The Urgency of Hope in the Darkest Times

It feels like things are getting darker and darker. Over the past almost-two years the horrors of October 7 have been compounded by the horrors of the suffering of Gaza. The images that we see every day from Gaza are the stuff of nightmares: images of the living enduring immense suffering, images of the dead, lined up in rows, their loved ones sobbing over them. And perhaps the hardest to look at, the living dead—the emaciated, the maimed, the bereaved. But we cannot turn away.

Gazans cannot access food. Seeking aid from the shadowy and ineffective “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” (GHF)—a US-Israeli led effort meant to replace trusted international aid organizations—means taking your life in your hands. Quite simply, GHF has proved a disaster. Since opening up in May, more than 1,000 Gazans have died while seeking food. “We have purged our hearts of fear,” one father told the Guardian. “I need to bring food for my children so they don’t die of hunger.” Earlier this month, 170 aid groups called for GHF to be shut down. On Monday, 25 countries including Britain, France, and Canada, in addition to calling on Israel to end the war, called the current food system “drip feeding” in a joint statement. 

It feels almost absurd to have to write this, but hungry people waiting for food should not be shot at. Period.

These are the kinds of situations that the courageous winner of this year’s NIF Bill Goldman Truth to Power Prize, Adi Ronen Argov, forces herself to look at every day. She is the founder, fact-checker, and now editor-in-chief of The Daily File, a website that brings Israelis’ attention to daily violence in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip. She brings information and images of settler violence, army raids of Palestinian villages and towns, and, yes, Gazan children killed, starved, and injured, into the Israeli mainstream. Her website’s tag line is: “so that we won’t say we didn’t know.”

Most of the information Argov posts is not reported by Israeli media. But she believes that knowledge is a vital step towards understanding and recognizing the urgency of a political solution. And so she spends her time—this 59-year-old clinical psychologist, mother and a grandmother—watching the horrors that none of us wants to see, verifying details, and posting. If you want an example of the work she does, take a look at her post on Gaza from last Wednesday, July 16. But I will warn you: this is not content for the faint of heart. Indeed, it is heartbreaking, almost too painful to bear.

Argov is also active in protesting the war–her website has provided the images for the grassroots protests that have been taking place across the country: Israelis who refuse to look away from what their government is doing in Gaza are standing, silent, and holding signs of dead Gazan children. So that everyone will see. So that they won’t say they didn’t know. 

Argov was quoted by the Washington Post in an in-depth feature about these protests. “This war is a war of denial,” she told them. But the protests made it feel “felt like there was a light in the darkness,” she said, “like we were finally standing with humanity.”

This is what we are doing at the New Israel Fund. As dark as things get, we find the light in standing with humanity. 

We stand with Adi, her project, and her protest. And we are doing so much more. We continue to support organizations working to bring humanitarian relief to Gazans. We continue to support the Hostage Families Forum, which has adamantly opposed the war, including the ground operation into Deir al Balah that began this week. We are supporting Rabbis for Human Rights, who continue to help Palestinians stay on their land in the West Bank. The struggle for a different, better future doesn’t end when things are the darkest; it only gets more urgent. And as Standing Together’s activists—who led anti-starvation protests across Israel this week (in Tel Aviv, Be’er Sheva and Nazareth)—like to say: “Where there is struggle there is hope.”

It is more important than ever that we insist on hope—not as a last resort, but as the spark of inspiration for our struggle for peace and justice. 

In a  speech to the Knesset earlier this month, just before the vote that would determine whether he would be expelled from the parliament (he wasn’t) because of his statement that he was happy for the safe return home of both the hostages in Gaza and Palestinian prisoners in Israel, Palestinian citizen of Israel and Member of Knesset Ayman Odeh said this:

This is not Arabs against Jews, and not Jews against Arabs. Because only together will we defeat fascism and Kahanism, and build here a future of peace and democracy.  And for all—Jews and Arabs—there is a place in the circle of victory.

Ayman’s sentiments, in the face of his own impeachment, contain a message we know in our hearts: tomorrow can be better than today. Arabs and Jews were not born enemies. We also know that so much can change in the blink of an eye. For ill, but also for good.