What in fiction is enjoyable and beautiful is often terrifying in real life. In real life, shifts in collective understanding are necessary for major changes to occur, but on the human, individual scale, they are humbling and existentially disturbing. Such shifts also do not usually come without a fight: not everyone can be unpersuaded of their worldview through argument and appeal, or through narrative. Maggie Nelson, in The Art of Cruelty, punctures the high-minded moralism of art that seeks, through depicting suffering, to move an audience to do something about it. “Having a strong reaction is not the same thing as having an understanding,” she writes, “and neither is the same thing as taking an action.” It’s true that emotion and understanding are not the same as action, but you might say that understanding is necessary for someone to act.

Of course, the word recognition has another, very formal connotation in political discourse as a diplomatic or governmental action; states will recognize the sovereignty of another state or political entity, or a political or legal claim, or a right to life, a right to have rights. Cultural recognition of difference can form the basis of just societies, but recognition that remains solely that—a form of acknowledgment without economic and political redistribution—is an act of language that leaves out the plot of history, where a word tries to stand in for material reparations through the smoke and mirrors of discourse and ceremony. The recognition of Indigenous peoples by settler colonial societies, including acknowledging First Nation territories, might be a place to start, but it is no place to end. In the Palestinian case, the Oslo Accords of the nineties, which inaugurated a misleadingly titled “peace process” and led to an entrenchment of Israeli occupation, prominently featured letters of mutual recognition between the PLO and Israel. The PLO was recognized as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people: granted the mantle of statecraft without an actual state.

In the language of both law and literary form, then, recognition is a kind of knowing that should incur the responsibility to act for it to have any value beyond personal epiphanies, or appeasing the critics of the one doing the recognizing. Great effort is required to ensure that such a moment marks the middle of the story, and not the finale. Another act must follow.

The fact is, huge edifices do move in human history. Empires have fallen. The Berlin Wall fell, political apartheid in South Africa did end, and although in neither of these cases were these putative conclusions by any means the end of the story, they are testaments to the fact that, under the force of coordinated international and local action, Israeli apartheid will also end. The question is, when and how? Where in the narrative do we now stand?

In one case discussed by the sources, the Israeli military command knowingly approved the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in an attempt to assassinate a single top Hamas military commander. “The numbers increased from dozens of civilian deaths [permitted] as collateral damage as part of an attack on a senior official in previous operations, to hundreds of civilian deaths as collateral damage,” said one source.

“Nothing happens by accident,” said another source. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed—that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”

According to the investigation, another reason for the large number of targets, and the extensive harm to civilian life in Gaza, is the widespread use of a system called “Habsora” (“The Gospel”), which is largely built on artificial intelligence and can “generate” targets almost automatically at a rate that far exceeds what was previously possible. This AI system, as described by a former intelligence officer, essentially facilitates a “mass assassination factory.”

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This week’s edition highlights a series of dispatches from Gaza, a true-crime story about a family of turtle hunters, an essay on the literal messiness of death, a portrait of the last lighthouse keeper in the US, and a can’t-miss profile of a legendary basketball coach with a complicated legacy.

1. “I Am Still Alive. Gaza Is No Longer Gaza.” 

Atef Abu Saif | The Washington Post | October 30, 2023 | 5,279 words

This week marks a month since, in response to attacks by Hamas, Israel launched a campaign of unconscionable violence against the Palestinian people. As of this writing, Israel has slaughtered more than 10,000 men, women, and children. Much has been written about the unfolding genocide—it should not be controversial to use that word—and this stark diary of life under siege is among the most arresting. A raw draft of history, its contents began as voice notes that Atef Abu Saif, a novelist and the minister of culture for the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, sent to friends abroad. He was in Gaza, enjoying a morning swim, when the bombing began, and he describes the horrors of the present through the crucial lens of the past. “I often think about the time I was shot as a kid, during the first intifada, and how my mother told me I actually died for a few minutes before being brought back to life,” he says. “Maybe I can do the same this time.” This memory, like many in the diary, is a stark reminder that Israel has oppressed Palestinians in a system of apartheid built on the heels of the mass dispossession of their land 75 years ago. And that is the wellspring: the violence that begets more violence in a devastating cycle. “Just as life is a pause between two deaths,” Atef Abu Saif says, “Palestine, as a place and as an idea, is a timeout in the middle of many wars.” —SD

