A beloved peace activist was killed in the West Bank. Can his death finally teach us empathy?
Awdah Hathaleen was my friend. Here are the lessons, as a rabbi, that I’m taking from his life
Courtesy of David J. Cooper
In my Zionist family, when you turned 16, you spent a summer in Israel. I turned 16 in June 1967, and arrived in Israel one month after the Six-Day War. Having grown up attending Conservative and Orthodox shuls, and a Hebrew day school, I was always within yards of a picture of the Western Wall, in Jerusalem’s Old City. In all the pictures, it faced a narrow street with houses, and I couldn’t believe that I was actually going to walk into that picture.
The day after I arrived, in early July, I toured Jerusalem’s Old City, which had been captured during the war. We came to the Western Wall with our tour guide, and I became confused. There was no small street, and there were no houses facing the wall. Instead, there was just an open area covered in gravel. I asked the guide what happened to the houses that had been there. He told us that they were just torn down the previous month.
Later, I learned that the now-empty square was the Moroccan Quarter, established in 1193. About 1,000 Palestinians lived there. After the war ended they were given short notice to gather up their possessions, and all the buildings were bulldozed, including two mosques.
I didn’t know that then. I just blurted out, “But what about the people who lived there?” The guide looked at me dismissively and retorted, “What does that matter?”
It mattered to me. That’s how I came to befriend Awdah Hathaleen, five decades later.
Awdah, a beloved peace activist in the West Bank, who earlier this week was shot and killed by an Israeli settler. Awdah, who, when I met him, was 23 and struggling with his English; who, at the time of his death at age 31, had himself become an English teacher. Awdah, with his big heart, commitment to nonviolence, and analytical mind. Awdah, the creative source of many ideas, some fairly wild, such as making Umm al-Khair, the embattled village in which he lived, a tourist destination.
Like many who knew and loved Awdah, who left behind a wife and three children, I still cannot believe I won’t see him again. Not when I visit Umm al-Khair, which has become a favored target of settler violence in recent years. And not on Zoom, where he would join a peace-seeking group started by my congregation in California’s East Bay.
I met Awdah on a visit to Umm al-Khair in 2017, 50 years after the onset of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, and 50 years after my own first visit to the region. Like many international peace activists now mourning Awdah, I found that my relationship with him deepened consistently as the years went by. He was hard-wired for companionship, and his friendship circle is substantial.
This is part of why Awdah’s death has created such a shockwave. He wasn’t just a well-known activist, especially after his central role in the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land. He was a well-loved one. For the first time, many American Jews now know one person in immediate grief for a Palestinian friend, killed by a Jew.
I can see the repercussions of his death resonating through my own community. My synagogue’s Jewish-Palestinian reparations alliance, Face-to-Face, partnered with Umm al-Khair four years ago. Awdah would join our group discussions every month on Zoom. I, and many others, came to rely on him as a touchstone to understand the situation from the perspective of someone on the ground. Some in the group became cyberspace friends with him, and were looking forward to meeting him in person.
Most never got the chance. We arranged for Awdah and his fellow leader of the village, Eid Suleiman, to come visit us at our shul in June, and to do a small tour in the United States. But even though they had valid visa applications, they were detained at San Francisco’s airport and sent back, despite the intervention of public officials.
Our synagogue was united in our disappointment at their deportation. We have not reached as strong a consensus on other matters in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre.
When I learned of the massacre, I was shocked by the horror of it. Within a day, I was also foreboding the slaughter that I was sure would unfold in Gaza. I knew it would be far worse than any of the previous military campaigns there. I also knew that Umm al-Khair was in jeopardy, as settlers would take advantage of the diverted attention on Gaza.
In my shul, which long equally prioritized the need for empathy for Palestinians and Israelis, some people were more focused on the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, while others were more focused on the victims of Hamas. Most held both concerns, to different degrees.
The political spectrum at Kehilla is narrower than in most synagogues. But in the following months, with many lives at stake, even the smallest differences became exaggerated. Some in our congregation have felt that our leadership had not gone far enough on one issue; others felt we went too far. Those tensions persisted — at my shul, and in the Jewish community at large. However, as starvation in Gaza has become more acute, and as more of our congregants have come to regard Israel’s actions as an attack on all the people of Gaza, and not just Hamas, a greater degree of consensus has been building
This has become even more evident as we have begun to contend with Awdah’s killing. I see it in the wave of condolences from my congregants and from fellow Jewish clergy, especially from those who have not previously shared my concerns. Now, they know a rabbi who is in mourning for a Palestinian friend. They see the devastation of Palestinians as personal, and not just an item in the news. At least I hope so.
Maybe now, I pray that the many American Jews who have been in some way touched by Awdah’s death — because of the extraordinary peace-seeking community he built in his life — will more viscerally understand that the close to 1,000 Palestinians killed in the West Bank since Oct. 7 were people who had parents, children, siblings, friends.
Maybe our grief over Awdah will help some see the approximately 60,000 individuals who have been killed in Gaza, mostly non-combatants, as less of an abstract statistic. I hope that with Awdah’s death people will face the ethical dissonance in which we now live, in which two million people in Gaza are hungry and suffering.
My Jewish community is not just my congregation, it is the larger Jewish American community, and also the American rabbinate. As I examine the polarities I see, I turn to the first two of Hillel’s famous three questions: “If I am not for myself, who will be?” and “If I am only for myself, what am I?” Both are equally important. Yet in the nearly two years since Oct. 7, I have watched a retreat from Hillel’s second question, toward an almost exclusive embrace of his first.
This was driven home to me at a Zoom gathering of a group of rabbis across the political spectrum about two months into the war.
One Reform rabbi talked about how the younger people in her congregation, particularly the teens, were expressing their concern for the people suffering in Gaza. I thought she was bragging. Then she said, “I’m not sure what we did wrong? Maybe too much Tikkun Olam?”
And all I could think was that her students’ understanding of the mitzvah of empathy owed so much to her success as their rabbi — while she had thought she failed.
Nothing can justify or ease the pain of Awdah’s loss. But I am praying that the death of just one Palestinian father in a West Bank village might help spark a return, a teshuva, to empathy, and to the prophets’ concern for the vulnerable. And I pray for us to restore the balance of Hillel’s first two questions.
And if not now, then when?
