Hello All - After more than 700 days of mayhem and killing, Gaza now has a ceasefire. Following the Trump “peace plan,” hostages and prisoners have been exchanged and a trickle of aid has been allowed into Gaza. The question before the world is, Can this ceasefire hold, and what can ordinary people do to help?
The obvious problem with the Trump ceasefire is how to prevent Israeli prime minister Netanyahu from restarting the war now that the hostages have been returned. Israel’s current government has declared from the beginning of the war (2023) that Palestinians must be forced out of Gaza. The Trump “peace plan” is so vague that Israel can be expected to claim that Hamas has violated the agreement and Israel has the right to re-start its genocidal war. This must be contested wherever and whenever it appears. In fact, it is Israel, not Hamas, that is violating the ceasefire everyday, killing more than 100 Palestinians and reducing the amount of aid entering Gaza to less than 10 percent of what is needed. Moreover, it appears that Trump’s takeover of the management of the Gaza “peace process” is creating a political crisis in Israel. As Ha’aretz columnist Gideon Levy notes, the immediate rejection by Trump and Vice President Vance of the Israeli parliament’s action to “annex” the West Bank to Israel is an example of the new constraints the US has placed on Israel.
There are good reasons to think that the Gaza ceasefire is doomed – as the writers of commentaries linked immediately below explain at length – but this should not demobilize those of us working for peace. At least for the moment, Trump and his team have essentially removed Israel from the picture and taken over management of the Gaza process. Netanyahu will rant and rave about Palestinian violations of the “peace deal,” but for now Trump has forced Israel to stand down. Given Trump’s craziness, we can rightly wonder how long this will last. But for now, the Trump “plan” is the Palestinians’ only hope for survival. To help Gaza, peace people must keep up our protest against Israel’s lying propaganda and show our elected officials that support for Gaza is still strong among the American people.
USEFUL INSIGHTS INTO THE GAZA “CEASEFIRE”
There is No Ceasefire: Muhammad Shehada on the Trump plan
From Peter Beinart Substack [October 26, 2025]
---- Our guest is Gaza-born political analyst Muhammad Shehada, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. He’s been explaining why Trump’s ceasefire isn’t even a ceasefire, let alone a path to Palestinian freedom. And he’s been discussing the clashes inside Gaza between Hamas and Israeli-supported clans. We talked about the Trump plan, Gaza’s future, and the long-term consequences of this genocide. Topics include: Israel’s plans for the more than half of Gaza still under its control; Palestinian public opinion of Hamas; The potential role of international peacekeepers in and out of Gaza; The background and makeup of emerging rival criminal gangs in Gaza; The future of Palestinian politics, and Marwan Barghouti’s potential role. [Read More]
What ‘Day After’ for Gaza?
By Sara Roy, New York Review of Books [October 25, 2025]
---- Trump’s plan was only the latest of dozens of proposals, agreements, and reports about how to rebuild and restore the territory for what is persistently called “the day after.” I know of twenty-nine such plans—from Israel itself, from the PA, from the EU and the US, from countries in the Arab world, from Israeli, Arab, and American think tanks, and from NGOs. I suspect I haven’t found them all. They come from a range of ideological starting points—from those that treat Gaza’s rehabilitation purely as a technical problem to those that go so far as to explicitly envision a future for Gaza with as few Palestinians as possible, if any at all. They vary greatly in their content, emphasis, and level of detail; some focus on Israeli security, others on humanitarian assistance and reconstruction. Trump’s plan has displaced the others, but it did not emerge in a vacuum. Understanding this wider corpus of proposals, especially the more prominent among them, may reveal where the Trump plan came from and what it will mean for Gaza. [Read More]
(Video) Norman Finkelstein on the Hamas/Israeli Ceasefire
From Solidarity Television [October 20, 2025]
---- Finkelstein’s scholarship is notable for its rigorous critique of history, moral-political arguments, and especially the Holocaust and the Palestinian region. He emphasizes the ethical implications of scholarship, public policy and international affairs. [See the Program]
NEWS NOTES
Francesca Albanese is the UN’s Special Reporter for the Occupied Territories. In this role she has delivered several excellent reports on Israel’s occupation and on its genocide in Gaza. Here she delivers the Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture in South Africa. In the program’s video recording, her turn to speak begins at 1:04 into the video. (October 26, 2025)
To much joy in Ireland, socialist and pacifist Catherine Connolly won the nation’s presidential election. As an article published on ZNet today explains, this is a “watershed moment”: “It is the first time that the left has won a majority of votes in a national election. This was not a narrow victory either; Catherine won the largest percentage and largest total vote of any Presidential candidate in history.”
