Israelis went to sleep Friday night celebrating the end of the Jewish High Holidays, looking ahead to a return to work and schools, and, while apprehensive about their own politics, fairly confident that they were safe in their beds.

The next morning, with Hamas’ devastating cross-border attack from Gaza, everything they thought they knew – about their country and politics, security and the army, and place in the Middle East – collapsed.

The abject failure of Israel’s intelligence and military has shaken a public reared on the prowess of the vaunted Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

The near absence of governmental authority in shattered southern Israel in the first few days of the war has undermined faith in the country’s leaders.

The savagery of Hamas commandos, left unchecked for hours as they went house to house shooting civilians in communities near the Gaza border, has made clear that the enemy from Gaza was vastly underestimated.

Yet in its shared trauma, the country has drawn together, with the divisions and mass protest movement against the hard-right government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put aside.

Like 9/11, but worse

The unprecedented toll – more than 1,000 Israelis killed, nearly 3,000 wounded, and over 150 taken hostage to Gaza, including women, children, and older people – made it, by far, the heaviest single-day loss in Israel’s conflict-filled history.

Even Israeli officials drew immediate comparisons to 9/11. But in relative terms it’s many times worse: Given Israel’s population, it would be as if more than 30,000 Americans were killed on that fateful day in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania.

Hadas Parush/Reuters

Israeli soldiers embrace as they mourn Ili Bar Sade, a soldier who was killed in an attack by Hamas militants, at his funeral in Tel Aviv, Oct. 9, 2023.

“It was a dramatic, epic event in Israeli society. Books will be written about it,” says one senior Israeli military officer. “It’s a game-changer in society. ... [It will] change the paradigm.”

Nearly every household in Israel has been impacted by Saturday’s attack and the ongoing fighting, now in its fourth day.

Survivors from an outdoor music festival held near the Gaza border that morning recounted on live television the subsequent massacre that took place, as Hamas militants fired indiscriminately at the young revelers. More than 250 bodies were later recovered at the site.

Funerals for fallen soldiers were held under rocket fire in Jerusalem Monday, as relatives of those captured or still missing held a press conference pleading for any information about their loved ones.

“I don’t think that anyone could have imagined that something like this was possible. I wanted to believe that ... the IDF or other authorities would have the ability to know about it,” says Adva Adar, whose 85-year-old grandmother, Yaffa, was taken captive from her kibbutz in southern Israel. “Even in our worst nightmare we couldn’t imagine that this was possible.”

Hatem Ali/AP

Palestinians transport a captured Israeli civilian (center) from Kibbutz Kfar Azza into the Gaza Strip, Oct. 7, 2023. Some 150 Israelis, including women, children, and older people, were taken captive.

The Israeli military claimed Tuesday that it had “more or less” secured the southern region bordering Gaza, and that its warplanes were striking expansively inside Gaza. Palestinian authorities said more than 900 Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank had been killed, and 4,000 wounded.

Water, electricity, and the entry of fuel and goods to Gaza have also been cut, Israeli officials said.

As some 360,000 Israeli reservists mobilize, analysts predict a major ground offensive deep into Gaza, a small, cramped slice of territory home to more than 2 million Palestinians. The goal, senior Israeli officials have said, is to completely dismantle Hamas and all other militant groups inside the coastal enclave.

“What will be done to our enemies in the coming days will resonate with them for generations,” Prime Minister Netanyahu said in a speech Monday night, girding the public for a “long and severe” campaign.

“This is a war for [our] home, a war for ensuring our existence,” he added.

Hamas was an “address”

That it has come to this with Hamas in Gaza has shaken Israeli political and military officials.

Despite multiple rounds of escalations and conflict in Gaza since the militant group seized the territory in 2007, the Israeli strategy for over a decade was to keep Hamas in control as an “address,” in the words of one senior Israeli security official, with which it could engage.

The bargain especially over the past decade was clear: Israel would ease the blockade around the territory, allowing in funds and more goods, and letting out thousands of Palestinian laborers to work in Israel. In return Hamas would, it was hoped, ensure quiet and nonbelligerence. This strategy, according to multiple Israeli officials, also collapsed over the weekend.

“Hamas made a strategic decision to [go] out of [its old] playbook,” said Eyal Hulata, a former Israeli national security adviser, on a call with reporters. Mr. Hulata said that previously Hamas used military force to extract economic concessions, infrastructure improvement, and other assistance for Gaza, admitting that Israel indirectly negotiated with the militant group to achieve those ends.

