My grandmother, Sylvia, was a genuinely beautiful soul. She was born in 1928 to an Ashkenazi Jewish family in London. I was born on her birthday, and we lived two houses down the street from each other, so naturally she and I became best friends. As a child I had tea with her almost every day after school. She loved to be silly and to laugh, but she also shared the pain of her childhood. She once told me about British Nazi sympathizers throwing rocks at her grandfather on his way to synagogue. Imagining her as a little girl, seeing her grandfather violently dehumanized like that, I wondered how anyone could be so cruel to another human being.
Because of my grandmother’s stories, visiting the DC Holocaust Memorial Museum as a child was deeply personal. What I experienced going through the museum shocked me, and I was left wondering what my grandmother couldn’t bring herself to tell me about that time in her life.
I felt a deep sense of responsibility to show the Palestinians that there is someone who does not look like them or speak their language, but sees them as human beings who are worthy of being supported and cared for.
What did it feel like to be dehumanized like that? To know that powerful “others” regard you as disposable? Grandma was the most childishly playful person I’ve ever known. Still, when I heard her talk about her own childhood, and what it was like to live in Jim Crow America, it was impossible to miss the pain of her own childhood.
Grandma knew nothing about the United States when she arrived here, and she quickly learned that her new country was far from the bastion of freedom she was expecting. Discrimination against African Americans in particular shocked her. Having been on the receiving end of European antisemitic racism, she simply couldn’t understand why people would hate others in this way. She would often remind me, “We all bleed the same color.” Despite—maybe because of—her having little formal education, Grandma could see toxic ideas for what they were.
Jennifer Arriaga's grandmother is shown as a young woman in London.
Since childhood I’ve cared deeply about the fight for human rights in my own country and the state of Texas. But before October 7, 2023, I paid no attention to Israel or the Palestinians. As much as I loved my grandmother, neither Judaism nor Israel were important in my upbringing or my adult life. But as I watched the assault on Gaza through my phone, I became disgusted by political leaders and those around me who blindly “stood with Israel.” In 2024 a neonatologist I worked with, Dr. Yassar Arain, volunteered in Gaza. When he returned we spoke about his time there, and about the complicity of the United States in the genocide.
Yassar’s descriptions of the conditions in Gaza were beyond anything I’d ever imagined. In my mind the kind of vicious dehumanization that allowed people to kill babies had been left in my grandmother’s past. Today we have the Geneva Conventions and iPhones. But as the assault on Gaza seemed to reach ever higher levels of depravity, I couldn’t take it any longer. By December 2024, I answered a call to volunteer for a medical mission to Gaza.
Gaza was my first time volunteering internationally. My family, friends, and co-workers were worried, but once I saw the call for volunteers I couldn’t ignore it. I didn’t really consider my distant Jewish heritage, but more so what Grandma would say about what I was doing. I guessed it would be something like: “The world has forsaken these children, just like it did my family. Go help them.”
As a nurse and a human being, it is ingrained in me that all people have a right to live. Seeing the attacks on innocents, even within the walls of hospitals, I felt a deep sense of responsibility to show the Palestinians that there is someone who does not look like them or speak their language, but sees them as human beings who are worthy of being supported and cared for rather than as “an infrastructure to be destroyed.”
Blocked
Israel controls all access in and out of Gaza. With the Rafah Crossing closed, entry for all humanitarian workers starts in Jordan. On January 22, 2025, I landed in Amman and met the team for the first time.
“We’ll get the final list late tonight,” our mission coordinator told us. “Someone always gets denied, so just be prepared for that.”
“Sorry,” I cut in. “Denied?”
“COGAT” she explained, referring to the Israeli military office, “will send a list of who was approved. Everyone else is denied.”
To tell a doctor or nurse that they cannot help someone punctures both their sense of self and their faith in humankind in ways that are difficult to explain or anticipate.
I didn’t know how to respond. Israel tells doctors and nurses where they can and can’t go? Who they can and can’t help? That night we learned three physicians and one nurse from our team would be blocked from entering Gaza. I was allowed in.
The effect on my colleagues was devastating. One might think it would be a relief to be blocked from entering one of the most violent places on Earth. But the moment one learns that their name is not on “the list,” issued by an unaccountable and faceless entity, is the moment a healthcare worker realizes something about themselves. Healthcare workers help people. We devote not only our careers but our whole selves to this pursuit. To tell a doctor or nurse that they cannot help someone punctures both their sense of self and their faith in humankind in ways that are difficult to explain or anticipate.
