The history of this mass expulsion has been chronicled by Nablusi in the endless objects that he has meticulously sourced and preserved in his store.

“Wait here, I have something else to show you,” Nablusi would say before disappearing behind his desk to retrieve another object.

I was amazed to see that he had authentic keys to the homes of Palestinian families who were forced to flee their homes in 1948, which have since become a symbol of the Nakba. He also produced old passports, photographs, and maps as he told us stories of his mother, who was only fourteen years old when the Nakba took place. Among the most unique artifacts was a collection of records that showed eighty-year-old Palestinian shops that existed in the Old City before the establishment of the State of Israel. Today, there are few, if any, surviving records of these sites besides Nablusi's books.

Nablusi’s work is crucial for preserving the legacies of a people who have been gradually marginalized and erased over decades. The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has erupted most evidently today in the form of a genocide in the Gaza Strip and an occupation in the West Bank, but it’s taken many forms in the past, including wars, occupations, settlements, expulsions, and legal discrimination. This erasure can be traced back in time to the establishment of the State of Israel, which has had lasting consequences on the region that we saw up close during our visit. I’ve included a historical preface to add context to what we saw during our trip, but if you want to just read about our personal experience, you can skip the next section.

History of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

1900 BCE - 1948 AD: Before the State of Israel

The current Israeli-Palestinian conflict stretches back over three thousand years to the days of the ancient Israelites, who are the ancestors of present-day Jews. Over several hundred years, the Kingdom of Israel was conquered and incrementally destroyed, namely by the Assyrian and Babylonian empires, among others. In 135 CE, many Jews were killed and expelled from the land by the Roman Empire after a failed revolt. The Romans subsequently renamed the land “Syria Palaestina”. Contrary to popular belief, this was not the first mention of “Palestine”; the first reference to “Palestine” appeared four hundred years before in a book written by the Greek historian Herodotus after visiting the region.

In the early 1900s, the founders of the Zionist movement argued that Jews held a right to return en masse to Palestine because it was land that their ancestors had inhabited for millennia. Though Jews had long been present in the region, the scale of Jewish immigration to Palestine increased dramatically in the late 1800s. The reason for migration varied from person to person, but the majority of Jews came from Eastern Europe, who sought refuge from anti-Semitic laws and violence, for example, the pogroms in Czarist Russia.

As more waves of Jewish migrants arrived in Palestine, tensions between Arabs in the region and Jews steadily grew. This reached an inflection point when British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour formalized the idea of a Jewish state in his well-known “Balfour Declaration”, in which he proposed a British-backed Jewish state in Palestine. The declaration’s acceptance by the British government brought the heart of Zionism to fruition — an idea that had earlier been popularized by the journalist Theodor Herzl, who argued that a Jewish state would require government support to be successful.

The eventual birth of the State of Israel can be ascribed to the alignment of British state interests with the aspirations of Jews around the world. For Britain, creating and supporting a Jewish state in Palestine would win the support of Jews internationally, which it desired towards the end of WWI. Additionally, it would allow Britain to exercise control over land that held immense geopolitical significance. Palestine’s proximity to the Suez Canal, for example, would allow Britain to engage in trade with the East without having to deal with a potential Arab state. For Jews, creating a State of Israel would allow its citizens to live amongst each other without fearing anti-Semitic treatment or persecution by the government.

When British troops were deployed in 1917 to Palestine to enact Balfour’s words, unrest among Arabs grew even more, particularly because this directly violated a prior agreement that Britain had discussed with the Arabs. According to the agreement, the British would help Arabs establish an independent state in exchange for helping to overthrow the Ottoman Empire. Furthermore, the discriminatory treatment that Arabs faced in Palestine contributed to the souring of relations — for example, how some Jewish-run businesses refused to hire Arabs.

Scattered fighting and protests continued for years until dissent erupted in the 1937 Great Arab Revolt. The British used brutal tactics to suppress the revolt, such as torture, executions, and destroying Arab homes. Most notably, some of the earliest documented uses of human shields emerged during the Great Revolt, as British troops commonly forced Arabs to ride in the front of trains to prevent railways from being detonated by rebels.

In total, roughly 5,000 Arabs were killed, while Jews suffered around 415 deaths.

In response to the revolt, the British met and later released the White Paper of 1939, attempting to forge a path for peace between the Jews and Arabs. The White Paper was a sharp departure from Britain’s previous stance as a supporter of the Zionist movement — instead, it attempted to appeal to the Arabs, proposing a strict limit on the number of Jews that could immigrate to Palestine each year. This angered both Jewish and Arab leaders, as the former felt betrayed by the British and the latter were unwilling to compromise on any amount of Jewish immigration.

Despite the years preceding the creation of the State of Israel being marked by intense violence, the notion that Arabs and Jews were diametrically opposed from the beginning is not accurate. In fact, early Arab and Zionist leaders were willing to compromise, such as the Nashashibi family, who rivaled the politically dominant Husseini family. The Nashashibis had more moderate views but appealed primarily to elites and moderates, thus persuading a smaller portion of Palestinians. On the other hand, the de facto Palestinian leader, Hajj Amin Al-Husseini, opposed the State of Israel and Jewish immigration to Palestine in general. Husseini also collaborated with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy to spread antisemitic propaganda across the Arab world — an action which marred the international perception of Palestinians.

By 1947, British leaders felt that the cost of continued military involvement in Palestine exceeded its potential benefits. With the immediate financial and human costs of WWII weighing heavily on the country, Britain decided to relinquish its control of Palestine to the United Nations. The same year, the UN formulated a peace plan called Resolution 181. It proposed to partition Palestine into two states, allocating 56% of the land for Jews and 44% of the land for Arabs. While Jewish leaders accepted, the resolution provoked outrage amongst Arabs.

Similarly, some Jews felt that the peace plans proposed by the UN were not satisfactory. Yitzhak Shamir — leader of the far-right Israeli militant group Lehi and future Prime Minister of Israel — commanded the assassination of the UN mediator for Palestine in retaliation. Shamir wrote:

First and foremost, terrorism is for us a part of the political battle being conducted under the present circumstances, and it has a great part to play … in our war against the occupier.

On May 15, 1948, Israel declared its independence, and the day after, Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon declared war on Israel. However, the war was motivated more by individual state interests than by the desire for Palestinian liberation, with each Arab country vying for a piece of the newly partitioned land. Transjordan, for example, came to an agreement with Israel that allowed Transjordan to annex territory allocated for the Arabs, provided that it didn’t attack land designated for the Jews. Although the Arab states outnumbered Israel five-to-one, Israeli forces outnumbered the Arab armies by roughly 10,000 troops and were better-trained, allowing Israel to defeat the Arab states.

By the time the war had ended, the Israeli army had violently expelled over 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. This is known today as the Nakba, which means “The Catastrophe” in Arabic. Besides those who were displaced, more than 15,000 Palestinians were killed, and 531 towns were destroyed. Palestinians were also subjected to biological warfare by the IDF, which put typhoid bacteria in water wells to drive them from their homes, which violated the 1925 Geneva Protocol. Many of these refugees resettled in either the Gaza Strip or the West Bank, while others went to Syria, Lebanon, or present-day Jordan. Soon after, the UN passed Resolution 194, which stated that refugees should be allowed to return to their original homes and be compensated for their property loss.

To this day, Palestinian refugees from the Nakba and their descendants are barred from re-entering Israel on the basis that the resolution is legally non-binding. By initiating the Nakba, Israel uprooted thousands of civilians, sowed the seeds for the following wars with surrounding Arab states, and created a refugee problem that is still a massive point of contention in peace negotiations between Israel and Palestine today.

1948 - Present Day: After the State of Israel

In the following years, Israel’s numerous conflicts with its neighboring Arab states continued to drive the wedge between Israelis and Palestinians further apart. In 1956, Israel, France, and Britain declared war on Egypt, again, to further state interests. All three countries aimed to lessen Egypt’s control of the Suez Canal, while Israel, in particular, sought to prevent a future war with Egypt as the Arab state had been quickly building up its arms capacity. The week-long war quickly came to a halt largely because of American and Soviet pressure, but it was enough to send a wave of anti-Zionism, pan-Arabism, and renewed interest in Palestinian liberation rippling across the Arab world.

Nine years later, in 1967, Israel again fought Egypt, which was this time allied with Syria. Egypt had received false information from the Soviet Union that Israel was building up its military along the Syrian border, and in retaliation, decided to move troops into the Sinai and close off a vital waterway used by Israel for trade. Gamal Nasser, the Egyptian president, saw an opportunity to demonstrate Egyptian strength amongst the Arab world by competing with Israel. Egypt, in alliance with several other Arab states, went to war with Israel. In only six days, Israel won a shocking victory over Egypt and its allies, conquering an unprecedented amount of land. The Sinai, Gaza Strip, West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Golan Heights all fell under Israeli control.

The sheer dominance of Israel played a major role in advancing settlements in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, as many Jews interpreted the war to be a miraculous victory granted by God. For them, settling in the occupied territories was viewed as a fulfillment of the prophecy. In the Arab world, it led to the growth of Islamism, as many Arab leaders blamed the loss on a lack of Islamic faith. In terms of the war’s effects on foreign policy, Israel’s demonstration of military prowess attracted U.S. investments and military deals, laying the foundation for the U.S.-Israel alliance that continues to this day.

Directly after the 1967 war, the Arab states met and issued a resolution which stated their famous Three Noes: no peace with Israel, no negotiations with Israel, and no recognition of Israel. Though hardline on the surface, the fact that Israel now held so much land meant that it could use it to negotiate for peace, even if official statements by the Arab states said otherwise. This is exactly what happened in the 1978 Camp David Accords, in which Egypt agreed to peace with Israel on the condition that it return the Sinai to Egypt. This “land for peace” model permeated peace deals in the future, in both future Arab-Israeli wars and negotiations between Israel and Palestine, such as the Oslo Accords.

