Dear Iqraa friends,

My Mom, Dana Dunbar Howe King, passed away at home with my sister Melissa at her side on March 20 after a full life of 92 years, lovingly narrated in her obituary.

Mom loved history and writing and published her works on family and the Middle East at Howe About Books. The first, All About US in the Middle East, was for children, featured simple, loving drawings on every page, and was told through the eyes of her oldest son, 7 years old when we arrived in East Jerusalem in January 1967.

A sense of adventure sent her traveling to find her place in life after graduating from the University of Texas (1955). She worked in New York City and then sea fared over the Atlantic. During the Cold War, generations of Americans and their families would serve in Europe, charged with protecting a newly reshaped world order—until then rooted in intra-European competition and colonialism—from predatory and expansionist authoritarianism. In that place and time my Mom met my Dad, a U.S. Army officer.

A decade later, Mom brought our family with four children to the Middle East, where my Dad was seconded to the UN Truce Supervisory Organization. From January 1967 to November 1969, we lived in East Jerusalem’s YMCA; the West Bank village of Beit Hanina; Tiberius, Israel by the Galilee; and Beirut, Lebanon, the “Paris of the Middle East”—a place and time that opened Mom’s eyes to the reshaping of another regional order.

Newly independent Arab states were navigating a path they saw as perched between liberty and security, while Western-backed Zionism grew within the British Mandate of Palestine, emerging as Israel in 1948. During this time, through to our first year in Palestine, Israel forcibly displaced more than a million Palestinians in the Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948 and the Naksa (setback) of 1967.

We were kids; our Mom experienced these events and the people affected in a range of personal ways. In her Middle East series for children, she gave us simple meanings without dwelling on politics, except the obvious. Personal connections came from talking to George, one of the Palestinian waiters who served our breakfast—he called my brother Bruce “Mr. Cornflakes”—at the YMCA in Jerusalem. Insight came from talking to the Jordanian officer who warned us he could still see light—which could facilitate aerial targeting by Israel–shining through the blackout curtains of our West Bank apartment in the days before the 1967 war.

George and other waiters at the YMCA, 1967

Mom was responsible for evacuating our family to Rome—Dad, as a UN observer, remained in the Jerusalem area—in early June and bringing us back after the war. We had many more memories than space permits, but these vignettes represent events we discussed multiple times in the decades since. They reflect her perspective of a new regional order—anchored on Israel’s security and backed by America with little if any regard for the policy implications on Arabs and others in the region.

• Disapproval of the “men with guns” in Israel waving down civilian vehicles for a ride, a jarring reality that reflected a cocky post-1967 militarism.
• A sensibility for justice offended by Israel’s razing of the Maghrebi (Moroccan) quarter in June 1967, immediately after its conquest of Jerusalem; it forcibly displaced hundreds of Palestinians to make way for the Western Wall plaza.
• Witnessing from our apartment a dozen civilian Lebanese aircraft burned by Israel in December 1968 at Beirut International Airport in “retaliation” for earlier PFLP attacks. This personalized subsequent decades of such Israeli reprisals against civilians, especially in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank.  
• Routine use of the phrase “all planes returned safely to base”—until Gaza—as reassurance after completion of air travel. We’d routinized this phrase from Israeli radio, where it was unfortunately a reflection of Israeli’s reliance on punitive airstrikes.

As a result of such experiences, Mom understood the ethnosectarian power dynamics in Palestine. For instance, her second children’s book, More About Us in the Middle East, recognized Israel’s 1968 National/Independence Day with her touching drawing of a Jewish boy holding an Israeli flag along with the notification that, “Even now, the Palestinian people continue to struggle under cruel conditions of the Occupation.”  

Such observations of unfairness by our Mom—injustice I was blind to until after conscientious study and reflection on my numerous disagreements with her–ultimately led me to recognize the source of our different understandings. The dominant narrative in America favors Zionism; the Establishment has for too long privileged the lives and narratives of Israeli Jews over others.

While Mom encountered Palestine/Israel as a conscientious adult, I was a boy; when we returned to America, everything I read in the mainstream media reshaped my understanding of what I experienced, explaining away the injustice and oppression as the legitimate security needs of ordinary Israelis.

The wake-up call for me—to resolve the cognitive dissonance between my eyes and what I read in mainstream media—came from Dana Howe on Palestine.

Our Mom often spoke about the principles of fairness that should guide our lives. Her views were intense—she grieved injustice in America and in the Holy Land–and she was not shy about expressing judgment. Fittingly, Psalm 10 will be read at her funeral service on April 11 in Richmond; all are welcome. Excerpts:

Why, Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?

