As conflict escalates between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iran, the war in Gaza has settled into a rhythm of devastation. Israel’s siege of the Gaza Strip has had disastrous repercussions: Over half of the Gaza population has been displaced, and tens of thousands of civilians have been killed amidst Israeli
bombings and campaigns against Hamas. Although this violence has largely been normalized after a year of war, the protraction of these uninhabitable conditions is perilous. Gazans’ reliance on humanitarian aid for basic resources like food, water, fuel, and medicine creates a persistent threat of famine. Meanwhile, the failure to achieve basic military objectives has prompted many Israelis to protest against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s continuation of the war. And yet, Israelis—fixated on the horrors of October 7 and the 101 hostages marking their one-year anniversary in captivity—are facing a shortage of empathy for Gazans.
There are triumphs and traumas that transcend group distinctions to be shared by all of humanity. These interpersonal understandings shape identity and have the power to reconcile conflicts rooted in perceived divisions, but also perpetuate them if no place is reserved for the voice of the other. The best way for Israelis to recognize Gazans’ suffering is to place it in relation to their own. The closest analog to the current events in Gaza in modern Israeli history is the siege of Jerusalem during the 1948 war by Arab militias and armies, which lasted for over seven months. Although very different in scope, the experiences of Israelis and Palestinians during each event reveal common ground in their unwavering connection to the land, even at their most vulnerable.
How empathy influences the next chapter in Gaza remains to be seen: Some immediate humanitarian concerns have been addressed even as long-term consequences of the war remain unresolved. This March, the Famine Review Committee (FRC), whose analysis influences international aid response, warned of the catastrophic levels of hunger that could occur if Israel were to launch a full-scale operation in Rafah, where refugees from the rest of the Strip had been directed. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) ultimately did attack Rafah on May 6 but also expanded alternative aid routes to offset the offensive’s closure of the Rafah crossing. Although food availability has actually improved since May, shipments have fallen recently due to new requirements for aid.
Accordingly, the FRC maintains that hunger in Gaza has remained pervasive due to the overdependence on often fickle aid delivery. After damage to nearly half of all arable land and a significant loss of livestock and fishing access, which many depend on for their livelihoods, Gazans have no way to provide for themselves. Moreover, residents in over 80 percent of the Gaza Strip have been ordered to evacuate, forced to abandon their homes and any surviving cultivated plots. As Gazans are displaced into an increasingly small area that is unable to fulfill their needs, it is more and more difficult to provide essential supplies to those who need them most. If the people without access to their basic needs are out of reach of aid organizations, as the FRC warns, it could prove disastrous. Israel should not disregard the civilian lives at stake.
Gazans have resorted to eating whatever is available, including mallow, known as khubeza in Arabic. Khubeza has been embraced as a nutritious wartime alternative to grape leaves and cabbage and is used to improvise Gazan dishes like summaqiya in the absence of traditional ingredients like chard. As a wild plant that grows anywhere with disturbed soil and quickly establishes roots that make it difficult to deracinate, in many respects khubeza symbolizes the resilience of Palestinians when confronted with tremendous adversity.
Nonetheless, Gazans are to some extent ambivalent about khubeza because it exists in physical proximity to Israel. The plant mostly grows in fields along the border, making Gazans hesitant to pick it out of fear. S worries are justified: Civilians have reportedly been killed by the IDF when scavenging for food. The IDF has also created a one-kilometer military buffer zone along the entire border, denying access to such fields in the first place. Troops are primed to view every Gazan in combat zones, even those foraging for food, as terrorists. War dehumanizes everyone involved, inuring all to brutality and making it easier for soldiers to perpetrate violence. Recognizing the other’s humanity is easier said than done.
Gazans’ reluctance to forage near the security fence can also be understood in terms of what lies on the other side. After all, khubeza grows in Israel in much the same way along roadsides and fields, and it even goes by its Arabic name. In a country where many Arab villages have been physically and symbolically erased, khubeza is an enduring remnant of the past. It serves as a physical connection to the homes from which Palestinians were displaced during the Nakba as part of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, just mere miles from where they live now.