From the mid-1970s onwards, the conflicts that Israel was involved in began to shift from traditional warfare with Arab states to smaller groups employing tactics such as guerrilla warfare and terrorism, as it became clear that Israel’s military was too strong to defeat with traditional warfare. This shift can explain how groups like Hezbollah and Hamas first came to power.

Hezbollah’s roots can be traced back to 1978 when Israel invaded Lebanon. At the time, Israel’s goal was to eliminate the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which had been attacking Israel from just north of the Lebanon-Israel border. The first week-long invasion failed to remove the PLO completely, although it killed over a thousand Lebanese and Palestinian civilians and resulted in the displacement of almost 100,000 people.

The second invasion in 1982 was much larger in scale and drew strong international condemnation. Government officials publicly justified the invasion by citing a recent attempted assassination of an Israeli ambassador. Despite Israeli intelligence knowing that the attempt was executed by an Iraq-based group, not the PLO, Israel invaded Lebanon to further the strategic interests of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. His interests extended far beyond the scope of what was understood by the Israeli public; in the words of Professor Dov Waxman, author of The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict:

Sharon’s grand plan went even beyond this [defeat of the PLO], as he wanted to evict Syrian forces from Lebanon and install a pro-Israel, Christian-dominated regime … In short, for the ultrahawkish Sharon, the invasion of Lebanon was the means toward much greater ends — eliminating the Palestinian issue once and for all, ensuring a “Greater Israel”, securing its northern border, and establishing its regional hegemony.

The Israeli government deployed tens of thousands of troops to Lebanon, laid siege to West Beirut, and most egregiously, failed to intervene in the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. In these massacres, over 3,500 Palestinian civilians were murdered by the Phalangist militia, Israel’s Lebanese ally, as revenge for the war that had caused the death of their leader. By the end of the war, Israel had achieved its goal of eliminating the PLO, but had tarnished its reputation because of the atrocities it had incited and allowed. Furthermore, the war spurred anti-Israel sentiment and ironically opened up an opportunity for Hezbollah to take the PLO’s place. Israel and Hezbollah remain in conflict to this day.

The opposite is true for the rise of Hamas — it came to power not because of an invasion but partly because of a military withdrawal. After Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005 due to international pressure, the Gazan economy tanked due to its large economic dependence on Israel. For example, many Gazans who had worked in Israel prior to the withdrawal had their work permits revoked, leaving them without a stable source of income.

The economic downturn in Gaza presented Hamas with an opportunity to garner political support among citizens. Their strategy was two-pronged. Firstly, Hamas operated many social, medical, educational, and welfare programs, among others, which benefited and appealed to local Palestinians. These programs undoubtedly helped propel it to an unprecedented victory in the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections. Secondly, Hamas violently suppressed those who supported its political rival, Fatah, which culminated in a battle between Hamas and Fatah. In the aftermath of the battle, Hamas secured its place as the ruling party of the Gaza Strip while Fatah retained control of the West Bank.

Many Palestinians credited Hamas and the Second Intifada for Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, thus increasing support for using violence as a tool to establish an independent Palestinian state. However, not all Palestinians who voted for Hamas agreed with its radical ideology, which has notably called for the destruction of Israel and the killing of all Jews. A 2006 exit poll showed that over 60% of Palestinians who voted for Hamas favored a two-state solution. Waxman argues that in many cases, “Palestinians voted for Hamas despite its ideology, not because of it”. However, Hamas did not alter its uncompromising stance to cater to its voters once it assumed power.

Only several years after Hamas won the Palestinian elections, the current Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, took office. In Netanyahu’s previous term, he had intentionally delayed the implementation of the Oslo Accords, which granted Palestinians the right to self-governance and guaranteed a gradual Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories in exchange for the Palestinian Liberation Organization agreeing to peace. The parallel rise of Hamas’s radical ideology with Israel’s far-right and hawkish government primed the Gaza Strip for violent conflict. Israel and Hamas have gone to war several times in the past two decades, with the most recent starting in 2023 when Hamas killed 1,195 Israelis and took 251 hostages to the Gaza Strip.

Israel has since committed genocide against Gazans in response. The government’s military offensives and blockade of the Gaza Strip have resulted in the deaths of over 55,000 Palestinian civilians, with more than half a million residents facing starvation. The initial stated goal of the Israeli government was to eliminate Hamas, but Israeli officials have since admitted their intent to ethnically cleanse, destroy, and reoccupy the Gaza Strip. On May 6th, 2025, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich stated:

They [Gazans] will be totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places.

Like Netanyahu, Smotrich has also made statements declaring that securing the return of Israeli hostages is secondary to achieving a military victory, which incited outrage amongst the families of hostages and the broader Israeli public. In general, Israel’s government has drawn immense international criticism for its actions in the Gaza Strip.

While armed conflict and peace resolutions are crucial to understanding Israeli-Palestinian relations, the real tension between the two groups is often more subtle and can only be seen by going to Palestine in person. This was one of the reasons behind our trip: to observe the deeply ingrained issues that no longer make the headlines because their novelty has long worn off.

Our journey to Palestine

On the morning of Friday, March 28th, I left my apartment in Amman with no clue of what to expect. When my friends and I told our Arabic teachers about our plan to visit Palestine, they were ecstatic but urged us to be careful. In the past, some students had been stopped briefly while others had been searched and questioned for hours. One student was even barred from returning to Jordan. Although we were skeptical of something that extreme happening to us, the mere fact that it was possible etched a spot of unease into the back of my mind.

It’ll probably be fine, I thought as we clambered into our taxi. Probably.

While my excitement built, the worries bouncing around my head grew louder as we inched closer to the Israel-Jordan border. I paid no attention to the lush scenery flitting past the window; instead, I stayed hunched over in the backseat, feverishly deleting messages from my phone. We’d been warned that our devices could be searched, and that any mention of Palestine, Gaza, or pro-Palestine protests could be enough to raise flags from Israeli security. By the time I finished cleaning my phone, the nearly two-hour journey to the border was almost up.

My real concerns had been for my other group of friends, whom we planned to meet up with in Jerusalem. They’d crossed the day before at the King Hussein Bridge, which sits halfway between Amman and Jerusalem. We’d chosen the other option: crossing through the northern Sheikh Hussein Bridge, which is about an hour further. We had several reasons: first, it would be easier to visit Nazareth in the north from there. Secondly, we felt that we had less of a risk of being arbitrarily stopped than at the busier King Hussein Bridge. Thirdly, we weren’t entirely sure how the visa process worked at the King Hussein Bridge in general.

The night before, we’d been half holding our breath, waiting for the other group to tell us that they’d gotten through the border. Being an all Muslim and mostly Arab group, we expected that they might encounter some problems on the way in. Thankfully, we got the news that they’d been let in, albeit being held at the border for five hours. What we didn’t know at the time was how poorly they’d been treated by the security.

One of my friends, who has prosthetic legs, was made to take them off, go through a metal detector four times, and undergo a pat-down search. She later described it as the most “degrading and ableist security check” of her life. Some of them had their phones searched, and they were questioned about the countries they had visited, the names of their family members, as well as if they had been to any pro-Palestinian protests, among other things.

By comparison, our experience at the border was relatively smooth. On the Jordanian side, we went through a short security check, got our passports stamped, and were promptly sent through to the Israeli side. For those who don’t want an exit stamp, you can request a piece of paper instead, which is useful for traveling to Arab countries that will refuse entry if they see evidence of having traveled to Israel, like Lebanon. On the Israeli side, we were asked similar questions but were never searched. The only hiccup came about when one of my friends was flagged by security because of his Arabic middle name.

He was made to wait for almost two hours, after which he was led into a side room for questioning via telephone. Over the phone, the security repeated the same questions we had been asked earlier, but this time they were especially curious about the origin of his name: was it given or did he convert to Islam? He explained that it was a family name, and after only a couple of minutes, the Israeli officials approved him for entry. With one of the most bizarre security screenings we’d ever been through out of the way, we were finally ready to start our trip.

A stop in Nazareth

When we arrived in Nazareth, it felt almost as if we were back in Jordan. The streets were lined with falafel shops, shawarma restaurants, fruit stalls, bakeries, cafes, and corner stores, whose signs were written in an eclectic mix of Arabic, Hebrew, and English. Though the atmosphere felt like a calmer Amman, one building in particular stuck out. Its sleek architecture made it a bit out of place standing amongst the other old limestone structures. Printed along the side of the building in bold, white lettering was one word: “Microsoft”.

Ah, I thought. Just what Jesus would have wanted.

Despite some curious new developments, the historic character of old Nazareth has remained intact to this day. The city holds a special religious significance, especially for Christians. Not only is it the city where Jesus Christ spent his childhood, but it’s also where it’s believed that the Angel Gabriel announced to the Virgin Mary that she would give birth to Christ. Over two thousand years later, Nazareth is still home to many well-preserved churches, mosques, and other historic sites. Thousands of visitors stop there every year to visit and pray in its churches, such as the Basilica of the Annunciation.

Though our plan was to tour the religious sites, I was more looking forward to learning about Nazareth's populace, as it’s almost entirely Arab. This is partly because the Israeli government anticipated that there would be backlash from the international Christian community if thousands of Christian Arabs were forcibly expelled from the city during the Nakba in 1948. In fact, former IDF Chief of Staff Haim Laskov is quoted as saying that “we had specific instructions not to harm anything, which meant that we had to take Nazareth by stratagem.” The city was largely exempted from the Israeli government’s plan of ethnic cleansing in 1948, and as a result, Arabs constitute almost all of its population today.

On Saturday morning, we decided to spend our day wandering the city and speaking with locals whom we met along the way. We especially wanted to understand the experiences of local Arabs and how they choose to identify. Do they see themselves as Palestinian and reject being labelled as Israeli? What has their life been like living in Nazareth? How do they view the Israeli government?