There would now likely have to be an IDF ground offensive into Gaza that would claim many lives on both sides, with the goal being to end Hamas rule, Mr. Hulata added.

“We refrained from doing that for a long time because of the costs that will be coming out from this decision,” he says. “We [thought we could] manage the situation. ... All of that has now changed.”

Violeta Santos Moura/Reuters

Israeli soldiers stand guard near damage caused by a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip, in Ashkelon, southern Israel, Oct. 9, 2023.

Wary eye on the north

More concerning than even this scenario is the possibility that the far larger and more powerful Hezbollah, a Shiite movement based to Israel’s north in Lebanon, will enter the fray. The Iranian-backed group, which Israeli officials now refer to as a “terror army” due to its vast rocket, missile, and drone arsenal, last fought a monthlong war with Israel in 2006.

The prospects of a large multifront war from both south and north breaking out, with projectiles raining down on Israeli cities, are seemingly growing. Over the past two days, over two dozen rockets and missiles were fired at Israeli territory from Lebanon, and at least one cross-border infiltration raid was made by Lebanese-based militants into Israel, with fatalities on both sides. Retaliatory Israeli strikes into Lebanon killed several Hezbollah personnel late Monday.

“[Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah said more than once that if a soldier of his will be hurt, he will hit back. He already said that if Israel will enter the Gaza Strip with ground forces, he will react. As we see with Hezbollah and Nasrallah in the last years, everything he says – it’s being done,” said Eyal Pinko, a former senior Israeli security officer, on the call with reporters. “We need to take that seriously.”

SOURCE:

Associated Press, New York Times

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff

Amid the devastation and bloodshed – and with more feared – Israeli society has united, despite the deep cracks exposed over the last 10 months amid the Netanyahu government’s push to overhaul the country’s judiciary.

The mass protest movement has canceled its weekly demonstrations and begun organizing food and aid drives to those in need. The military reservists who suspended their service in protest at government policy have all returned to their units.

“The pain is terrible. ... Everyone knows someone who is lost and won’t return, and everyone has someone who at this moment is on the battlefield,” Shikma Bressler, a prominent protest leader, said in a recorded video Monday.

Ammar Awad/Reuters

A soldier launches a remote-controlled drone as Israeli soldiers patrol near the border with Lebanon, in northern Israel, Oct. 9, 2023.

Unity government?

There are even talks offered by opposition leaders about joining an “emergency unity government” alongside Prime Minister Netanyahu, which mere days before would have been unthinkable.

“The people are united, and now the leadership needs to unite,” Mr. Netanyahu, formerly the most divisive figure in Israel, said in his address Monday night.

Recriminations and investigations can wait until after the war ends, say officials themselves. Analysts surmise that many top security officers will ultimately pay with their jobs, and even Mr. Netanyahu – who for years billed himself as “Mr. Security” – will not be left unscathed.

Even several days after the start of the war, government agencies still appear unresponsive; multiple relatives of captured Israelis say no Israeli official has yet contacted them. Talks for the release of the hostages have reportedly been rejected by both sides, at least for now.

For these reasons and so many more, the public anger and personal trauma inside Israeli society will likely take a long time to heal.

“The worst feeling of the last few days is that the country that was supposed to protect you just wasn’t there,” says Ben, a young father living in Tel Aviv who asked that his full name not be used. “Everyone I spoke to is distressed. I know another dad whose son asked him if someone is going to break in and kidnap them. How are you supposed to deal with that?”

Even worse, this latest war – the most devastating since 1948 between Israelis and Palestinians – will likely only harden the hate and distrust.

Similar to many Israelis, Ben, a political moderate, has been changed by what has transpired in recent days. Asked about the future prospects of coexistence with the other side, he says quietly: “Many years will have to pass for that to happen.”

Fatima Shbair/AP

Palestinians inspect the rubble of buildings in Gaza City hit by an Israeli airstrike, launched in retaliation for a Hamas attack on Israeli civilians.

A mood of shock and inevitability has spread over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as residents find themselves plunged into a war that has caught everybody off guard.

But even as the Gaza Strip braces for an Israeli ground assault and its 2 million inhabitants prepare to cope with what Israeli officials call “a complete siege” denying them food, water, fuel, and electricity, a large majority of Palestinians appear to support Hamas militants’ brutal weekend attack on Israel.

Before Israel began retaliating for the deaths of more than 1,000 Israelis, mostly civilians, with massive airstrikes, the breaking news of the surprise Hamas eruption had prompted celebrations on the streets of Ramallah, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, where people distributed sweets to gathering crowds.

