My earliest childhood memory is still rather vivid. I recall passing my parents in the living room each evening after dinner as they sat glued to our old RCA television set. It was their ritual: watching Walter Cronkite, the anchor of The CBS Evening News. Night after night, he reported on the war in Vietnam, often relaying the body count of American soldiers.
I was too tiny to comprehend what Cronkite was saying, or even acknowledge what war was. But I knew something was amiss by the distressed expressions on my parents’ faces as they listened to Cronkite’s grave and measured cadence. I had four older brothers, and I now know my parents were terrified they’d be drafted and killed on a foreign field, thousands of miles from home.
Cronkite, I came to understand, was a serious newsman, but also an establishment man. He acknowledged that for years he had believed what the US government had told him and the rest of the media about Vietnam: that America and the South Vietnamese were on a path to victory over the communist North. That is, until he radically changed his view in the winter of 1968. While Cronkite embraced the fight against communism and understood the intervention—the news anchor, like millions in his audience (many of whom had taken their lead from student activists on campuses around the country, who were protesting America’s involvement in the conflict), eventually realized that the slaughter of American troops and Vietnamese civilians was not only part of a useless, cynical military exercise, but a vain political quagmire that had to end before it ripped American society in two, as it had already torn apart Vietnam.
Cronkite’s broadcasts, in time, would help turn much of the nation against the US presence in Southeast Asia. In February of 1968, after a visit to the frontlines of Hue—as succinctly described in a study of Cronkite’s outsize impact by Joel Achenbach in The Washington Post—Cronkite appeared on the air to say, “It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out [of the war]…. will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.” President Lyndon B. Johnson—along with my parents, I might add—was watching that night and was shaken by what he saw on the screen. Here was the person many called “the most trusted man in America,” inferring that the Pentagon had not only been lying, but needlessly placing US GIs in harm’s way. According to Bill Moyers, who had served as Johnson’s press secretary, the president shut off the TV and confided to his aides, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.”
I remember when the war ended in April of 1975—in American ignominy. Again, I was still too immature to take in the huge loss, but I do remember the effect it had on my small town, Caldwell, New Jersey. By then, I was wearing a copper bracelet engraved with the name of a local boy who was a P.O.W. I had swiped it from my brother’s top drawer. I remember my mother comforting other mothers in the A&P as she did her shopping, mothers whose sons hadn’t been as lucky as my brothers.
Why do I bring this up when discussing the war currently raging in the Middle East? Because it informed my worldview—and my career choice. In many ways, my childhood was shaped by the anxiety and horror of the Vietnam War and by the intensity and righteous outrage of the protests that accompanied it. I was enamored of the bumper stickers, the marches, the music, and the festivals that spawned a counterculture in which many young Americans no longer trusted their elders or any of their elected officials. Leading up to the fall of Saigon in April of 1975, came the revelations of the Watergate scandal. (G. Gordon Liddy, who led the Nixon administration’s illegal wiretapping scheme, was a local boy too; my mother had gone to tea with his mother who was rallying the locals for his defense.) By the time of Nixon’s resignation in August 1974—choosing to leave office instead of facing impeachment charges for obstructing justice and abuse of power—America’s faith in its leaders was in tatters, the establishment’s façade beginning to crack wide open.
I truly believe the American public never fully recovered from the Watergate mess, nor from the tremendously profound societal damage caused by a deeply unpopular war, the abandonment of returning veterans, the failed foreign policy in Southeast Asia, and the enduring distrust felt across the globe toward the American military establishment. I am not Freud, but I am sure that I chose to become a conflict journalist because the early backdrop of my life had been colored by war. My activism was ignited when I failed to understand why Black kids from Newark were being mowed down by the Viet Cong, but rich kids from the affluent New Jersey leafy neighborhoods I grew up in could go to college and beat the draft.
During my teenage years, I couldn’t figure out why the president refused to listen to the kids on the street, marching to stop the war—and why such an unpopular war took so long to end.
It all sounds too familiar.