The first person we talked to was the owner of a fruit shop downtown. He told us that the Israeli government treats Arabs well, and interestingly, that Arabs living with Arabs together wasn’t a good thing. He didn’t elaborate much (the fact that the conversation was in Arabic made it more difficult), but suffice it to say, we were a little surprised. On the way back from visiting the Nebi Saeen Mosque, we were told the same thing by a local baker: “Life as an Arab is good here.”

However, not everyone agreed. In Nazareth’s Old City, two university students in a community space told us that they felt stifled in terms of their ability to express their true thoughts about Israel and Palestine. One of them gave us the example that the Palestinian jewelry that she wears in Nazareth wouldn’t be acceptable where she studies in Tel Aviv. What I was quickly coming to understand was that there was no single Palestinian narrative, at least amongst those we talked to.

On our last day in the city, we decided to hike up Mount Precipice, which offers a stunning view of the land southeast of Nazareth. If it’s a clear day, you can even peer into the rolling hills of the West Bank in the direction of Jenin and Nablus.

A few minutes after we started up the mountain’s steep, winding path, a car rolled up beside us.

“You guys need a lift?” came a voice from inside the car.

In the driver’s seat was a man with short dark hair and a neat beard who was probably in his mid-twenties. We gladly accepted his offer and thanked him. Later that night, he graciously invited us to have dinner with his entire family, who are Christian Arabs. We shared stuffed artichokes and date-filled cookies while we chatted about his life, family, dreams, politics, identity, and more.

“Arabs here are born conflicted,” he said. “You’re Palestinian, but you live in Israel.”

Although he worked full-time to help run a family business, he was chasing a career as a writer and filmmaker. An avid Christopher Nolan fan, he loved writing sci-fi and thrillers, especially inspired by films like Inception and Interstellar. The wars over the past few years have made realizing success in the film industry much more difficult. He recalled how he once had to stop a film shoot that he was directing in the city of Haifa because there had been rocket fire in the area. Despite this, he said he had no interest in making political films. At the end of the day, he said, he just wants to live in peace and work on the projects that he’s truly passionate about.

I thought about his words that night as we packed our bags for Jerusalem. Tens of thousands of Muslims would be at the Al-Aqsa Mosque the next morning to celebrate Eid al-Fitr. I wondered how many would never make it to Jerusalem because they were turned away at the border or killed in the Gaza Strip, and how many people want peace and equality simply so that they can return to their hometowns in the West Bank or share an iftar with their families in the Old City. The unsettling thing about being in Palestine was realizing that we were no more than a two-hour drive away from a genocide at any given time. It was deeply sobering to consider. On the other side of the coin, the compassion we’d received from the people we’d met in Nazareth gave me a glimmer of hope.

Eid al-Fitr in Jerusalem

At the northern entrance of Jerusalem’s Old City, a seemingly endless river of people flowed from the three-thousand-year-old walled city. We’d just caught the tail end of the morning prayers on the first day of Eid al-Fitr, whose attendees were now streaming from the Al-Aqsa Mosque in droves to rest, buy food and gifts, or spend time with their families.

The street food vendors in the Old City’s Muslim Quarter were already hard at work. Though Ramadan is marked by strict fasting from sunup to sundown, Eid is the first day that daytime fasting is broken. Vendors near the gate sold fresh-squeezed juice, assortments of candy, and freshly baked bread. The smell of grilled lamb and charcoal wafted through the air. People sang and danced in the streets. Some children played with their new toys while others were busy wolfing down pastries and sandwiches.

It’s customary to wear your best clothes during Eid, but it was only when we finally met up with our other group of friends that I realized what “best clothes” meant. They were adorned in beautiful clothing, wearing elegant hijabs that matched intricately patterned robes called abayas. My friend and I had not packed anything of this caliber. I wore a grey sweatshirt and bomber jacket with a gigantic video camera slung over my shoulder, while my friend had brought a hiking backpack stuffed to the brim with both of our clothes for the week.

“Wow,” one of them had said upon seeing us. “You guys look like foreigners!”

I couldn’t disagree. We sat down at a cafe, where they told us about their experience crossing the King Hussein Bridge and how the final days of Ramadan had been for them. Having prayed for most of the night, they’d barely slept, but their enthusiasm for being in Jerusalem during Eid hadn’t diminished in the slightest. From what they told us, the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound had been completely packed with people praying that morning, not just inside the Dome of the Rock, but spread across all of its walkways, courtyards, and gardens too.

Between prayer times, my friends were free to explore the Old City with us. For context, the Old City is divided into four quarters: the Muslim Quarter, the Christian Quarter, the Jewish Quarter, and the Armenian Quarter. We spent most of our time in the Muslim Quarter, exploring the bazaars and meeting shopkeepers just like we had done in Nazareth. It was here that we met Nablusi and saw his antique shop.

At one point while we were in Nablusi’s shop, we met a Palestinian-American woman who was helping to digitize some of the documents that he had collected. I began to realize how much of the history of the Old City, for example, I would never learn because much of it only exists in one place in the entire world. Digitizing every artifact in his shop seemed like an impossible task, but if nobody tried, all of it would eventually be lost to the sands of time.

The spirit of passing on Arab and Islamic history had not been lost on my friends. As we walked, they told us stories about their Arab heritage, the history of Islam, and explained what role religion played in each of their lives. We watched videos of musicians from around the world coming together in Jerusalem to perform traditional Islamic songs about the prophets, and we talked about the different prayers that my friends had devoted hours to performing over the past month. We learned about Taraweeh — a special prayer done during Ramadan which grants forgiveness of past sins, and Eid Salah, which celebrates the end of Ramadan and shows gratitude to Allah.

For me, the most memorable conversations were about each of my friends’ personal journeys with Islam. For example, some of them talked about how they came to the decision to wear a hijab.

“I wanted to be judged on the quality of my ideas and not on my body,” one of my friends explained.

For another friend, she’d felt drawn to wearing a hijab ever since she was in grade school. Even though she was singled out and looked at differently by some other students because of her choice, she refused to let them discourage her from wearing it as a symbol of her faith every day. I began to see just how different everyone’s journey with Islam was. Even though there are core beliefs of the religion that are shared across all Muslims, no two people are identical in the exact way that they practice or the way that they interpret the teachings of certain prophets.

As we walked from quarter to quarter, I felt that people of different religions throughout Old City behaved a bit like water and oil — overlapping but never mixing. For example, we were invited inside the house of a Moroccan family whose ancestors came to Jerusalem and settled in the Old City’s Moroccan district, which was demolished in 1967 by Israeli forces. Residing right next to the Western Wall, they explained how other residents don’t want them there simply because of their religious and ethnic background.

My friends also faced discrimination from Israeli security, who control entry to religious sites like the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound and the Western Wall. Once, when trying to enter the Al-Aqsa Mosque, they were questioned and asked if the land that they were in was Israel or Palestine. One of my friends answered that it was both, which upset the security. Because of her answer, they were blocked from entering the mosque to pray on their last day in Jerusalem.

Fortunately, we got to visit the Al-Aqsa Mosque together in the days prior. We toured the Dome of the Rock, the Qibli Mosque, and talked about their history while relaxing in the shade of the compound’s vast olive tree garden. The Dome of the Rock is nothing short of incredible. Built in only six years towards the end of the 7th century, Maghrebi explorer Ibn Battuta proclaimed in 1326 that “any viewer’s tongue will grow shorter trying to describe it”.

Teal and white grid-like patterns swathe the mosque’s exterior walls, which sit underneath a glimmering cap of gold. Inside, tessellating gold and maroon designs radiate outwards from the roof, almost resembling the petals of a gigantic dahlia. When I saw it for the first time, I remembered the words of another student from my Arabic school who’d visited a mosque in Iraq, who said that upon entering it, “I felt like I was in another world.” I think I understood what she meant.

Viewing the Dome of the Rock from afar was just as amazing. On the first night of Eid, we climbed up the Mount of Olives to see the sunset over West Jerusalem. The sky was perfectly clear that night. A cool wind blew gently across the mountain. We stood in silence and tuned our ears to the breeze as we watched the sun vanish behind the Jerusalem skyline, turning it pitch-black. The sky multiplied in shades as the minutes ticked by, transforming from a lone periwinkle blue to a dazzling gradient of deep yellows, oranges, and reds. Before long, you could see an ivory sliver of the moon barely peeking out against the night sky, like a fingernail that had been forgotten amidst the cosmos.

It was one of the most serene and breathtaking things I’ve ever seen.

Bethlehem and the road home

Before we had to return to Jordan, we decided to visit Bethlehem, which is only a 15-minute bus ride from Jerusalem. Although it’s in the West Bank, our bus didn’t stop at an Israeli checkpoint on the way in — only on the way back to Jerusalem. When we arrived, we were taken on a tour of the Aida Refugee Camp by Ali, a local guide and artist.

The Aida camp was established in 1950, when the West Bank was still part of Jordan. Today, there are over 7,000 Palestinian refugees living in the camp according to the UNHCR. Its proximity to the Israeli separation wall and two illegal Israeli settlements has provoked many violent clashes in the past, prompting the walls of houses to be covered with murals of refugees who had been killed by the IDF. Many of the victims were children. As we meandered through the alleyways, we ran into a group of kids playing with toy rifles. Ali explained to us that they played with guns because violence is all that they knew growing up.

Overt violence is only one of many problems that Palestinians living in the West Bank face. Systems imposed by the Israeli government, such as checkpoints, permits, and military courts, can arguably be just as harmful. Many Palestinians are not allowed to move between cities in the West Bank, and for those who are, it can be difficult to obtain the necessary permits to do so. The system for designating who is allowed to travel where is as convoluted as it is because of Israel and Jordan’s tangled history of occupying the West Bank. Decades of wars and peace negotiations have resulted in a reality where a Palestinian from Nablus born in 1950 might have a completely different set of legal privileges than one who was born after the 1993 Oslo Accords, for example.

