While the violence in the Gaza Strip might seem half a world away, its impact extends far beyond the Middle East — even to doorsteps in Oklahoma.
In March, three FBI agents showed up at the Stillwater home of Egyptian American Rolla Abdeljawad to interview her about anti-Israel comments she had posted on Facebook.
In Decemeber 2023, Rabbi Vered Harris of the Temple B’nai Israel in Oklahoma City received an emailed bomb threat, forcing evacuation of the synagogue and canceling scheduled activities until police could clear the building.
And more viscerally, the last year has been a nightmare for Mukarram Zuhair, a Palestinian American in Norman with more than a dozen relatives killed in Gaza, a place she remembers from her childhood as somewhere neighbors managed to get along despite religious and cultural differences.
“See, that’s the thing,” Zuhair told NonDoc. “We’re Palestinians and that’s it, whether you’re a Muslim, Christian, Jew or nonbeliever. It doesn’t matter.”
As the tragedy has escalated for a year with no clear end in sight, it has caused Oklahomans to grapple with tough questions at the core of their shared human existence.
“It is quite clear that much of the violence is done for vengeance and retribution rather than for strategic objectives. Not only did Hamas wantonly kill Israelis during the day that it managed to break out of Gaza, but the Israeli military has done so throughout the last year, destroying close to 75 percent of the housing in north Gaza and almost as much elsewhere,” said Joshua Landis, a professor and director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma. “Both the Jewish and Arab communities in Oklahoma are in shock and feel like victims.”
‘They were just gone, just like that’
The area’s most recent war ignited Oct. 7, 2023, when armed soldiers of Hamas, Gaza’s de facto government, swarmed across the border into Israel, killing approximately 1,200 civilians and capturing more than 240 hostages, some of whom have since been released or recovered.
Israel began its retaliatory offensive in Gaza a few hours later, unleashing a massive military operation that prompted protest movements and appeals for peace from the global community. So far, efforts to negotiate a ceasefire and the release of more hostages have failed, even as criticism from U.S. officials has mounted.
All in all, the violence since Oct. 7 has claimed the lives of more than 45,000 Palestinians and 1,500 Israelis, according to the United Nations.
“There is no solution because 7 million Palestinians live in historic Palestine, which is ruled by Israel. Five and a half million of those Palestinians live under military control and have no rights and no hope of self-determination,” Landis said.
Many relatives of Oklahomans have died, a fact acknowledged by Rhona Seidelman — a professor and the director of OU’s Schusterman Center for Judaic and Israel Studies — during a vigil on OU’s campus this October.
“For us, this is not a distant news item. Many of us are from Israel or have family and other people we love there. We have relatives, colleagues and friends who were killed, attacked, wounded, displaced, taken hostage. We have spent happy times in the beautiful towns and communities that were destroyed on Oct. 7,” she said. “We are not indifferent to the suffering of Palestinians in this horrific war. We ache for all people of all nationalities suffering from the devastation of this conflict in the Middle East.”
Zuhair’s family has lost its matriarch — her aunt, who died late last year along with several other relatives of younger generations.
“They were just gone, just like that,” she said.
Zuhair said she cannot afford to grieve her family casualties because she needs to “keep herself intact.” As the onslaught continues, she fears she could lose more relatives in Gaza. She worries, too, for the health of her parents, who have no access to medical care outside of occasional clinics, which she described as booths under tents with limited services.
“It’s an unreasonable amount of killing — not that any killing is reasonable. It is beyond any justification, beyond any, what you would call, ‘self-defense,’” Zuhair said. “You’ve got 2 million people trapped in that small piece of land that are having horrendous living conditions.”
According to an investigation by the Associated Press, Zuhair is not alone in losing so many loved ones: More than 60 U.S. families have lost “dozens or more” of their family members in Palestine since Oct. 7, 2023.
Vivian Jaber, a Palestinian American board member of Oklahomans Against Occupation, characterizes the Israeli government’s actions against Palestinians as genocide.
“I think we’ve seen from day one that the bombing of Palestinians has been indiscriminate. I think the last figure I saw was that 70 percent of the casualties in Gaza are women and children,” Jaber said. “The starvation is affecting everyone in Gaza. Children are dying from malnutrition. People don’t have access to clean water, and that’s been since day one.”
Released Sept. 20, a United Nations report corroborated Jaber’s analysis.
