INTRODUCTION

Throughout my life, I worked for nearly 20 years with international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) in development and humanitarian assistance. This was followed by over 20 years as a U.S. Foreign Service and Senior Foreign Service Officer before retiring five years ago. I told the story of the early part of my career and how I came to feel chosen for this work as a life vocation in my book ANDEAN ADVENTURES. I hope you’ve read it, and if you haven’t, please consider looking at it on Amazon or your favorite bookseller. It’s available in different formats, including audiobooks and English and Spanish.

Since those earliest formative experiences, I’ve worked in many environments where we sometimes must deal with adversaries and enemies, even potential or past terrorists. As a former development practitioner and executive with diplomatic assignments, I know that true diplomacy is supposed to help you talk with your adversaries and manage your enemies, not with your friends. Diplomacy isn’t needed to speak to your friends. Sustaining positive relationships in the best of times should not be a massive reach.

However, accurate diplomatic skills are required when you reach out to persuade, cajole, demand, or otherwise pressure people who are not your friends to act in ways they might not otherwise do. Yet, we often find ourselves in situations where we give up by default and make no effort to talk to our enemies. What’s the harm in not doing that? We’ll get to that a little later.

I’ve written this book to share the story of my work in Gaza and Israel. I recently served as Mission Director for International Medical Corps in the occupied Palestinian territories for two years, based roughly 50/50 divided between Gaza City and East Jerusalem through almost all of 2022 and 2023, present during multiple escalations and conflicts, and a witness to the constant damage and harm to the people of Gaza, the children and youth of Gaza and communities and civil society, most of whom had little or nothing to do with Hamas, or as the USG preferred to call them, the De facto Authority (DFA).

Living in Gaza, indeed, the experience during two years of going back and forth between Gaza and Israel was profoundly touching, one which I feel enriched me as a person and as a professional, but which also profoundly wounded me. I’m still coming to terms with the experience. In this book, I will talk about the Gaza of today and the implications of humanitarian assistance and its delivery to noncombatants and civilians. Still, I also want to talk about the Gaza and the Gazans I came to know before the most recent spasm of death and violence. I will draw on a series of classes I gave earlier last year online to a mixed group of adult education subscribers, including Jewish and Palestinian people, some Muslim, and some Christians.

I knew little about Gaza at first, beyond the basics of course of the Israeli occupation after they seized it from Egypt in the 1967 Six Day War and the retreat by the late Ariel Sharon from Gaza in the early 2000s, dismantling the Israeli Jewish settlements and supposedly leaving it to fend for itself. I have visited Israel several times since the late 1980s and the West Bank. But Gaza was Terra Incognita for me.

Accepting the job and deploying with International Medical Corps in Gaza and the occupied Palestinian territories (commonly abbreviated as the ‘oPt’) did give me initial pause when I saw the reaction of several friends. Some who also worked internationally said I would be crazy to take the risk to go to Gaza. They thought I would be in mortal danger if I were to go, as an American with a Jewish background. They insisted I ‘sanitize’ my social media before going, presumably to hide somehow the fact that I was Jewish. I heard similar advice from the IMC Security Advisor before I traveled. He warned me not to take my usual phone or laptop into Gaza because of the risk of surveillance and possible hacking. It was amusing in the run-up before I traveled to the Mideast. I had what seemed to be a difficult conversation with my future supervisor at IMC, who seemed disturbed by something but unable to come right out and tell me. I realized after a few minutes that somehow, he and others at IMC must have just realized I was Jewish and perhaps imagined that I had not realized the risk of going into what was expected to be an extremist, fundamentalist-ridden Muslim environment.

I confess that I initially looked through my Facebook and Instagram accounts and wondered if I should do so. I deleted one post and stopped because I thought this would be ridiculous. More than anything, if I were to start sanitizing things, this could be seen as suspicious behavior, as if I was trying to hide something. So, I stopped and decided the best policy would be openness and transparency. I felt I had nothing to hide or reason to do so.

WHAT WAS MY RECEPTION LIKE IN GAZA?

To get to Gaza, I traveled first to Ben Gurion Airport outside Tel Aviv, Israel, spent a few days in Jerusalem to manage some logistics and ensure I had all the proper permissions from both the Israeli military and DFA sides, and then ran the gauntlet into Gaza from Erez Terminal, a substantial airport-like terminal for land pedestrian entry into Gaza about 90 minutes from Jerusalem. I’ll talk more about that later.

