Conversations with Randa: How the life of a Gazan refugee maps Israel’s dilemma

Randa Abumudallala. (Photo: Supplied)

By Kevin Bloom

17 Jul 2024

At the time of the First Intifada, when Randa Abumudallala was a small child, roadmaps to coexistence between Palestinians and Jews were marked as 'top priority' by Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency. But through her twenties and thirties, the Gaza blockade and the regular Israeli bombing campaigns would demonstrate the deafness of the Zionist leadership. Today, as a refugee attempting to evacuate her family from Rafah, Randa’s story is evocative of the paralysis in Israel about the 'day after'.

“What they overlooked was that Arabs were human beings like themselves and that it might be dangerous not to expect them to act and react in much the same way as Jews…” — Hannah Arendt

Another traitor’s heart

“You know, those soldiers were less harmful and more respectful,” said Randa Abumudallala, “even if they were going in or out of your building, they were talking to you politely.”

It was now more than a month since I had recorded these words, and there was still nowhere concrete to go. As an answer to my question about her earliest childhood memories of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), Randa had been softspoken yet firm. She had given voice, if all too briefly, to the world of her four-year-old self — the world of a small child coming into consciousness in an apartment block in northern Gaza, just as the First Intifada was beginning to erupt.

Put simply, there was nowhere concrete to go because, whatever words I tried to nail to the page, they failed to do justice to what it actually meant to be Randa. Her redacted life story, which she shared with Daily Maverick over three sessions — one at her employer’s offices in the United Kingdom, where we met, and the other two via WhatsApp chat after I had returned to South Africa — was conveyed in a tone at once ardent and detached, as if her experiences had been scorched into her psyche until they had hardened as her fate.

The other problem, as Randa knew — and as I had shared in an article published in late October 2023 on this platform — was that when she was a young girl facing the fallout from the First Intifada, I was demonstrating my love for Israel as a volunteer in the IDF. No matter how much I told myself that I was no longer the fervent Jewish idealist I had been back then, nothing could bridge the gap between her memories and mine.

And so the weeks passed, with numerous failed attempts at getting to the heart of the story, and Randa’s unforgettable voice languishing on my hard-drive.

Then, in late June 2024, on the “X” account of the influencer and “proud Zionist” Hillel Fuld, I saw something that promised a way through. Fuld had posted a clip of Ami Ayalon, the former head of the Israeli internal security agency Shin Bet, explaining to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour that his country had only two options left:

“To divide [the land] and keep our identity; or, not to divide [the land], and to lose our identity and security…”

As far as I was concerned, Ayalon’s blunt statement — alongside everything else he had said to Amanpour — made profound and urgent sense. Fuld, on the other hand, found the former security chief “repulsive” and “disgusting”. In every generation, he opined, there were “Jews who sided with the enemy and abandoned their brothers and sisters.” Here, in Fuld’s estimation, Ayalon was no different to centrist Israeli figureheads such as Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, who had made similarly “disgraceful” statements on global news networks.

But why would this seemingly fanatical post, with only 1200 likes and 500 comments, turn out to break the deadlock that I was facing with Randa?

There were two parts to the answer, and the first part was personal.

Randa Abumudallala. (Photo: Supplied)

In mid-May 2024, a few weeks after I had published an essay on Daily Maverick that explored how the narrative of Jewish victimhood was implicate in Zionism’s worst excesses, I received a message from a close family member that accused me of the same betrayals with which Fuld was now denouncing Ayalon. Apparently, according to this Israel-based blood relative, I had turned into a “Jew-hater”. And the tragedy, aside from the fact that it was likely this person would never speak to me again, was that such views were no longer “fanatical” — they had become reflective of Israel’s mainstream, with the vast majority of Israeli Jews supporting the military’s approach in Gaza as well as the limiting of humanitarian aid.

The second part to the answer lay in the background context that Fuld had provided, however unwittingly, to Randa’s earliest encounters with the IDF. Because, as she had told me, Randa could remember those soldiers throwing sweets to her from the top-floor apartment they had commandeered in her block.

“Now,” she said, “when you are looking at the news, when you are seeing how they are behaving in the West Bank and Jerusalem, when you see their videos on TikTok and social media … I mean, what are they doing?”

Hypothetical though it was, for me, this was a fundamental question. At the same time, with her throwaway yet deeply felt line, Randa was touching on the normalised bloodlust of the contemporary Israeli combatant — as articulated, by way of standout example, in the social media rap hit “Harbu Darbu” — as well as on the transformation of Israeli society since 1993, when the First Intifada had ended.

Inspired by Randa, as I would ask myself again and again, what exactly was the modern IDF doing?