Many saw the attack, in which over 100 Israelis were abducted and taken as hostages into Gaza, as retribution for the deaths of Palestinian civilians in earlier rounds of conflict and in daily life. “The world keeps saying this attack is unprovoked, but in fact the world is ignoring how violent the daily occupation is,” says Diana Buttu, a former adviser to the Palestinian delegation to peace talks with Israel, now in abeyance.

Mohammed Zaatari/AP

Palestinians in a Lebanese refugee camp carry their flag in celebration of the attacks that the militant Hamas group carried out against Israel on Saturday.

Since the United Nations started counting deaths in 2006, 2023 has been the deadliest year for Palestinians – 200 have died this year at the hands of Israeli soldiers or settlers in the occupied West Bank. “We’ve tried to make ourselves likable, and now I think the Palestinians are seeing we can never be in a good place with the international community, so we have pushback instead,” says Ms. Buttu.

The bloody events of last weekend, including the massacre of over 250 revelers at a rave party, have been condemned by people around the world as a terrorist outrage. In Gaza, however, they are widely seen as a breach in the Israeli-built wall that has trapped residents for 16 years and condemned them to victimhood.

“The situation is very devastating, and we couldn’t take it anymore,” says local journalist Hind Khoudary, describing deteriorating living conditions in Gaza. “It may not be aligned with international law, but, for the first time, Palestinians here in Gaza do not feel helpless.”

They are, however, paying a heavy price.

As Israeli missile strikes on the strip continued for a third day, the death toll rose to more than 900 by late Tuesday, including 120 children, according to Palestinian health officials. The Israeli military warned Gaza residents on Tuesday to leave the strip through a border crossing with Egypt, in order to escape danger, but a spokesperson later acknowledged that the crossing is closed. Multiple Israeli missile strikes hit the Gazan side of the border crossing late Monday, effectively sealing Palestinians in, according to the independent Egyptian media outlet Mada Masr.

“It’s difficult to predict anything at this stage,” cautions Ahmad Bassiouni, a Gaza-based researcher, but like many Gazans, he expects an Israeli ground assault in the coming days. The “proper Israeli response hasn’t yet started,” he says.

When it does start, say Hamas officials, there will be no going back. In previous rounds of violence, Hamas lobbed missiles into Israel and then desisted in return for increased economic aid, brokered by Egypt and Qatar. Israeli officials believed that the arrangement was manageable.

Amir Cohen/Reuters

Israel's Iron Dome anti-missile system intercepts rockets launched from the Gaza Strip, as seen from the city of Ashkelon, Israel, Oct. 8, 2023.

But Hamas officials describe the current war as a turning point. “We will not go back to the situation before Oct. 7,” says a Hamas source close to the movement’s leadership, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Hamas appears to have had both domestic and international motivations for its attack, which inflicted the heaviest one-day death toll on Israel since the Jewish state’s foundation in 1948.

Officials told Arab media that their goal was an end to Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory and that they were also reacting to alleged violations by Israeli extremists of rules regulating access to Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, revered by Jews as the Temple Mount.

Also in Hamas’ sights is a prisoner swap, according to the Hamas source. He indicated that the movement would seek to exchange more than 100 Israeli civilians and soldiers held hostage in the Gaza Strip, a group that includes children and older Israelis, for Hamas militants held in Israeli jails, although Hamas had “not yet set conditions for the release.”

Unverified, graphic videos, purportedly showing Hamas militants abusing their hostages, are circulating on social media.

In remarks broadcast by Al Jazeera late Monday, Abu Obaida, spokesperson for Hamas’ military wing, announced it would execute an Israeli civilian hostage every time an Israeli missile strike hit a residential building in Gaza without prior warning. 

But Hamas spokesperson Ibrahim Hamad also told Al Jazeera TV on Sunday that the attack was “absolutely a message” to Muslim countries seeking normalization with Israel.

Among them is Saudi Arabia. Palestinian political observers believe the Hamas attack will derail U.S. moves currently underway to broker a deal between Riyadh and Israel. The Israeli military offensive against Gaza is expected to galvanize anti-Israel sentiment on the streets of Arab countries and strengthen public sentiment that Arab states should not ignore the unresolved question of Palestinians’ status as they pursue closer economic and security ties with the Jewish state.

Ronen Zvulun/Reuters

Israeli soldiers drive a tank by Israel's border with Gaza in southern Israel, Oct. 10, 2023.

The assault also appeared to be an attempt to alter the balance of power in domestic Palestinian politics, particularly with Hamas’ rival Fatah, which has recognized Israel and forgone resistance to negotiations in the framework of the 30-year-old Oslo peace process. That policy has won few concessions from Israel and lost Fatah support and territorial control in the West Bank, where Fatah is based.

