Thousands of miles of land and sea separate Maryland from the epicenter of the Israel-Hamas war, yet the conflict remains closer than ever for the state’s Israeli and Palestinian communities.
In the days leading up to the first anniversary of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, which marked the start a war with a terrible humanitarian toll, local residents with ties to both Israel and Gaza assembled peacefully across Maryland, which has the eighth-largest Jewish population and the seventh-largest Muslim population among American states.
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore on Sunday spoke of unity amid the conflict.
“I humbly ask that we extend each other the grace required to navigate this difficult situation together — as one Maryland and one people,” Moore said in a statement.
Survivor remembers chaos of Nova music festival
On Sunday night, dozens of community members gathered at the ARIEL Chabad Center in Pikesville to listen to Matan Boltax, a 23-year-old native of Long Island, New York, who has lived in Israel since 2009, recount his story of escape from the Nova music festival a year ago.
On Oct. 7 last year, a couple of split decisions meant that Boltax got out of the music festival with his life while others in his group didn’t.
Less than a year removed from his time stationed along the Gaza border with the Israeli Defense Forces, the early-morning rocket fire didn’t strike him as all that abnormal, he said.
But the sound of AK-47′s about 45 minutes later did.
Boltax described a chaotic scene of thousands of festival-goers trying to leave the concert, which was in a remote area of southern Israel connected with just one highway.
As they sat in traffic trying to get out, cars started driving back with shattered windows. People had been shot. He heard more fire from AK-47′s, a distinct sound that Boltax knows from his time as a soldier, he said.
They headed down a dirt road and came upon people shooting from the bed of a white pickup truck and made a quick U-turn, winding through other roads until they eventually found the highway, he said. They jumped a private fence in the town of Tkuma and remained in that family’s bomb shelter for 10 hours.
Cellphone towers had gone down. It was still Shabbat. He didn’t connect with his mother until he had been sheltered for an hour. Tons of people were reaching out to check if he was OK, he said.
“Exactly a year ago, Israel has witnessed, the Jewish nation has witnessed, the greatest tragedy we have experienced since the Holocaust,” ARIEL Center Rabbi Velvel Belinsky said in an interview before the event started. The rise in antisemitism since Oct. 7 has also been horrific, he said.
“We have always come together to support each other in difficult times, and this event is just that,” he said.
Bronwen Tursman of upstate New York attended the Sunday night event while in town visiting family, saying it was important to lift up and focus on the voices of victims. The past year has felt like one long Shiva, she said, a year of long, palpable grief.
“You would not meet a Jew who is happy about a child or a mother or these innocent civilians dying,” Tursman said.
The massacre that Boltax survived and other Hamas attacks in Israel on Oct. 7 killed about 1,200 that day. And hundreds of IDF soldiers have died since then.
Israel’s response has been deadly, killing more than 40,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between soldiers and civilians. Estimates say roughly half of those dead are women and children.
Life in Israel this past year has meant living with “a constant threat in your head,” said Boltax. Still, he’s trying to return to normal life — he recently attended another large music festival in Europe alongside thousands of other Israelis and is preparing to start his university studies soon.
Calling attention to the crisis in Gaza
Local residents with deep Palestinian ties also convened over the weekend to implore Marylanders not to forget the humanitarian crisis facing civilians in Gaza.
Howard County author Ramsey Hanhan had returned to his native Palestine for a book tour last October when the Gaza border exploded into violence.
He woke at 6:30 a.m. in his family’s home and scrolled through accounts of the attacks. Everyone was confused and anxious. They watched Al Jazeera on the satellite all day. By evening, they heard the thunder of Israeli bombers flying overhead.
“It was very frightening,” Hanhan recalled Sunday.
He was among more than 100 Palestinian families, supporters and activists for peace who rallied Sunday afternoon at a busy intersection before The Mall in Columbia to call attention to the war.
“Free Palestine,” their signs read. “Honk for Gaza children.” “End all U.S. Aid to Israel.”
The rally participants said they wanted to remind Howard County of the continuing bloodshed. They wanted to see the U.S. end military aid to Israel.
“The U.S. is a huge financial contributor to Israel, and that money is used to kill a lot of children, a lot of civilians,” said Hiruy Hadgu, a local activist. “That money can go for doing good here, for building our community. We need a society that’s [focused] toward educating children, not killing them.”
They intentionally held the rally on Oct. 6, not the Oct. 7 anniversary of the attacks. They traced the war back to the 1940s and the Nakba — the “catastrophe” in Arabic — that split Palestine. To them, Oct. 7 was not the beginning, but another horrific date in a conflict that has stretched back generations.
Hadgu said Americans have turned a blind eye to the awful realities of this history of violence.
“Just seeing children killed should move us. Why is there no collective outrage?” Hadgu said. “We need to ask ourselves that question. I don’t want an Israeli mother losing her son, just like I don’t want a Palestinian mother losing her son.”
The rally participants wanted Howard County and all of Maryland to take notice of the war.
“It’s about making sure communities across the state know what is happening because it’s happening with our tax dollars. We’re directly implicated,” said Ahlam Dahood, of the MD2Palestine group.
Anna Cortes carried a cardboard sign denouncing racism, theft and genocide against the Palestinian people.
“Palestinians, like everyone else, have a right to resist oppression,” she said. “We’re resisting for them right here in Howard County.”
Last year, as the Israeli bombers thundered overhead, Hanhan began to compose a poem. On Sunday, the crowd hushed and he read it aloud. His poem begins:
“What do I pray for, when planes roar overhead? / That the pilot will have a heart, / And not push the button?”
This is a developing story.
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