Two sides of Gaza conflict united in their calls for a ceasefire deal
Ayman Nijim walked to the stage, a kaffiyeh around his neck, and looked out at the thousands of people before him. Gripping the microphone, he told the crowd he hadn’t been able to talk to his mother in the Gaza Strip for 200 days.
The night before — blocks away on Washington’s National Mall — Aviva Siegel spoke to dozens of people about the terror of October 7. She ticked through the details of how Hamas militants abducted her and her husband, Keith, and brought them to Gaza as hostages. In November, she was released. He was not.
Nijim and Siegel are both appalled at the human suffering in this war and are outraged with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Both spoke at demonstrations in the US capital last week with groups demanding Netanyahu sign a ceasefire deal.
While they have rallied closer to home — Nijim in Boston and Siegel in Tel Aviv — they thought Netanyahu’s visit presented a new opportunity. They saw DC as the place where their advocacy would carry power, and the possibility for change.
Ultimately, they would both leave disappointed. No deal to release more hostages. No ceasefire to end the bombing in Gaza.
The main pro-palestinian protest that Nijim attended was organised by several groups, including the Answer Coalition, which receives donations through its fiscal sponsor, the Progress Unity Fund — a San Francisco-based nonprofit organisation that received more than US$797,000 ($1.34m) in 2023. Code Pink, which brought in more than US$1.2 million in revenue in fiscal 2023, and the People’s Forum, which brought in more than US$4.4 million in revenue in fiscal 2022, were among other groups behind the protest.
The protests triggered a massive police response.
Nijim and Siegel knew tensions would be high. But they wanted to broadcast their own message – one more personal and nuanced than the images that would be shown across television screens or go viral on social media.
Siegel, 63, came with a plea during a rally Tuesday night: “I’m begging Bibi Netanyahu, there is a deal on the table, and you have to take it. We need this world to be a better world for everybody. For the people in Gaza that are good. For the people in Israel that are good.”
Nijim came with a plea, too. He wants an enduring solution, one that makes war protests unnecessary. Siegel heard the horror first.
At the sound of missiles on
October 7, she and her husband, Keith, who is 65, went to a small shelter.
Siegel was kidnapped and held with Keith, whose ribs were broken, in a tunnel with barely enough oxygen to breathe. She said she watched her husband be beaten and humiliated and become frail. She prayed she would die before him.
Then, she had to leave him behind.
After 51 days, in November, she was freed as part of a pause in fighting.
“I’m still in Gaza,” she said. “All the time. Sometimes I get out of Gaza for two minutes, and then I’m back, thinking about Keith, thinking about what I went through with Keith.”
Blocks from the US Capitol last week, before Netanyahu’s speech to Congress, she recounted the horrors.
“I’m here to share. I’m here to talk. I’m here to scream,” she said. “And I’m here to stand on the table.”
Siegel met Keith, who was born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, when he was visiting his brother in Israel. They have been married for 43 years and have three daughters, one son and five grandchildren. Siegel called Keith a “person’s people,” who studied Arabic to talk with people from Gaza who worked on their kibbutz.
She didn’t attend Netanyahu’s speech before Congress because the only thing she wanted to hear from him was “Keith is coming home.” Instead, she used her time in the United States to appear on national television, criticising her Government.
Nijim’s grandfather was a Palestinian farmer who was expelled from his home in Ashdod during the 1948 war that created Israel, which Palestinians refer to as the Nakba, or “the catastrophe.” Nijim’s grandparents took refuge in Gaza, where his family has remained.
Nijim left Gaza when he was about 28 to pursue his education in the US, with the goal of helping children with trauma, including those in Gaza.
He has protested in DC before, including during Netanyahu’s last address to Congress, in 2015. But this time was different. His three children, ages 13, 12 and 4, were with him, and he wanted to teach them the importance of using their voices to make the world a safer place.
He told the crowd he was the plaintiff in a now-dismissed federal lawsuit against President Biden and others for their alleged failure to prevent what he described as Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Nijim said the rally was invigorating, but that it was difficult to feel present when he knew his family was suffering in Gaza.
His family left before thousands amassed at Union Station, where protesters lowered American flags and set one ablaze. A protester climbed the Christopher Columbus fountain and wrote “Hamas is comin’.”
That phrase made Nijim shake his head. “That is not representative of our struggle,” he said.
Nijim doesn’t want anyone separated from their families, including the hostages.
He wishes people had compassion to worry about both the hostages and the tens of thousands of Palestinian children and families who have been killed and wounded in the war, as well as Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli jails.
By the time he made it back to his Alexandria hotel, it was 11pm. Sitting alone in his car, Nijim pulled up Netanyahu’s speech on Youtube. He watched as the man he describes as a war criminal stood in front of Congress and received standing ovations.
The next day, Nijim drove to western Massachusetts and Siegel stepped onto a flight back to Israel. There were hours of travel ahead, time spent ruminating over the questions that plagued them. Were they doing enough? Did they make a difference?
Netanyahu’s nearly hour-long address to Congress came as the war in Gaza grinds on for the 10th month. In Tel Aviv, hundreds of Israelis accused Netanyahu of dragging out the war for his political survival.
In his address, Netanyahu was defiant. He vowed retribution.
It was disturbing to hear, Nijim said. So he is left to continue writing, seeking to understand the violence from Israel that permeated his childhood and continues today.
The topic of his dissertation as a doctoral student at Saybrook University in Pasadena, California, is the infrastructure of genocide, focusing on how mass death is normalised and how to heal from it.
“This is what I can do for humanity,” he said.
By the time Siegel got to her apartment in Gazit, a kibbutz in northern Israel, she told her daughter she felt empty.
She had done all the interviews, sat through all the meetings. But she was still alone at home – and Keith was still somewhere in Gaza.