In this report from the Associated Press, “A Florida family already grieving the beating death of a 20-year-old relative is now pleading with U.S. leaders to help free the dead man’s cousin, a 16-year-old Palestinian-American from Florida who has been held in an Israeli prison for eight months. Relatives, advocacy groups and some Congress members have been seeking the release of Mohammed Ibrahim since he was taken into custody when he was 15 by the Israeli military in February.” Last week the Guardian published a letter to Sec. Of State Rubio signed by 27 congressional Democrats demanding action to free Mohammed Ibrahim. NOT AMONG THE SIGNERS were our own Rep. George Latimer (202-225-24640), Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (202-224-4451), and Sen. Chuck Schumer (202-224-6542). Why didn’t they sign this letter? Call them and ask them. Often.
It appears that Congress is shut down so that the newly elected Rep. from Tucson can’t be sworn in. This is likely because she would be the last vote needed to force the Trump people to release the Epstein files. Somewhat lost in the DC hoopla is the horrible and sordid details about what Epstein and his rich friends did to young girls. One of the victims, and one who has come forward with a new book, is Virginia Giuffre, who committed suicide at the age of 41 a few months ago. Last week Demmocracy Now! had an informative interview with the woman who “ghost wrote” the book. See/hear what she had to say here.
CFOW NUTS & BOLTS
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. Weather permitting we meet for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, at 12 noon at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) The Northwest Yonkers Neighbors for Black Lives Matter holds a Monday afternoon vigil at 5:30 pm at the corner of Warburton Ave and Odell. The CFOW newsletter can be read on Substack, and is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com, and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook group. Another Facebook group focuses on the climate crisis. If you would like to join one of our Zoom meetings, each Tuesday and Thursday at noon, please send a return email for the link. If you would like to support our work by making a CONTRIBUTION, please make out your check to “Frank Brodhead,” write “CFOW” on the memo line, and send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks.
REWARDS!
This week’s Rewards for stalwart newsletter readers come from the fabulous Resistance Revival Chorus. They have a large repertoire of great songs. Chosen this week are “This Joy”; “Ella’s Song” (after SNCC founder Ella Baker); and “All You Fascists Bound to Lose” (with Rhiannon Giddens). Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
FEATURED ARTICLES & ESSAYS
Pervasive Impunity
By Cora Currier, New York Review of Books [November 6, 2025 issue]
[FB – This is a review of Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life]
---- The “war on terror” is so pervasive and hard to define that it is easy to lose sight of its most shocking features. Over the years it became “a kind of water that people noticed just every so often,” as Richard Beck puts it in his new book, Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life, “even though they spent their lives swimming in it.” It’s a cliché, Beck points out, to talk about the war coming home to be visited on the country’s citizens; it is far more accurate to say that it began at home and has continued here. Homeland is a polemical account that shows how September 11 reshaped the American psyche—and argues persuasively that the resulting militarism “transformed everything from the kinds of heroes Americans wanted to see on television to the vehicles they drove to the grocery store and the city streets on which they walked.” Donald Rumsfeld said in a speech in October 2001, “We have two choices: Either we change the way we live, or we must change the way they live. We choose the latter.” In fact we chose both. [Read More]
Israel’s Government Prides Itself on Sadism, Abuse and Torture
By Gideon Levy , Ha’aretz [Israel] [October 23, 2025]
---- The return of the hostages has exposed the truth that was known to all: Israel’s poor treatment of Palestinian prisoners made conditions for the Israelis held captive in Gaza worse. It is now clear that evil had its price. … The British newspaper The Guardian reported this week that at least 135 mutilated and dismembered bodies were returned to Gaza. Next to each of the mutilated bodies were found notes indicating they had been held in Sde Teiman. In many of the pictures, you could see that their hands had been tied behind their backs. Not a few showed signs of torture, including death by strangulation, from being run over by a tank and other means. It is not clear how many were killed after they had been arrested. Sde Teiman was a collection point for Palestinians killed elsewhere. … Today, the government prides itself on sadism, abuse and torture. It does so because it knows the souls of its citizens. The majority of Israelis are vengeful and approve of the abuse. … Israel’s only concern is the harm that was done to the hostages. Everything else is forgiven. In many cases, we even get excited, cherish and appreciate the abuse. We wanted sadism; we got sadism. [Read More]
