SHARE:
On a cold night in February this year, local journalists gathered on the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery to light candles for journalists killed in Gaza, Israel and Lebanon. Four months had then passed since Oct. 7, 2023, when the militant group Hamas killed an estimated 1,200 people in Israel, and Israel responded with ground and air attacks that have killed at least 41,788 people in Gaza to date, including close to 16,500 children.
The scene among the journalists at the art gallery that night was bittersweet because it held two truths at once: the simple joys of collegiality intermingled with the sad facts of what brought us together. Many in attendance worked for regional publications like The Tyee, where our primary focus lies on the part of the world known as British Columbia. While we lack direct influence on or expertise in the unfolding events in the Middle East, the horrific news from Gaza and Israel has been an ongoing presence in our newsroom, which includes staff across B.C. and Canada.
“To be truly human we must not dehumanize,” Tyee editor-in-chief David Beers wrote last October, one week after the Oct. 7 attacks. “As we have been reminded this past week, to dehumanize is to prepare the way for the slaughter of innocents.”
Those words resonate while trying to make sense of the recent news from Israel, whose government has expanded its ground and aerial attacks to Beirut, Lebanon. The Israel war cabinet recently vowed a strong response to Iran’s missile attack on Israel last week.
It's now one year to the day since the Hamas attack on Israel. Here are 12 Tyee pieces that we have published over the past year in response to the war. We are grateful for the ongoing support of Tyee readers who make this work possible.
How a Vancouver Restaurant Raised Thousands for Aid in Gaza
At the heart of their efforts: bowls of mujaddarah, a Palestinian favourite.
By Jen St. Denis
Eager to find a way to share their Palestinian culture when they immigrated to Canada, Sobhi Al-Zobaidi and Tamam Zobaidi decided to open a restaurant. Located in Vancouver’s Hastings-Sunrise neighbourhood, the spot is called Tamam Fine Palestinian Cuisine. The owners have been holding regular Sunday fundraisers in the restaurant to raise money for aid in Gaza.
To watch the war in their homeland unfold from thousands of kilometres away has been painful, the couple told The Tyee.
“It’s hurting us,” Al-Zobaidi told Jen St. Denis. He grew up in Ramallah in the West Bank. “Being here, and talking to our family back home in Palestine, and feeling unable to do anything.”
At the time of St. Denis’s reporting, the couple had raised $20,000 in a four-hour fundraiser. And they have held many more such events since.
How a Palestinian Injured in a Drone Strike Came to Canada
Mohammed Alzaza was seriously wounded at 15. An international Jewish community stepped in to help.
By Amanda Follett Hosgood
Mohammed Alzaza grew up in Gaza City, where his family still lives. When Amanda Follett Hosgood met him in Vancouver’s Kitsilano neighbourhood last fall, his family was sheltering in a daycare after their house had been bombed.
“I’m very lucky, because I’m here. But my body’s here. My heart, my mind, is with a lot of people that have the same medical needs, surgery needs,” he told Follett Hosgood.
“Right now, in Gaza, no water, no food. At the same time, bombs everywhere.”
Alzaza was playing soccer with his cousin during Ramadan in August 2011 when a drone strike hit the boys and left Alzaza, then 15, with third-degree burns and broken bones. His cousin died, but Alzaza survived, in terrible pain and in need of medical treatment. Members of the Vancouver chapter of Independent Jewish Voices co-sponsored Alzaza as a refugee to Canada with the BC Muslim Association, and he has since undergone extensive medical rehabilitation since his arrival in Canada in February 2023.
The Agonizing Decision to Yank a Play in Vancouver
War, art and the PuSh Festival decision to cancel ‘The Runner.’
By Dorothy Woodend
Tyee culture editor Dorothy Woodend is no stranger to how challenging it can be to hold space for inclusive public dialogue when community tensions are high. In a January essay on the difficult decision of the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival to pull a play from its 2024 program because of its depiction of Palestinian people in a time of heightened global conflict, Woodend shared her experiences with screening a controversial film as the former director of programming for the DOXA Documentary Film Festival.
A few days before the scheduled screening of a film called Tears for Gaza, Woodend received a Facebook message to her personal account full of obscenities, threatening both her and DOXA if they went ahead with the screening.
“To be honest, I was scared,” Woodend wrote. “But in conversation with the rest of the festival team, we decided to go on with the screening. To do otherwise would have felt like a capitulation or, worse, a rejection of what the festival was truly about: showing films that demonstrated the fullest scope of human experience. I still remember the overwhelming dread in the pit of my stomach on the day of the event.”
On the day of the screening, she continued, “Something unexpected happened. After the screening, people stayed for hours, talking to one another. I think the extended gathering that took place after the screening was, in part, because the intensely harrowing nature of the film placed everyone in the theatre in a shared space of trauma and suffering. People spoke openly about how they felt as well as what they thought might offer a way forward.”
The PuSh Festival was facing a different challenge. One of its Palestinian playwrights, Basel Zaraa, did not feel he could have his work, a play about his family’s struggle as Palestinians exiled by Israel, presented at the festival alongside a play that he said contained dehumanizing narratives of Palestinians.