The same khubeza has played an important role in Israeli history, further complicating Palestinians’ relationship with the plant. In November 1947, after the United Nations approved the partition plan that would divide the land into a Palestinian and a Jewish state, Arab militias began launching attacks on the routes that supplied the Jewish enclave in Jerusalem. Despite costly attempts to regain access, by May 1948, constant bombardment by Jordan’s Arab Legion completely besieged the city, isolating it from the outside world. Food prices rose as the city was forced to institute a ration that limited residents to roughly five hundred calories and low water rations per day (amounts in line with the conditions in Northern Gaza at the beginning of the current war). To cope with the siege, the local radio station instructed Jerusalemites to forage for khubeza and offered recipes for how to cook it. Ultimately, the trapped and starving defenders surrendered the Jewish quarter of the Old City on May 28.
However, the siege is now most frequently called upon to highlight the heroic efforts to establish the Burma Road in June 1948, which saved the residents of West Jerusalem by restoring access long enough for the permanent Road of Valor to be constructed. The road’s anniversary is marked by Jerusalem Day, a national holiday that also celebrates the city’s reunification in 1967. Viewed in this context, khubeza can be compared to Hanukkah’s miracle of oil for sustaining the people of Jerusalem until the IDF broke the blockade of the city. The Israeli Department of Education and Culture even celebrated the seventh anniversary of the war in 1955 by encouraging families to make dishes using khubeza to commemorate the siege of Jerusalem, embedding the plant in the modern Israeli imagination.
In contrast, traumatic memories of the siege are repressed in the national consciousness. The capitulation of the Old City exemplifies Israel’s vulnerability to attacks by its enemies. Abdullah El-Tell, the Jordanian military governor of East Jerusalem during the war, observed that “Al Quds [Jerusalem] was purged of Jews and for the first time in 1000 years no Jew remained there.” Jewish effacement from Jerusalem suggests that nowhere is the existence of Jews permanent or assured, even at their holiest sites. Irrespective of how deeply embedded Jews are in the land, they can be uprooted. This ever-present existential threat was exposed once more by the events of October 7.
For Israelis and Palestinians alike, khubeza comes to represent themselves and their pasts. Like weeds, people resist transfer, expanding into any available space and disregarding the invisible lines traced into the earth. The danger of identifying with khubeza is that it implies the renunciation of a deeper form of belonging; like weeds that are ripped out to make space for others, one people can be easily displaced if there exists another population that claims earlier and more deeply entrenched roots in the same land.
As a result of this fear of displacement, many Israelis and Palestinians refrain from sympathizing with any part of each other’s claims because they believe doing so legitimizes the other’s remaining demands in their entirety at the expense of one’s own. For example, according to Nadim Khoury, the reason why the two-state peace talks failed following the Oslo Accords is because they required Palestinians and Israelis to agree to this kind of narrative partition that set 1967 as the point of contention while ignoring 1948 altogether.
Michael Fakhri, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, recently published a report emphasizing the inherent food sovereignty of Palestinians because of their historical presence in the land, which he then extends to their rightful sovereignty over the land as a whole. This approach is fundamentally misguided. Competitive identification with the land is the fundamental basis of this conflict. By framing the war in Gaza as an attempt by Israel to supersede Gazans’ superior claims to the land, he perpetuates the same rhetoric of primacy and unwittingly legitimizes the Israeli government’s actions in a fight for survival, which can only end in mutual devastation.
What results is a reluctance to associate khubeza with the other. To disrupt this endless cycle of violence, Israelis and Palestinians must look to khubeza, not as evidence of their own political claim to the land but rather as an enduring reminder of each other’s humanity. If nothing else, Israelis should remember the siege of Jerusalem and glean from it the imperative to avert the suffering of others just as much as their own.
Chelmit, the Hebrew word for khubeza, comes from the root chalom, meaning dream. If Israelis and Palestinians are so bold as to dream, let us dream of khubeza.