The Peril of a White House That Flaunts Its Indifference to the Law
By Charlie Savage, New York Times [October 24, 2025]
---- Since he returned to office nine months ago, President Trump has sought to expand executive power across numerous fronts. But his claim that he can lawfully order the military to summarily kill people accused of smuggling drugs on boats off the coast of South America stands apart. A broad range of specialists in laws governing the use of lethal force have called Mr. Trump’s orders to the military patently illegal. They say the premeditated extrajudicial killings have been murders — regardless of whether the 37 people blown apart, burned alive or drowned in nine strikes so far were indeed running drugs. … The irreversible gravity of killing, coupled with the lack of a substantive legal justification, is bringing into sharper view a structural weakness of law as a check on the American presidency. [Read More]
(Video) ‘Leave us alone’: Jemima Pierre on Haiti’s struggle for sovereignty – 25 minutes
From Aljazeera [“UpFront”] [October 25, 2025]
---- Marc Lamont Hill speaks with scholar Jemima Pierre on Haiti’s crisis, foreign occupation and fight for sovereignty. As foreign troops, private contractors and international powers tighten their grip on Haiti, the country is facing one of the worst crises in its modern history. But who is really to blame? This week on UpFront, Marc Lamont Hill speaks with scholar and activist Jemima Pierre, who argues that the crisis is not home-grown but the result of two decades of United States, United Nations and Western intervention that dismantled Haitian democracy and sovereignty. [Read More]
THE WAR ON PALESTINE
Map of Gaza shows where Israeli forces are positioned under ceasefire deal
By Sanad Verification Agency and Mohamed A. Hussein, Aljazeera [October 23, 2025]
---- Satellite imagery analysis by Al Jazeera’s fact-checking agency Sanad shows that the Israeli army holds about 40 active military positions in the part of the Gaza Strip outside the yellow line, the invisible boundary established under the first phase of the ceasefire to which its troops had to move, according to the deal. The images also show that Israel is upgrading several of these facilities, which help it maintain its occupation of 58 percent of Gaza even after the pullback by troops to the yellow line. … Since the ceasefire took effect about two weeks ago, nearly 100 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks across the Strip, with some attacks occurring near the yellow line. [Read More]
(Video) Ex-U.S. Diplomat Robert Malley on Gaza Ceasefire & U.S. Double Standards on Israel
From Democracy Now! [October 23, 2025]
---- Secretary of State Marco Rubio is the latest top U.S. official to visit Israel as part of a push to maintain the Gaza ceasefire. Reports suggest the Trump administration is worried about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu undermining the agreement, with the U.S. visits dubbed “Bibi-sitting” missions to prevent any sabotage. Meanwhile, lawmakers in the Knesset have advanced a bill to apply Israeli sovereignty to all illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank — a move that would effectively annex the territory and kill already dim hopes for a future Palestinian state on that land. For more on the state of the Gaza ceasefire and the future of Palestine, we speak with Robert Malley, co-author with Hussein Agha of the new book Tomorrow Is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine. Malley is a veteran negotiator involved in previous U.S.-backed peace talks between Israel and Palestinian leadership. He says despite the many flaws in the Trump plan, including “deciding everything for Palestinians without Palestinians having a voice,” it has at least halted the worst of the violence. He also notes the “double standard” in how all U.S. administrations have dealt with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as “the search for a two-state solution became a gimmick” while the U.S. allowed Israel to entrench its occupation. [See the Program]
Olive groves under siege: Palestinian families face Israeli violence during harvest
By Aziza Nofal, Middle East Eye [October 23, 2025]
---- “I felt like I was dying,” said Afaf Abu Alia, recalling the moment Israeli settlers took turns to beat her with sticks as she and her family harvested olives in a village near Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank. Pointing to her exhausted body and speaking in a barely audible voice, the 53-year-old Palestinian added: “I was alone among more than 20 settlers… They beat me on my head and hands… here, and here.” Afaf and her family had headed out early on Sunday morning to pick olives in Turmus Ayya. After about three hours, a small group of settlers - coming from nearby settlements including Maale Levona, Shilo, Givat Harel and Eli - attacked them. Along with her husband, sons and brothers-in-law and their wives, Afaf fled to a distant, safer area, leaving behind their tools, vehicle, and the olives