“The policies and practices of Israel during the reporting period are consistent with the characteristics of genocide,” the report read. “The targeting of Palestinians as a group, the life-threatening conditions imposed on Palestinians in Gaza through warfare and restrictions on humanitarian aid — resulting in physical destruction, increased miscarriages and stillbirths — and the killing of and serious bodily or mental harm caused to Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, are violations under international law.”
Zuhair is critical of calling what has taken place since Oct. 7 as a “war” or “conflict” between two equal combatants. Instead, she adamantly says genocide is taking place.
“You’re talking here about civilians. I mean, what is the excuse for bombing refugee camps?” she said. “If it’s not a genocide, if it’s not extermination, if it is not ethnic cleansing, then what is it? We need a new language right now to describe it if you’re not going to be using those words.”
Islamophobia, anti-Semitism on the rise
The Oct. 7 attacks and the destruction in Gaza have also triggered a significant rise in the number of anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish incidents across the United States.
On March 19, three people identifying themselves as FBI agents came to Abdeljawad’s home asking questions about her social media posts in which she criticized the Israeli military and asked God to destroy “Israhelli terrorist filth.” While recording, Abdeljawad demanded the agents show their badges. They refused. In a statement to 2 News, the Oklahoma chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations said it had verified the people at Abdeljawad’s door were, in fact, FBI agents.
Abdeljawad’s story went viral, with the likes of Edward Snowden weighing in and The Washington Post reporting that some activists found the encounter reminiscent of the increased surveillance Muslims experienced after 9/11.
Adam Soltani, the executive director of the Oklahoma chapter of CAIR, said the FBI was within its legal rights to engage in a home visit over Abdeljawad’s posts, but he said it was the sort of thing that makes Muslims in America feel unsafe.
“What we saw in Stillwater was not the first. It probably won’t be last,” Soltani said. “She was probably the fourth or fifth phone call we had received about FBI visiting and wanting to speak to people about things related to this ongoing conflict. (…) It’s definitely concerning.”
In 2023, CAIR’s national office recorded the largest number of anti-Muslim incidents, discrimination reports and hate crimes occurring within a one-year period since it started tracking the statistics 30 years ago. The level of Islamophobia recorded by CAIR since Oct. 7 exceeds even that recorded by the organization after the 9/11 attacks.
“We definitely have to connect what’s been happening since Oct. 7 to the rise of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia,” Soltani said.
To that end, the Anti-Defamation League, which tracks anti-Semitism in the United States, has identified record levels of violence against Jewish communities since Oct. 7, with anti-Semitic incidents surging 360 percent in the U.S., according to Axios.
Oklahoma’s ADL chapter did not respond to a request for comment.
On Dec. 18, 2023, Temple B’nai Israel in Oklahoma City received a hoax bomb threat via email. The threat, believed to be part of a larger campaign to scare the Jewish community, came one day after 199 bomb threats were investigated across 17 states, according to The Oklahoman.
Synagogue president Mark Ephraim was appointed to his post in May 2023, just a few months before the Oct. 7 attacks, after serving on the temple’s board of trustees for the past 10 years. Although local and federal law enforcement agencies determined the OKC bomb threat was a hoax that originated overseas, he said it still rattled his congregants, who are “understandably a little bit nervous.”
“We have a safe building,” Ephraim said. “We do everything that we can do as right as we know to do it. What do you want to do? You can’t stay at home all the time, right?”
He and Harris, the rabbi, said some congregants have close family members or distant relatives in Israel who were taken hostage by Hamas on Oct. 7.
“We talk about the situation with the hostages — the sexual assaults (…) the rapes, the torture — so that people hopefully remember that the government of Gaza that is Hamas started this war on Oct. 7 with their attack of civilians in the sovereign state of Israel,” Harris said. “It’s really hard for us to separate that and to not see that as antisemitism, even though in the bigger picture, politically, I am not sure that that is entirely accurate.”
Failed pathways to peace – and power
Gaza is one of two Palestinian territories. In area, it is smaller than Norman, with more than 2 million people living on 139 square miles of land.
The other Palestinian territory is the West Bank, a landlocked area neighboring Israel and Jordan. The U.S. does not formally recognize the Palestinian territories as a state, and in late April, blocked the United Nations’ efforts to do so.
Efforts to establish peace between these territories and Israel have encountered repeated setbacks. In 1978, Egyptian Prime Minister Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin won the Nobel Peace Prize for signing an Egypt-Israel peace treaty in cooperation with U.S. President Jimmy Carter. Sadat was assassinated in 1981 in Cairo.