Ultimately, Israeli security officers have the final say on who is allowed through checkpoints. This effectively means that Palestinians’ freedom of movement is subject to the day-to-day whims of IDF soldiers. Not only have these checkpoints and the West Bank separation barrier restricted Palestinians’ freedom of movement, but they have also severely held back economic growth in the region.

We saw how disruptive these checkpoints could be firsthand. Midway through our bus ride back from Bethlehem, we were stopped by the IDF. As our bus slowed to a halt, some passengers glanced around nervously and started to collect their bags and passports. Looking out the window, I could see the unmistakable olive green fatigues of soldiers waiting patiently for us to exit the bus.

Perfect, I thought.

Part of me had naively thought that our bus might’ve coasted inconspicuously through the checkpoint like on the way in. I just hoped that the soldiers wouldn’t inspect my camera. They probably wouldn’t be too happy about the photos I’d taken at the Aida Refugee Camp, which included shots of anti-government graffiti spray-painted on the separation wall, Palestinian flags, and murals of refugees who had been killed by Israeli snipers.

As passengers steadily filed out of the bus, I fumbled around for my passport and tried to upload as many photos as I could to Google Drive. Outside, we formed a neat line and waited uneasily for the soldiers to start checking our passports. It took about ten minutes for the first passenger to be waved through the checkpoint. I tried to crane my neck around the queue to see if the soldiers were searching anyone, but thankfully, it didn’t seem like it.

Most people seemed to be going through with no issues, which was good given that our bus had a decent mix of Palestinians, Israelis, and foreign tourists. Right before my turn came, I stuffed my camera into my bag, readied my passport, and hoped for the best. The soldier who took my passport scrunched up his face as he flipped through it.

That can’t be good, I thought.

He looked up at me, back down at my passport, then back up at me. After pausing for a second, he waved me through, barely uttering a single word. Back inside the bus, I felt my shoulders relax a little. At worst, going through the checkpoint was a minor inconvenience for us. For a Palestinian commuting between the West Bank and Jerusalem every day, it could be the difference between getting to their job or not. It’s not uncommon for the IDF to arbitrarily deny Palestinians entry at checkpoints even if they have the proper documentation.

I was just thankful that there were no issues for my friends who had been questioned for hours at the border. Unfortunately, we’d have to go through Israeli security one more time before we left. Most of my friends planned to cross back into Jordan the same way they entered: via the King Hussein Bridge. To avoid getting a return stamp at the land crossing, one of my friends and I planned to take a connecting flight from Tel Aviv to Amman. We repeated the process of painstakingly cleaning our phones on the way out and getting rid of anything that could get us in trouble — the one exception being a fridge magnet with a photo of artwork on the West Bank barrier that read “Make Hummus Not Walls.”

In the Tel Aviv airport, my friend and I were questioned for almost half an hour. We were briefly interviewed together, after which we were split up and questioned individually. The security officer I spoke to was especially curious as to why I had chosen to study Arabic in Jordan, particularly now. I tried to play it off as merely a cultural interest, not mentioning anything about wanting to do journalism in the Middle East. My answer didn’t seem to convince her.

“But why Jordan specifically?” she asked me. “There’s a war going on in this region. Why come now?”

Of course, I didn’t say that this was precisely one of the reasons I had come. I went on a long spiel about how I liked Jordan’s historical sites, culture, people, food, dialects, and so on, hoping that she would find my rambling answer satisfactory.

“Yes, but why Jordan?” she asked again.

I was genuinely confused. Having just listed everything I’d grown to love about the country over the past four months, I was legitimately running out of things to say. The next few minutes consisted of me rewording the same arguments over and over again, like how one might when trying to reach the word count of an important term paper. Somehow, it worked. The security officer then asked me about everything else: my occupation, travel history, family, friends, trip itinerary, and more. I answered them all honestly, and after about thirty minutes, my friend and I were finally approved to board our flight.

My head was swimming on the plane, just as it had on the taxi ride up to the border only a week prior. However, the reasons were completely different. In the place of anxiety and excitement now stood a strange mix of anger, joy, confusion, and solemnity. The feelings that I hadn’t even known had been brewing inside me throughout the trip were finally starting to froth to the surface. From the stories I’d heard of displaced Palestinians being unable to return to their hometowns at checkpoints to my friends being rejected from praying at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, what bothered me more than the overt discrimination was the inconsistency of it all.

Questions swirled through my head. Why should an IDF soldier get to decide on whether or not Muslims can or cannot enter their own place of worship based on a set of arbitrary questions? Why should my friends have to worry about whether wearing a hijab will mark them as being a security risk at the border? When will we stop needing to paint murals of murdered children in refugee camps? I’d hoped that the trip would answer some of my previous questions, but if anything, I felt that I had more loose ends to tie than before I’d left.

I thought back to a lecture at our Arabic school given by Dr. Nadim Bawalsa, a Palestinian historian who specializes in modern Palestine. He guided us through almost five hundred years of history until the present day, and at the end of his lecture, a student asked what she could do to help, with tears streaming down her face. Bawalsa acknowledged that no single person could bring an end to the violence, nor could one person remedy all the injustices wrought upon the Palestinian people. But what stuck with me was the end of his answer:

Keep listening to us, keep visiting us, and keep telling our stories.

His words reminded me of a concept in Islamic law that my friends had taught me about while we’d roamed around the Old City: the waqf. It’s the name for something that’s been permanently donated for the benefit of the public, usually a building or a plot of land. After something is designated as a waqf, it can’t be given away or sold. A waqf can be a school, a mosque, a hospital, or many other things. Whatever it is, the original owner has invested in the betterment of generations of people whom they will never meet.

Preserving Palestinian history and culture is no different. Every Nakba story that you listen to, every Palestinian-owned shop you visit, and every book you read about their history and traditions is an investment in counteracting their erasure. As individuals, the impact can be hard to discern, but collectively, over the years, decades, and centuries, the efforts always compound. I encourage you to follow Bawalsa’s words and never stop listening to, reading about, or talking about the Palestinian people.

View our sources here.

Nachtwey immediately packed up his equipment and rushed to the World Trade Center, where he would nearly lose his life documenting the deadliest terror attack in American history. He exhausted twenty-seven rolls of film, capturing the collapse of the South Tower, scenes of firefighters pulling survivors from the rubble, and soot-covered New Yorkers navigating the mangled steel remains of the buildings.

In a TED talk, Nachtwey remarked:

In the midst of the wreckage at ground zero, I had a realization. I’d been photographing in the Islamic world since 1981, not only in the Middle East, but also in Africa, Asia, and Europe. At the time I was photographing in these different places, I thought I was covering separate stories, but on 9/11, history crystallized. And I understood I’d actually been covering a single story for more than twenty years, and the attack on New York was its latest manifestation.

Although Al-Qaeda had only been founded thirteen years prior, the Islamic extremist ideologies that motivated the terrorist organization had been on the rise for decades. The beliefs of Islamic fundamentalism — marked by a return to traditional and conservative values — combined with a fervent disdain for the United States had erupted in violence before, such as during the deadly 1979 riots at U.S. embassies in Pakistan and Iran.

Furthermore, the United States and the Soviet Union had unintentionally fueled the fire of militant Islamic extremist groups by fighting a proxy war in Afghanistan beginning in the late 1970s. The repercussions of this war would become evident on 9/11, which catapulted the United States into decades of additional conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ten years into America’s war on terror, President Obama announced that the military had finally assassinated Osama bin Laden.

Obama reflected on the assassination in his memoir A Promised Land, saying:

The public instinctively seemed to seize on bin Laden’s death as the closest we'd likely ever get to a V-Day — and at a time of economic hardship and partisan rancor, people took some satisfaction in seeing their government deliver a victory. … With these thoughts came another: was the unity effort, that sense of common purpose, only possible when the goal involved killing a terrorist?

This question of achieving national unity has resurfaced this year, especially bearing in mind that America’s foreign policy has become one of the most polarizing issues of the election — particularly the country’s involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While only a small minority of Americans say that it is one of the top issues facing the country today, it is a top issue among certain demographics including Muslim Americans, many of whom reside in swing states.

Many Muslim Americans desire concrete foreign policy changes from the next administration, such as negotiations for a ceasefire and an end to foreign aid for Israel. Polls have suggested an even split between their support for Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, meaning that the recent campaigning efforts by both candidates to secure their votes could be the deciding factor in an extremely tight race.

Although the president plays a key role in determining America’s involvement in conflict as the commander-in-chief, these decisions ultimately involve thousands of people from all corners of the government, from senators in Congress to special agents in the CIA and FBI. Reflecting on America’s previous decisions in wars abroad — specifically in the Middle East — can provide an inkling as to what the future of international conflict might look like after this year’s election.

The road to 9/11

Looking at Afghanistan’s history through a geopolitical lens can help us understand how it became a hotbed for Islamic extremist groups like Al-Qaeda in the late 20th century. Sandwiched between China and Iran, control over Afghanistan had long been sought after because of its crucial role in international trade. Its pathways through rough and mountainous terrain enabled merchants to travel freely across Central Asia as far back as the days of the Silk Road.

Whoever controlled the region could grow their wealth by imposing taxes on those who passed through and could exercise heavy influence on the flow of goods, inciting fierce competition amongst rulers seeking to fortify their empires. This cycle of conflict went on for centuries and culminated in a brutal decades-long fight between Britain and Russia for control over Afghanistan during the 1800s.

At the time, Britain and Russia were both keen on expanding their territories as two of the most powerful empires in the world. Inching closer and closer together across the Middle East and Central Asia, the British approached from the south while Russia crept forward from the north. If no buffer zone was established in the middle, their inevitable meeting would likely result in a catastrophic war.