For Israelis like Fuld and my relatives, of course, there was nothing to debate: the unconscionable Hamas attack of 7 October, unprecedented in its body-count, brutality and number of hostages still to be saved, needed to be met with a counter-attack that was orders of magnitude worse. And yet what they were refusing to acknowledge, it seemed to me, was that for a long line of Shin Bet chiefs, including but not limited to Ayalon, the events of 7 October were the inevitable result of such thought-forms.

As Avraham Shalom, the head of Shin Bet just before the outbreak of the First Intifada, had disclosed to the director of the award-winning Israeli documentary “The Gatekeepers” in 2012:

“Overkill! It’s security stupidity! It’s military stupidity!"

Like the other five veterans of Shin Bet that had appeared in “The Gatekeepers”, Shalom had broken his silence because of what he’d deemed the greatest threat to Israel’s future: the endless escalation of the violence, justified as necessary by Israeli coalition governments that had become indebted to extremist rightwing parties. For all of these retired security chiefs, whose domains had once extended to the containment of “Jewish terror” too, the only way out of hell was the middle path — or, as they had put it to the camera, the path of negotiation and diplomacy.

“It’s a trait of professional intelligence to talk to everyone,” Shalom had memorably explained. “I see you don’t eat glass. He sees I don’t drink petrol.”

Money-back guarantee

I had first met Randa in London, on a Monday morning in late May, during a visit to the offices of the refugee relief and trauma counseling non-profit where she had just landed a job as executive assistant. It was about three weeks into the IDF’s ground incursion into Rafah, and — as her boss had informed us during the introductions — she had not heard from her parents or siblings since the previous Friday.

“It’s remarkable that Randa has the strength to come into work at all,” her boss had said, aware that her new employee’s family had been camping in tents on the Rafah beach.

That initial meeting had established the raw facts of Randa’s reality. As a recent refugee herself, she told me, her new job and a gofundme campaign had bought her the resources to pay an Egyptian company the princely sum of USD15,000 — worked out at USD5,000 per adult (the charge for a child, she said, was USD2,500) — to secure the escape of her parents and one sibling. The rest of her family, numbering 10 adults and 11 children, including in-laws, nephews and nieces, would have to wait, she added.

But, as Randa knew better than anyone, waiting in southern Gaza had become a treacherous game. A few days after our first interaction, on 30 May 2024, Israel would take effective control of Gaza’s entire land border with Egypt, complicating its relationship with the northern African state. Also, during that same week, an Israeli airstrike would ignite a fire in a tented camp in Rafah, killing 45 displaced Palestinians.

And so the next time I spoke to Randa, via WhatsApp after I had returned to South Africa, her predicament, nightmarish to begin with, had become hellishly complex.

What I was eager to learn, aside from whether she had been in contact with her family the previous week — as it turned out, she had — was how she now planned to deal with the Egyptian company.

“Until today, they are saying that they will return the money if we want, and I know that they have returned the money to some other people,” she said.

“But you are talking about a lot of people who have paid money to that company. And the news now is saying that maybe a European group will be responsible for the Rafah border. So I think if that happens, this Egyptian company will not be able to work again.”

Which left her where, exactly?

“I still have hope that the Rafah border will open and my parents will be able to get out. Due to that, I am not asking for them to return the money.”

Because this was a lot for a Jewish person to imbibe — even, or perhaps especially, for a “traitorous” Jewish person — it would take a while until I grasped the levels of irony in Randa’s situation. What neither of us had brought up, probably because we had both accepted it as given, was the awkward detail that not one country in the Arab world had offered sanctuary to Gaza’s displaced, even while those same countries were officially endorsing the Palestinian cause. Also, for many non-traitorous Jews, this very same point was now being used as a foil for some truly dark motives — the idea that since the Palestinians were universally “unwanted,” Israel was entitled to “not want them” too.

Perhaps the deeper irony, though, was why the Palestinians were unwelcome in the Arab world. And here, the Q&A interview that Politico had run in February 2024 with former US ambassador Ryan Crocker, who had spent four decades representing American interests in the Middle East, was about as authoritative as one could get.

For Crocker, the basis of the underlying antipathy towards Palestinians among the elites of Syria, Jordan and Lebanon — Israel’s neighbours all, with large Palestinian populations to boot — had long been the existential threats that their nationalist movements had posed to the incumbent regimes. Even the Egyptian government, according to Crocker, which had never permitted a Palestinian influx, continued to “fear” their particular brand of armed struggle for statehood.

“That is why Egypt just exploded when [US Secretary of State] Tony Blinken proposed they give temporary sanctuary to Gazans,” noted Crocker, referring to the abandoned attempt at a solution from the early days of the Israel-Hamas war.