I feel the same about the Israel-Hamas War. I have lost faith in the leaders of Israel and Palestine and the United States, and in the diplomats who supposedly guide the so-called international community. It is unfathomable to me that after the chants of “Never Again” in the wake of the Nazi genocide, after the African and Balkan genocides of the 1990s, after the recent decimations of Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Ukraine, more than 40,000 people who were alive last year at this time in Gaza are now dead; thousands of Palestinian children orphaned; hundreds of Israelis killed, tortured, or held hostage; messianic heads of state empowered to such an extent that we stand, in my view, poised on the brink of World War III.
Since October 7, 2023, I have tried to understand why the Israel-Hamas War has shaken me more—from afar—than any conflict I have covered up close, which amounts to nearly 18 wars, including three genocides, in 35 years. Surely, I have seen horror before. I have felt helpless before. I just got back from Ukraine last week in my role as CEO of a war crimes unit, having written about the war for this magazine as recently as 2022, 2023, and earlier this year.
But the Israel-Hamas War, in its way, seems qualitatively different.
To me, perhaps, I am looking through the lens of a five-decade moral hangover from Vietnam. I have lost faith in my own government, which didn’t listen to its people. In my view, and the view of many students, activists, and lawyers, the Biden administration has allowed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to conduct a war not only against Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran and its proxies, but one waged largely against civilians, a war seemingly without end. (Not that Donald Trump wouldn’t have done the same—or worse—given his wholesale embrace of the Israeli government during and after his time in office, along with his pattern of anti-Arab rhetoric, proposed bans against Muslim-majority countries, and recent threats of mass deportations.) In addition, just as I witnessed during the Vietnam era, I hear the voices of the people on the streets being drowned out by the droning arrogance of the powerful, the wealthy, and those who cynically have decided to use the war for their own political gain.
My sorrow over Gaza also springs from the fact that the first conflict I covered as a journalist (after a brief trip to Nicaragua) was, in fact, in Gaza. It was during the First Intifada, or Palestinian uprising, which began in 1987. My maiden 1989 trip to the Holy Land, arriving from London as the pink sun rose over Jerusalem, captivated me, as did the tangled complexity of the region’s history, people, politics, and demographics, which I began to study and research. I am an ardent critic of the policies of Netanyahu, but I am no fan of Hamas or Hezbollah, organizations that have used state terror and repression against their own civilians, not to mention committed unspeakable crimes against those of their enemies.
My mentor was the great Israeli lawyer, Felicia Langer. She was a Polish-born Israeli Holocaust survivor, and when I first met her, she was one of the few Jewish lawyers defending Palestinians in military court. She had emigrated to Israel after she came out of the concentration camps, full of fight and sorrow and a rabid hope for the future. She was an ardent communist. After Israel’s 1967 annexation of the West Bank and Gaza, she went to law school and decided to represent “the enemy.”
Hers was not a popular position. Her office was firebombed. She was spat upon in the street. But she believed, above all, in justice. And she imparted this to me. Her mantra was that you had to see injustice in order to understand it. Consequently, she impressed upon me the need for deep field research.
I have repeated what she told me so many times in my life as a reporter, a human rights advocate, and a war crimes researcher. Her parting words before she sent me off to Gaza and the West Bank for the first time, armed with my notebook full of contacts: “If you have the ability to go somewhere where bad things are happening, and write about them, then you have an obligation.” I took this to heart. She told me not to get hit by flying rocks; the First Intifada was known as the conflict of stones because, in those days, the Shabab (young boys) used slingshots against Israeli soldiers. She entrusted me to take accurate testimonies of everyday life. When my taxi let me out, alone, in Gaza City, I felt like I was entering a new world.
My first book, Against the Stranger, was about life amid the occupation, told from both the Israeli and Palestinian sides during that deadly period before the 1993–95 Oslo Peace Accords. I conducted three years of interviews with Jewish, Muslim, and Christian families, throughout Israel and the occupied territories. I grew up in a mixed Jewish and Christian community in New Jersey and had close Israeli friends and Jewish friends who went to pick pears on kibbutzim for the summer. So I was aghast when I witnessed a different Israel in the 1990s (that continues to today)—one that was deeply damaged by subjugating and humiliating those in the lands the nation’s authorities occupied, and by repeatedly breaking international law with impunity. I was also aghast when members of radicalized Palestinian factions calling themselves representatives of the people of Palestine, would systematically commit unspeakable acts against Israelis, or, later, when Hamas or the Palestinian Authority engaged in rampant corruption for their own gain, reportedly diverting funds meant for the Palestinian population.