Fatah, and the Palestinian Authority, which it controls, are obliged by the Oslo Accords to cooperate with Israel. But they now find themselves caught in a political bind, faced with a public supporting Hamas’ action and increasingly calling for similar violent resistance.

The Palestinian Authority has been notably silent since Saturday, and officials turned down requests for comment on the political situation.

On the broader international front, Israel and the United States say they had no evidence that Iran was closely involved in planning Saturday’s rampage, as has been reported. In recent months, however, Palestinian Authority officials have warned privately of attempts by Iran to involve itself directly in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by providing arms and funds to new militant groups forming in the West Bank.

SOURCE:

Associated Press, New York Times

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff

They are filling a vacuum left by the demise of Oslo peace talks, says Ms. Buttu, the former adviser to the Palestine Liberation Organization team at those talks. She believes that last weekend’s attack and the public support it has attracted among Palestinians are a result of the failure of the peace process and the international community’s reluctance to uphold Palestinian rights or to press Israel to resume talks.

This year marks 30 years since the Oslo Accords, which established the Palestinian Authority as a seed for promised statehood – which seems as distant as ever.

“For all those years, there has been no push on Israel to do anything” that might lead to Palestinian statehood, full civic rights, or an end to violence and discrimination against Palestinians, Ms. Buttu points out. “The message here is ‘enough is enough.’”

Editor's note: This story was updated to reflect the number of Israelis and Palestinians who died.

Inside a high school classroom, Bryan Martinez quickly jots down several purchases that would require a short-term savings plan: shoes, phone, headphones, clothes, and food.

His medium-term financial goals take a little more thought, but he settles on a car – he doesn’t have one yet – and vacations. Peering way into his future, the 18-year-old also imagines saving money to buy a house, start his own business, retire, and perhaps provide any children with a college fund. 

Bryan’s buddy next to him writes a different long-term goal: Buy a private jet.

“You have to be a millionaire to save up for that,” Bryan says with a chuckle.

Call it a reality check or an introduction to a critical life skill, this exercise occurred in a yearlong course called Advanced Algebra with Financial Applications. The elective math class has been a mainstay in Capital City Public Charter School’s offerings for more than a decade, giving students a foundation in money management while they hone related math skills. Conversations about credit, investments, and loans, for instance, intersect with lessons on compound interest, matrices, and exponential equations.

But do topics like high interest rates translate to higher interest among students? Tonica Tatum-Gormes, who teaches the course, says yes. She attributes better student engagement to them seeing the connection between math and their future financial well-being.

Students begin to understand that “yes, I need to learn decimals, and I need to learn fractions, and I need to learn percentages because I have to manage my money and I have to take out a loan. I should understand what I’m reading before I sign,” says Ms. Tatum-Gormes.

The Washington, D.C., charter school may be a front-runner in providing financial education, but in recent years, many others have followed suit – often spurred by state-level decisions. Since 2020, nine U.S. states have adopted laws or policies requiring personal finance education before students graduate from high school, bringing the total number to 30 states, according to the Council for Economic Education.

Twenty-three states require personal finance as at least a stand-alone semester course, says Tim Ranzetta, co-founder of Next Gen Personal Finance, which tracks state-level developments. The nonprofit offers lessons and resources, and advocates for financial literacy education. The upshot is that nearly 50% of students in public high schools in the United States will receive this type of instruction through a dedicated course.

Jackie Valley/The Christian Science Monitor

Tonica Tatum-Gormes leads her students through a math problem involving a money-saving strategy, Sept. 12, 2023. She teaches a course called Advanced Algebra with Financial Applications at Capital City Public Charter School in Washington, D.C.

The surge comes as educators are scrambling to bolster students’ math skills, which plummeted during the pandemic and haven’t fully recovered. At the same time, math anxiety or a general dislike for the number-focused subject remains an obstacle among young people.

Advocates say personal finance courses could, quite literally, pay dividends if students learn how to make wiser money decisions and avoid financial hazards. In the process, they may also develop an interest in math because of its practical applications. 

“I think the philosophy we took in building the course was, ‘Let’s start with the personal finance first as the hook, and then let’s introduce the math,’” Mr. Ranzetta says. “Math can be intimidating.”

Skills for real lives 

The K-12 standards for personal finance education, as recommended by the Council for Economic Education, include topics such as earning income, budgeting, saving, investing, and managing credit and financial risk. The scope goes beyond math itself, hence why experts say it’s a course that doesn’t necessarily have to be taught by a traditional math teacher.