As for the Iranians, Crocker added, they were simply “[using] the Palestinians for horrific ends of their own”.

Randa’s family, then, like the other 2 million Gazans that were living the interminable nightmare, were pawns in a contest with end-time stakes and two-faced rules. The solidarity claimed by the Arab states was a mirage, and the US, which remained the only country on the planet with the influence to enforce a truce, was instead easing the “bottlenecks” in its regular supply of munitions to Israel’s army, air force and navy. The ultimate irony, meanwhile, was that inside Israel itself, the word “peace” was becoming less traitorous.

The IDF’s core strategy of “escalation as deterrence” was revealing its cracks, with The New York Times reporting, in early July, that Israel’s top generals wanted a ceasefire, even if it meant that Hamas remained in charge. For these anonymous military chiefs, who had exhausted their troops in the failed attempt at eliminating Hamas, a ceasefire was the only way to negotiate a release of the hostages. Their more complexing problem, however, was Iran’s much stronger proxy, Hezbollah, which had the will and the firepower to bring the war to Israel’s towns, ports and infrastructure. And Hezbollah was being explicit, from its hideouts in southern Lebanon, that it would stand down in the north if Israel stood down in Gaza.

By any reading, therefore, it was a full-circle return to the retired heads of Shin Bet, whose understanding of a ceasefire — as Ayalon had told Amanpour — was that it was commensurate with negotiations for a Palestinian state. And yet in this sense, after three decades of ignoring their warnings about what real long-term security would entail, was it anywhere in Israel’s character to stand down?

Certainly, it wasn’t in the character of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “I do not know who these anonymous sources are,” he stated on 2 July, in response to The New York Times report, “but I am here to make it unequivocally clear: This will not happen.”

The rest of Israeli society, perhaps less sure now, was nevertheless riding on the momentum of history — and nowhere was this more apparent than in Randa’s answer to why she had fled her homeland.

“It was a decision I took after the last war in Gaza, in May 2021,” she told me. “This was the first time for me to be really scared for my life. I witnessed a lot of wars in Gaza. I witnessed 2018, 2016, 2014, 2008, and I never felt before that I am afraid. But no, the last war, in 2021, they started to use different kinds of bombs, which they were calling now ‘the fire belt’.”

Given that I had not heard the phrase before, Randa explained:

“They were starting to bomb one area after another, for 30 minutes without stopping, during the night, and the fire was burning everything in that area. It left me sometimes feeling that it was our turn [to die].”

Should I stay or should I… ?

On 2 July 2024, the same day that Netanyahu was pushing back against his generals on their demands for a ceasefire, the “proud Zionist” Fuld was invited to address the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament in Jerusalem. The topic of Fuld’s talk, an ancient one for my brethren, was “Why people hate the Jews”. Fuld, by the standards of his subject, was perfectly on message.

“There doesn’t have to be a reason to hate the Jews,” he began. “In Germany we weren’t white enough, today we’re white colonialists. When we were poor, they hated us. When we were rich, they hated us. There doesn’t need to be a reason. And anybody who tries to find a reason, and says it’s because of a Palestinian state or anything else, is simply dishonest.”

It was, unfortunately, a classic example of Zionist deafness, just as the Jewish state was imploding from within.

Less than 24 hours before, there had been rioting in Jerusalem by groups of ultra-orthodox young men, who had clashed with police over a law that repealed their exemption from military service — a law that had been in place since the foundation of the state. The ultra-orthodox, or the “Haredim,” which by the latest census made up more than 13% of the population, had always been tolerated as a community that functioned according to its own religious precepts. Now, with the IDF in urgent need of 10,000 additional soldiers, they were showing the Zionists that they would not join willingly.

On the other end of the spectrum, but still reflective of Israelis who wanted nothing to do with the war, were the 500,000 citizens that had left the country in the days immediately after 7 October. Although the scale of the exodus had been quashed by the Israeli press, it had been cited, among others, by Professor John Mearsheimer, one of the West’s most influential political scientists, in a talk in mid-May titled “Why Israel is in deep trouble”. And by late June, symbolic of the fact that things were getting out of hand, Israel’s former prime minister, Naftali Bennett, would write an open letter in Hebrew imploring his countrymen to stay.

“Who wants to return to the days of the wandering Jew,” Bennett asked, in his penultimate paragraph, “without real freedom, without a state, subject to every anti-Semitic whim?”

There was a wealth of information in Bennett’s letter, most of it unstated, about the size of the hole that Israel had dug for itself. For starters, like Fuld, he was evincing the common Israeli position that it was “Jews against the world,” just as it had supposedly “always” been. Of course, as Fuld would soon do in the Knesset, he was completely discounting the fact that there had been a direct correlation between the global rise in anti-Semitism and the IDF’s actions in Gaza after 7 October.