But for now, I can say this: as I lived and worked in Gaza, I was never molested by the DFA. I had to be interviewed by their security personnel when I first arrived, who had done some homework about me looking into my social media and internet footprint and fingerprints. They were respectful and transparent: “Mr. Wind, we are honored that you, as an American Jew and someone connected with the Baha’i community in Haifa, Israel, would agree to live among us and help the needy. Marhaba! You are most welcome, and we will always protect you.” There was no other American Jew like me or my position there.

I wasn’t naïve to think this treatment was out of the charity in their hearts. I assumed that with IMC present for 15 years providing essential health services, the DFA had no reason to interfere with our activities. Of course, that’s a risk and a calculation that could always change.

For two years, I met with hundreds of Gazans all over Gaza, from Beit Lahia in the north to Rafah in the south. I met with dozens of small Gazan charities and civil society organizations dedicated to social safety needs, the needs of the marginalized, the needs of the handicapped and disabled, and the empowerment of women. I found many points of view, but the vast majority of the people, the civilians I met, said they did not hate Israel; they did not hate Jewish people; they just wanted to live their lives in peace and have the chance to give opportunities to progress to their children. I am not naïve; I have worked in public health and international development diplomacy in many countries, including Iraq and Afghanistan, under kinetic circumstances. I’ve been shot at and in harm’s way more than once. Yet I found civility, courtesy, and humanity in Gaza – as did my wife when she joined me a couple of days on a visit to Gaza in late 2022 – that completely belies the narrative of so many today.

The brutal attack on Israeli border communities on October 7th last year by Hamas and other militants was undeniably savage, even by the standards of the region. The ordeal of the hostages is unconscionable.

However, and this must be understood, this brutal war did not begin on October 7th. The attack grew out of a blockade and siege of Gaza for over 16 years. This is ignored by a mythology spread by news media and pundits alike. Many well-meaning and misinformed people commonly misunderstand the Blockade of Gaza. For example, I hear repeatedly on television pundits refer to the fact that Gaza was handed back or given independence by Israel 17 years ago, and Israel’s reward was years of terror and attacks from Gaza. It’s true that Israel removed settlers and soldiers from Gaza in 2005 but then blockaded land, sea, and air access to Gaza with very narrow and tightly controlled exceptions, converting Gaza into what has been called for many years the world’s largest open-air prison. Israel’s justification was the history of solitary lone-wolf terrorist attacks on buses and public places before 2005. But for the Gazans, it meant virtually no escape; only the well-to-do could pay off Egyptian guards. The 2005 Israeli removal was unilateral; it was uncoordinated with the Palestinian Authority or Hamas, and no efforts were made for a normal handover.

WHAT WERE YOU DOING IN GAZA?

I led a USAID-funded $10 million health and humanitarian assistance effort for International Medical Corps across all five governorates of Gaza to support primary health care, Mental Health Psychosocial Services, disaster risk reduction, child protection, and address gender-based violence. The staff included about seven expats and 70 Gazans. Gaza was an area of seemingly incessant repeated and recidivist conflict with Israel, with almost annual escalations and air strikes and previous ground invasions as well from Israel. USAID did not try to undertake a long-term development program. Still, the USAID Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance had funds available to provide humanitarian assistance to the neediest and most marginalized communities in Gaza. Fewer international NGOs were working in Gaza than in the West Bank, given the heavy lifting for access and logistics.

I and my staff were frequently constrained by a counterproductive USG policy naming Hamas a Foreign Terrorist Organization. American diplomacy and Humanitarian assistance since 2007 maintain an official No Contact Policy of the USG that does not allow USG officials or even private humanitarians to talk to the DFA. This involved poorly thought-out government regulations and policies from the U.S. Treasury Office of Foreign Asset Control, which imposed a legal liability and risk on NGOs that felt they had to engage. How can you negotiate peace and reconciliation, or even just the amelioration of suffering, that way?

As a result of this and other counter-productive U.S. laws like the False Claims Act, I know of several INGOs that were sued and accused of giving material aid to Hamas. For example, I heard plenty of anecdotes when right-wing activists from groups like NGO Monitor in the U.S. found photos on the Internet that showed DFA low-level health ministry staff at a table for an NGO health conference. Water bottles were seen on the table and described as illegal “material aid.” They threatened nuisance lawsuits against certain international NGOs, nonprofit charities seeking to provide humanitarian assistance worldwide, and Gaza and the West Bank in particular. In several cases, charitable organizations had to shell out millions of dollars in legal fees to fight off nuisance claims. In other cases, they paid millions to settle cases to avoid legal risks.

Most people don’t know that the rules and barriers are ever so much tighter and restrictive, specifically with Hamas and Palestinian groups, compared to every single other adversary we have in the world. Senseless – even worse than ISIS, Al Qaeda, or the Taliban, who were and are far more dangerous.