2. The Great Cajun Turtle Heist

Sonia Smith | Texas Monthly | November 7, 2023 | 5,973 words

I was hooked from the first line of Sonia Smith’s true-crime tale about the elusive alligator snapper—a large species of turtle found in the southeast US—and the Louisiana family of prolific hunters who poached them for decades. The snapper was declared endangered in the ’70s in Texas, which allowed a protected population to multiply. But that didn’t stop the Dietzes from crossing the border to capture and smuggle them home to sell, the carloads of turtles so heavy they’d sometimes blow out the engine or overwhelm the brakes. Smith’s piece unravels like an engrossing movie. The Dietz relatives, whose lives are deeply embedded in the bayou, are fascinating characters, and so is the Marine-turned-wildlife inspector who grows determined to catch them. My favorites, though, are the two enormous turtles, Brutus and Caesar, who are undoubtedly the most memorable characters by far. —CLR

3. Flipping Grief

James McNaughton | Guernica | November 6, 2023 | 5,369 words

James McNaughton’s brother Conor died of an overdose at 27, relapsing after two years of sobriety during which he built a successful roofing business. McNaughton bookends this essay with scenes where he and his family are clearing out Conor’s apartment, literally cleaning up what his brother left behind. Death and grief are messy, and Conor’s passing was no different. But in the face of the sheer force of death, it’s the subtlety of McNaughton’s writing that will knock you flat: “We stopped by Publix and rented a Rug Doctor. We signed a contract on the counter that said we would return it clean.” That last sentence is filthy with nuance, as is the whole piece. McNaughton deftly juxtaposes those there to help with those who prey on vulnerable people like Conor, struggling to stay sober. He exposes the scurrying cockroaches using Conor to further their own agenda, those out to make a quick buck off a distressed sale, off the distressed family of the deceased. This is by no means an easy read, whether you’ve lost someone dear to you or not. But sometimes braving what’s dark and messy—equipped with only words as a beam of light to shine on the dirty work of grief—is the one way you can try to get clean. —KS

4. The Last Lighthouse Keeper in America

 Dorothy Wickenden | The New Yorker | October 30, 2923 | 4,500 words

Sally Snowman is the 70th keeper in the history of Boston Light lighthouse. She is also the first woman. And the last. When Snowman retires, the station will be “unmanned”—“unwomaned,” as she puts it—and Boston Light will go the way of many a lighthouse before it. (The United States currently has about 850 lighthouses, but only half are active, and these use automated eclectic lamps.) In this lovely ode to a dying profession, Dorothy Wickenden looks at the history of Boston Light: tragic deaths, minimal pay, unbearable loneliness, and madness. It’s a ride. There’s also stuff on the mechanics of lighthouse lenses, if you’re into that sort of thing, but for me, it was Wickenden’s honest descriptions of lightkeeper life, with only the “moan of the foghorn and the ceaseless crashing of the waves” for company, that drew me in. A piece of history worth remembering. —CW

5. Bonefishing Off Bimini With Bobby Knight

Kevin Koenig | GQ Magazine | November 7, 2023 | 6,248 words

I spent this past weekend in the college town where I grew up. This college town also happens to be where legendary basketball coach Bob Knight cemented his complicated legacy. (Yes, I was at the game where he threw the chair.) Through three national championships and more wins than any college coach at the time, he loomed over the place like a god—a temperamental, wrathful god, but a god all the same. After Knight died last week, a deluge of remembrances followed. To a one, they celebrated the man’s accomplishments and acknowledged his flaws. Yet none of them came close to capturing him the way Kevin Koenig’s 2015 profile in Angler’s Journal did. Three days with Knight fishing in the Bahamas. Three days of witnessing his locker-room joviality giving way to a tempest. Three days of conversation and combat, drama and détente. It’s a portrait that feels complete, and a portrait I never thought I’d read. I missed it the first time around; thankfully, GQ reprinted it this week, with a foreword from Koenig unpacking the aftermath of his warts-and-all approach. If you love sports, it’s a can’t-miss. Even if you don’t, it’s still mandatory reading. Rarely these days do profiles steep you in a sense of place, but Koenig’s bucks that trend. You’ll feel the spray in your face, the sun on your arms—and in the many moments where Koenig’s questions encounter Knight’s volatility, the burn of shame on your neck. —PR

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For a long 10 minutes, I cried and cried. Overwhelmed by the horrors of the past few days, I walked out of the hospital and found myself wandering the streets. I thought idly, we could turn this city into a film set for war movies. Second World War films and end-of-the-world movies. We could hire it out to the best Hollywood directors. Doomsday on demand.

Who could have the courage to tell Hanna, so far away in Ramallah, that her only sister had been killed? That her family had been killed? I phoned my colleague Manar and asked her to go to our house with a couple of friends and try to delay the news from getting to her. “Lie to her,” I told Manar. “Say the building was attacked by F-16s but the neighbors think Huda and Hatem were out at the time. Any lie that could help.”