The Runner’s playwright offered a humble response: “If removing The Runner is the only way Canadians can hear Basel’s crucial voice, then there is value in stepping aside,” he wrote.
“I am deeply saddened by humankind’s capacity to wage war. We’re living in troubled times and the impact of the war in Gaza and Israel is profoundly felt in Canada. It’s unsettling when Canadian theatres cannot be a space for the public to engage in a dynamic exchange of ideas.”
The PuSh Festival continued its annual run without The Runner.
“I feel terrible for everyone involved,” wrote Woodend.
“One of the most important things that art can do is offer multiple ways of contending and grappling with an issue. It doesn’t offer easy answers. But it holds space for ongoing engagement with multiple truths, and the hard work of empathy and understanding.”
How Shared Values Can Bring Jewish and Palestinian Canadians Together
Jeffrey Wilkinson and Raja Khouri, co-authors of ‘The Wall Between,’ are bringing their message to Vancouver on June 13.
By Katie Hyslop
Katie Hyslop’s interview with Jeffrey Wilkinson and Raja Khouri demonstrated how the work of building understanding between Israelis and Palestinians had been taking place long before the events of Oct. 7.
Wilkinson, who is Jewish and was born in the United States, and Khouri, who is Palestinian and was born in Lebanon, met through human rights work in Canada and co-authored a book, titled The Wall Between, on Palestinian and Israeli relations.
“We don’t see hierarchy in trauma,” Khouri told Hyslop. “Trauma is strong. We talk about the primary Jewish trauma being the Holocaust, and the primary Palestinian trauma being the Nakba. We spend quite a bit of time in the book talking about how these sorts of overarching subjects are always at the heart of how people react.”
THE RESPONSE FROM DOCTORS
As Gaza Suffers, What’s My Role as a Young Doctor?
Why physicians have a responsibility to condemn Israel’s military invasion of Gaza.
By Dunavan Morris-Janzen
A medical student at the University of Alberta training to become a general surgeon, Dunavan Morris-Janzen contemplated his obligations to his patients alongside his desire to participate in a campus demonstration for Palestinian solidarity in May.
“So what is my role as a physician? I experienced a moral conundrum at the encampment. I knew getting arrested would compromise my ability to care for my patients,” he wrote in an opinion piece for The Tyee. “But I also knew I couldn’t turn my back on the students fighting against the largest health crisis of our time.”
Morris-Janzen grew up learning about the Israel-Palestine conflict through his father, a peace studies professor.
“The tension I am experiencing illuminates our responsibility as physicians: to strive for the health of all. We are public servants held in high regard by society and expected to act with moral clarity as we tend to people during their most vulnerable moments,” he wrote.
“While it can feel outside the scope of our duties, physicians must look beyond their own to promote health for all.”
To Health-Care Workers in Gaza: ‘Remember Them’
A Calgary family doctor shares an urgent call to act on peace.
By Fozia Alvi
Dr. Fozia Alvi practises family medicine in Calgary, Alberta, and founded an international health-care non-profit called Humanity Auxilium. She travelled to Gaza on a medical aid mission in early 2024. Ahead of her journey, she wrote an opinion piece for The Tyee on the incredible challenges facing health-care workers in Gaza.
“I must make it clear that I am not pro-Hamas. As a medical professional, I value all human life. And I mourn all the lives lost in Israel,” Alvi wrote.
“If I think about what I’ll remember in years to come from this time, I will remember the nobility and sacrifice of Dr. Abu Nujaila. I will remember every picture of burned and dismembered children over the last several weeks.
“I will remember the doctors who had to provide surgery without anesthesia and the pain experienced by those who survived, and those who died from the shock.
“But I will not forgive myself if I don’t do everything in my power to pressure my government to stop letting this go on. I urge you all to do the same.”
When Discussing Israel and Palestine, Universities Must Do Better
We owe it to our students.
By Sean Tucker
Sean Tucker is a professor at the University of Regina and is a sessional faculty member at the University of British Columbia. He wrote a Tyee opinion piece in August that considered where universities are falling short in their approach to dialogue about the Israel-Palestine conflict.
“While responses have varied, overall universities are falling well short of fulfilling their core mission when it comes to the ‘conflict’ in the Middle East,” he wrote. “But given the core mandate of the university — teaching, learning, research and public service — and protection for academic freedom and the tradition of freedom of expression, shouldn’t we be setting an example for dialogue and learning? Isn’t that a big part of what universities are for?”
Tucker shared his process of self-education about Palestine and Israel, a journey that began 10 years ago and which, he noted, has accelerated over the last year. Tucker told us that, in approaching his piece for us, he was inspired by a Tyee story by Ubyssey opinion editor Spencer Izen on the complexities of his role during a time of global conflict.
“As faculty members, we need opportunities to openly share and discuss our experiences in the classroom, to learn from each other,” he wrote. “Looking ahead, we should anticipate and, where appropriate, create space inside and outside the classroom for discussion about Palestine and Israel.”
