Israel Killed the Family Next Door. I Don't Know How to Tell My Kids They'll Never Be Safe

By Mohammed Azaiza, Haaretz

21 November 19

t 5:45 A.M. last Tuesday the phone rang; it was the man who drives my children to school. Good morning, he said. Today there is no school. Why? I asked. They assassinated Baha Abu al-Ata, and the Education Ministry announced that school was canceled today. 

The phone woke my son Karim, a third grader, who asked who had called. It’s Yihye, the driver, I said. He told me there’s no school today. He smiled as if he’d won a prize, and didn’t even bother to ask why school had been canceled. As we were talking I glanced at some news websites and understood that we were facing a new escalation, which might or might not be similar to the previous one. 

When we began to hear explosions near the city, Karim’s spontaneous smile was replaced by a look of worry and fear. “Is it war, Dad?” he asked. I told him it wasn’t war and there was no reason to worry, everything would be OK. I wasn’t certain about my answer, but I didn’t know how to explain the essence of life in the Gaza Strip to my son. After all, in Gaza our fate is not in our hands. And every time we hear an explosion our thoughts start to race — where did the bombs fall this time? Who was killed? Who was wounded? 

The kids were looking at me with worried faces that were begging me to protect them from fear and death. But how can we protect them? Where can we take them? There are no bomb shelters in Gaza, no safe place. 

That is the terrible feeling that consumes me with every escalation, the helplessness at being unable to protect what’s most precious to you. You go from room to room, trying to gain a little more time of laughter and mischief with the children, but every boom reminds you that you live in Gaza. Your mind replays all the memories, hopes and challenges, goes through what you tried to do and what you might be planning, and remembers that while death is not painful to the dead, it scathes the living. 

On the night before the last day of the escalation, Thursday, I was woken at 1:30 A.M. by an explosion that shook the whole of Dir al-Balah. When I realized that the kids hadn’t woken up, sparing me their haunted looks, I let out a sigh of relief. But I asked myself if this nightmare was ever going to end. 

At the same time I heard the ambulance sirens and the rumors spread like wildfire — they bombed a house with everyone inside it. It was the Asoarka family. Eight people lost their lives, including children. There were pictures of people like me, who were searching for the missing in the sands, pulling children out of their beds and throwing them on the mattresses of the dead. As if we were living in a different planet. 

I remained awake and when the crime was revealed at sunrise, the shock was heavy. It was a helpless family that I knew well. A simple family that lived in tin shacks and had a hard life even without Israeli planes dropping bombs on them. When they finished removing the bodies it turned out that only two of the children, a 1-month-old baby and a girl, were still alive. 

News cameras were following the girl in the hospital; what happened, how do you feel, they asked. In my heart I answered for her — I lost my family, I’m alone, why did they bomb us? The girl told the journalists that she had been afraid and couldn’t sleep, that she fled with the first bombing and later the whole place was destroyed. I won’t see my father, my mother, my siblings anymore, I’ve lost all of them, she said. 

I asked myself why the army had bombed this family. And then I read that the army explained there had been a mistake. A mistake? This is a terrible sin, a crime that should remain on everyone’s conscience, including the international community, which presumably will do nothing. 

Every experience is meant to teach you something, even a war in Gaza. The lesson I learned was that life is cheap and worthless, an equation whose solution is zero. Because you might be the next mistaken target, life is meaningless. The work you love, your friends, the possessions you’ve accumulated, your clothing, the laughter of your children, your home, the plants you’re growing, even your morning coffee suddenly seem worthless. 

The fighting has died down and there’s no way of knowing whether the next round is close or not. We’ve returned to “routine”: The electricity is still on for eight hours and off for the next eight hours, and there’s no potable water in our faucets. The unemployment and poverty rates are still rising, the economic situation is terrible; everyone is living with their own economic and emotional crises. Israel and the world are trying to ignore the situation and Gaza and deal with the symptoms. Israel has for years maintained a closure on the Gaza Strip, one of the most densely populated places in the world, and its trapped residents are expected to take responsibility for their harsh lives. 

What’s the solution? The first answer that occurs to a prisoner is to run. Shall I follow in the footsteps of one of my friends and flee to Europe? There my children will wake up safe and ride their bikes to school, without fear or worry, in a country governed with justice, equality and the rule of law. Or perhaps I should wait in Gaza for my turn to be a target? 

Despite everything Gaza lives in the hearts of Gazans, who yearn for freedom and peace. The boys and girls of Gaza are waiting for a better future and know that it is planted in the Strip. 

Trump's Committee to Protect the President

By Russell Berman, The Atlantic

21 November 19

Republicans doing the president’s bidding at the House impeachment hearing were focused less on the truth than on how it got out—like a modern-day version of Richard Nixon’s infamous leak patrol.

ast week’s Republican rallying cry on impeachment was “Hearsay!” By this morning, the focus had turned back to the whistle-blower who started it all.

The consensus GOP retort to the first three public witnesses in the House impeachment inquiry—Ambassadors William Taylor and Marie Yovanovitch, and George Kent, a deputy secretary of state—was that none of them had direct, firsthand knowledge of President Donald Trump’s alleged attempt to condition aid to Ukraine on an investigation into his political rival.