In his arrogance the wicked man hunts down the weak, who are caught in the schemes he devises…

He lies in wait near the villages; from ambush he murders the innocent. His eyes watch in secret for his victims…

He says to himself, “God will never notice; he covers his face and never sees.”

Arise, LORD! Lift up your hand, O God. Do not forget the helpless…

You, LORD, hear the desire of the afflicted; you encourage them, and you listen to their cry,

defending the fatherless and the oppressed, so that mere earthly mortals will never again strike terror.

Your dutiful son,

Kirk 

Saturday morning in Minneapolis was hard to take because we love our country. For the community that fights untruths and indifference to seek justice for Palestine, ICE brutality and MAGA community support for it is unsettlingly familiar.

This familiarity comes from decades of witnessing oppression in Israel-Palestine, the images and sound bites of which reverberate in America as echoing shocks in recent years, climaxing—for the moment–on January 24.  

“We wake with

no words, just woe

 & wound. Our own country shoot

ing us in the back is not just brutal

ity; it’s jarring betrayal; not enforcement,

 but execution. A message: Love your people & you

 will die. Yet our greatest threat isn’t the outsiders

 among us, but those among us who never look

 within. Fear not those without papers, but those

 without conscience. Know that to care intensively,

 united, is to carry both pain-dark horror for today

 & a profound, daring hope for tomorrow. We can feel

 we have nothing to give, & still belove this world wait

ing, trembling to change. If we cannot find words, may

 we find the will; if we ever lose hope, may we never lose our

 humanity. The only undying thing is mercy, the courage to open

 ourselves like doors, hug our neighbor,

 & save one more bright, impossible life.

~Amanda Gorman, For Alex Jeffrey Pretti (2026)

Meanwhile, the everyday prose of social and political life that was our custom—friendly or heated debates over the meaning of events and the appropriate policy response—have evolved since January 6, 2021, into often righteous anger over disagreement on basic facts.  

One theory of how this happened is that for too long there’s been a lack of integrity in the morality Americans believe we bring to the world. We proclaim in favor of freedom and equality–universal rights. Our actions often belie our words. Nowhere is the dual standard more manifest than on Israel-Palestine.

Why it matters

Both U.S. political parties, but especially the Democrats—who for decades claim to stand with integrity for such universal values as justice and equality—reveal a moral core hollowed by this dual standard. How much more difficult it is then to face down the lies of January 6 and after, when their MAGA purveyors throw them back, alleging hypocrisy.

In addition, the Democratic party is needlessly weakened—an own goal—by internal division between progressives who believe that everyone is equal and “progressives except on Palestine” (PEP) who make exception for Zionism, which privileges Israeli Jewish lives and narratives over all others.

Belief in the universality of equal rights is not radical, but PEP and our society more broadly treat it as such regarding Palestinians. If you doubt this, try insisting publicly on Palestinian rights and freedom at work or school or places of worship the way you might for Ukraine or against antisemitism. Results may vary—“why this bias?” … ”that’s too political” … “do you support Hamas?” or “that’s not appropriate for this campus”—but are generally not welcoming.

Nevertheless, a united progressive movement, whether that’s the Democratic party or something else, is not possible until progressives truly unite and act with integrity around our core moral values.

Separation Wall with image by Lushsux; honors Palestinian Iyad Hallaq, killed by Israeli police

 in Jerusalem the week Minneapolis police killed George Floyd.

America and Israel-Palestine

After Israel’s 1967 war victory, America became Israel’s primary strategic patron, succeeding Britain and France. Ties became so close that Israel could rely on the US readily vetoing and hollowing UNSC resolutions critical of occupation, settlement building, and military aggression, and US condemnation or counterefforts on UNGA actions favorable to Palestine or that described Zionism as racism. Meanwhile, Americans celebrated Israeli leaders such as Prime Minister Golda Meir—the most admired woman in America in 1974, according to Gallup—who declared in 1969, “there was no such thing as Palestinians.”

Inside Israel, the political seeds of thought that justified the 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe)—driving 750,000 Palestinians from their homes—bloomed with the military occupation in 1967. The Jewish population dominated by Labor Zionism during initial immigration and the founding of the state turned steadily rightward after the 1967 war. Israel began building settlements even before the September 1967 Arab summit’s “three No’s.” By 1977, with settlement building under way for a decade—beginning in Syria’s Golan in July 1967—but growing in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem too, the right-wing Likud replaced Labor as the dominant force in Israeli politics.