they had already harvested. About half an hour later, when the settlers left, the family returned to find their vehicle smashed and their harvest stolen. They decided to move to a safer plot of land, but on the way an Israeli military patrol, sent to protect the settlers, intercepted them and fired a gas canister in their direction. Afaf, who suffers from a respiratory allergy, was overcome by the gas. It was not the first time Afaf and her family had been attacked during the olive harvest, but they had never previously experienced such brutality. “They’ve become bolder towards Palestinians,” she said, describing how, over the past two years of escalating violence, every settler assault has taken place under the protection of Israeli soldiers. [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST - (Video) “International Court of Justice: As Occupying Power, Israel Must Allow U.N. Aid into Gaza,” from Democracy Now! [October 23, 2025] [Link]; (Video) “It Was Never About Hamas - Israel’s Refusal to Release Marwan Barghouti Proves It,” from Peter Beinart [October 20, 2025] – 10 minutes - [Link]; and “Israeli Scramble for Gaza’s Gas Reserves,” by Dan Steinbock, Antiwar.com [October 21, 2025] [Link].
THE WAR ON UKRAINE
Desperation Row
By Patrick Lawrence, Consortium News [October 20, 2025]
---- What a big game Volodymyr Zelensky talked before his latest little while in the Oval Office last Friday. The Ukrainian president (who is no longer legitimately the Ukrainian president) arrived for another summit with President Trump with a shopping list of air defense and weapons systems worth $90 billion. Yes, $90 billion. This compares with $128 billion the United States has already given Ukraine since the Russian intervention began in February 2022, according to a Council on Foreign Relations report dated July 15, 2025. Playing to Trump’s penchant for keeping everything business, Zelensky said Ukraine would purchase all the new hardware in what he called “a mega deal.” What nonsense. Kiev is flat broke. How could the regime possibly pay for new weapons and matériel? … As the late Stephen F. Cohen taught me years ago, Russia’s position vis-à-vis the West is not about spheres of influence, which we can count a 19th century anachronism: It is about spheres of security, and you cannot name a nation that does not shape its foreign policies with this as an objective. [Read More].
WAR ON VENEZUELA?
US conducts 10th deadly boat strike as bombing campaign quickens
By Allison Griner, Aljazeera [October 24, 2025]
---- The United States has announced its 10th missile strike on a maritime vessel accused of trafficking illegal narcotics, killing all six people on board. Friday’s attack brings the total known death toll to 43 since the bombing campaign began. It also marks an escalating pace to the air strikes: The US government has announced three strikes this week in as many days. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth broke the news of the latest bombing on his social media, identifying the victims as members of the Venezuela-based gang Tren de Aragua. He also indicated that President Donald Trump himself had once again given authorisation for the strike, which allegedly took place in international waters in the Caribbean Sea…. While this year the Trump administration has started designating Latin American cartels as “foreign terrorist organisations”, the label has traditionally been used to describe armed groups that seek to use violence for political or ideological aims. Legal experts also maintain that a terrorism label alone does not justify the use of military force. Already, leaders in Colombia and Venezuela have denounced the bombing campaign as “murder”, and human rights experts at the United Nations have condemned the killings as a potential violation of international law. [Read More]
(Video) Colombia’s U.S. Ambassador Denounces Trump’s Deadly Strikes on Boats in the Caribbean
From Democracy Now! [October 22, 2025]
---- Tensions are escalating between Colombia and the United States as President Trump conducts deadly airstrikes on supposed “drug boats” in the Caribbean. Colombian President Gustavo Petro accused the U.S. of committing murder for killing a Colombian fisherman in one attack in mid-September and just recalled the country’s ambassador, Daniel García-Peña. “Even if they were in fact carrying drugs, the procedure is to capture them, to seize them, to arrest them and to find information about who was behind them, and not blowing them up,” García-Peña tells Democracy Now! from Bogotá. [See the Program]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “U.S. Deploys Aircraft Carrier to Latin America as Drug Operation Expands,” by Charlie Savage and Eric Schmitt, New York Times [October 24, 2025] [Link]; “Admiral’s Mystery Retirement Amid Secret War Leaves Key Command in Turmoil,” by Nick Turse, The Intercept [October 23, 2025] [Link]; “The Oldest Colony, the Newest War: Puerto Rico as a Launchpad for War on Venezuela,” by Michelle Ellner, Antiwar.com [October 24, 2025] [Link]; and “Inside Marco Rubio’s Push for Regime Change in Venezuela,” by Ryan Grim, et al., Drop Site News [October 24, 2025] [Link].