“The more math you add to financial literacy, frankly, the better it is,” says Annamaria Lusardi, founder and academic director of the Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center. “In many cases, to make a decision, you have to do calculations, so I think math is a very powerful tool. ... Having said that, financial literacy is more than math.”

Idaho is one of the states where a new financial literacy curriculum is hitting classrooms. The 2023 state Legislature approved the course as a graduation requirement with bipartisan support.

The new course will give students the chance to apply skills from their algebra, calculus, and economics classes to their real lives – computing their future student loans, rent payments, and income requirements.

“This was such a priority out of the gate because I heard from so many people during the campaign last year that our young people weren’t prepared with the basic financial skills they need to succeed in life,” says Debbie Critchfield, Idaho’s state superintendent of public instruction, who spearheaded the effort.

Experts say the subprime mortgage crisis that helped spark the Great Recession in 2007, followed by pandemic economic uncertainty and today’s inflationary period, may have heightened Americans’ desire for a solid financial understanding. Less than a quarter, or 24%, of millennials demonstrate basic financial literacy, according to the Council for Economic Education, which also estimates that half of the nation’s younger members will earn less than their parents.

The U.S., despite having the world’s largest financial markets, has long trailed other nations in arming its populace with money management skills, says Dr. Lusardi, who is also a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

“We need to learn financial literacy in the way we learn every other topic, which is you have to learn it as early as possible,” she says.

Advocates say that left untaught, teens and young adults may turn to questionable sources, such as TikTok or YouTube videos, where the validity of the advice is murky at best. Plus, children whose parents aren’t financially savvy can’t rely on learning at home, making it an equity issue that can drastically alter wealth accumulation between various groups.

In 2020, the NAACP issued a resolution calling for more financial literacy programs in K-12 schools.

“It’s an empowering course”

Even as financial courses gain more steam in schools, access continues to fall along racial, socioeconomic, and geographic lines. An analysis by Next Gen Personal Finance found that in schools with predominantly Black and Hispanic student populations, where there are no state-mandated requirements, only 7% of students have guaranteed access to at least a semesterlong personal finance course. Conversely, that figure rises to 14.2% for schools with less than a quarter of students identifying as Black or Hispanic.

The equity consideration has been a major driving force behind the long-running financial literacy course at Capital City Public Charter School, which serves a student body that is 64% Latino and 25% Black.

“It’s an empowering course,” says Laina Cox, head of the school. “I think it gives our young people the language that they need and the voice when they’re in certain rooms and at certain tables.”

Ms. Tatum-Gormes says the course could have prevented her from experiencing financial pitfalls at a young age, but she takes solace in knowing that her students are avoiding those same mistakes. Alumni have come back and thanked her for the class. Some have shared the financial strategies with their parents, giving them an indirect lift as well, she says.

Back in her classroom, the conversation about savings goals turns into a math problem on the whiteboard. She’s asking students to calculate how much someone would need to save to create an emergency fund covering three months’ worth of expenses. 

At her nudging, students piece together an equation, which she scrawls on the board. It’s early in the school year, but for students, the value of the dollar is already becoming apparent.

Bryan, who’s one of nine children, says he signed up for the course because he watched his parents struggle to make ends meet over the years. His hope is that he walks away with knowledge about when to spend – and not spend – money.

“I just want to prepare myself for the things that are coming toward me,” he says.

Sadie Dittenber from Idaho Education News contributed to this report.

This piece is part of The Math Problem, an ongoing series documenting challenges and highlighting progress, from the Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight diverse newsrooms: AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times. To read more of the collaborative’s work, visit its website. 

Kalpana Jain

Traditional grain houses are situated inside the village chief's residential complex in Cisungsang village in West Java province, Indonesia. The Kasepuhan Cisungsang, an Indigenous group that lives at the foot of Mount Halimun, is opening up its village to visitors.

Once isolated from the rest of the world, the Kasepuhan Cisungsang – an Indigenous community in Indonesia – has been inviting outsiders to get a glimpse into their lives.

Their village rests at the foot of Mount Halimun in western Java, a six-hour drive from the bustling megalopolis of Jakarta. When visitors arrive, a band of musicians dressed in flowing black robes and colorful headdresses greet them by playing the angklung, a traditional bamboo instrument, while young girls dance. The guests are shepherded into a spacious hut where a Kasepuhan Cisungsang representative explains that the community is led by the abah, or father, and that they’ve lived in this forested area since before Dutch colonization.