In the morning, I rejoined the search for bodies. The building was, as T.S. Eliot would say, “a heap of broken images.” We searchers picked through the ruins under the cricket-like hum of drones we couldn’t see in the sky.

What we are not allowed to say, as Palestinians speaking to the Western media, is that all life is equally valuable. That no event takes place in a vacuum. That history didn’t start on October 7, 2023, and if you place what’s happening in the wider historical context of colonialism and anticolonial resistance, what’s most remarkable is that anyone in 2023 should be still surprised that conditions of absolute violence, domination, suffocation, and control produce appalling violence in turn. During the Haitian revolution in the early 19th century, former slaves massacred white settler men, women, and children. During Nat Turner’s revolt in 1831, insurgent slaves massacred white men, women, and children. During the Indian uprising of 1857, Indian rebels massacred English men, women, and children. During the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s, Kenyan rebels massacred settler men, women, and children. At Oran in 1962, Algerian revolutionaries massacred French men, women, and children. Why should anyone expect Palestinians—or anyone else—to be different? To point these things out is not to justify them; it is to understand them. Every single one of these massacres was the result of decades or centuries of colonial violence and oppression, a structure of violence Frantz Fanon explained decades ago in The Wretched of the Earth.

What we are not allowed to say, in other words, is that if you want the violence to stop, you must stop the conditions that produced it. You must stop the hideous system of racial segregation, dispossession, occupation, and apartheid that has disfigured and tormented Palestine since 1948, consequent upon the violent project to transform a land that has always been home to many cultures, faiths, and languages into a state with a monolithic identity that requires the marginalization or outright removal of anyone who doesn’t fit. And that while what’s happening in Gaza today is a consequence of decades of settler-colonial violence and must be placed in the broader history of that violence to be understood, it has taken us to places to which the entire history of colonialism has never taken us before.

The simmering fear of violence that we had felt every day now turned into terror. Kabul was shelled relentlessly for months. Food and water became scarce. Each day, we received news of more deaths among our family, friends and neighbours. I lived in an extended family of several uncles and aunts and my granny, and it became our family ritual to pray for the dead before eating supper. My grandmother would lead the prayers. My four little siblings and I would follow, scared and confused by death. My heavily pregnant aunt looked numb, all expression drained from her, as if she needed reminding to move her arm and her hand to reach the food on the plate in front of her.

 In the kitchen, my Jewish partner stands soberly over the stove, making food we will not taste. My father sighs. We flounder in complex grief.  

It is a sorrow lifetimes larger than words. One wide enough to acknowledge Jewish pain, both recent and historical. As a Palestinian, I refuse to mimic the oppressor by denying the humanity of the deceased. But this sadness sits inside the crater of certainty that the world will still refuse ours. It is a chasm carved by decades of discourse in which only certain bodies bleed. Inside this consensus, there is no violent dispossession of our land, no acceptable form in which we may resist our many slow and instant deaths. It refuses the fact that for decades we have buried hundreds of slain for every one Israeli killed. In this selective, Western gaze, there is only our barbarism, which must be brutally contained.

In 2012 — the year after I first met them, and the year after their brief trip to Austin — Tarzan and Arab fled Gaza. Hamas in Gaza, and Hamas-affiliated militants, had been harassing them and their family for months.

The aggressors were upset at being tricked, both in the making of Colourful Journey and in Tarzan and Arab’s smuggling themselves into Egypt. They were upset at Tarzan and Arab’s flamboyant clothes and public celebration of the movie house, a place the fundamentalists considered little more than a temple to pornography.

On a wet, gray February day in 2012, Abed Salama was plunged into every parent’s worst nightmare. His son Milad had left for kindergarten early that morning, carrying an orange drink, a sleeve of Pringles, and a chocolate Kinder Egg — special treats for a class picnic. When Abed got word that there had been an accident involving one of the school buses carrying Milad’s class, he panicked. Getting to the scene required navigating sluggish traffic, past high walls and fences, then running on foot when soldiers wouldn’t let his vehicle go any farther; he asked for a ride in a military jeep but was refused. Getting answers about Milad — where was he? was he alive? — was even more punishing. Abed didn’t have the right information, the right papers, the right ethnicity. He is Palestinian, and in his world, as writer Nathan Thrall details in an astonishing feat of reporting for the New York Review of Books, every parent’s worst nightmare is compounded by Israel’s decades-long efforts to make Palestinian lives all but unlivable:

For over half a century, Israel’s strategic dilemma has been its inability to erase the Palestinians, on one hand, and its unwillingness to grant them civil and political rights, on the other. Explaining his opposition to giving Palestinians in the West Bank the same rights as Palestinian citizens of Israel, [former foreign minister] Abba Eban said that there was a limit to the amount of arsenic the human body could absorb. Between the two poles of mass expulsion and political inclusion, the unhappy compromise Israel found was to fragment the Palestinian population, ensuring that its scattered pieces could not organize as one national collective.

Administratively, fragmentation was implemented by imposing varying restrictions, decrees, or laws on Palestinian residents of the different sub-units Israel defined for them: Gaza; the West Bank; East Jerusalem; Israel within the Green Line; and refugees outside the state. Nowhere were Palestinians granted rights equal to those of Jews. Physically, fragmentation was achieved through the establishment of Israeli settlements and their surrounding roads, national parks, archaeological sites, and closed military zones, which left Palestinian communities isolated from one another and surrounded by fences, walls, checkpoints, closed gates, roadblocks, trenches, and bypass roads.

In the case of the accident, fragmentation meant that no one placed a call for assistance until 19 minutes after the school bus collided with a tractor trailer, flipped over, and burst into flames. Israeli emergency services were just a minute and a half away — a military checkpoint was even closer — so onlookers assumed help was coming, but it wasn’t. A video shot at the scene shows a tragedy unfolding in real time:

Men rush forward with small fire extinguishers taken from their cars. Others bring plastic bottles, helplessly pouring them onto the blaze. The flames continue to grow. A man paces desperately in a circle, gripping his face with both hands. Another hits himself on the head. A third, his small fire extinguisher emptied, storms away from the bus, yelling, “Where are you people?! Dear God!” as he raises the extinguisher over his head and slams it to the ground. A small blackened corpse lies on its back in the middle of the road. “Cover him, cover him,” one man tells another. “Where are the ambulances?!” someone else yells. “Where are the Jews?”

Fragmentation also meant that, in the aftermath of the crash, which ultimately claimed several lives and left many children injured, it wasn’t possible to hold Israeli institutions accountable. “Left unsaid,” Thrall writes, “were criticisms of the policies the parents and politicians alike were powerless to change.” Abed would eventually learn what happened to his son, but not from Milad himself. The little boy died, and his body was so badly burned that a DNA test was required to identify him:

Several years after the accident, when Abed was working as a taxi driver, he gave a ride to a mother and her children traveling from Ramallah to their home in the Shuafat Refugee Camp. As they approached the accident site on Jaba road, Abed whispered the Fatiha, the opening prayer of the Quran. From the back seat the mother said, “May God protect them.” Abed was surprised. “You know about the accident?” he asked. She said that her son, sitting beside her in the taxi, was among the students on the bus that day. Abed insisted that the family come home with him for lunch right then. They passed Milad’s school, where, on the anniversary of the crash, Abed would bring Kinder Eggs to the students in Milad’s old classroom, and stopped at a store, where Abed bought a toy for Milad’s former schoolmate. At his home, Abed worked up the courage to ask the boy if he remembered anything about Milad that day. The boy said he did: “Milad was in the front of the bus. He was scared, and he crawled under his seat.”

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Yifat Susskind | Longreads | April 2019 | 17 minutes (4,193 words)

When my sons were younger, I remember explaining to them the difference between real and imaginary. Their dreams and nightmares weren’t real; you couldn’t see or touch them. The stories in their books weren’t real; I soothed their worries about monsters coming to life by assuring my boys it was all just imaginary.

Those conversations have surfaced in my mind as I’ve been thinking about borders; these made-up lines etched across the Earth by the powerful to hold their power in place — lines that are imaginary at first and then all too real.

Just look to the killing field that Israel has sown around Gaza, imprisoning people on a spit of land so ruined that it will soon be uninhabitable. It’s over one year since people there rose up to stage on-going protests against the occupation that has ruined lives and destroyed communities.

There’s also the US-Mexico border in Arizona, cutting across the land of the Indigenous Tohono O’odham People, now thick with the apparatus of state violence: cameras, fences, drones, guns, jails. Or the line that was drawn to divide Korea, now the world’s most militarized border, stuck with the Orwellian designation DMZ, for “demilitarized zone.”

As the director of MADRE, an international women’s rights organization, I’ve spent time recently at each of these borders, with feminist peace activists and Indigenous women leaders. In each place, I listened as women described what it’s like to be trapped by borders, as mothers told of their responsibility for the survival and peace of mind of their children in these zones of hostility and violence, loss and separation.

To see the world through the eyes of those who are responsible for its most vulnerable people: that’s what it means to work from the perspective of mothers. When we do this, we understand anew the issues that drive migration and border brutality — and the solutions needed to address them.