Between 1993 and 1995, the Bill Clinton administration helped broker the Oslo Accords, an agreement between Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister of Israel, and Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestinian National Authority. Under that agreement, the Palestinian Authority was created as an interim government, and the Israeli military was supposed to withdraw its forces from parts of the West Bank. After five years, leaders were expected to seek permanent solutions regarding borders, refugees and Jerusalem.
Rabin was assassinated in November 1995. For his role in the negotiations, he was branded a traitor by hardline nationalists within Israel, including current Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu — for whom the International Court of Justice recently issued an arrest warrant for Israel’s catastrophic attacks in Gaza over the past year. As Rabin left a rally he had hosted to promote peace with Palestinians, he was shot and killed by a 25-year-old man who believed Rabin’s concessions betrayed Jewish law. The assassin said he had faith killing Rabin would stop the peace process. Some commentators now acknowledge it did exactly that.
Killed by members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Sadat also was likely assassinated in part for his attempts to make peace with Israel. Many factors motivated his assassination, but the Carter-facilitated peace treaty is believed to have been one of the last straws.
Today, Israel, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority — which has long outlasted its original interim status — share power in the Palestinian territories. However, the Palestinian Authority’s power is limited. It governs parts of the West Bank, while the Israeli military governs other parts. The Palestinian Authority is led by a political party called Fatah, a faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Hamas has controlled Gaza since 2006, when it defeated Fatah in elections.
As Israel’s attacks on Gaza have escalated, Israeli settlers have increased attacks on Palestinian communities in the West Bank. Palestinian residents face resource restrictions on water, electricity and transportation, among other things.
That helps explain why the violence in the Palestinian territories is about more than Gaza and Hamas, said Jaber, who has family members who live in the West Bank in a small town near Ramallah. She said her relatives are afraid to travel for fear of being detained by the Israeli military, which occupies the region.
“It’s terrifying, honestly, because you don’t know if you’re going to wake up one day and hear the news that your family has been attacked, their homes have been burned down,” Jaber said. “There’s always a constant fear that something’s going to happen to them.”
To Jaber, Palestinians are not empowered to select new leadership.
“How can you expect Palestinians to hold an election and overturn Hamas and get a new government in place if they’re being carpet-bombed, and they don’t have their basic necessities met, and they don’t have infrastructure, and they don’t have food, and they don’t have water?” she said.
Zuhair said violence is never acceptable and condemned Hamas’ attacks on Oct. 7, but she said the root causes of why the militants felt driven to attack must be addressed.
“You need to give people equal human rights. You need to be treating them with respect and dignity for them to enjoy life and be able to live up to their potential and be able to thrive. There’s no such a thing in Gaza. People there, when we talk about human rights, it’s like a joke. We laugh at it,” she said. “We laugh at it because it’s unobtainable, it’s like a dream. ‘What are you talking about? This is not for us.’ So that’s what needs to be addressed more than anything at this point.”
Zuhair said the world needs a ceasefire immediately.
“We need this killing to stop, to end, right now, and then to address the real root of the issues,” she said. “You cannot live with occupation, apartheid and segregation and then expect peace. That’s not logical.”
Ideally, Zuhair said she supports a one-state solution, a world where Palestinians and Israelis live alongside each other with equal rights.
“I still stand by that,” she said. “However, at this point, I am in support of whatever solution preserves Palestinian life, Palestinian existence. That’s it. Because really, right now, we are literally being exterminated, and the sense of loss that we all feel is indescribable. I cannot even put it into words.”
Seidelman, who teaches Israeli history at OU, said she feels “heartbreak and despair” after the past year.
“I am profoundly grateful for, and in awe of, the voices of peace and compassion — people who recognize that the evil at play in this situation is not all Palestinians and Arabs nor all Israelis and Zionists, but rather the hateful, violent extremists in each of those groups,” Seidelman said.
Seidelman advocates for a two-state solution where Israel and Palestine both have their own independent countries. She said “decades of hate, bigotry, anti-Semitism, violence and mistrust” have long been to blame for failed peacemaking attempts, along with interference from non-Israeli and Palestinian governments, such as the U.S., Russia and Iran, which has launched hundreds of missiles and drones into Israel this year.
“I see bridge building and cross-cultural compassion as the only possible way to go forward,” she said. “Listen to the extraordinary voices of compassion and moderation and peace among Israelis and Palestinians and do what you can to support them.”
