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Quoting Dr. Dotan Halevy: “For Israel, looking at Gaza is like looking in a mirror”

More than one hundred students and faculty members at Tel Aviv University participated in an anti-war event titled "Public Lesson on Gaza," organized by "Students Against the War" and "Academia for Equality." Despite initial attempts by the university administration to prevent the gathering, the event, featuring lectures on the extensive destruction in #Gaza and the various aspects of the war, proceeded in a packed hall under the sponsorship of the History Department.

Speakers addressed #Israel's disregard for the Palestinian issue, the problematic "just war" discourse, the deliberate destruction of Gaza's healthcare system, and Israel's failure to understand the ongoing impact of the Nakba on Gaza.

[…] The last speaker was Dr. Dotan Halevy, a lecturer in the Department of Middle Eastern History who researches the history of Gaza. At the beginning of his remarks, Halevy emphasized that the anti-war conference was organized by students and thanked the organizers for the important initiative. In his lecture, titled "Gaza: The Israeli Blind Spot," he stated that the military failure on October 7th is just the tip of the iceberg of Israel's failure to understand the Gaza Strip. "There is a pathology in the way Israel fails to understand the Gaza Strip and what is happening there. Again and again, Israel is surprised by the developments in Gaza," he said. According to Halevy, the root of the problem is Israel's refusal to understand the Nakba. He added: "Gaza is the representation of the Nakba as ongoing displacement and the loss of the possibility of a state. In the Nakba, there were 700,000-750,000 refugees, of whom 200,000 arrived in Gaza. Today, the refugees and their families are the vast majority in the Strip. Therefore, Gaza is a crystallization of the Palestinian situation. To deal with Gaza is to deal with the Nakba – with the core issue in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – and therefore Israel is unable to do so. For Israel, looking at Gaza is like looking in a mirror."

Hebrew https://zoha.org.il/134802/

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