3 Responses to “When communinnies clash”

• #1

  What a Maroon

  October 22, 2025 at 12:48 pm

  Pro-Gaza? Or pro-Hamas? Those are very different things, as we see now that Hamas is back in the open killing Gazans who don’t tow their line.

  The Washington Post editorial pages have mostly become a shit show over the past year, but every now and then they publish a column like this.

  My Gaza, where I wish to live, exists between Israel and the yellow line. There, the war is over and change buzzes in the air. People have access to food, medicine and electricity. And other signs of normality are beginning to return, such as some children going back to school. This is the Gaza that is waiting with anticipation to work with a new civil administration and an international protection force that will keep the peace as Israel withdraws. Few there speak of Hamas with any warmth or positivity. For once they no longer have to.

  In my Gaza there are hundreds of local leaders who are waiting for a chance to work with our new international partners to help make Gaza a success story. From imams and teachers to community organizers and future political leaders, we may need help from the outside, but we can do a lot of the groundwork in remaking Gazan society ourselves.

  I have been deeply involved in Gaza’s underground civil society movement for many years, much of which was spent preparing for an unknown moment where we would have a chance to be free of Hamas’s cruel domination and break the cycle of war with Israel. That moment is now here, and I am certain that this is the chance for which I spent my life protesting, organizing and suffering. It was worth the scars and the terror to see that there can be a different future here.

  But on the other side of the yellow line exists another Gaza that will do anything to prevent this from happening. Over there the war continues, albeit not between Israel and Hamas but between Hamas and Gaza itself. In the nearly two weeks that have passed since Trump’s deal was signed, and in the absence of IDF soldiers, Hamas has emerged from its tunnel network and is reasserting control in the most violent manner possible, its reemergence accompanied by a terrifying bloodletting that targets any form of internal dissent, both real and imagined, past and present.
• #2

  Omar

  October 22, 2025 at 2:26 pm

  Religion! Ethnicity! History! Theocracy! Rivalry! A toxic brew. Football doesn’t improve it.

  Soccer is about as close as humans can go short of actual war. It is not helped by the low scoring rates: always 1-0, 2-1, maybe even 3-2. (I’m definitely an Australian Rules fan.) Throw some religious sectarian dogma into the mix on one side – it does not matter what we believe, as long as we all believe it together – and the whole thing becomes a bomb, primed and ready to go off.

  As Grand Final day approaches, it can become necessary to carry the referee onto and/or off the field in a cage.
• #3

  Two alternate realities - Butterflies and Wheels

  October 22, 2025 at 4:20 pm

  […] Via What a Maroon, Moumen Al-Natour writes in the Washington Post of the two Gazas: […]