Living on Edge— And Thinking About Gaza’s Endless Siege

Starvation, Displacement And America’s Complicity

Since I started writing about the aftermath of my Whipple surgery, I’ve been overwhelmed by the kindness of so many DWT readers. Don’t worry— this isn’t another installment of the cancer diaries. I’ll spare you the aches and pains. But one thing I can’t shake is how on edge I feel. Every sound jolts me. A car backfires and my whole body braces for disaster. It’s like my nervous system has been rewired for “fight or flight,” permanently switched on.

If that’s what recovery feels like here, in a quiet leafy neighborhood, I can’t stop thinking about what it must be like for people in similar health predicaments who live in war zones. Imagine being in your 70s, battling cancer, heart disease, or just the daily indignities of aging— except you’re not in a safe, supportive home. You’re in Ukraine. Or in Gaza.

Today, Israel ordered the evacuation of Gaza City— the first time it has told the entire city to empty out. Once home to about a million people, Gaza City is now starving, trapped, and bracing for a full invasion. According to Nabih Bulos’ report, hundreds of thousands remain, not because they don’t understand the danger, but because there’s literally nowhere left to go. Famine has already killed nearly 400 people. The U.N. warns this mass displacement could amount to a war crime.

Netanyahu says: “You have been warned; get out of there.” But as UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini put it, “There is no safe place in Gaza, let alone a humanitarian zone. It is a large and growing camp concentrating hungry Palestinians in despair.”

I think of myself flinching at the sound of a muffler popping. Then I think of families in Gaza who hear jets overhead every night, who don’t know if the walls around them will still be standing by morning. My own suffering feels small by comparison. And yet, in some tiny way, it connects me to theirs.

The body under siege reacts the same way, whether from disease or from bombs— it stiffens, it fears, it waits for the next blow. The difference is that I have the luxury of recovery. They don’t.

And here’s where politics matters. Washington still writes the checks and ships the bombs that make this war possible. Trump, like Biden, has indulged Netanyahu’s scorched-earth strategy, with Democrats and Republicans competing to see who can sound tougher. The result? An endless cycle of “warnings” to evacuate to nowhere, of siege and starvation carried out in America’s name. If the U.S. truly stood for human rights, it would use its leverage to stop this war, not to fuel it. Instead, we find ourselves complicit in the obliteration of Gaza, reducing a people already crushed by occupation into refugees within their own home.

If I, in the relative safety of Los Angeles, can’t calm the storm in my nervous system, how can we possibly expect those in Gaza to survive theirs? The difference is choice. I get to recover. They’re being denied even that.

Look for candidates who will stand up strong against genocide-- enough with supporting the AiPAC wing on the political system!