Protesting for Palestine in a red state
Organizations like Oklahomans Against Occupation advocate for Palestine through events such as teach-ins or cultural nights intended to spread awareness of Palestinian and Israeli history, according to Jaber, along with protests and campaigns to get city governments to acknowledge the massive loss of life in Gaza.
“I wouldn’t even say that this genocide just started in 2023. I think it’s been going on for decades. So I think one thing I would do is encourage people to understand the history of of Palestine and how, you know, we’ve been kind of undergoing this genocide for 76 years, and I know it can be hard to know where to start,” Jaber said. “Also, recognizing Oklahoma is directly tied to Israel — we have weapons manufacturers out here in Oklahoma that are manufacturing and supplying the bombs that are killing people in Gaza.”
In the spring semester of 2024, universities and colleges around the world became hotbeds of pro-Palestinian protests in which law enforcement officers clashed with those who set up encampments. More than 3,100 people were arrested or detained at universities nationwide, according to the New York Times.
Universities and colleges in Oklahoma have remained relatively calm, but they have not been totally silent. Landis, who teaches about the Middle East at OU, acknowledged it has been a difficult year for students with personal ties to the ongoing violence.
“Many students are very upset, particularly students with family in Israel, Gaza, Lebanon and Iran. Many Jewish students are also upset, as are Muslim and Arab students,” he said. “Many Jews feel unsafe and remark on the rise of anti-Semitism in social media. Arabs and Muslims are horrified that their president has so little regard for the lives of their families and use their tax dollars to supply ever more bombs and fighter jets to Israel.”
Students at the University of Oklahoma held a May 1 rally in support of Palestinians. A similar rally was held the next day at Oklahoma State University. Both events proceeded peacefully.
At OU, the Student Coalition for Palestinian Liberation demanded divestment from Israel and called for a one-state solution under which Palestinians and Israelis could live together with equal rights.
In a letter penned with the OU Muslim Students’ Association, the OUSCPL asked OU to:
- Divest from companies supporting Israel’s war effort;
- Highlight Palestinian voices alongside those of Israelis, especially on campus; and
- Act to reduce the distress of Palestinians and Arabs on campus — for example, via improved mental health services.
More recently, an OU security guard took down flyers and Palestinian flags during a “study-in” protest organized by a separate group called OU Students for Justice in Palestine. The flyers included messages such as “books not bombs,” “there are no universities left in Gaza” and “OU divest from death,” according to an Instagram post.
When student journalists asked why the flyers and flags were removed, The OU Daily reported that a representative sent a link to OU’s expressive activity guidelines and declined to elaborate further. “Affixing posters/banners/leaflets/flags to university buildings, artwork, landscaping, flagpoles or walls” is listed as a violation of expressive activity policy.
‘This is absolutely not a religious conflict’
A decade before the current violence began, Zuhair lost her grandmother during the 2014 Gaza War. She had lived next door to Christian Palestinians, Zuhair emphasized.
“This is absolutely not a religious conflict,” she said. “This land is a land of all Abrahamic faiths, where all people ever existed and lived together and loved each other and were there for each other in peace and harmony and love and caring and support.
“Coming in to divide people (…) is just horrendous.”
Harris, the rabbi at Temple B’nai Israel, also carries a personal link to the violence. One of her distant relatives was captured and taken hostage Oct. 7.
“I want the hostages returned home. If that could be accomplished by a ceasefire, personally, my opinion is that I’m all in,” Harris said. “For me, politically, this war is devastating because of the people who would like to live in a free democratic society who are being killed and who are being called collateral damage. That’s where I — that’s where my tears come. But a ceasefire without the return of the hostages negates Oct. 7, and it ignores every pogrom that the Jewish people have faced that essentially led to the establishment of the state of Israel.”
Harris said she is in agreement with her friend, Imam Imad Enchassi of the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City, that “this issue is not about Jews and Muslims.”
“The Jewish culture and Islamic culture have so much in common,” she said.
The day NonDoc spoke with Harris, she was headed to an iftar dinner to celebrate the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Temple B’nai Israel has also hosted iftar dinners for the Muslim community.
“What’s right about Oklahoma is the Jewish leaders and the Muslim leaders and (…) the Christian leaders saying, ‘We need to be better than the bigger world,’” Harris said. “We may not have all our religious beliefs in common, but we’re Oklahomans who care about people.”
(Editor’s note: Andrea Hancock and Tres Savage contributed reporting to this story.)