When they arrived at the Capitol this morning, however, Republicans could no longer make that complaint. The witnesses before the House Intelligence Committee—Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman of the National Security Council and Jennifer Williams, a special adviser to Vice President Mike Pence—were both listening in on the July 25 call in which Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to do him “a favor” by pursuing an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son.

As it turned out, the committee’s top Republican, Representative Devin Nunes of California, wasn’t much interested in that now-infamous call; instead, he most wanted to know who Williams and Vindman had told about it.

For the past three years, Nunes has used his perch on the Intelligence Committee—first as chairman and now as ranking member—to do Trump’s bidding. That continued this morning, as he used his question time to try to get first Williams and then Vindman to publicly identify the whistle-blower whose complaint set off the investigation that has become an impeachment inquiry into the president. Nunes asked both witnesses whether they had spoken with anyone in the press about the call. Both replied that they had not. Nunes then asked who inside or outside the White House each of them had spoken with in the immediate aftermath of the July 25 call between Trump and Zelensky. Williams replied that she had spoken with no one about it, so Nunes quickly moved on to Vindman, and that’s where it got interesting.

“Yes, I did,” he replied. “My core function is to coordinate U.S. government policy, and I spoke to two individuals with regards to providing some sort of readout of the call.” Both, he explained, were “cleared U.S. government officials with the appropriate need to know.”

Vindman said one of those individuals was Kent, the deputy assistant secretary of state who testified last week. The other was “an individual in the intelligence community.”

When Nunes asked him to identify that person, Committee Chairman Adam Schiff interjected. “We need to protect the whistle-blower,” the Democrat said. “Please stop. I want to make sure that there is no effort to out the whistle-blower through these proceedings.”

He advised Vindman to be careful, and Vindman listened. After consulting his lawyer, he said he had been advised “not to answer specific questions about members of the intelligence community.”

After another minute of protest, Nunes moved on, but his ally Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio later took up the same line of questioning, with a similar result.

Both Schiff and Vindman have said they do not know the identity of the whistle-blower, but the exchange left little doubt that the person Vindman spoke with in the intelligence community is the one who ended up filing the initial complaint. The whistle-blower’s employment in the intelligence community was established in the complaint, which also said that the whistle-blower had heard about the July 25 call from multiple officials in the White House.

As of this writing, Nunes and Jordan were not successful in their efforts to out the whistle-blower, but their very public attempt—like the many tweets Trump has sent criticizing the person—could have a chilling effect on future whistle-blowers, who must decide whether to report wrongdoing up the chain of command. Indeed, that may have been the intent of the GOP effort.

Vindman did not file a formal whistle-blower complaint, but he did report his concerns about the Trump-Zelensky call and other meetings involving Ukraine to lawyers in the National Security Council. His appearance and testimony this morning made plain the risks he faced in doing so. Vindman is a decorated military veteran who was wounded serving the nation in Afghanistan, and is still currently serving in the White House even as he testifies against the commander in chief. Conservative loyalists of the president have used Vindman’s Ukrainian heritage—his family fled the Soviet Union for the United States when he was 4 years old—to question his loyalty. Shortly before the hearing began, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Army had made preparations to move Vindman and his family to a military base to secure their physical safety if necessary. And while the hearing was going on, the White House issued a tweet undermining the credibility of one of its own employees. The GOP committee counsel, Steve Castor, pressed Vindman to detail offers he rejected to become Ukraine’s defense minister. “I immediately dismissed these offers, did not entertain them at all,” he replied.

Vindman appeared, as is customary for military officers on Capitol Hill, in his dress uniform, but his nerves showed at the beginning of the hearing. If Taylor, Kent, and Yovanovitch were the polished veteran diplomats easily sharing their stories with Congress, Vindman seemed to represent the rest of us. His hands shook as he read his opening statement, and, speaking quickly, he omitted a few of the more vivid adjectives that were included in the written version he submitted before the committee. But Vindman did not deviate from the most powerful portion of his testimony, when he addressed his father—and by implication, the attacks against him—at the end. He noted that his father had fled a country, the Soviet Union, where he would likely have been killed for doing what his son was doing today. “Dad, do not worry,” Vindman said. “I will be fine telling the truth.”

A Democratic congresswoman, Representative Jackie Speier of California, told him later in the hearing that his testimony had “sent chills up and down my spine.”

Vindman grew more comfortable as the hearing went on. When he was asked what languages he spoke, he drew laughs when he replied, “I speak Russian, Ukrainian, and a little bit of English.” And when Nunes addressed him as “Mr. Vindman,” he corrected him. “Ranking Member, it’s Lieutenant Colonel Vindman, please,” Vindman told the Republican.

Nunes honored his request, but it did not stop either him or his Republican colleagues from their apparent goal: largely ignoring the substance of Vindman’s testimony and instead using him as a pathway to exposing the whistle-blower. Their pursuit wasn’t so much the truth as it was discovering how the truth got out.

A crucial piece of the Watergate scandal was the revelation that President Richard Nixon, paranoid about disloyalty in the government, had created a “plumbers unit” in the White House—a group charged with plugging leaks that ended up breaking into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters and bringing down his presidency.

In 2019, President Trump seems to have found his own plumbers down the street—right there in the House Republican conference on Capitol Hill.