“Our ancestors have left us a message to protect and defend the environment,” says Raden Angga Kusuma, the abah’s eldest son and crown prince of the village. 

Indonesia is home to an estimated 50 million to 70 million Indigenous individuals, or nearly 20% of the country’s population. However, Indigenous communities’ claims to their homeland are precarious, often hinging on a community’s ability to convince local authorities of their Indigeneity. Add to that pervasive stereotypes about Indigenous communities being anti-development or stuck in the past, and the challenge for many of the archipelago’s Indigenous leaders becomes retaining their traditional culture and customs, while also evolving with the times. For the Kasepuhan Cisungsang, opening to visitors is part of that strategic thinking.

Through a translator, Kasepuhan Cisungsang elder Apih Jakar shares another saying from their ancestors: “Cope with the dynamics of time and adapt with it.”

Battle over land

For the Kasepuhan Cisungsang and the 56 other Kasepuhan groups living in the Halimun Salak area of Java, the battle for land rights dates back to the 19th century, when Dutch settlers failed to acknowledge the communities living in and around the Mount Halimun Salak National Park. The colonizers’ demarcations and land practices persisted after independence in 1945. Under Indonesia’s second President Suharto, Indigenous land was converted into state forests and redistributed as private concessions to rubber, mining, and palm oil companies. 

Throughout the Suharto era, “the Indonesian government argued that the country had to catch up and needed to achieve higher rates of growth,” says Timo Duile, an anthropologist at the University of Bonn who has spent years researching land rights in Indonesia. “That could be done by cooperation with the West and by opening the country to foreign capital. ... Land was an important issue that created a lot of conflicts.” 

It wasn’t until 2013 that a historic ruling known as MK35 provided Indigenous people the opportunity to reclaim ancestral land. However, this has proved to be a long and complicated process. 

Kalpana Jain

A statue of a tiger, symbolizing guardianship with nature, sits atop the entrance to the Kasepuhan Cisungsang's village in West Java province, Indonesia.

An independent mapping initiative has recorded over 50 million acres of Indigenous land in Indonesia, but only 15% has been recognized by the government. Critics blame the bottleneck on slow bureaucracy, poorly implemented and conflicting forest laws, and corporate land grabbing.

But the first hurdle many communities face is proving their roots. 

Proving Indigeneity

A community’s Indigeneity must be recognized by an administrative unit in a province known as a Kabupaten. 

A group can qualify if they have markings as an Indigenous peoples, such as following customary laws and retaining unique social institutions, says Muhammad Arman, director of advocacy for policy, law, and human rights at Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara (AMAN), or the Indigenous Peoples Alliance of the Archipelago. But many kabupatens have ill-defined regulations, and proving Indigeneity can depend on the whims of local politicians. 

“If you wear modern clothes, the government can say you have changed socially and culturally and therefore are no longer a member of an Indigenous community,” says Mr. Arman.  

Legal recognition is also no guarantee that a community’s wishes will be respected. 

Mama Rosita Tecuari is one of several leaders from the Namblong Indigenous Community in Papua province fighting to defend their land from the expansion of a palm oil plantation. A company got the license and a permit to use the land without any consent from the 500 tribes settled there, says Ms. Tecuari. Even after local laws recognized the Namblong community’s right to the land in 2021, the company has not retreated. 

“It’s not that we don’t want development,” she says, they just don’t want it to come at the expense of the environment. “We in Papua think of forests as our own hearts. If you clear our forests, it is the same as killing us.”

Still, for Indigenous groups to have a shot at local autonomy, they must show that they retain their Indigeneity. “To get land rights, they have to prove continuity between past and present with Indigenous institutions and Indigenous laws,” says Mr. Duile. “They can be in a process of change, but have to convince officials that they are the same.”

Kalpana Jain

Crown Prince Raden Angga Kusuma (far left) sits with other inner circle members on a rug in a room where visitors are received. He says, "Our ancestors have left us a message to protect and defend the environment."

History of transformation

That emphasis on continuity means that Indigeneity can get conflated with primitiveness, says scholar Rebakah Daro Minarchek from the University of Washington.

For her 2019 dissertation, Dr. Daro Minarchek spent years studying how three Kasepuhan communities, including Kasepuhan Cisungsang, were embracing technology.

After the central government brought ​​Ciptagelar village internet through a universal connectivity program and built a TV station and a radio station, villagers trained youth to interview elders on traditions and record their musicians. One village leader even turned to YouTube videos to teach himself how to use GPS technology to map land boundaries.