Over the decades, America directly linked both our strategic and moral outlook and our policy thinking for the region to inherently racist Israeli policies, which were implemented both inside Israel and in the occupied territories. “Racist” because only racism—whether latent and subtle or overt, cruel, and brutal—could underpin the open-ended subjugation by one people of another.

Thus, the same ‘the moral underpins the political’ dynamics that drove American slaveholding to result in Southern secession and the Civil War, have also led Israel’s occupation to result in what genocide scholars (and South Africa’s 2023 case at the ICJ) allege is genocide in Gaza. Problematically—shamefully, for the conscientious—whether Israel’s behavior is genocide or some other immoral epithet, the crisis is ongoing with worsening conditions now in the West Bank, while America continues to support Israel—financially, militarily, politically, strategically.  

In an earlier moment like the one that moved Amanda Gorman, our former National Youth Poet Laureate, Mahmoud Darwish—the Palestinian national poet—wrote of Gaza. And note (as reflected in the date), that what’s happening to Gaza has happened for decades.

“Gaza has no throat. Its pores are the

ones that speak in sweat, blood, and

 fires. Hence the enemy hates it to

 death and fears it to criminality, and

 tries to sink it into the sea, the

desert, or blood. And hence its

 relatives and friends love it with a

 coyness that amounts to jealousy

 and fear at times, because Gaza is

the brutal lesson and the shining

 example for enemies and friends

 alike.

~Mahmoud Darwish, excerpt from Silence for Gaza (1973)

Today’s moment reflects our history at home and abroad, and it calls for integrity, both to purify our message and to unite us around it. For unity can bring what Gore foresaw as “profound, daring hope for tomorrow.”

At its heart, the Christmas story is about the arrival of a new era.

In the Christian narrative, Jesus was born in Nazareth in Palestine to herald a new kingdom on earth in which love and justice would prevail. It would bring true peace in which all are participants.

Christmas is a time to celebrate these possibilities…but on Palestine we’re still waiting.

We’re waiting for new ideas of living together to replace the old, in which one people claimed supremacy and sought to replace another people. For the new to arrive the old must pass.

Zionism is “the old.” There are two ways to think about replacing it. One is confronting it and exposing what it’s become. The other—our primary role given that we live in society imbued even subconsciously with values that privilege Israeli Jewish lives—is to challenge and educate ourselves.

Several years ago, resolved by the murder of George Floyd to “do something,” I took the Episcopal Church’s Sacred Ground course on racism in America, racism that subconsciously imbued our society, privileging the lives of Whites above others. The course was an awakening, but its primary lesson was that our most important action is not to “do something” outwardly, such as social action, but to invite change inwardly, transforming ourselves.  

Soon after October 7—when it was already clear that Israel’s response would exceed its typical (racist-framed) “mowing the grass” military operations but before “genocide” was the widely understood description of its actions in Gaza—I attended a public, interfaith discussion of Antisemitism and Islamophobia at a nearby synagogue.

Like many, I was puzzling over the relationship of Zionism and Judaism and saw that critics of Israeli actions sought to distinguish the two. A supremacist, land-claiming ideology that elevated the state as an end and envisioned clearing indigenous people as a means is vastly different from a religion that reveres God and God’s teachings, and that recognizes the value of human life is so great that each person is a universe in itself.

Yet when I framed my question to the rabbi, on the panel to discuss Antisemitism—asking whether she recognized that critics of Israel distinguish Zionism from Judaism to prevent antisemitism–she rebuked my question as an affront to her Judaism, in effect insisting that Zionism could not be questioned.  

Her defensiveness didn’t prove my point, though the distinction between faith and political ideology is manifestly obvious. But it highlighted something more broadly important about the Palestine-Israel struggle centering on the narrative: what is the meaning of what is happening—why and what are the moral lessons? –and most importantly, who can narrate.

The struggle inside Israel-Palestine—and in the region immediately beyond that’s within reach of Israel’s U.S.-provided combat weaponry–is mostly decided by force and by facts on the ground: military dominance, ethnic cleansing, and settlement expansion. But it’s the moral struggle over the narrative and who controls it—a debate that takes place mostly outside Palestine-Israel–that will decide the content and character of the new era.

And our first responsibility in this advent time is self-transformation.

This picture is from Puerto Rico in early December and was taken in Luis Munoz Rivera park. LMR was a poet and struggler for Puerto Rican autonomy from Spain.