CIVIL LIBERTIES
The Chilling Effect of State Repression
By Conor Gallagher, Znet [October 26, 2025]
---- Authoritarian regimes rarely criminalize dissent all at once; they normalize repression step by step. Donald Trump’s recent Executive Order (EO) designating antifa as a domestic terror organization, issued in the wake of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk’s murder, is framed as a measure to denounce political violence. … This EO should be understood as part of an ongoing move in a broader authoritarian strategy: to label dissent as “terrorism” and to silence opposition under the guise of public safety. It is evidenced by the deployment of National Guards against residents of cities that oppose Trump. The criminalizing of dissent has already occurred as we observed from the deportation of activists who support Palestine and against immigrant rights activists fighting against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Recently, a federal court judge thankfully saw it for what it was by holding that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Secretary of State Marco Rubio violated the First Amendment by targeting pro-Palestinian students for deportation. [Read More]
The Red Scare Is American Past and Present
By Benjamin Balthaser, Jacobin Magazine [October 2025]
---- In his firsthand account of the 1949 Peekskill Riot, the two-day frenzy of state-sanctioned mob violence against a left-wing music festival headlined by Paul Robeson, writer Howard Fast mostly describes his disbelief. … What Fast was witnessing was the early unfolding of the Second Red Scare, the decade-long suppression, arrest, deportation, terrorization, and occasional public execution of Communists and other leftists in the United States. As we enter something like another red scare, one that seemed to many liberals and even leftists impossible to conceive of months before its machinery started, it’s helpful to remember what we are analogizing. … By official counting, two people were executed by the state, several hundred academics were fired, several thousand went to prison or were deported, and several tens of thousands lost their jobs as state or federal workers. While the Red Scare “was not Nazi Germany,” to quote Schrecker, that one even needs to declaim it as such is telling. As Herbert Marcuse wrote in the last years of his life, the Red Scare inaugurated “a new stage of development” in the “Western world,” one that echoes the “horrors of the Nazi regime,” a state of “permanent counter-revolution” against “every thing” that is “called ‘communist.’” [Read More]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
Trump Is Waging War on His Own Country
By Nick Turse, The Nation [October 21, 2025]
---- The Trump administration’s military occupations of American cities, its deployment of tens of thousands of troops across the United States, its emerging framework for designating and targeting domestic enemies, its dehumanization of its political foes, and its assertion that the president has the right to wage secret war and summarily execute those he deems terrorists have left this country on the precipice of authoritarian rule. With Trump attempting to fashion a presidential police force of armed soldiers for domestic deployment, while claiming the right to kill anyone he deems a terrorist, the threat to the rule of law in the United States is not just profound but historically unprecedented [Read More]
ICE vs. NYC: The feds will not have a good time here.