Dr. Daro Minarchek also observed Ciptagelar village send two young men to Japan to learn how to do commercial gardening and increase productivity. Many Indigenous communities are hesitant about certain kinds of education that distance youth from the community, she explains, but they don’t look down on education. 

In the case of Kasepuhan Cisungsang, the crown prince and a few others have been allowed to go to a university under the condition that they will return to their village and their way of life.

In recent years, the village has also invited international visitors to attend an annual harvest festival, known as Seren Taun, a thanksgiving ceremony for all the blessings received during the year. The tradition was captured in a 2016 short documentary called “Harvest Moon Ritual.”

This adaptation isn’t new, Dr. Daro Minarchek notes, pointing to the community’s religious practices. The Kasepuhan Cisungsang currently practices Islam, but incorporates it with ancestral practices including shamanic animism, along with Hindu and Buddhist practices.

“To say that this is a community from 700 years ago that hasn’t caught up to the future is dehumanizing,” says Dr. Daro Minarchek.

On an overcast morning in late August, more than 30 girls entering grades 1-8 gather behind Edison Intermediate School in Westfield, New Jersey. The fields are home to a new summer camp: Blue Devil flag football.

Coaches Matthew Andzel and Sara Liptack, along with two female high school students, lead the players in a series of warmup exercises. Some of the participants giggle as they skip and side-shuffle. Afterward, Mr. Andzel shows the girls how to hold, throw, and catch the brightly colored footballs. The girls do a relay race before taking a short break. Then the coaches do some drills, instructing players to catch the ball and keep running.

Ms. Liptack’s 9-year-old daughter, Lyra, is among the participants in the camp. “I like how there are so many girls here, and some are so good,” Lyra says. “The older ones help the little ones. It’s fantastic.”

A modified version of American football, flag football has been gaining popularity not just in Westfield, but across the country. Since 2015, participation by 6-to-12-year-olds has increased 38%, according to NFL Flag. Tackle football among that age group has dropped by 29%.

“In the last 10 years, it’s boomed,” says Russ Crawford, author of “Women’s American Football: Breaking Barriers On and Off the Gridiron.” “Football is the most popular sport in America, and the girls want to play.”

In the United States, traditional tackle football is available to girls, with teams such as Utah Girls Football in Salt Lake. Girls also play the contact version of the sport on boys’ teams. “With the growth of the concussion crisis, flag is a more socially and medically [secure] way for girls to play,” explains Dr. Crawford, a professor of history at Ohio Northern University.

Ingrid Ahlgren

Sara Liptack coaches participants at the Blue Devil girls' flag football camp in Westfield, New Jersey, Aug. 28.

Typically played with teams of five to eight players, flag football involves advancing the ball down the field by either passing or running. The sport reduces physical contact by replacing tackling with the pulling of flags worn by the players. 

According to a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published in Sports Health in 2021, youth tackle athletes had a median of 378 head impacts per season. Flag football athletes averaged just eight a season.

In addition to being safer than tackle football, flag football is also more accessible to a wider group of people. You don’t need to be huge to play it (agility, speed, and strategy are more important than size and strength), and you don’t need a lot of expensive equipment.

“This is something new and it’s a fresh start,” says Ms. Liptack. “It’s so cool to see kids trying something new and loving it and having fun.”

Leveling the playing field

John Dugan Jr., a former police officer, helped create Westfield PAL Flag Football in 1998 for youth who wanted to play but didn’t want to compete in tackle football. Since then, the organization has grown from 67 players to approximately 1,000. Recently, Westfield PAL added a new program for girls.

“We saw a need where more and more girls were playing. To try to level out the playing field for them, we thought we should have this program,” explains Mr. Dugan, president of the Police Athletic League.

Westfield parents Kelly and David Hantman helped launch Westfield PAL Girls Flag Football League. “Our family wanted to open up access to this great sport, so girls can decide if they would like to try it,” explains Ms. Hantman, whose daughter was among the girls who played in the league in 2022. “So far, it’s been a great success!”

Ingrid Ahlgren

Sara Liptack inflates footballs at the Blue Devil girls' flag football camp in Westfield, New Jersey, Aug. 28.

The NFL has partnered with Nike to grow girls’ flag football leagues across the country. Ms. Hantman connected with the New York Jets’ community relations department, which supported the launch of the girls’ league by donating flag belts and Nike cleats. “Additionally, the Jets invited our league to their practice facility last summer for a minicamp, which was an incredible experience for the players and families,” she says.

