“When you feel like your life is endangered, all you want to do is protect your family. You don’t care what’s happening to anybody else, all you want to do is survive.”
That’s how Alice Miller felt during the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks from her home on Kibbutz Hukok, a few miles from the Sea of Galilee. But she decided to “keep my heart open” instead. A year and a half ago, she became the chief operating officer of NATAN, an Israeli volunteer corps delivering disaster relief services worldwide, as well as in Israel and Gaza.
At the Z3 conference in Palo Alto on Nov. 9, Miller joined two other humanitarian leaders and J. arts and culture section editor Maya Mirsky for a panel on “Why War Puts Our Humanity to the Test and How Compassion Endures.”
At a conference filled with Jewish speakers and attendees, Miller was the only Jew on this panel. Another panelist, Maria Jiries, is a Christian Israeli Arab who on Oct. 7 was visiting her parents in the village of Rama, 20 miles west of Kibbutz Hukok.
Jiries, who also spoke at an earlier panel on the factures within Israeli society, identified the national leadership as one prominent source of political and social polarization in Israel. As the head of the NGO Shittah Institute for Local Policy, Jiries works directly with municipal leaders to come up with solutions to their communities’ problems on the ground.
“We believe that the cities and local leadership can handle the situation differently from the national leadership,” she said. “In this deep polarization we face, I think we should try all the ways to get people to meet and know each other.”
Also on the panel was Palestinian American Dr. David Hasan, a Duke University neurosurgeon who traveled to Gaza to treat wounded patients. He also went to Israel to bear witness to the atrocities Hamas committed and to form partnerships with Israeli organizations to support his vision to build a rehabilitation center for Gazan orphans.
Working in the midst of a war that dominated social media, Hasan was desperate to find practical solutions to the most pressing problems Gazans faced and not get caught up in online discourse.
“I refused to engage in word fights and subjective claims about genocide, war crimes. I try to be a physician and stay on the facts,” Hasan said in Palo Alto.
After he was interviewed by Haaretz and recounting his experiences in Gaza with medical convoys, the article elicited thousands of messages from Israelis asking what they could do to help, he told the Z3 audience.
Hasan and a network of Israeli and Palestinian volunteers and donors, including NATAN, launched a project a few months ago called the Gaza Children Village Academies of Hope. In Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis, they built spaces that have served around 3,000 children with medical care, food and education — including, Hasan said, the only schools in Gaza that teach a fact-based curriculum on Israel.
Miller thanked Hasan for his work and said she has personally seen how the villages and his other humanitarian efforts are bringing Israeli and Arab volunteers together.
“I think that this is going to do something fantastic for the society inside Israel,” Miller said. “We will be able to work together, be together and have a common cause.”