I’ll address the Taylor Force Law similarly later. It had the counterproductive effect of disrupting PA finances and blocking any serious capacity the PA could have to outmaneuver Hamas.

As IMC Mission Director in Gaza, I also sat on the UN Humanitarian Fund Advisory Board, and I was elected to the Executive Committee, the Board of Directors for the Association of International Development Agencies (AIDA), a network with over 90 INGO members from the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Even before the war, we faced frequent challenges from Israeli government authorities, questioning and sometimes blocking the flow of resources and the flow of people from Israel proper into West Bank/Gaza. It wasn’t universal – many Israeli military authorities welcomed me and others and said they appreciated our humanitarian work with the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. But other Israeli officials and government ministries influenced by the changes from the Netanyahu extremist government sought to try to punitively tax and punish Israeli civil society organizations that were partners; they sought to suppress legitimate Palestinian charities, NGOs, and human rights organizations and block visas and access for humanitarian workers from the UN and NGOs.

WHERE WERE YOU ON OCTOBER 7 (10/7)?

Were it not for a meeting called for by USAID in Jerusalem on October 5th, I would have been in Gaza during the attack. As it turned out, I was in Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem, a Palestinian neighborhood that has had its horrors and oppression by Israeli religious extremists for years and the demolition of their homes for years. But with the attack, I then was forced to spend 16-hour days seven days a week trying to protect and rescue from harm’s way over 35 expat staff from IMC and other INGOs trapped by the war until we could finally get them out somehow through Rafah – with little to no help and some obstruction by certain governments.

My hope, and perhaps hubris, was that my extensive experience with many different international organizations and my diplomacy skills would help me negotiate treacherous waters on all sides and find a way to protect our expat and local staff more effectively. I hoped I could bring some common sense to the table. While the evident trauma and rage from the Israeli side was understandably massive, and we know this attack and conflict had reached far beyond the common annual escalations and tit-for-tat attacks, I still had hoped we would be able to continue our support and program.

I also persuaded and looked for ways to identify and protect from Israeli bombing and airstrikes the humanitarian assistance work locations of our over 70 Gazan staff. We reported either directly or through the UN the GPS coordinates of our sites to request deconfliction. Many of my relationships with Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) liaisons were positive and productive, and they respected and trusted me. But over time, I often felt misled; they brought our people into harm’s way when they said they would not.

There is no easy way to convey the all-consuming desire for revenge that came over most Israelis after the savage crimes of October 7th. Perhaps the time after 9/11 was comparable for Americans, but I don’t quite think so, not on that level.

Perhaps the scale of October 7th was also so much more significant – the murder of over 1000 Israelis at one time was death for Jews not seen since the Holocaust, and the equivalent in a country of almost ten million people of perhaps 30 9/11 attacks, as if America had lost in one day nearly 90,000 people.

10/7 changed virtually all my many Israeli friends, so many of whom were at least somewhat sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and the need to respect Palestinian civil and human rights. This changed fundamentally for so many over the days and weeks after the 10/7 attack.

As December 2023 rolled in, the program I knew and led was dissolved mainly in favor of a USG idea to promote emergency field hospitals in southern Gaza. This was funded all while the many millions of dollars that American and European taxpayers had paid to improve health and humanitarian assistance services were destroyed in systematic policies to destroy every hospital and facility in Gaza.

Far worse would happen within a week and in the ensuing weeks and months.

DO INTERNATIONAL HUMANITARIAN LAW VIOLATIONS APPLY?

I was present in Gaza during several escalations and Israeli rocket retaliatory attacks. Some airstrikes and missiles came within 500 meters of our expat residence. I saw the damage from brutal attacks on Gaza in 2008, 2014 and 2021. True, these sometimes came after extremist groups like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) would fire off rockets at southern Israel. But these are almost toy rockets with minor consequences and frequent backfires.

Yet the IDF policy has been that for every Israeli casualty, at least 20 Palestinian casualties would be visited upon the other side. And these were never with toy rockets of dubious capabilities but with 21st-century high-impact weapons. I know that the IDF took all gloves off in October 2023, and their calculus for casualties was no longer 20:1 but 300:1 or even 1000:1. This is well documented by multiple Israeli civil society organizations and former IDF soldiers who became whistleblowers. And there were no longer virtually any constraints on trying to minimize damage and death for women and children.