***

Palestine: Motherhood under Siege

I grew up with a story about the food in Aleppo, Syria. My grandmother would recount a meal to me, the best she’d ever eaten, as I looked down at the plain boiled chicken and clumps of white rice on my plate: the sweetest tomatoes, the greenest olives, the endless variety of salty white cheeses, the crispy roast lamb and pistachio kibbe, the rich desserts scented with orange blossom and honey. We would sit at one of the long white Formica tables in the noisy communal dining hall of the kibbutz she had founded, called Evron. My father and I were born here, on land belonging to the Palestinian village of Ghabsiyyeh. From my favorite spot by the window, I could see the avocado fields, and beyond them, the tops of the hills in Lebanon. That’s where most of the people of Ghabsiyyeh lived as refugees, but I didn’t know about them then. They were never part of my grandmother’s story.

She was 19 when she ate the most memorable meal of her life in Aleppo, a stop on her journey overland from Hungary to Palestine. It was 1937, and my grandmother didn’t yet know that Europe’s borders would soon become deathtraps for the family and friends she had left behind. Or that the borders of the new country she was going to help “build” (in the Zionist parlance of her day), would cut her off from Aleppo forever. Her story always ended the same way: with a promise that peace would come soon, like a longed-for break in bad weather, and we would then take the train to Aleppo to taste its legendary cuisine.

That was my favorite part of the story — not the idea of peace, which I knew I should wish for, yet couldn’t imagine, — but the notion that it might one day be possible to cross the border.

Contrary to my grandmother’s fantasy, Israel’s borders have not become enticing gateways for visits to neighboring lands. They remained war zones throughout most of my childhood and are essentially war zones today. That’s largely because Israel has tended to treat its borders as temporary limitations on its expansion. If you watched a time-lapse of a map of historic Palestine, from 1948 — when my grandmother danced with my father on her shoulders to celebrate Israel’s independence — until now, you would see the shape-shifting lines of Israeli territorial control expand to nearly wipe Palestine off the map. Spend an afternoon in Hebron or Jaffa or Jerusalem, and you can watch this happening now, in real-time.

Israelis themselves became a people obsessed with borders: where they should be, who should be allowed through, how to control them. That obsession can be mobilized into political leverage, as recently re-elected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attempted when he vowed to annex the West Bank and definitively redraw the lines of Israeli sovereignty — an 11th hour attempt to rally votes from the right for his beleaguered candidacy.

By now, Israelis have managed to barricade themselves in on all sides: the 25-foot-tall Wall to the east; the network of fences, checkpoints, and barbed wire between Israel and Gaza; the fence along the border with Egypt meant to keep out migrants from Africa; and to the north, a new cement barrier to seal off the border with Lebanon. These borders are famously fortified to keep people out, not least, the descendants of the 800,000 Palestinians that my grandmother’s generation drove from Ghabsiyyeh and hundreds of other villages in 1948.

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But as William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” That was the message of the March of Return that began last March in Gaza and that triggered a full year of protests: that the dispossession of 1948 and the occupation that began in 1967 continue to unfold daily for Palestinians who have lived under Israeli siege since 2007, when Israel imposed an air, land and sea blockade on Gaza.

The blockade has made Gaza into an open-air prison, one of the hardest places in the world to be a mother. It prevents almost two-million Palestinians from crossing the border to work or visit family. It has also deeply restricted access to the resources mothers need to care for people: food, education, medicine, essential services such as clean water and electricity, and any possibility of economic livelihood. The result is that today, nearly 80 percent of Gazans depend on humanitarian aid, and over half live in poverty. Mothering in Gaza has become even harder since the Trump Administration made punishing cuts to US funding for humanitarian aid.

Beginning March 30, 2018, Land Day, a group of young Palestinians spearheaded ongoing protest along the massive network of electric fences, barbed wire, surveillance systems and shoot-to-kill zones that we call the Israel-Gaza border. As is often true of popular, peaceful protest, this was a family affair, with space for participation, voice and leadership from women and girls, as well as men and boys.

One young woman, 21-year-old Razan al-Najjar, found her calling as a first responder, treating those injured by Israeli army gunfire and teargas. During the ninth week of the march, she was shot dead — a victim of indiscriminate Israeli military violence against protesting civilians, which the UN last month reiterated may have constituted war crimes and crimes against humanity. News of her death reached me through my friend Majda, who helped train Razan as a volunteer medic.

On the phone that day, Majda and I began planning to replenish the first-aid supplies needed in Gaza with a shipment in Razan’s memory. We talked about our own children and about the unimaginable heartbreak of her mother. Just one week after her daughter’s death, Razan’s mother donned a medic’s vest and took her daughter’s place caring for protesters at the border.

This is how I understand border militarization. Not as an abstract set of policies, but as a real and present threat to families and communities around the world. It’s what killed Razan, consigned her mother to a lifetime of grief, and keeps Palestinians trapped under occupation. It’s what strips people of possibility and turns them into second-class citizens, forced to navigate checkpoints in places as far afield as Arizona and Palestine. It’s what throws up walls, literal and figurative, between communities, and convinces people that they’re safer behind those barriers, even as they allow their own humanity to slip away.

***

From Central America to Arizona: The Road to Refuge

The violence of colonial borders is well known to Indigenous Peoples around the world, including the Tohono O’odham, whose territory straddles Arizona and Mexico. Their land is ground zero in the resistance to Trump’s proposed border wall, projected to loom along 75 miles of these federally recognized tribal lands. As currently planned, the wall would cut people off from their families, sacred sites and ancestral lands. The Tohono O’odham language has no word for wall, and people here have no intention of seeing one built on their territory.

Last year, I traveled with an international delegation of six Indigenous leaders to the Tohono O’odham territory and southern Arizona. These women, from Guatemala, Nicaragua, Cameroon, Kenya, and Nepal, have all seen their lands divided by colonial borders created to exclude and control. Yet they believe, as Eduardo Galeano writes, that “the world was born yearning to be a home for everyone.”

And so they came to Arizona, to demonstrate that migration is an Indigenous issue and to lay the groundwork for a global campaign of solidarity with the Tohono O’odham and with the migrants seeking refuge on their land.

/

Over tacos and iced tea, in the concrete courtyard of the Puente Community Center in Phoenix, we sat in a circle of colorful plastic chairs, talking with families who had risked the treacherous journey across the desert, to the US. Each story was unique, but every person hinted at the longstanding US policies that ultimately made their home untenable.

Fabiana* born in Mexico the year that NAFTA came into effect, spoke of the trade agreements that bankrupted farmers. Ignacio made a wry joke about the US meddling that helped install Honduras’ repressive government (adding that it surely rivals any Russian operation in the US). Paola described the patrols of vicious armed men that mushroomed across the Salvadoran countryside as Washington waged its “war on drugs.” All of this in the wake of the US-backed wars and genocide of the 1980s, with their legacy of displacement and trauma — a burden that weighs heavily on those especially targeted, Indigenous Peoples.

Throughout the region, years of repression and instability have also produced epidemic levels of gender violence. For instance, during Guatemala’s 36 years of civil war, tens of thousands of Guatemalan women and girls were raped, tortured and murdered. These attacks — abetted by Elliott Abrams, who is now back in action as the US Special Representative for Venezuela — were part of a deliberate strategy to traumatize individuals and terrorize entire communities. Since peace accords were signed in 1996, the perpetrators have rarely been brought to justice, further normalizing gender violence.

A 2015 report found that Guatemala has one of the highest rates of femicide in the world; the number of women murdered in the country has tripled since 2000, and with rampant impunity:in 2011 less than four percent of homicide cases result in conviction, and by 2015 the numbers had not improved. With no protection for those at risk and effectively no accountability for the crimes that have been committed, it is no wonder that so many of those fleeing to the US are women with children in their care.

Trump has seized upon the narrative of Central American gang violence, but not out of concern for its targets. Instead, he strips away any of this political or historical context and labels entire communities as “criminals,” demonizing the victims of gang violence that is part of the US legacy in Central America, and cutting them off from safety.

As families shared their stories, one other reason for leaving home stood out: climate change. “We could no longer grow food,” said Magdalena, a young mother from Guatemala. Shifting her four-year-old, Bibi, on her lap, she described the gathering panic of watching corn wither on the stalk. “Every morning it’s a little worse until you realize all is lost.” The parents in the circle nodded grimly. “After my daughter was born, we had less to eat every year.”

In fact, since Bibi’s birth in 2014, when the “child migrant crisis” on the southern US border began making headlines, a creeping “Dry Corridor” has cut through the four Central American countries with the highest rates of migration: Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. For all of Trump’s racist and self-serving talk of gang violence, many migrants from Guatemala are, like Magdalena and Bibi, fleeing the drought that’s been intensified by a century of US carbon pollution.

We said our goodbyes to the families at Puente and headed southeast to the town of Florence. There, we met with exhausted young lawyers from the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, hard at work trying to reunite families separated by the Trump Administration. Their clients included babies as young as one year old and terrified Indigenous children, who speak neither Spanish nor English. No one had told them where their parents were or why they were alone in a strange place. I thought about the time I had lost sight of my son in an airport when he was a toddler. It was all of 10 minutes, but I can still remember the terror that lodged in the back of my throat from not knowing where he was and whether he was safe — and the relief that surged through me when I found him.

I climbed back into the van with my colleagues and our partners, and we immediately began to organize: planning a network of Mam, Tz’utujil, and Kaqchikel speakers to translate for people in detention, finding trauma counselors to ease suffering, and continuing our partnership with the Florence Project and with groups across the border to build a network of support for migrant mothers.

Later, I stood at the border, looking over the fence into Mexico. The hard-baked ground was strewn with discarded plastic water bottles, bits of small pink clothing, used diapers. It was punishing to stand in the sun even for a few minutes, impossible to imagine carrying a baby across that desert.

I thought of Warsan Shire’s poem, “Home,” where she says:

you have to understand,

no one puts their children in a boat

unless the water is safer than the land.

who would choose to spend days

and nights in the stomach of a truck

unless the miles travelled

meant something more than journey.

And I also thought of another arid landscape, thousands of miles away, where mothers in Gaza remain trapped with their children. They have little option to flee to a safer place as Israel’s border policies and economic siege render their homes unlivable. Young people in Gaza are especially vulnerable to the deprivations that occupation creates. It cuts off the fuel needed to generate electricity for water treatment or sewage management, so dirty water is a leading killer of children. Gaza’s economic collapse has meant that more than half of the people are unemployed. That number surges to about 66% among youth.

Some have disparaged mothers who make the dangerous journey north to the US or who would allow their children to take part in the border wall protests in Gaza. They have blamed Razan’s mother for permitting her daughter to do the dangerous work of a medic. They’re unable or unwilling to imagine that no one puts their children in harm’s way unless a greater danger looms.

***

On Motherhood and Marginalization

There are simple, daily acts of mothering — nursing, caring, healing — that carry immense power. These are the ways we show our children that they are loved and safe, and grow them into compassionate, capable adults. These acts of love are more than private, familial shows of affection: they are the way we help ensure the best potential of human beings. Every public policy should be oriented in support of that work.

Instead, parenting is under assault — at the US border and in so many of our policies and institutions. The Trump Administration has dehumanized migrants to the point where they deem it acceptable to kidnap and cage thousands of children. Or to take a nursing child away from their mother. Or to stalk and detain a woman as she brings her son to the hospital for his broken arm.

One of the more wrenching dinner-table conversations I’ve had with my sons was about how Trump’s “family separation” policy is only the most recent expression of this country’s white supremacy. We talked about enslaved black children, sold away from their parents for profit and to sever ties of love that anchor resistance. We talked about Indigenous children, abducted and sent to boarding schools to extinguish their cultures.

My sons are teenagers now; they already know of these atrocities, but I still sometimes have to resist the urge to shield them from these stories. Somehow, when you think your children are safe you don’t want to even speak to them of danger. But that option to protect my kids from the mere knowledge of US brutality is one born of white privilege. It’s an option that perpetuates racism and deprives our children of the tools to confront it. What’s more, the brutal world will always intrude. What safety could I promise my Jewish children after the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh? We can’t hide forever behind white privilege, oblivious to both danger and responsibility.

And of course, the option to turn away from hard truths is one that millions of mothers don’t have. The story of systematic and forced separation of families by the state isn’t only foundational to US history. It’s also the story of millions of incarcerated people in the US right now, disproportionately poor, brown and black people — and increasingly, mothers. Their right to mother and be mothered, to parent and be parented, has long been under attack. Many prison reform and abolition advocates were quick to point this out. During the flashes of public outrage against the Administration’s abuse of immigrant families, they guided people to see common and long standing policies of mass incarceration in the same light.

So, what comes next? We organize, to sustain that flash and turn it into an enduring, more expansive spotlight. We refuse to turn away. We join together to support mothers and activists who never grew inured to the danger because racist assault has always been a clear-and-present threat in their lives and who could never afford to shield their children from the truth. Anyone looking for ways to sustain resistance and action should turn to their wisdom, leadership, and solutions as a guide.

***

The Two Koreas: A Dream of Peace

Last May, I traveled to the Korean peninsula as part of a delegation organized by Women Cross DMZ and the Nobel Women’s Initiative. We were more than 30 women peacebuilders from all over the world, gathering to strategize with local women peace activists. For these Korean women, peace means erasing the arbitrary, impenetrable border imposed on their country by the US and the Soviet Union nearly 66 years ago. Peace means reuniting the families that have been severed along with the land.

“During the war, I fled to the south,” one elderly woman told me as we joined 1,200 other women in a peace walk across the so-called “demilitarized zone” along the border. “Then Korea was divided, and I never saw my mother again. My children never knew their grandmother. When you don’t know your grandparents, when you don’t know the place you come from, you are missing a part of yourself. Because of the border, everyone in Korea is missing a part of themselves.”

The peace walk was held on May 24, the day the UN launched a new agenda on nuclear disarmament. In Korea, the women told us, denuclearization is not an isolated imperative. It’s a prerequisite to the dream of making their country and their families whole again. And overcoming the nuclear threat, in Korea and everywhere else, is inextricably linked to taking on the culture and economy of militarism that holds so many of our countries hostage.

Militarism has seeped into the way we decide policies, approach conflict, deliver humanitarian aid, greet impoverished families seeking refuge at the border and set government budgets. Trump’s latest proposal for US military spending in 2020 clocks in at $750 billion — an increase of $34 billion over last year. Militarism has come to define our very identities as people and countries. Its power is manifest in a 1.7 trillion dollar an year industry (in which the US spends as much as the next seven countries combined) and a global infrastructure of nearly 800 US military bases in 70 countries. Increasingly, we’re seeing the tentacles of this monstrous industry wrapping around borders, in an explicit sales pitch to “[bring] the battlefield to the border” by installing military weaponry, surveillance, and personnel. In this globalized political economy, military research and development is subcontracted by the US to Israel, tested on people in Gaza, and then sold and installed to enforce border regimes in the US and Korea.

***

Mothering and Migration as Acts of Hope

That architecture of separation on the Korean peninsula reminded me of the US-Mexico border that artificially divides the Tohono O’odham People. It reminded me of the restrictions on freedom of movement for Palestinians, with arbitrary checkpoints and military zones dividing families. Over time, this kind of separation eats away at the ties that bind people to each other and to their histories.

But the work of mothers to make their families and communities viable and safe, to meet people’s basic needs for health care, water, or schooling, also serves to build back the connections that create resilient, healthy communities able to imagine a new way of living, and to demand policy action to achieve it. That’s the deeper promise behind South Korean women’s lifesaving efforts to deliver milk, medicines and humanitarian aid to mothers in the north; behind mothers mobilizing across Central America to care for migrants and their children making the dangerous trek north; or behind Palestinian women’s organizing to support health care and food delivery.

This work gives us all a lens to reconsider issues like international trade agreements, development, climate change, national security, geopolitical relations, nuclear weapons proliferation, and the military-prison-industrial complex. These are not only women’s issues — as women’s human rights activists have long argued — but also mothers’ issues. You don’t have to be a woman or a parent to know this. You only need to understand that the policies that govern the most pressing questions of our time require a fundamental overhaul from serving the powerful to protecting the vulnerable. And that is what mothers have always done.

When Trump announced the deployment of US soldiers to the southern border, shut down the government over billions in funding to build a wall, and even threatened to close the border altogether, I thought again of Magdalena, who fled the fatal realities of failed harvests in Guatemala. Trump would have us believe that it’s not climate change, but Magdalena and her four-year-old who are the threat. His diatribes against an “onslaught” of immigrants echo the Israeli government warnings — not of the inhumane conditions in Gaza, but of Palestinians protesting those conditions, threatening to “breach into Israel’s borders.”

In fact, at borders around the world, black and brown people are trying to escape conditions largely created by the countries that enforce those borders. Public support for militarized border enforcement depends on the demonization of those seeking safety and sustenance: the men are “rapists” and “animals,” says Trump; the women are guilty of bringing more black and brown people into the world.

Those of us inside of militarized borders, within zones of relative safety and wealth, have a choice to make. We can choose Trump’s fearmongering and seek the way of the “armed lifeboat.” That’s the choice to hide behind weapons and barbed wire to deny the rest of the world.

Or we can build a mothership that carries everyone, understanding, as the poet Alexis De Veaux does, that “Motherhood is not simply the organic process of giving birth… It is understanding the needs of the world.”

If we wish for more than mere survival, our best hope to overcome the crises we face — from climate change to militarism and beyond — lies in the bonds and resilience we build with each other, across borders of all kinds. If we understand that, we defend people’s right to have viable homes safe from war and disaster. We can confront policies of separation and occupation that spread misery and pain. And we fight with just as much fervor for people’s right to seek new lives across borders. Because migration, like motherhood, is an act of hope.

*All names in this section have been changed.

* * *

Yifat Susskind is the Executive Director of MADRE, an international women’s rights organization. For more than 20 years, she has partnered with grassroots women activists from Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and Africa to create programs in their communities that meet urgent needs and create lasting solutions.

Editor: Sari Botton
Fact-checker: Ethan Chiel