When I spoke to right-wing Orthodox Jewish settlers working in Gaza to grow tomatoes in hothouses and swimming in the sea fully clothed, they swore to me that this land was theirs. When I spoke to Arabs who showed deeds to plots of land in the West Bank, now occupied by Israeli settlers, they swore to me that this land was theirs. Who was right? I saw Russian and Ethiopian immigrants who were not born Jewish but who had converted, who, having emigrated to Israel, now had more rights than the Palestinians who still held the keys to the houses from which their ancestors had been evicted in 1947. I saw the Shabab protesting, risking bullets and tear gas, slinging stones like a legion of Davids versus a mighty Goliath. Later, I interviewed the families of Palestinian suicide bombers and the families of their victims. Once, I spent time shuttling between the families of two 17-year-old girls, one Jewish, one Palestinian, who lived several miles away from each other, not far from Bethlehem. Their mothers were united in pain.
My life’s work, in a sense, was honed by those years researching my book on the First Intifada and the Second Intifada, which came a decade later. But what I was struck by was a deep sense of injustice and a violation of laws, which Langer and her colleagues worked on tirelessly. At the time of the First Gulf War, in 1990–91, I flew to Vienna to see Langer accept a major human rights award. But by then she was exhausted from her years filing motions and lawsuits in Israeli military courts, being mocked by judges. She had lost most cases she tried, but she had kept going. Shortly after that, she emigrated to Germany to teach law at Heidelberg University and live a life away from the occupation, which haunted her.
October 7 was a horrendous act of savagery. The sadistic glee with which the perpetrators carried out their carnage—captured on their own cell phones and Go-Pro cameras—was evil personified. But the plot and the execution of the October 7 plan by Hamas—as inexcusable as it was—did not, as the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres famously said, “happen in a vacuum.” Preceding it was not just the 1947 Nakba when Palestinians were expelled from their lands in the wake of the nascent Israeli state, but the First and Second Intifadas. The summer before 10/7, extremist West Bank settlers, seemingly in line with Netanyahu’s radical expansion policies, ran amok in the West Bank, burning Palestinian land, and terrorizing and killing civilians. What would it be like to be born in a land where you knew your people had no rights and were granted no dignity, and where you could not defend yourself? Somewhere where you did not have powerful friends like the United States or Germany or the United Kingdom? Generation after generation of Palestinian kids grew up scarred, bitter, angry, and broken.
In 2021–22, Vanity Fair gave me an unusual assignment to go to Gaza and not focus on the misery and deprivation, but to talk to millennials and members of Generation Z who were succeeding and thriving despite a blockade on both sides of the Gaza Strip by both Israel and Egypt. This is not to say their conditions were not miserable—they were. Daily electricity cuts; inability to leave Gaza for studies or workshops; even getting an Apple computer sent in was impossible. But I still met extraordinary—and extraordinarily resourceful—young people I believed were the key to Gaza’s future: a future beyond Hamas. I was awed by their talent, tenacity, and drive, despite the limits being placed on them at every turn.
The terrible events of October 7 traumatized Israeli society. They also destroyed any thread of hope that people like my young friends had for peace, or for living a life beyond the conflict. These were the people I was counting on for peace. Many are now dead. The Gaza Sky Geek was a computer coding academy whose cheerful headquarters, bearing signs from places the coders would never get to go—New York, Berlin, London—was a venue where I loved to hang out. But many of those young coders are dead or displaced. The music store and studio where I went to listen to my favorite rock band, Osprey V, is gone. These young people held the promise of the Palestine of tomorrow, one in which Israelis and Palestinians might coexist peacefully. But since the wanton destruction of Gaza—and the continuing hail of missiles and rockets that have been exchanged between Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Israel—that is simply not possible. It will not happen in the foreseeable future.
