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Orit Arfa

Orit Arfa is an author and journalist based in Berlin. Her first of two novels, The Settler, follows the aftermath of the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza. Her work can be found at: www.oritarfa.net.

Immediately after the Hamas attack, Israeli filmmakers, out of personal and national urgency, interrupted their regular programming and shifted toward stories shaped by the national trauma.
Opposition to the newly founded national film awards represents more than a political dispute. It raises the deeper question of who gets to define Israeli culture in moments of national crisis.
His passing stirs my grief for Gush Katif and the loss of that land, made possible by the constant defamation and dehumanization of the good people living there.
Einat Bloch, a teenage activist at the time of the Gaza pullout in 2005, says that leaving Gaza saved her community from an Oct. 7-style attack.
“It should be a strip of land open to all, not something closed,” says Meir Dana-Picard, a leader of the 2005 resistance against disengagement.
Bryna Hilburg, a symbol of the bereaved families of Gush Katif, talks to JNS about the attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the prospect of reinterring the remains of her son in Gaza.
“The idea is not to go back to Gush Katif but to go back to a type of social, historical, Zionist, Jewish awareness that it’s a part of the State of Israel.”
“We want to go back, not like we were, as ‘settlers,’ but as the entire nation of Israel, so they understand that this is what we have to do,” says Aviel Tucker.