According to Ms. Hantman, the girls who play range from athletes to dancers to gymnasts. “It’s a sport that attracts every girl because you may have a great arm and be able to play quarterback, be really fast and take a handoff, or be great at defense and pull a flag.”

Opportunities for all

Flag football proponents say the sport can become even more inclusive. Mr. Dugan says Westfield PAL never turns a player away for financial reasons. “We have a scholarship program,” he adds. “We pride ourselves on that.”

In addition, Westfield PAL recently started a special needs program. “Some of the kids who have special needs feel like they can’t compete with mainstream players,” Mr. Dugan explains. “We’ve had minicamps with 20 or more players come out. We plan on having more this year.”

Other flag football advocates have modified the game to open it up to more people. For example, in the International Women’s Flag Football Association, instead of playing five on five, which is the version played by NFL Flag teams, participants play an eight-on-eight version. This opens up the sport more to girls and women who are not traditionally athletic.

Diane Beruldsen, president and founder of the association, believes more skills come into play for the eight-on-eight version of the game. “For five on five, it is more about running and throwing,” she explains. “In our game, if you can’t catch, you can kick or punt. The strategy is very different.”

There’s no age limit: The oldest woman who played at a recent tournament was 72.

Ms. Beruldsen says the association also works to foster female coaches and officials.

“Our goal is to make leaders out of these women, but good, kind, compassionate leaders,” she says. “We need to redefine sports and this concept of winning. We should enjoy practices as much as games, and we should help one another.”

Reuters

Four months before the Hamas attack on Israel, a Palestinian woman collects wheat on a farm in the Gaza Strip.

The brutal weekend attack on Israel by fighters from Gaza, which has resulted in the worst military conflict between Palestinians and Israelis in half a century, raises a host of concerns. How can civilians be sheltered from further harm? What were the real goals of Hamas, Gaza’s ruler? Was Iran involved in the planning? And what is the military objective in Israel’s full-scale retaliation? 

One question matters the most: What happens when the guns fall silent? A return to a tense cease-fire like those after previous Israel-Gaza conflicts seems impossible. Israel seems intent on destroying the Hamas leadership even as it faces acute political divisions over its democracy. Once the war ends, both Israelis and Gazans will need to grapple with a renewal of governance. What social and civic resources will they draw on to rebuild their respective societies – and perhaps build bridges between them?

A starting point, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said yesterday, is mutual empathy. “Israel must see its legitimate needs for security materialized – and Palestinians must see a clear perspective for the establishment of their own state realized,” he said. “Only a negotiated peace that fulfills the legitimate national aspirations of Palestinians and Israelis ... can bring long-term stability to the people of this land and the wider Middle East region.”

Such mutual concern has lately been growing. In the weeks prior to the war, protests in Israel against an overhaul of the judiciary by a right-wing government have spread to Israeli settlements in the West Bank. That spread has heightened recognition that a stable Israeli democracy cannot be separated from justice for Palestinians.

In addition, more than a hundred Palestinian artists and intellectuals condemned Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas for making what they saw as false and antisemitic remarks about the Holocaust. They stressed in an open letter that Palestinian aspirations for “justice, freedom, and equality” must reflect “a struggle that stands against all forms of systemic racism and oppression.”

In this new conflict, some Israelis are calling for a “humanitarian corridor” to facilitate prisoner swaps and the safe return of civilians trapped or held hostage on both sides of the Gaza-Israel border. Such compassion, wrote Israeli journalist Yossi Melman in Haaretz, “could possibly increase trust between the sides.”

The deepest wells of renewal may be within Gaza itself, a narrow strip bordered by southern Israel, Egypt, and the Mediterranean Sea and sealed off by Israeli Defense Forces on land and sea. It has been under the authority of Hamas since 2007. Many of its 2.3 million residents are weary of the group’s corruption, mismanagement, and repressive control. Tens of thousands have risked their lives to migrate in recent years. Others have gathered in rallies in defiance of harsh restrictions against public protest. “We want to live in dignity,” one young man said in a video recently posted on X, formerly Twitter.

A poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in September found that only 10% of Gazan residents express positive evaluations of their living standards, while 72% say Hamas-run institutions are corrupt. Only 39% said they felt they could openly criticize Hamas without fear. More Gazans say that corruption, unemployment, and poverty are more important problems than the construction of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

“What do Palestinian youth want?” a recent Arab Center Washington DC study asked. “They want what Palestinian youth have wanted for generations: liberty, opportunity, and justice.” Despite the unnecessary and extreme violence, this war cannot interrupt the challenge that both Palestinians and Israelis share: pursuing the values and aspirations they want reflected in their leaders.