Both empires foresaw this, prompting Britain to invade Afghanistan in hopes of installing a pro-British ruler and converting the region into a buffer state — effectively putting some breathing room in between two gigantic empires who were now shoulder-to-shoulder. The Afghans revolted immediately. Years of armed conflict ensued as the British and Russians tried to capture Afghanistan as well as its surrounding territories, resulting in multiple wars, countless failed negotiations, treaties, and ultimately the death of thousands from all sides.

Dost Mohammed Khan, the ruler of Afghanistan in the early 1800s, said:

I have been struck by the magnitude of your resources, your ships, your arsenals, but what I cannot understand is why the rulers of so vast and flourishing an empire should have gone across the Indus to deprive me of my poor and barren country.

Khan’s words foreshadowed years of war throughout the late 1900s that would further devastate Afghanistan’s economy and infrastructure. In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan with similar motives to the British who had invaded over a hundred years before: maintaining power and keeping western powers at bay. Unsurprisingly, the Afghans revolted.

In response, the United States funded anti-Communist Islamist insurgents known as the mujahideen to stop the Soviet Union from expanding into Afghanistan. This thirteen-year-long multibillion dollar CIA operation was code-named Operation Cyclone. At its helm during various administrations were presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush. Once again, Afghanistan had been reduced to a pawn in a game of geopolitical chess — but the consequences of this proxy war would be far more than any single participant could have predicted.

The toll of the war on Afghanistan was enormous. Over two million Afghan civilians died in the crossfire and many more fled the country in search of refuge. Its economy was left in tatters. An Afghan schoolgirl interviewed about her life during the Soviet-Afghan war said:

When they [Soviets] came, they killed my father and four brothers. … I turned against the Soviet invasion. I became a member of a mujahedin group … I forgot my childhood. I forgot a lot of things that a child would dream of or wish for. I became very invested in politics.

Aside from the war’s immediate aftermath, the growing threat of terrorism began to loom in the minds of operatives at American intelligence agencies. In journalist Steve Coll’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book Ghost Wars, Coll details how the United States inadvertently armed and funded Afghan warlords and Islamic extremist insurgents, some of whom would later become members of Al-Qaeda.

Coll cites a particularly dangerous weapon that the U.S. shipped en masse to Afghanistan: Stinger missiles. These missiles were described by investigative journalists Donald Barlett and James Steele in 2003 as “the shoulder-fired, anti-aircraft weapons … used with deadly accuracy against Soviet helicopters and that are now in circulation among terrorists who have fired such weapons at commercial airliners”. Barlett and Steele go on to state: “Among the rebel recipients of U.S. arms: Osama bin Laden.”

After realizing that Stinger missiles might have fallen into the wrong hands, the U.S. spent $10 million attempting to buy them back under a program named Operation MIAS (Missing in Action Stingers). It was a losing situation no matter the outcome. If the program was successful, millions of dollars of funding would be funneled directly to Afghan warlords whether or not they harbored malicious intent towards the United States. If it wasn’t, these groups would be left with weapons capable of dealing unimaginable damage in combat.

Operation MIAS was ultimately dubbed a failure, leaving Afghan militant groups with a mix of U.S.-supplied money and weapons. On 9/11, Americans came face-to-face with a terrorist organization that had capitalized on these very foreign policy decisions. In the present day, we can observe a similar pattern of events in Israel’s handling of their adversary Hamas, which ultimately ended in disaster.

The United States, Israel, and Palestine

Much like how the United States funded Afghan warlords to prevent dangerous arms from falling into the hands of terrorists, Israel indirectly funded the terrorist organization Hamas plausibly as a strategic maneuver to weaken the Palestinian Authority and prevent the formal establishment of Palestine as a state.

As widely reported by the Times of Israel, the Haaretz, and the New York Times, a Netanyahu-led administration approved the transfer of millions of dollars in cash to the Gaza Strip via the Qatari government for years. The Gaza Strip is largely controlled by Hamas, while its political rival, the Palestinian Authority, is based in the West Bank. To quote Times of Israel correspondent Tal Schneider:

The various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group. The idea was to prevent Abbas — or anyone else in the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank government — from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state.

This tactic of gaining an advantage by deepening the wedge between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority was articulated in 2015 by far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who described Hamas as an “asset” and the Palestinian Authority as a “burden”. The official reason provided by Netanyahu for these cash infusions was to “return calm to (Israeli) villages of the south, but also to prevent a humanitarian disaster (in Gaza)”.

However, Israel has frequently blocked humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip. According to the U.N., almost all aid was blocked in the first two weeks of October, leaving hundreds of thousands of Palestinians without sufficient food, water, and other resources. Israeli government officials have also openly admitted the failure of this policy. Naftali Bennett, former prime minister of Israel, said:

I stopped the cash suitcases because I believe that horrendous mistake — to allow Hamas to have all these suitcases full of cash, that goes directly to reordering themselves against Israelis. Why would we feed them cash to kill us?

This policy of allowing money into the Gaza Strip has done more harm than good for both Israelis and Palestinians, as it represents the antithesis of Netanyahu’s stated goal of eliminating Hamas. Instead, it likely further enabled Hamas to execute deadly terror attacks against Israel as it did on October 7th of last year. Depending on the outcome of the U.S. presidential election, policies like these could either receive more pressure or implicit validation from the American government. In 2014, the U.S. remained neutral when the idea for these cash payments was first originated, which indirectly allowed conflict between Israel, Hamas, and the Palestinian Authority to worsen.

The differences in foreign policy towards Israel and Palestine are not immediately obvious when considering a future Trump or Harris administration. While Trump proposed a peace plan for the region in 2020, it appeased Israeli leaders and angered Palestinians due to its favoring of Israel on key issues, such as the designation of Jerusalem’s borders and the legal status of Jewish settlements. His act of moving the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem also drew outrage from Palestinians.

On the other hand, Harris served as vice president in an administration that has repeatedly approved the sales of billions of dollars of arms to Israel. However, her Jewish outreach director Ilan Goldberg has criticized Netanyahu and was previously a part of the 2013-14 Israeli-Palestinian peace talks during the Obama administration — perhaps indicative of a shift in Harris’s administration towards vying for a peaceful resolution. In a prescient 2018 essay, Goldberg wrote:

With every crisis, the humanitarian situation in Gaza worsens. There will come a moment when basic order collapses altogether, or Israel is forced to invade and retake Gaza. The only way to avoid this terrible outcome in the long-term is a sustainable political arrangement that should include both a long-term ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that includes major economic opening of Gaza combined with a Palestinian reconciliation deal between Fatah and Hamas that slowly brings the Palestinian Authority back into Gaza.

Six years later, the humanitarian crisis in Gaza has worsened to a state that many scholars describe as a genocide committed by Israel. Although proposed peace deals have historically had a poor track record, the alternative option of engaging in relentless warfare has destroyed the lives of countless Israelis and Palestinians alike.

Time and time again, we have seen how war slowly but surely exacts its toll on its combatants. Its consequences can be messy, far-reaching, and surprising, even to those who have the direct power to allocate federal funding for war or send thousands of troops into battle. These are the considerations that world leaders have to make, but they are also issues that should be present in the minds of those who vote them into office. In the words of James Nachtwey:

I think that there are things worth fighting for in this life. But I think we should also be aware where war leads: what are the inevitable consequences of war in human terms? … And we must think deeply upon it before ever committing people to fight a war.

View our sources for this piece here.

The global Microsoft computer outage in mid-July — caused by a bug in a widely-used cybersecurity program — is a perfect example of how one broken component can topple the precarious Jenga tower of code that keeps millions of vital systems running. It’s easy to forget how reliant we are on these machines until thousands of flights are grounded, emergency phone lines are knocked out of service for hours at a time, or doctors are forced to record patient data on pen and paper.

So, why did this happen?

In a nutshell, every computer that crashed was running a program built by the company CrowdStrike, which sells cybersecurity services to other businesses. Their program detects hacking attempts by monitoring the data that a computer transmits and receives over the Internet. Here’s the problem: in order to watch all of this data, CrowdStrike’s program had to have access to some code that exists on every computer called the “kernel”, which is necessary for any computer to function properly.

If you think of a computer like a car, the applications that you use day-to-day — like Zoom or Google Chrome — are the steering wheel and pedals. They’re the controls. The hardware, like the CPU or hard drive, are the engine and wheels. They’re the foundation. The kernel is everything in between: the gears, axles, brakes, hydraulics, and so on. Without the kernel, you wouldn’t be able to operate your computer, much like how you wouldn’t be able to drive your car if it didn’t have those intermediary bits of machinery.

Because the kernel manages all of a computers’ Internet connections, it’s the perfect place for a company like CrowdStrike to embed their security software. If their program detects a virus being downloaded, for example, it can alert the user or even shut down the affected connection by using the kernel. There weren’t any issues with this setup until CrowdStrike released a faulty update on the night of July 19th. Once installed, this update would crash their own security software, which would in turn crash the kernel — crippling the computer from the inside out. This error wasn’t caught until it had been installed on millions of devices all over the world, which led to this:

Over $5 billion were lost because of the downtime. Ironically, it was a cybersecurity company that accidentally created one of the most destructive viruses of all time. These types of incidents — from outages to security breaches — happen surprisingly often, and they can affect almost anyone who uses the Internet.

It’s simultaneously fascinating and worrying to consider how much of your personal information you’ve disclosed to a variety of miscellaneous companies online. All of your passwords, credit card numbers, banking details, and other types of sensitive information are stored on servers somewhere in the world, so it’s worth asking exactly how these digital systems work, how they’re all linked together, and why they sometimes fail.