One of those blocked was Sandra (name changed). Sandra is a pediatrician, a Canadian citizen of Indian origin. She was enthusiastic and kind. Her smile was incredibly warm, and I could picture children responding to it and feeling safe with her. She and I were sitting next to each other at dinner when we were told she had been blocked.
I’ll never forget the shock and devastation on Sandra’s face. She tried to stay calm but burst into tears, trying to speak through them to say she was glad at least I would be able to go. More than a year later she still does not understand: “Why was I blocked from entering? What did I do?” She doesn’t understand that the simple fact is there’s only one reason to stop a pediatrician from doing their work: to enhance the suffering of children. In Gaza, my bunkmate was also a pediatrician. I remember her coming to our room at the end of every day, exhausted, and telling me how badly pediatricians were needed. After all, half of Gaza’s population is children, and by many measures they are the sickest and most traumatized kids on the planet.
John (name changed), a family doctor and wound-care specialist, had been to Gaza twice before. He left his wife and two toddlers to volunteer a third time. His first two trips showed him just how much damage Israel’s US-backed assault on Gaza’s healthcare system had done. Hoping to bring back useful solutions, he spent the eight months between his last trip and this one investigating wound-care techniques in resource-limited settings, knowledge he was eager to spread to his Palestinian colleagues.
John was so devastated by the news that he was being blocked from Gaza that, while everyone was focused on Sandra, he silently got up from the table and left to see his family in Amman. We did not see him again until we ran into him at the Jordanian border the next day. Instead of going with us to Gaza, he was going to attempt to visit Jerusalem.
This state of affairs seemed so outrageous that I couldn’t sleep that night. Sandra, John, and the others were not allowed to… heal people? Lying in bed I tried to convince myself: It can’t be just because we were going to heal Palestinians specifically. Right? There must have been some kind of security concern! But as I dragged my bags across Kerem Shalom, I had to face reality: That morning, both Sandra and John visited Jerusalem as tourists. How could they be security concerns in Gaza but not in Jerusalem?
Months later, John still refused to believe that anyone would deliberately stop a doctor from providing care. “Clearly I’m not a threat,” he told me, just before trying to return to Gaza again. “I was approved to enter Israel! It was just a mistake.” He signed up for another mission. On August 18, 2025, Israel blocked him from Gaza again.
I wonder if whatever Israeli bureaucrat at the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs came up with this particular assault on human dignity is proud of themselves.
“You Can Sleep Here or in Jail”
When I left Gaza, I promised my Palestinian colleagues I wouldn’t forget them and would bring their stories to my family, friends, and community in Texas. I organized speaking events at local churches to reach people who, like me, knew nothing about what Israel is doing to the Palestinians with our tax dollars and weapons. I signed an open letter to President Donald Trump, along with 151 other American healthcare workers who had volunteered in Gaza, telling him what we had seen with our own eyes.
Then, in August of 2025 I connected with a nurse practitioner who was looking for a neonatal ICU nurse to go to East Jerusalem for the JHPIEGO educational mission. I quickly signed up. As the trip drew closer, the possibility of being blocked started to worry me. I had come to know dozens of other healthcare workers who had been denied entry into Gaza, and Israel had started blocking healthcare workers from volunteering in the West Bank as well.
I entered Israel through Ben Gurion Airport with little difficulty. Meanwhile my co-volunteer Heather (name changed), a British physiotherapist who had never been to Israel or Palestine, was blocked from entering. At the end of that trip, JHPIEGO asked me to come back and teach again in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, just one month later. I happily agreed, especially since it seemed that I was one of the few people who could enter consistently.
How would my grandmother understand all of this? What would she think about her suffering being weaponized against her granddaughter and other healthcare workers because we internalized her love of humanity and refused to accept the dehumanization of others?
Five weeks after this educational mission ended, I landed at Ben Gurion Airport again, on January 28. I presented the visa I had been given in December. The agent asked me a series of questions and then told me her supervisor would like to speak with me. After two hours, I was called into a small office with one unidentified man, asking questions and writing my answers down on a scratch piece of paper. I was asked exactly the same questions as before and gave exactly the same answers.