By Hamilton Nolan, How Things Work [October 23, 2025]
---- This week, ICE broke the seal on New York City. Prodded, idiotically, by a conservative influencer who was shocked to find knockoff goods being sold by non-white people on Canal Street, ICE agents staged a military-style daytime raid, arresting several vendors and prompting a spontaneous street protest against their presence. Though ICE has been snatching immigrants out of court hallways for months, this was their first out-and-out public raid like this in our city. As in Los Angeles and Chicago, the federal government has declared war on the immigrants who make New York City great. People are pissed. On Tuesday night, just hours after the raid, several hundred people flooded a Broadway intersection downtown, just above City Hall, to yell and wave signs and chant “ICE, Gestapo, out of New York!” [Read More]
Showered with Lies: Kennedy, Trump, and a “Reckless Disregard for Science and the Truth”
By David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, Tom Dispatch [October 19, 2025]
---- The Senate Finance Committee hearing with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was explosive. The Secretary of Health and Human Services was accused of “reckless disregard for science and the truth,” and senators from both parties were openly hostile as they questioned him extensively on his vaccine policies, as well as the firing of scientific advisory board members and agency heads and their replacement with ideologically driven anti-vaccine supporters. During that more than three-hour session, he was called a charlatan and a liar, and he returned the insults. The distrust of his honesty and integrity was palpable. The public health community already mistrusted his views on vaccines and the role of science. There was, however, some modest hope that he would at least follow through on his views on the environmental causes of chronic disease and the food industry’s disastrous impact on obesity and diabetes, as well as other diseases. Sadly, that’s been anything but the case and there’s quite a history behind that reality. [Read More]
OUR HISTORY
The Heat Is On: Chester Himes’s Harlem Noirs.
By Gene Seymour, The Nation [October 20, 2025]
---- One imagines Chester Himes as a species of cactus lurking along the edges of the literary landscape: arresting, prickly, and resilient, stinging harshly when pressed too hard or approached too indelicately —and yet carrying enough water beneath its tough hide to refresh, even renew the landscape around it. In a lifetime beset with neglect, struggle, and scorn, that is exactly what Himes did. He wrote and wrote, channeling his anger, taking risks, and leaving behind a shelf of more than 20 books, the best known of which were his detective stories set in Harlem—a place he didn’t actually spend as much time in as he had in the Midwest, where he’d begun writing while serving prison time during the 1930s, or in Europe, where he’d moved in the 1950s after a series of personal and professional setbacks in his native country confirmed for him his destiny as a literary outlier, marginalized even within the relatively marginalized status of Black American writers near the dawn of the civil-rights era. … So as unlikely as it may seem even to his devotees, Chester Himes for much of his life bore the soul of a romantic. A thwarted, combustible, often embittered romantic, to be sure, but the kind of romantic capable even on his worst days of spinning stories about tough, sore men using fair or foul methods to keep—or find—peace. [Read More]
How My Grandmother Remembers the Nakba
By Tareq Baconi, The Nation [October 25, 2025]
[FB - Tareq Baconi is the author of Hamas: The Politics of Resistance. His new book, Fire in Every Direction, from which this essay is an excerpt, will be published in November.]
---- Nineteen forty-eight. A shadow—the darkest one—cast over our lives in Amman. I pull my grandma Tata’s diaries out of the weathered yellow box, which is filled with scores of letters; cards received from friends and family; old journals and pads; and paraphernalia that releases childhood smells of sugary sweetness and perfumey paper when opened. The diaries are minimal. Barely anything is divulged from this time, apart from her love for her God. Everything else documents basic events as they transpired, in a clinical and sober tone. A historian’s archive rather than a record of a lived life. Her notes help me make sense of the tales that permeated our early years in Amman—unobtrusive, undemanding—like wallpaper on the back of our consciousness. … .Tata’s father had decided they would not flee, and that was supposed to be the end of that. Even as more windows in the houses around them shuttered and front gates latched shut. Even as neighbors disappeared into the depths of the night without farewells or promises of reunions. Even as her girlfriend across the road vanished, as if her family had never occupied the two-floor villa on the corner, the one that had already acquired the forlorn look of deserted buildings. She knew her mother was worried, and that the firmer her father was, the more anxious her mother became. “I am the head of the parish, for God’s sake!” he declared repeatedly. He was not going to leave his flock of parishioners behind, no matter how rapidly it diminished. It had taken him two years—ever since they had relocated from Jerusalem to Haifa so he could assume this position—to gain the congregation’s trust. What kind of message would he be sending his flock if he ran away? [Read More]