Notes from a Jewish Opinion Editor of a University Newspaper
In context of the war in Gaza, the stakes for civil discourse are high.
By Spencer Izen
“I’m Jewish. I don’t hide my identity, and those who know me know I’m very proud to be,” wrote Spencer Izen in a Tyee opinion piece this spring. But his identity — and some of the loaded presumptions that came with it — was pulled into the spotlight this year as he took up a position as the opinion editor for the Ubyssey, the major campus newspaper at the University of British Columbia.
In an opinion piece for The Tyee, Izen shared four interconnected takeaways from his year as opinion editor: that conversation works; that press freedom and editorial transparency matter; that this work is uncomfortable; and that censorship is no friend of social justice.
“Those who bravely share their views in opinion articles have my complete admiration for their fortitude in difficult times,” Izen wrote. “Reasoned arguments on a newspaper’s pages move us beyond paralysis and polarization.”
For Campus Encampments Supporting Gaza, What’s Next?
As police move in, questions arise about the role of post-secondaries in times of global crisis. A snapshot from UBC.
By Jeevan Sangha
The Tyee’s 2024 Hummingbird journalism fellow, Jeevan Sangha, spent days at the encampment for Palestinian solidarity at the University of British Columbia’s Point Grey campus, where she gathered stories from the ground to help readers make sense of a growing campus movement across North America that was raising questions about the role of post-secondary institutions in times of global crisis.
When we published Sangha’s story in June 2024, the campus encampment at UBC had been operating for about a month and several groups of faculty members had issued public statements on its presence in its early weeks of operation. The campus administration, meanwhile, was dealing with mounting tensions between campus protesters and the police.
“The real difficulty and challenge is in deciding the limits of the right to protest,” law professor Richard Moon told Sangha.
“The whole mission of the university is to create and disseminate knowledge, and free speech protest is an important dimension of that. So the university as an institution has a duty and obligation to the members of the community to ensure they have space to engage in expression.”
In Gaza’s Dark Night, What Do We See?
There is a path to peace from war. But who will walk it?
By Crawford Kilian
In a November 2023 essay, Tyee contributing editor Crawford Kilian offered a searching, sobering response to the Israel-Hamas conflict of the last four weeks. “Wars of rage and revenge, of ‘good’ against ‘evil,’ never turn out well,” he wrote.
“Finding ourselves divided has been worse than unsettling. In countries that boast of their freedom of speech, people have lost their jobs for expressing the wrong opinion. Others talk themselves into extreme positions they will soon regret. And still others wish a plague on both their houses, when what both houses need is a blessing.”
True to form, Kilian offered a sharp rebuke of the status quo. And warned of what would happen if we continued down this path.
Sid Shniad: ‘This Must Stop’
A founding member of Independent Jewish Voices on Zionism, antisemitism and the need for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. A Tyee Q&A.
By Amanda Follett Hosgood
One month into the October 2023 eruption of violence in the Middle East, Amanda Follett Hosgood sat down with Sid Shniad, a founding member of Independent Jewish Voices Canada. Formed in 2008, the advocacy group stepped forward in fall 2023 with a full-throated call for a ceasefire to allow humanitarian aid in Gaza.
“Israel and people who support it unquestioningly like to give the impression that all Jews are onside with the Israeli project,” Shniad told The Tyee. “Our views and values, we think, are much more universalistic and progressive.”
In an incisive interview that is as relevant now as it was then, Follett Hosgood and Shniad explored the discursive challenges of the moment, the dangers of conflating political critique with antisemitism and where there’s room for hope.
“People want to work with other like-minded people,” Shniad told Follett Hosgood, “to effect progressive, humane change, to put an end to this horrible crisis, to say, ‘This must stop.’”
In Gaza, Both Sides Have Lost the War
But both sides can win the peace, too. Here’s how.
By Crawford Kilian
A thoughtful January 2024 essay from Tyee contributing editor Crawford Kilian considered the “forever war” wrought by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “The charge of genocide is just one example of Netanyahu’s failure,” Kilian wrote.
“The ICJ [International Court of Justice] hearings mean that Israel still has enough concern for world opinion to defend its actions in Gaza, rather than ignoring South Africa and other critics of the war. Canada has said we will abide by the court’s decision. But whatever the ICJ decides, Israel has put itself and its friends in an impossible position.”
Kilian paints a picture of what could be gained through the establishment of a Palestinian state, and what would happen if both sides were to lose the war: “a two-state solution would enable both to win the peace,” he wrote.
“Adopting such a settlement in 1948 would have saved the world 75 years of misery and violence, but it’s pointless now to assign blame for that failure. What matters is that Palestinians and Israelis live side by side as equals, if not as friends, knowing their own security depends on the security of their neighbours.” ![[Tyee]](/design-article.thetyee.ca/ui/img/yellowblob.png){kind=small}
Read more: Rights + Justice, Politics
Tyee Commenting Guidelines
Comments that violate guidelines risk being deleted, and violations may result in a temporary or permanent user ban. Maintain the spirit of good conversation to stay in the discussion and be patient with moderators. Comments are reviewed regularly but not in real time.
Do:
Do not: