Bay Area Israelis and Palestinians watch developing war with grief, fear for future

For seven years, Dan Cohen helmed his Oakland-based media relations company from his new home just outside Tel Aviv — an across-the-world move intended to bring his wife and three children closer to their Jewish roots. And for seven years, life carried on in the relative warmth and safety he expected.

Then came Saturday’s air raid sirens and the repeated sprints to a nearby bomb shelter amid a massive Hamas attack that killed hundreds of Israelis and has reportedly left more than one hundred held hostage.

“In a small country, everybody knows somebody,” Cohen said. “This will shape a generation of Israelis.”

Days into the bloodiest conflict Israel has seen in decades — which has killed hundreds of people and injured thousands of others — those who live in the Bay Area with ties to Israel and the Middle East reeled in shock and grief. While their causes, political allegiances and underlying beliefs remain radically different, both Israelis and Palestinians with roots in Northern California expressed horror at a bloody situation that appears likely to deteriorate in the coming days.

Rallies in multiple Bay Area cities gathered in support of both Israelis and Palestinians. One demonstration in San Francisco over the weekend brought out House Speaker Emeritus Nancy Pelosi and San Francisco Mayor London Breed.

Meanwhile, some Israeli citizens in the region are making preparations to go back to Israel as part of a massive military mobilization.

At the same time, Palestinians and their supporters voiced fear for their relatives living in Gaza, where Hamas launched its attack Saturday and where a full-scale invasion by Israel was a looming possibility.

“The Palestinian diaspora are terrified right now,” said Wassim Hajj, an outreach coordinator and case manager for the Arab Resource and Organizing Center, based in San Francisco. “And I think they’re also tremendously, as always, hopeful that they’ll one day see a free Palestine.”

People on both sides of the conflict sought solace in their faith: At the Chabad House in San Jose’s Almaden neighborhood, some Jewish mourners arrived to pray and wrap their arms in tefillin, a traditional Jewish garb made of thin strips of black cloth.

“Every single Jew living here in the Bay Area knows someone — some family member, in the army — someone affected,” said Rabbi Mendel Weinfeld. “It’s scary. It’s devastating. But the Jews have gone through these things over and over again. And our trust and belief in God is rock solid.”

Some Bay Area-based Palestinians voiced deep fear for the their loved ones, aware that a full ground invasion of Gaza could be in the offing.

Wael Buhaissy, 55, a Palestinian who has lived in San Ramon for the last three decades, stressed that it is impossible to understand the current situation without acknowledging Israel’s blockade of Gaza and tactics by the country that have made the 140-square-mile region an “open-air prison.” For too long, he said, Israel’s actions have left Palestinians oppressed and grasping for the simplest necessities of food and economic independence.

On Monday, as Israel amassed troops outside Gaza and the ranks of its military swelled with freshly summoned reservists, Buhaissy began to weep. His aunt vowed during one of her most recent phone calls that she would not flee Gaza, even if given the chance.

“She told (my mother) that we have nowhere else to go and are not leaving — we die here standing,” Buhaissy said. “I’m getting emotional now just talking … because if you just tune into the news and watch, that’s what people don’t see.”

As Israel mounts its forces, the full scale of Saturday’s surprise attack from Hamas came into greater focus.

In a stunning intelligence failure, the assault by Hamas militants happened without warning and on a scale not seen in decades. A barrage of rockets hit targets across Israel early Saturday morning, near the end of the Jewish holiday Sukkot. Gunmen stormed a music festival, killing 250 people, while Hamas militants took at least 150 Israelis hostage, many of them civilians.

The geopolitical implications of Saturday’s attack remained murky and impossible to predict. It happened as the United States was seeking to broker a deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia that would see the two countries normalize relations — much as Israel had done in recent years with the United Arab Emirates and other Middle Eastern countries. In one fell swoop, the attack appeared to leave the future of that deal in limbo, along with the future of a potential Palestinian state.

Tyler Gregory, the CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council Bay Area, said he was “strongly encouraged” by the swift support offered to Israel by President Joe Biden and other American representatives across the political spectrum.

“There’s a lot of deep concern and trauma happening right now,” Gregory said. “Importantly, this is really just the beginning. There’s going to be some kind of war that happens, and we’re sort of encouraging people to be resilient.”

Yet less than 72 hours after the start of the attack, those concerns remained an afterthought Monday for many Bay Area people with ties to the region. At UC Berkeley, students tried making sense of the violence with professors who have spent decades studying the relentless complexities of the region, said Ron Hassner, a professor of Israel studies at UC Berkeley.

The scale of the conflict is unlike anything the region has seen for decades, Hassner said. Due to Israel’s relatively small size — at 9 million people, it ranks only slightly more populous than the broader Bay Area — it would be as if tens of thousands of Americans were killed in a single day.

“This is really perceived in Israel and around the U.S. as an Israeli 9/11 — that a line has been crossed, that the status quo has been irrevocably crossed.” he said.