Then I was taken to another holding area and told to wait. After about one hour the same man came over and handed me a piece of paper telling me I was being denied entry to Israel. The organization I was volunteering with, he said, was “blacklisted.” I explained that it was not blacklisted; they had an established office in Jerusalem. He insisted they were indeed blacklisted and told me to proceed with him to a detention area.
I called my team’s handler in the United States. “They’re saying JHPIEGO is blacklisted,” I told him. No, he explained, it most certainly is not. Another physician had entered with JHPIEGO one week prior and had been told the same thing. At that time JHPIEGO contacted Israeli border control, cleared up the misunderstanding, and she was allowed entry. I explained this to the nameless Israeli agent, who said it didn’t interest him. I contacted an Israeli lawyer who has helped international volunteers enter Gaza, but before I could explain the situation a new nameless Israeli agent showed up and demanded that I follow him to security for inspection.
It was now late at night, and the airport was mostly empty. The nameless agent took me, along with two elderly people who were also being deported, to an empty gate and told us to stay there until the morning. I managed a laugh and asked, “We’re sleeping in the airport?”
“You can sleep here or in jail.”
“Okay,” I said, taken aback. I would be fine, but it seemed like cruelty for its own sake to require an elderly couple to sleep on an airport floor. “Do you know how we can get our luggage?”
“Your luggage isn’t my problem.”
At that moment, my team called and said they had called the American embassy and asked them to explain to the Israeli government that JHPIEGO is not a blacklisted organization. “But”—my hopes were raised, only to be dashed—“the embassy wants nothing to do with this.”
After exhausting every avenue, reality started to set in. My Jewish heritage and my American citizenship wouldn’t help me help people, because I was there to help the wrong people. Suddenly I was overwhelmed, the same way Sandra and John had been when they were blocked from Gaza. Oscillating between anger and sadness, I broke down crying.
On May 18, a colleague of mine texted me, “I joined the club for people not allowed into Israel.” A blonde, blue-eyed, American-born nurse practitioner in her late 60, she has been working with the Palestinians since the 1990s. She has flown through Ben Gurion Airport more than a dozen times. This time, at the request of JHPIEGO’s East Jerusalem office, she was on a team of six healthcare providers traveling to the West Bank to teach the pediatric Fundamental Critical Care Support course offered from the Society of Critical Care Medicine. She would have taught Palestinians how to save the sickest children’s lives. Israel blocked 5 out of their 6 teachers. “No real explanation—except our visa was not the right one for a volunteer mission. Totally false.”
How would my grandmother understand all of this? What would she think about her suffering being weaponized against her granddaughter and other healthcare workers because we internalized her love of humanity and refused to accept the dehumanization of others? Would she even believe someone who told her that a self-declared Jewish state denies sick infants access to volunteer nurses and doctors?
Ali
In January 2025 I worked with a nurse named Ali Al-Najar in the pediatric ICU (PICU) at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, a city in the middle of the Gaza Strip. We were caring for a 3-year-old boy, Ibrahim (name changed), who had been shot. The physicians decided Ibrahim needed a CT scan, requiring us to transport this incredibly sick child to another building and back.
This is risky work under controlled circumstances. But in Gaza, where the elevator and electricity frequently fail and human resources are stretched thin, it seemed to me like an impossible task. But Ali reassured me: We can do it together. So, we made a plan: He would guide us down the stairs and through the hallways, while I would monitor Ibrahim. I would care for Ibrahim; Ali would care for me.
Ali picked Ibrahim up and placed him on a transport stretcher. I held onto the breathing tube in his throat, pushed oxygen into his lungs with an Ambu bag, and slung the intravenous drips of medications keeping Ibrahim alive and asleep over Ali’s shoulders. We carried Ibrahim down the stairs of the pediatric building, outside into the utter chaos of the strip, into the main hospital building, and over to radiology.
In Gaza, every step was fraught with uncertainty. But Ali, like everyone I met there, just kept moving forward.
While carefully walking down the many staircases, over the broken and uneven pavement, and trying to balance the stretcher with one hand and push air into Ibrahim’s lungs with the other, all the while blindly trusting Ali, my mind flashed back to when I saw Ibrahim rushed into the ED. I had watched him go through surgery for his gunshot wound and performed chest compressions on him when his heart stopped after surgery. He had been through so much in his short three years of life. “He survived all of that,” I told myself. “We will get him to radiology.”
