David Larson
Carolina Journal
This week, former President Donald Trump, posting on his Truth Social platform, asked that everyone “continue to keep the American hostages held in Gaza in our thoughts” and demanded they be brought home.
Trump’s comments marked 10 months since the terrorist group Hamas attacked southern Israel, killing over 1,200 and taking 253 others hostage. Among those taken captive more than 300 days ago were Americans, including Keith Siegel of Chapel Hill and his wife Aviva Siegel. Aviva was freed in November, but Keith, if he has survived, remains in captivity.
Keith is 64 years old, a father of four, and grandfather of five. He grew up in the Triangle area attending Durham’s Beth El Synagogue. His father, Earl Siegel, was a professor of maternal and child health at UNC Chapel Hill. The family took regular trips to Israel, and Earl was very proud that Keith and another of his children decided to move to Israel.
Like many young idealistic Jewish immigrants to Israel of his generation, Keith ended up on a kibbutz, which are communal farming villages often built in remote, desolate places. On Oct. 7, he and his wife Aviva were kidnapped from their home in the kibbutz of Kfar Aza. More than 100 other members of the close-knit kibbutz were simply executed.
Aviva was freed in November as part of negotiations, but Keith remained behind. Many are presumed dead, but in April, Hamas released a video showing that Keith was still alive.
He looked like he has gone through hell, and likely has. In the short video, where he was being bullied into delivering the propaganda message of his captors, Keith broke down more than once, putting his head in his hands and weeping. One can only imagine how often over the last 10 months he has had similar moments of fear, pain, and despair.
Aviva, now free of these terrorists, is speaking to anyone who will listen on behalf of her husband.
She has also described the conditions that she and the other female hostages were held in. They were, and many still are, held underground in the elaborate tunnel systems under Gaza without water, food, showers, blankets, or often light. Aviva and other female captors also said the Hamas soldiers are also sexually abusing the women.
Aviva said the female hostages are being used like “puppets with whom they could do what they wanted, when they wanted” and that “there wasn’t a minute that we didn’t experience abuse.”
A family friend from Keith’s Durham synagogue said that in Israel, they treat the “missing” posters, which display pictures of those taken captive, as sacred, but in the United States and other nations, people tear them down.
It’s hard to imagine what the Siegel’s Jewish family and friends in Durham and Chapel Hill must feel as the anti-Israel protesters block traffic along the Durham Freeway or UNC student activists distribute images of the paragliders used by Hamas in their attacks.
One man’s colonizer is another’s refugee
The protesters really believe they are on the side of right. Even before any Israeli response to Oct. 7, they were tearing down posters, justifying the Hamas attack, and holding demonstrations against Israel. A lot of it comes down to a very simplistic worldview of colonizer and colonized. If you are from a colonized group, anything you do to resist is justified. And if you are deemed a colonizer, anything done to you is fair game.
At the UNC Chapel Hill protests, activists wrote Frantz Fanon quotes in red paint on iconic stone steps on campus. Fanon is a favorite of the anti-colonial movement. In his 1960s Marxist manifesto “Wretched of the Earth,” Fanon addresses the question of actions like Oct. 7 in the first chapter, titled, “On Violence.” He argues that the colonized can find “catharsis” by killing civilians and that there really are no civilians among colonizer settlements, since their very existence is violence.
College students on campuses across the country seem to have taken this nonsense from their Marxist professors to heart and applied it to the Israelis. Even if the Israelis were a straightforward case of colonial oppressor, Fanon and Hamas would be wrong about the morality of killing civilians and kidnapping and tormenting people like Keith and Aviva Siegel. But their ignorance of the history of the conflict sets aside a lot of context that makes it hardly as straightforward as they assume.
They start their history with the 1948 “Nakba,” meaning “the catastrophe” in Arabic. This was when the British left and the United Nations granted Israel certain territory to be a state. Israel accepted the deal, but the Arabs in the region, both surrounding nations and the local Palestinians, declared war. The Arabs wanted to drive the Jews out of the area, but they lost.
If you go one step earlier, it’s not too hard to figure out why the Jews of that area were skeptical of a single-state with the Palestinians and instead accepted the two-states drawn up by the UN. In the years immediately before 1948, the Palestinians, led by Grand Mufti Amin al-Husseini, largely allied with the Nazis during World War II. Husseini helped spread antisemitic propaganda across the Muslim world and tried to topple governments in the region and replace them with Nazi puppet states, which he did successfully in Iraq.
According to Nuremberg Trial documents, Husseini encouraged Hitler to exterminate Europe’s Jews so they wouldn’t end up in Palestine. In 1943, long before the alleged Nakba, Husseini told regional leaders that “It is the duty of Muhammadans [Muslims] in general and Arabs in particular to … drive all Jews from Arab and Muhammadan countries.”
Which they did. Partly because of Husseini’s work, antisemitism reached a fever pitch in the Muslim world, and the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa were almost entirely forced out of lands they’d been living in for centuries.
So, yes, there was a catastrophe in 1948 for Palestinian Arabs, many of whom were actively fighting against Israel. An estimated 750,000 fled or were ejected, but many others stayed, as Israel is about 20% Arab today. But the region’s Jews had an even larger Nakba after 1948, as around 900,000 were forced out of their ancestral homes. Descendants of these Middle Eastern Jews of many different nations, called Mizrahi Jews, make up a majority of the Israeli Jewish population.
The other major group, European Ashkenazi Jews, also don’t meet the definition of a colonizing force. These are largely people who fled Europe due to the Nazi genocide, which local Palestinians under Husseini largely supported.
Protesters in the United States and here in North Carolina see no irony in one day holding their “All refugees welcome!” signs and the next day denouncing a nation of refugees as “colonizers” and justifying atrocities on them.
Those who tear down pictures of our kidnapped T
ar Heel neighbor Keith Siegel are siding, not with the noble victims of colonization, but with a generations-long effort to eliminate the Jewish people.
Let’s keep Keith, the other four American hostages, and all the people of Israel in our thoughts and prayers as this effort continues.
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