Then there was Bennett’s stated reason for writing the letter — a “brilliant software engineer” he knew had decided to “leave Israel for a country in Europe”. Here, the former prime minister was inadvertently inviting us to look at one of the scariest open secrets in Israeli society, which was that its fabled tech sector was being gutted by emigration. As with the general emigration problem, this had been declared off-limits by the Israeli media, but there were still expat Israelis who were calling the problem for what it was — most notably the political economist Shir Hever, during an appearance in mid-June on The Electronic Intifada podcast.

Finally, although he wrote about a “renewal” for Israel, promising that the next 50 years would be about “rebuilding, creative joy, security and growth,” Bennett did not once mention the Palestinians. For me at least, the questions posed by this oversight were obvious. Were Israelis too traumatised by the events of 7 October to confront this blind-spot in their collective psyche? Did they know that, as in the South African democratic transition, there would be no future without the people they were oppressing? What did “renewal” in Bennett’s terms even mean?

Set against Randa’s situation, then, Bennett’s letter was demonstrative of the truth that there was no end to the ironies. In the three decades since the end of the First Intifada, which Israeli voters had mostly handed over to the governance of Netanyahu and his rightwing coalition partners, the Israeli economy — spurred by its tech sector — had experienced a period of unprecedented growth. In those same 30 years, Randa had watched as the blockade of Gaza turned her home into the world’s largest open-air prison — a prison that would be bombed every few years in a process known colloquially in Israel as “mowing the lawn”.

Also, there was the blatant irony that most Israelis had the travel documents to leave at any time, while Randa’s family, rejected by the Arab world, living in tents on the beach, their apartments and businesses and universities destroyed, were stuck.

It was, therefore, clearer than ever to me, deep in my traitorous Jewish heart, that if there was to be any way through for the people who were fated to share this land, it would take nothing less than a complete reset of the programme.

And so on Friday 5 July, when both the Israeli and international press were reporting that Netanyahu’s government had caved in to the IDF’s demands for a ceasefire, I sent Randa a voice note. What, I wanted to know, did her family make of these developments?

“Do you know how many times they’ve talked about ceasefire?!,” she responded via text. “The last time, the people in Gaza went out to celebrate, then they had a setback when they realised it’s just a game. I told my sister yesterday maybe this time it would be a real ceasefire, she replied, ‘Doesn’t matter, we’re already dead!’”

Four of her relatives, Randa added, had been diagnosed with Hepatitis A, while five of her nephews and nieces had been struck with chickenpox — there was, she informed me, “no medicine”.

By Sunday 7 July, it was apparent that Randa’s family may have been correct to dismiss the latest promises of a ceasefire — once again, Netanyahu’s government would be accused of sabotaging the deal. And a week later, by Sunday 14 July, the international press would be reporting on one of the “most violent” seven days since the first months of the war, with Israeli airstrikes killing more than a hundred Palestinians in attacks on a school and a humanitarian zone.

But Israel’s problem, as Randa’s life-story showed, wasn’t just Netanyahu. After three decades of consciously choosing the low road, neither the Israeli military nor the society-at-large could conceive of a “day after” — plans to create “Hamas-free ‘bubble’ zones in northern Gaza” were being met with loud internal resistance, as were most of the other mooted visions for Gaza after the war.

For me — and this, to a Zionist, was probably the most traitorous thing a Jew could say — it was a paralysis of the Israeli national psyche that was only marginally about Hamas.

“The Palestinian people have carried a lot since 7 October, and they are just suffering, suffering, suffering,” Randa had explained to me in June. “Do you think that until now all these people are supporting the resistance movement and need Hamas to achieve the victory and make a future for them? Definitely no, definitely no.”

While Randa may have been a sample of only one, by July her analysis would be confirmed by the BBC, whose Gaza correspondent would report a widespread backlash against the Hamas leadership, both on the streets and online.

The astonishing thing about this trend, or so it seemed to me, was that it held the seeds of the elusive reset. If the Palestinians in Gaza were beginning to realise that they had voted for a disastrous leadership — a leadership that had sacrificed their lives and livelihoods to the demons of vengeance and war — then why couldn’t the Zionists in Israel?

“We need to live in a secure place,” as Randa had said. “We need to feel that we are humans in this world.”DM

Read more by Kevin Bloom on the crisis in the Middle East:

Holy War revisited — ‘You want it darker, we kill the flame’ (8 May 2024)

Messianism and madness: An intimate hell ride through end times in the Holy Land (22 October 2023)

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Another traitor’s heart

Should I stay or should I… ?