Internet troubles

When I was about six years old, my dad showed me something on the computer called the command line. The command line was this little black window that housed a small blinking cursor, a bit of text, and nothing else. It looked like the displays from one of those old boxy computers made in the 1970s, but in plain black and white instead of lime green. I tried clicking around it with my mouse, but to my dismay, nothing happened. My dad explained. Before the days of drag-and-drop icons and customizable wallpapers, you had to manually type in commands just to navigate your computer — hence the command line. This blew my mind.

People in the past must have been geniuses! I thought.

Thankfully, it turned out not to be too complicated. Within a few hours, my dad had taught me a few basic commands that I could use to fiddle around with the computer. If I typed in “mkdir”, I could summon a folder from nothing. If I wanted to delete it, I could simply type in “rm” and it would vanish just as quickly as I had created it. It was magic. Those commands were great fun, but the “ping” command quickly became my favorite out of all those I learned. Though it bears no relation to ping-pong, it’s interesting because it can help us understand an actual technique that hackers use to take down websites.

The way it works is simple. First, you type in the word “ping”, then follow it by any website you want, like “google.com”. The computer will start sending little packets of data to Google’s servers to see if it gets a response, and if it does, the command line will let you know when it hears back. You can use this command to check if there’s a problem with your WiFi, but hackers can also use a similar technique to bring down entire servers.

They do this by scaling up the amount of data that their computer sends — by a lot. Responding to a couple packets of data per second isn’t a problem for most websites, but what about a couple hundred? A couple thousand? A couple million? Ultimately, the more data they send, the more of a problem it is for the website. If a website isn’t equipped to handle sudden floods of traffic, it can become overwhelmed and crash.

This is called a distributed denial-of-service attack, or a DDoS for short. DDoS attacks are what brought down massive sites like Netflix and Amazon in 2016, and they’re also what crashed most of Estonia’s web infrastructure back in 2007. At best, a successful attack might mean that you’re not able to watch movies for a couple hours. At worst, it could mean not being able to access your bank account online for days at a time.

You might be wondering why DDoS attacks don’t happen more frequently. In fact, they’re attempted much more often than you might think. Cloudflare, a company that protects websites from cyberattacks, reported that they mitigated almost nine million DDoS attacks in 2023. It’s worth asking how Cloudflare does this, because it can teach us a lot about how the internet works behind the scenes.

To explain, I’ll turn to an analogy that I hope many of you are familiar with: alcohol. Visiting a website is kind of like ordering a drink at a bar. When you type in a URL like “facebook.com”, you’re being served a cocktail of ones and zeroes that happen to present themselves in the form of a usable website. Your internet service provider, like Comcast or AT&T, is the bartender. Just like how a bartender knows to reach for the ginger beer when you order a Moscow mule, your internet service provider knows where to fetch Facebook’s data from by using something called the Border Gateway Protocol, which is like a massive address book of servers distributed all over the world.

This arrangement works if the bartender only has to fill a couple orders at a time, but what happens if a hundred drunk college kids storm in and demand ten beers apiece? Either the bartender will start to panic or the bouncer will have to kick them out. In this case, Cloudflare is the bouncer. They stand in between you and your favorite websites to ensure that malicious or excessive traffic is stopped before it can do real damage. Although Cloudflare isn’t the only company that provides this service, they’re one of the most prominent players in the network security industry — estimated to monitor almost 16% of global web traffic alone.

DDoS attacks are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to hacking, and although cyberattacks are always a concern for software engineers, it’s common for systems to fail simply because of poor design. Take the botched launch of the U.S. HealthCare.gov website in 2013, for example. The website crashed almost immediately when nearly three million Americans tried to sign up for health insurance on the first day that it was available. In its entire first week, it’s estimated that only one percent of people interested in purchasing health coverage were able to enroll on HealthCare.gov.

Perhaps the biggest issue was that its development team grossly underestimated the number of people that would attempt to use the website. A day before it was launched, a test done by government contractors showed that HealthCare.gov slowed down when faced with only several thousand concurrent users — nowhere close to the hundreds of thousands of people that would simultaneously access the site in the coming days. One of the reasons for this was because of how inefficient it was at serving users information from its database. Per a 2014 Time Magazine report:

HealthCare.gov had been constructed so that every time a user had to get information from the website's vast database, the website had to make what's called a query into that database. Well-constructed, high-volume sites, especially e-commerce sites, will instead store or assemble the most frequently accessed information in a layer above the entire database, called a cache.

Back to our alcohol analogy, caching is akin to pre-batching cocktails before service. When customers ask for one of the pre-made drinks, the bartender can just give it to them as opposed to mixing one from scratch every time. This is the same with websites; instead of needing to synthesize random bits and pieces of data strewn across a database, the cache provides a neat repository of pre-arranged data for the website to quickly serve to a user.

The trade-off here is that the user won’t be served fresh data from the cache because it might only be updated, say, every hour. Having a large delay between updates might not be great for a website that needs to show real-time data, like a sports website covering every play of the Super Bowl, but it can work well for sites that consistently show the same information, like an FAQ page.

The problem is that adding a feature like caching takes work, and when there are tight deadlines, us programmers sometimes try to minimize the work that has to be done by taking shortcuts. Whether that means not documenting code, not testing code thoroughly, writing code that doesn’t scale well, or in the case of HealthCare.gov, all three of these — we end up with something called “technical debt”.

It’s a figurative debt that accumulates over time from these poor decisions, and it implies that someone down the line will have to pay to absolve the sins that the software development team committed during the early stages of development. HealthCare.gov embodied technical debt in the most literal sense. Although its initial budget was just shy of $100 million, it ended up costing American taxpayers an astounding $1.7 billion. While the total cost cannot be entirely attributed to its initial technological failure, it’s likely that implementing a more scalable system architecture from the beginning could have saved the U.S. government significant time and money.

Understanding technical debt

So, why not just write good code from the start? You ask. It can’t be that hard.

This is a completely fair question, and I think that the best way to answer it is to show you firsthand the thought process of a software engineer building an app from scratch. Technical debt isn’t always a result of laziness, but often comes from genuine oversights or from the use of outdated software in a rapidly evolving landscape of programming languages and tools.

I want you to imagine that the year is 2010 and that you’re a programmer working on the very first version of Instagram. The other engineers on the team have already laid the groundwork for you; they’ve written the code that allows users to upload photos, follow their friends, and scroll endlessly through their feed. Your only job for the week is to make sure that users can comment on each others’ posts.

Easy enough, you think.

A tinge of stress hits you as you realize that launch day is only a couple weeks away. Not only do you need to add this feature quickly, you also need to ensure that thousands of people will be able to post comments when the app is live. Uh oh. Even though it’s almost midnight and you’re still at the office, you decide to spend a minute at the whiteboard on your way out to plan everything you’re going to code the next day.

The user interface might be the first thought that comes to your mind. At minimum, you’ll need to add a little box under each post that allows a user to type in some text. When they hit the submit button, their comment should be saved to a database. Now, when a user views a post, you can retrieve all of that post’s comments from the database to display underneath it. This is where it gets tricky. There are a couple of ways that you can store comments in the database, and depending on what method you choose, you’ll either be in for a relatively pleasant development process later on or a world of pain.

For simplicity’s sake, we can think of the database as a big Excel spreadsheet. Each column will store some unique information about each post, like the date it was posted or the user who uploaded it. The database will need to store similar information about each comment, so we’ll split our spreadsheet into two pages: posts and comments.

The first way that you could store comments would be to add a column to the posts page called “comments”. That column would store a list of unique ID numbers, where each ID corresponds to a different comment. These IDs function a bit like phone numbers in that every phone number in your contacts corresponds to a different person. When you text one of your friends to see if they’re in town, you’re using their unique number to asynchronously retrieve information about them, much like how ID numbers allow the database to look up information that’s stored across different pages.

In computer science, this method of storing comments would be classified as a one-to-many relationship. On one post, we store many comments. Let’s compare that to the inverse method: using a many-to-one relationship. On each comment, we’ll store the ID of its corresponding post. That way, when we want to retrieve all of a post’s comments, we can just filter all comments in the database by those that have a certain post ID attached to it.

But wait, you say. Isn’t the second method slower?

After all, we would need to filter through every single comment that has ever been posted — every time a user views a post. This is a valid concern, but consider the following scenario if we use a one-to-many relationship. Suppose a hypothetical user by the name of Hailey Welch posts an unexpectedly hilarious video on her account. The post ends up going viral, and by the next morning, over a million people have commented on it. In our Excel database, roughly one million comment IDs will be stored in a single bloated row. Not only will this be extraordinarily cumbersome to work with as a software engineer, it will drastically slow down the rate at which we can transfer information from the database to our app.

By storing comment IDs in a single list, we’ve lost the ability to break it into smaller chunks that can be loaded sequentially, forcing the database to load all one million comments at once. In other words, loading data using this method is like trying to eat a footlong Subway sandwich in one gigantic bite instead of patiently nibbling at it like a normal person.

Using a many-to-one relationship saves us from this problem. Because comments are being modularly stored in their own page instead of an inseparable list, we can ask the database to only send over, say, ten comments at a time. This technique is called “lazy loading”. If you’ve ever scrolled to the bottom of an Instagram comment section, you’ve probably noticed there’s a slight delay before the next comments appear. This is because the website needs a moment to pull the next batch of comments from the database, and it will get very nervous if you keep swiping repeatedly while it tries to do this. If you ever become frustrated because it’s taking too long, please know that the website has had a long day and is trying its best.

In this example, we’ve barely scratched the surface of how commenting is realistically implemented on massive social media sites, but the point is to emphasize the importance and difficulty of getting the foundations of a system right. As we saw with the HealthCare.gov website, one wrong technical decision at a fundamental level can have disastrous consequences. Optimally, no user should notice anything amiss, but this is much easier said than done.