When Ali placed Ibrahim into the scanner, the tech reminded him to avoid the bullet fragments lodged in the machine’s bed. Ibrahim was sedated and certainly wouldn’t comprehend English, but I talked him through what was happening anyway while continuing to push air into his lungs. Anywhere else in the world a lead apron would have been available to shield me from the scan’s radiation. When the scan was finished, we did the whole exercise in reverse, bringing Ibrahim back to the PICU. The excursion took well over 90 minutes, an eternity of risk for this fragile, grievously injured toddler.
My mission in Gaza ended before Ibrahim awoke, but on my way out of Gaza, as I was processing all the emotions from the trip—an impossible task, as one cannot exit Gaza without driving through the largest fields of rubble on Earth—I received a text from another nurse. It was Ibrahim, awake and smiling, drinking juice.
Transporting Ibrahim was one of the most stressful things I’ve ever done. In the United States we would have had a mobile ventilator, a respiratory therapist, and both myself and a nurse assistant. We would have had a working elevator, dependable electricity, a clear hallway, protection from radiation, and a CT scanner that worked reliably and hadn’t been shot. In Gaza, every step was fraught with uncertainty. But Ali, like everyone I met there, just kept moving forward. His family was displaced and homeless. He couldn’t assume he or any of his loved ones would be fed or alive when he returned “home” to his tent. But despite all of that, he dedicated himself not only to Ibrahim but even to me, making sure that I felt I could provide the best care possible in this healthcare nightmare.
A few months later, in Fort Worth, I took another patient to the CT scanner. As we raced through the halls of the hospital I couldn’t help but think of my time in Gaza with Ibrahim and Ali. I told my astonished co-workers what it was like to do this in Gaza, fondly recalling Ali’s guidance and care.
After my shift I couldn’t stop thinking about Ali. I texted him but got no response. I figured he was busy. But a few days later I saw a post about him on Instagram. On May 2, 2025, Israel murdered Ali and his brother, blowing them up with a drone.
Sylvia and Ali
Working with the Palestinians taught me more about the world than I expected. My grandmother was everything I knew about Judaism as a religion and Jews as a people. I simply cannot recognize her in the unnamed and casually cruel men at Ben Gurion Airport. I don’t see her in either the drone operator who pushed the button that ripped my friend Ali to shreds or in the state organizing and carrying out the genocide in which he was killed.
I see my sweet grandmother’s face in my memories of Ali. I see her in the nurses and doctors I met in Palestine, and in the mothers of Gaza who deprive themselves of everything to keep their children alive for just one more day. The beauty, resilience, and dignity that my grandmother carried in her heart and soul is found today in Gaza and throughout Palestine. And the ugliness of the neo-Nazis who threw stones at my great-great grandfather for being Jewish is manifest nowhere more than in the ultra-racist arrogance of Danny Danon, Bezalel Smotrich, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Daniella Weiss in Israel, and Ted Cruz and Randy Fine here at home.
A fanatically Jewish supremacist, “super-Sparta” state of Israel, serving as American gendarme over the people of the Middle East forever, is no solution to the problem of Jewish safety. Neither the United States nor this distorted and perverse conception of an exclusively Jewish state act to keep Jews safe.
We, and plenty of others, are not safe precisely because the United States and Israel insist on committing monumental crimes in our name.
I’m hardly the first person to say so. Jewish thinkers from Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt to Benjamin Balthaser, and Palestinian intellectuals from Walid Khalidi to Edward Said, have all argued as much far more convincingly than I can. Josh Nathan-Kazis recently noted that “Jewish establishment groups rushed to yoke themselves” to the illegal US-Israeli assault on Iran despite the obvious fact that “they are setting up American Jews to take the blame if the war goes badly, as it appears destined to do.”
I hope my experience can help others, especially those who can’t work directly with Palestinians, to see these simple truths. I’ve seen what occupation and genocide are, up close, if only for a few weeks. They are systems that prioritize state power and control over the welfare of children and the lives of healthcare workers. Israel’s own behavior convinced me that even the most cynical argument for why all of this is necessary—without it, the Jews will never be safe!—is absurd. We, and plenty of others, are not safe precisely because the United States and Israel insist on committing monumental crimes in our name.
Our real allies are the people who want what everyone wants: to live their lives in peace, to watch their children grow and thrive. Our real allies are the nurses at Nasser Medical Complex, not the thugs in Tel Aviv’s airport.
Jennifer Arriaga's grandmother is shown as a young woman in London.