Over the past year, I’ve kept in touch with my Palestinian friends when their cell phones had battery power. Most have fled to Rafah, which means they left their homes behind (if they hadn’t already been reduced to rubble). One of the saddest stories I know happened to Ahmed Alnaouq, who was one of the young writers I met at a collective called #wearenotnumbers. Ahmed also founded a Facebook page called “Across The Wall,” which was translated into Hebrew, a peacebuilding space for young Israelis and Palestinians. He wanted to inhabit a world in which they weren’t slaughtering each other.
I instantly liked Ahmed—a tall, gentle, and kindhearted man who had just won an important scholarship to study in the UK. He spoke perfect English and came from a large, loving family. One beautiful August night, he took me to meet them in Deir al Balah, at the house where he was born and raised. Being with his family is one of the reasons I began my more recent research into why Palestinians, who had suffered so much, were still so resilient. A sociologist who studied Gaza for years told me it was precisely because of the Alnaouqs’ intensely close and loving family units that they had somehow been shielded from the pain of everyday living.
As the deadline approached for Ahmed to leave Gaza to begin his studies in London, he began to panic. He could not get an exit visa to leave. Finally, with calls to Ramallah, Washington, and Brussels, various friends of his (including a senior European Union official, the assistant secretary for human rights at the UN, and I) helped him cut through the bureaucracy. Ahmed was relieved to be in London and happy to be studying. But he was also torn in the way many Palestinians are when they leave their home. He missed his close-knit family, and he felt he should be doing more for the Palestinian cause.
After one of his brothers died of kidney disease in 2014 because he could not leave to get medical treatment outside of Gaza, the family bonds became even closer. When his mother got sick with cancer, Ahmed was in anguish because he could not go back due to the COVID-19 clampdown. She died in 2020, he later told me, because the Egyptian border closure forbade her from traveling for chemotherapy.
At dawn, last October 22—as I have described in a previous VF essay—20 members of Ahmed’s family were wiped out: his father, his two brothers, his three sisters, along with 14 nieces and nephews. The home where I had laughed and eaten and shared stories with his family was supposed to be in a safe zone. It had become a charnel house.
Ahmed was devastated. “Shame on you for providing a cover for my family’s massacre,” he wrote the next day on Twitter. “I will pursue you in the European Court of Justice.” When I reached him by phone in London he was not sleeping or eating, and was chain-smoking.
There are so many terrible stories that I can’t recount them here. While it’s difficult to get accurate statistics given the conditions, the UN estimates that as of April this war has claimed the lives of about 14,500 children, and has left 19,000 orphaned or separated from their parents. Save the Children estimates that 20,000 children are missing, and that more than 10 children per day in Gaza have lost one or both of their legs since the beginning of the conflict, which would total close to 4,000 children for the year. However experts believe that the real tolls are probably much higher, as those still buried under the rubble haven’t been accounted for, and untold numbers are being detained. The accounts of Gaza’s doctors are heart-wrenching, as some tell of hearing the agonizing screams of the kids they are treating when they have run out of painkillers, and they are unable to provide comfort because either their young patients’ parents are missing or dead.
Today, I corresponded with a man who lost his three sons a week before Christmas when a missile hit Gaza City’s Saint Porphyrius Greek Orthodox Church, where I have attended mass. “There is no future for me without my children,” he wrote on WhatsApp. How can anyone recover from such loss, and how can a society ever heal from such trauma? So, too, Israeli society will be forever damaged by its own mounting losses. And both sides, I dare say, will be ravaged by the moral weight of their leaders’ decisions to call for the killing of so many “enemies,” with such disregard for their humanity.
Looking back on my 35 years working in Israel and Palestine, I saw hope ebb and flow. I saw Palestinian kids grow up, some of whom I knew when they were toddlers, imprisoned or killed. I saw Israeli friends, staunchly committed to peace, get fed up and leave the country. At one time, if someone asked me where solutions lay for Israel and Palestine, I might have been able to analyze various strategies to end this war without end. I could talk about peacemakers. I could thread narratives. Now, one year after the infamous and terrible day of October 7, I can no longer do it. There has been too much blood.
Janine di Giovanni is the CEO and executive director of the Reckoning Project and the author of nine books, the latest of which is The Vanishing: Faith, Loss and the Twilight of Christianity in the Middle East. She has worked in Gaza since 1989.
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