Working on software at a large scale is like building a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle. It can be a meticulous, slow, frustrating process, but I think that’s also where many programmers find the attraction. There's a certain fun in studying each little piece, flipping it over and over again to find the correct orientation, and sometimes, scrapping the whole thing and just starting from scratch. Every piece of software in existence has been built on this principle of constant revision, and it’s remarkable that despite the occasional hiccup, the systems that we use day-to-day hold up as well as they do. As long as there are people writing code, there will be tech debt; it’s the inevitable cost of living in an age that is as technologically advanced as the one we’re in now. Tech debt might not ever be completely eliminated, but it’s what props up both the necessities and the luxuries of life in the modern world.

View our sources for this piece here.

“Don’t go any closer, or you might scare him away,” she told me.

The kitten pawed hesitantly at the newspaper-lined mesh, but the tuna at the opposite end of the cage proved to be too enticing. It stepped inside. It had been almost half an hour since Coulter had set up the trap, but her patience finally paid off. The trap sprung.

Time had been running out for Coulter to catch the kittens in this colony, as they were nearing the age at which they could not be socialized anymore. Cats who are not acclimated to human contact are forced to spend the remainder of their lives outdoors without the care of a permanent owner. On the street, these cats can suffer from abuse, diseases, and other hazards such as freezing temperatures or sweltering heat waves. In addition, they can threaten local wildlife such as some endangered species of birds.

This colony of cats in Northwest Philadelphia is just one of hundreds throughout the city — which provides a glimpse into the widespread issue of stray and feral cat populations spiraling out of control in densely populated areas. According to Philadelphia’s Animal Care and Control Team (ACCT), roughly 400,000 stray and feral cats live outdoors. Trapped cats are usually taken to a veterinarian, where they are temporarily sedated, vaccinated, and cleaned before they are put up for adoption. However, this tuxedo kitten wasn’t old enough to undergo involved medical treatment.

“I just can’t see putting this cat under anesthesia because he’s so little,” said Coulter. “I’m more comfortable when they’re three pounds — a little bigger.”

Kittens in this situation can stay in a shelter until they’re ready to receive treatment, such as at the facilities of animal care organizations like The Cat Collaborative (TCC), where Coulter works as a volunteer outreach coordinator. To learn more about the stray cat problem and how these organizations work, we spent a day with volunteers from TCC. In addition to this article, we produced a mini-doc that you can watch below.

The history of stray cats

To understand why stray and feral cats became so prevalent in cities like Philadelphia, we can look at their history. Cats were domesticated as early as 10,000 years ago in the Middle East during the Neolithic Period, which was marked by the shift from the nomadic, hunter-gatherer lifestyle to more permanent agricultural communities. In addition to being social companions, cats served a practical purpose to humans by killing pests, which could harm grain production, for example.

Cats’ native claim to Mesopotamia explains why residents of cities like Istanbul not only tolerate, but actively embrace their massive stray cat population. Their prolonged existence likely enabled the local ecology to develop in such a way that cats no longer pose a threat to nearby wildlife, which is not the case in other parts of the world.

In places like Philadelphia, cats are a relatively new development. After clambering aboard the ships of early European colonialists, cats arrived in North America during the mid-1600s. As they quickly populated the East Coast, the number of strays in large cities drastically increased — a pattern that continues to persist. Interestingly, Philadelphia has a rich history of helping stray or otherwise neglected animals. For example, the Morris Animal Refuge was founded in 1874, which made it one of the first animal care organizations in the United States.

Fixing the stray cat problem

Local organizations such as The Cat Collaborative follow in the footsteps of early animal care groups, nowadays armed with more advanced methods of rescuing strays. TCC practices a method called TNR, which stands for trap, neuter, and return, release, or respond — depending on the organization. The goal of TNR is to get as many cats off of the street as possible while simultaneously slowing their population growth.

In practice, TNR groups can face a number of challenges, ranging from coordinating with cat caretakers across multiple communities to finding a permanent home for a cat once it’s been rescued. When all goes smoothly, TNR can greatly improve stray cats’ quality of life and reduce their population growth. However, the entire process is highly resource-intensive. Kathy Jordan, founder of animal care organizations Green Street Rescue and Le Cat Café, told us that her groups are losing money — spending up to $15,000 per month on operating costs.

“We’re all fighting so hard for the same thing,” said Julianne Davis, the outreach coordinator at TCC. “Everyone is a volunteer … they are taking every hour they have for cats. They really want the best outcome for the cats in Philly.”

However, TNR has sparked controversy amongst the scientific community and wildlife advocacy groups for being ineffective at a large scale due to the sheer rate at which cats reproduce. According to the American Bird Conservancy:

Rather than immediately reducing numbers through removal, TNR practitioners hope to slowly reduce populations over time. The scientific evidence regarding TNR clearly indicates that TNR programs are not an effective tool to reduce feral cat populations. Rather than slowly disappearing, studies have shown that feral cat colonies persist and may actually increase in size.

We can see this effect by simulating the growth of a cat colony and observing the effects of TNR at varying levels of coverage. In the graph below, we model the month-over-month growth of the colony, representing each animal with a square. Starting with just one pregnant female cat and no human intervention, the population can balloon to almost a hundred in only two years.

On the other hand, if three-quarters of cats are trapped and fixed one year into the existence of the colony, the population growth is greatly subdued — indicating a success for TNR.

However, the vast majority of cats must undergo TNR in order for it to be effective. According to a 2004 study, at least 75% of cats must be trapped and fixed in order for the population to be controlled. The figure below shows what could happen if only 20% of a cat colony undergoes TNR.

To date, The Cat Collaborative has rescued almost 14,000 cats in Philadelphia. Given that there are close to 400,000 stray cats in the region, it represents progress but indicates that there is still more work to be done. In addition to ramping up rescue efforts, multiple members of TCC stressed the importance of educating the general public about the stray cat problem in order to solve it.

“I wish people would recognize how infant-like these animals are, and how little able they are to take care of themselves,” said Paul Gerber, a cat trapper at TCC and former schoolteacher. “As successful as we are, we can’t solve the problem — we can only help the cats that we find. … If more members of the communities where the need was were pitching in, you might see a reversal of this.”

Special thanks to Teo Genera for contributing to this piece as a videographer. View our sources and further reading for this piece here.

“My mom was worried about me when I was a baby because I was so sick,” said Avila, in an interview. “She took me to the hospital. The doctors made clapping noises, but I couldn’t hear them.”

Medicine was scarce for sick children who grew up during the Nicaraguan Revolution, a brutal conflict that spanned from the early 1960s to 1990. Common illnesses like ear infections and meningitis could cause permanent hearing loss if left untreated. Unfortunately, the decades-long war had plunged the country deep into poverty, depriving thousands of children like Avila from the medical care they needed.

Avila spent her youth isolated from others affected by hearing loss, as deaf communities in Nicaragua were almost nonexistent up until the revolution. As a result, she never learnt complex sign language. Instead, Avila spelled out words letter-by-letter with her hands. She had no idea that a little over a hundred miles away in Managua, the nation’s capital, deaf schoolchildren were not only forming their own community, but inventing their own sign language. Later named Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL), it is the only case in recorded history of a language being created almost entirely from scratch.

Avila would only find out about this new language when she was nineteen years old. She was at home when she received a knock at the door from a man who she had never met before. Strangely, the man was American. He had a long, thin face, adorned with wiry metal glasses perched above a graying goatee. His name was James Shepard-Kegl, and he had helped establish a boarding school for deaf children in Bluefields, a city in southeastern Nicaragua. He had a proposition for Avila.

Shepard-Kegl offered Avila the chance to study at the boarding school, where Nicaraguan Sign Language was the standard language for all students and faculty. However, she would have to leave behind her family and the small town that she had known her entire life, only to be immersed in a language that was unlike anything she had ever seen before. The transition would be difficult, but Avila agreed. In 1999, she packed up her bags and boarded a plane to Bluefields.

It was a decision that would change her life forever.

An unprecedented language

Avila was greeted by a sea of grade schoolers dressed in smart white-collared uniforms when she arrived. She watched the children sign to each other effortlessly, their hands flitting and contorting so quickly that you might miss an entire sentence if you blinked. Shepard-Kegl lectured enthusiastically, either standing or sitting half-perched atop a table at the front of the classroom during lessons.

His arms swooped and carved the air as he narrated the great discoveries of Babar the Elephant and the sheer terror of Goldilocks coming face-to-face with three gargantuan bears. His signs conjured fantastical images in the minds of his students, but to Avila, his gestures were just that—gestures.

“I was a little bit shy and embarrassed because I was so new to signing still,” said Avila. “But I continued learning.”

Aside from learning the basic vocabulary, she would have to master the more difficult techniques of a language that had grown remarkably complex in merely thirty years. One such technique is spatial modulation, which allows the signer to modify the meaning of a word by adjusting where they perform the sign relative to their body. You can see an example of this in the pictures below by comparing the orientation of the signer on the left-hand side to their orientation on the right-hand side.

On the left, the signer makes the neutral signs for the verbs “see” (top-left) and “pay” (bottom-left). On the right, she makes the same signs, but this time on the left side of her body. This indicates that the same person was both seen and paid—a useful tool for distinguishing between multiple characters in a story, for example.

Spatial modulation was only one of the countless new additions to Nicaraguan Sign Language at the time. Younger speakers like Avila used it fluidly in conversation, but the people who invented the language never used spatial modulation at all. In that sense, NSL was like a time machine. By closely observing each generation of its speakers, you could watch a language evolve right before your eyes. This made it a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for scientists.

Dr. Ann Senghas, a burgeoning psychologist from Massachusetts, was one of the few researchers to capitalize on this historic moment. She had been flying to Nicaragua every summer to document NSL since Avila was in elementary school, but even she had arrived late to the scene. The language had been born years earlier in the mid-1970s at a special education school in Managua, which had made national history by bringing hundreds of deaf Nicaraguan children together for the first time.