This war, more than so many others, has inflicted collective punishment on a civilian population in ways hardly ever seen or imagined. From the start, all access to food, water, power, and communications was cut off to a civilian population of over two million. And today, nearly nine months into it, with 37,000+ Palestinians (primarily women and children) killed in retribution and 10,000 more missing and presumed dead for 1200 murdered, tortured, and kidnapped Israelis, we end up either in a numbers game or blindness to what many see as the unrestrained destruction of a people.

This is not legal self-defense. Israel did not fire the first shot on October 7th and was, of course, traumatized and overwhelmed by the slaughter of innocents. But it surrendered the claim of self-defense when it proceeded to not only go after Hamas infrastructure and targets, but many times IDF committed massacres of innocent civilians and the desperate and starving. Actual intent by the IDF is not the issue but the effects.

There is no place to flee; all borders are mostly sealed. The Israeli government surrendered the claim of self-defense when it empowered, encouraged, and even financed Hamas to isolate, block, and weaken the Palestinian Authority. The Israeli government deliberately followed a practice for decades of “mowing the lawn,” that is, the regular extermination of moderate or potential negotiating partners who stuck their heads up for decades, creating more and more extremists attack after attack. I saw this, I heard this, I witnessed this in Palestine. This has been freely admitted by IDF and Shabak sources.

When you rob a people of their past and their future, you leave them no choice but to strike out any way they can, often to soft targets and often to other innocents. When have we seen a conflict like this resolved militarily?

WHAT SPACE IS THERE FOR A SOLUTION?

The only solutions can come from discarding all our paradigms, prejudices, and paranoia of the past and remembering my former buddy Ambassador Rahm Emanuel’s words decades ago: “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that is that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”

We must stop the insanity now, rescue Israel and the Israelis from their blindspots, and push for peace and reconciliation.

We must have a humanitarian ceasefire now. It can’t be tied to the question of the hostages because, despite their suffering and that of their families, however horrible and painful, they cannot hide the fact that they’ve been lied to from the start by their government about the true priorities of the Israeli Prime Minister and Government. The slain and forgotten hostages cannot stand in the way of stopping the senseless killing. Few seem likely to be still alive.

Israel will never be able to erase Hamas from the Palestinians through warfare. Only a political solution can hope to liberate the Palestinians and the Israelis from further terror, extremism, and violence.

HAVE YOU SEEN ANY POSITIVE SIGNS?

It’s hard to see many positives. However, despite the massive loss of life of civilians, I’m thankful it's not even more significant. It could have been even far worse already, with 100,000 or more dead. The IDF could have tried to physically drive the Gazans entirely out of Gaza into a hostile and uncooperative Egypt – a reverse Exodus! This seems cruelly ironic as we recently passed through the Jewish Passover holidays, commemorating the liberation from the bondage of the Hebrew people from Egypt under Pharoah Ramses II. That reverse Exodus might still happen if the right-wing extremists in the Israeli Cabinet have their way. We could have already been in a wider regional war to a far worse degree with Lebanon, Syria, Iran, and even Jordan.

I’m amazed that even amidst hunger and the onset of famine in some places, food has lasted as long as it has. The supermarkets and shops in Gaza before the war always amazed me. Thank God it was not as bad a winter as it could have been, but the summer heat is now here and getting far worse. I’m amazed that I can still be in contact with many former staff members and their families on WhatsApp and Facebook. I’m glad to see some efforts to speak out against the violence in civil society in Israel as well as here and from some in Congress. But I’ve been hugely disappointed and ashamed of the Biden Administration. Far too little, far too late.

In the coming chapters, I am going to paint a larger picture of what it meant to be in the oPt – in Gaza – before the calamities of 10/7 and the Israeli retaliatory war against Hamas. In the first chapter, I will talk about the context of Gaza and what I saw and learned. In subsequent chapters, I will talk about the needs of Gaza, the central conundrum of Palestine, Humanitarian Assistance and Development programming in Palestine, confronting the problem of persistent corruption and the lack of accountability in Palestine, the neglected open wound of Gaza and Palestine, the many lost opportunities for peace and what this all has meant for national security. I will come back to today and recent months since 10/7 and try to engage with you on options for the future, as well as the implications of the many protests nationwide to the suffering in Gaza.

  There are photos scattered throughout the book. They are primarily self-explanatory with the text. Chapters II-V include ample PowerPoint slides drawn from a multicultural class I gave in 2023 before the war under the ENCORE Adult Education learning organization, which provides subscribers classes in person at George Mason University in northern Virginia or online. My classes were, of course, the latter, Zoomcast from Gaza or East Jerusalem, and included American Jews, Christians, and Muslims. They provide background and context.

  For the safety of many Gazans mentioned here, I do not usually provide the last names except where they have consented or are deceased.