Since these children were forced to read teachers’ lips to understand lessons, the school had unintentionally created the perfect conditions for a more efficient mode of communication to develop. Playgrounds, lunchrooms, and school buses all became indispensable channels for students to share the gestures they’d invented with each other. What had begun as an eclectic smattering of motions eventually settled into a cohesive lexicon, like a vast network of tributaries melding into a single current.

“Nobody taught these people [the students] to sign,” said Senghas, in a lecture. “The teachers at the school used Spanish, which they couldn’t hear.”

The current of Nicaraguan Sign Language meandered but never stopped as it flowed from one generation of students to the next. Some signs died out while others remained for decades. A common set of grammar rules became widely adopted. The rise of regional dialects—while diversifying the vocabulary—frequently caused disputes when people from different parts of Nicaragua conversed.

Through thousands of interactions involving conflict and compromise, NSL was forced to evolve, subject to the same forces of natural selection that molded early primates into modern humans. In the words of Senghas:

We have two evolutionary processes on two really different time scales. We’ve got human reproduction and selection on one hand and language reproduction and selection on the other. … When languages reproduce, they send out all these accumulated symbols and patterns of combinations, but it’s a blurry and limited signal. … In the process of selection, it’s not the useful stuff but the learnable parts of the language that survive.

Although the younger generations determine which aspects of any language survive, it is only because of the oldest that they are birthed into existence at all. Since Nicaraguan Sign Language appeared “out of thin air”, to quote cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, some scientists have interpreted its development as strong evidence that humans possess an innate facility for learning and creating language.

Proponents of this theory argue that children would not be able to intuit language as quickly as they do without being born with a grasp of “universal grammar”. While this idea is still up for debate, Senghas and her team were able to shed light on the importance of community in the maturation of language. The researchers concluded that “neither children, nor adults—independent of each other—can create a language, but a community in which both are available … can provide the fertile ground out of which language grows.”

James Shepard-Kegl’s schoolhouse in Bluefields was as fertile a ground for Nicaraguan Sign Language as could be. He may not have developed the same intuition for NSL as those who were exposed to it as a toddler, but his strength lay in creating the environment for younger students to learn, to make mistakes, to befriend others like themselves, and to ultimately grow into capable adults unhindered by the shackles of linguistic isolation.

His efforts paid off. In the span of months, Avila had become fluent in NSL, able to narrate Babar the Elephant to a crowd of wide-eyed elementary schoolers with ease. Like her mentor, Avila began traveling across Nicaragua to locate and teach other deaf children about the language. When NSL was born, it was only used by several hundred students in Managua. Today, it is used by over 3,000 people in part due to the work of educators like Avila and Shepard-Kegl.

The growth of Nicaraguan Sign Language reveals what is possible when creativity is permitted to flourish, and when teachers learn from their students as much as their students learn from them. For Avila, her time at the school in Bluefields shaped not only how she expressed herself, but more importantly, the self that she had learnt to express.

“Now, what do I dream? I dream different stories,” said Avila. “I dream about how I want to dance. I dream about my boyfriend; someone to talk to. I dream about teaching little kids so they can get bigger, get married, and have their own lives.”

For years, Avila’s passions had been trapped by what she had lost at only nine months old. Nicaraguan Sign Language had simply opened the door.

View our sources for this piece here.

Ever since France had fallen to Nazi Germany in 1940, the government had developed a keen interest in surveying the country’s Jewish population. Collecting this data would allow them to expedite the rounding up and murder of Jews en masse — and coupled with recent advancements in computing — this process could be made alarmingly efficient. However, the French officer in charge of leading this survey found a way to covertly sabotage their plans.

René Carmille, an engineer by training, instructed his workers at the statistics bureau to “slow down as much as possible all activity concerning the Jews”, according to biographer Michel-Louis Lévy. If he was able to stall for long enough, tens of thousands of civilians across France could be saved. If Carmille was outed, he would be killed.

With each passing day, his supervisors grew more and more impatient as they waited for the census to be completed, and each day, Carmille invented new excuses to explain why the data had still not been collected. Perhaps France was simply too vast to survey in a reasonable amount of time, or maybe a faulty machine had prevented a person’s religion from being properly recorded. It seemed to be working, but it was only a matter of time before the Germans realized what he had done.

The systems of genocide

Carmille probably didn’t dream of sabotaging one of the most powerful regimes in the world while he was growing up. He likely envisioned a secure career in academia, pushing the boundaries of human knowledge as a research scientist or educator. After graduating with a degree in engineering from the prestigious École Polytechnique in Paris, he joined the French army, using his mathematics skills to streamline the production of weapons and munitions. It was here where he first stumbled upon punch cards — an innovation key to Germany’s orchestration of the Holocaust.

Invented in the early 1800s, punch cards are pieces of paper that store data by having holes mechanically punched in them. Combined with IBM’s “tabulating machine”, a device that automates the process of aggregating data from thousands of cards, these inventions constituted an enormous technological leap forward that laid the foundation for modern computers as we know them today. In other words, if punch cards were early USB sticks, tabulating machines were the computers that read them.

Tabulating machines were especially useful to Carmille, as his job required him to draw upon countless physical records in order to answer specific questions; for example, how many heavy mortar rounds had been manufactured in the past month? Instead of spending hours tallying up rounds by hand, Carmille could find the answer in a fraction of the time by using a tabulating machine.

The Nazis immediately saw the potential of this technology to track Jewish citizens at an unprecedented scale, and it was IBM who willingly supplied Germany these machines. IBM’s computers were used in every facet of the Holocaust, from identifying Jews in concentration camps to scheduling the trains that transported them there. In fact, the serial numbers tattooed on prisoners’ arms were originally generated by IBM’s numbering system. To quote historian Edwin Black, author of IBM and the Holocaust:

Without IBM, there would have always been a Holocaust of hundreds of thousands … but it was IBM that helped the Third Reich create the industrial, high-speed, six-million-person Holocaust, metering ghetto residents out to trains, then carefully scheduling those trains to concentration camps for murder and cremation within hours, thus clearing the way for the next shipment of victims — day and night.

The dangers of tabulating machines falling into the wrong hands were clear. However, as Hitler’s grasp widened to France, Carmille again looked to these systems for help — this time, to discreetly assemble a list of demobilized soldiers that could be quickly activated if the government decided to rebel against German occupation. Carmille needed to gather details about millions of citizens, including their ages, locations, and occupations. To accomplish this without alerting his higher-ups, he disguised this massive operation as simply a routine census.

Carmille’s plan miraculously flew undetected for months. In the summer of 1941, government officials put out a bid for the completion of a Jewish-specific census. Carmille saw this as another opportunity for sabotage. If another statistics service took the lead, the results could be catastrophic for Jews, especially if it was headed by a Nazi sympathizer. In a letter to Xavier Vallat, the Commissioner-General for Jewish Questions, Carmille wrote:

In the event that the model of the Jewish census is not definitively established, I am at your disposal to gather all the useful information on the Jews and ultimately to be enlightened exactly on the Jewish problem.

Vallat was convinced. Around Christmas, Carmille’s statistics department was selected for the job. For decades, Carmille had spent his life trying to serve the French government to the best of his ability, meticulously reshaping the country’s slow, antiquated systems into an efficient, well-oiled machine. Now, his objective was to throw a wrench into the cogs that he’d laid; to implode a behemoth that he himself had crafted. Failure was not an option, but it was the solution.

Over three hundred thousand lives depended on it.

The first ethical hacker

Thirty-one questions were included in the French census form of 1941, but one in particular stood out. The eleventh question bluntly asked citizens: “Are you of the Jewish race?”

While the government waited for Carmille to compile their responses into an easily accessible database of punch cards, police relied on handwritten records to persecute Jews in the meantime. In what was the largest French deportation of Jews during the Holocaust, 13,000 people were arrested and confined in the Vélodrome d'Hiver sports arena, roughly half a year after Carmille had been chosen to lead the census.

Carmille did everything he could to prevent the census from being completed on time. He ordered his team to slow down, intentionally misspelled names of Jewish citizens, and even reprogrammed his own machines to omit the answer to the eleventh question. According to his son Robert Carmille, who worked with him on the census, “we never punched column 11”. This defiant act earned him the title of the first ethical hacker. Beyond his efforts to delay the census, Carmille also helped over 20,000 Jews evade capture by supplying them with the identity cards of the deceased.

Unfortunately, Carmille couldn’t resist the mounting pressures of the government forever. He accepted requests to recruit people for forced labor in Germany, but in spite of his periodic compliance, German officials eventually grew wise to his role in the resistance. In 1944, Carmille was interrogated and tortured at Montluc Prison in Lyon for two days. He was subsequently sent to the Dachau concentration camp. Carmille passed away early the next year. During his imprisonment at Montluc, he composed a sonnet for his wife:

To my wife,

Thirty years have passed since our marriage.

The roses of love did not want to wither, and their golden petals have always dominated the languid calm sense of the wind of the storm.

We have spent all the time of this age in a world exploding into dislocated debris, where fury summoned by Satan showed in its ugliness what human anger is.

The great love of ours is also the redeemer of human madness.

The hope of our hearts has remained strong among all those who pass.

Although Carmille died before the war ended, the impact of his dissent lived on. In most countries occupied by Nazi Germany, such as Poland, the Netherlands, Greece, and Estonia, more than eight out of every ten Jews in each territory were deported and killed. In France, this number was fewer than three out of ten.

Though this difference cannot solely be ascribed to Carmille, it is likely that his sacrifice saved the lives of thousands of Jews. His commitment demonstrates that resistance need not always be glamorous, and that power need not always compromise one’s morals. It is true that Carmille was a brilliant engineer, but he will be remembered first as a selfless humanitarian.

View our sources for this piece here.