In January, when the historian Avi Shilon returned to Columbia University from winter break, a thought coursed through his mind: If calm can take hold in Gaza, then perhaps it could also happen in Morningside Heights. Just a few days earlier, in time for the start of the semester, Hamas and Israel had brokered a cease-fire in their war.

Over the many months of that war, Columbia was the site of some of America’s most vitriolic protests against Israel’s actions, and even its existence. For two weeks last spring, an encampment erected by anti-Israel demonstrators swallowed the fields in the center of the compact Manhattan campus. Nobody could enter Butler Library without hearing slogans such as “Globalize the intifada!” and “We don’t want no Zionists here!” and “Burn Tel Aviv to the ground!” At the end of April, students, joined by sympathizers from outside the university gates, stormed Hamilton Hall—which houses the undergraduate-college deans’ offices—and then battled police when they sought to clear the building. Because of the threat of spiraling chaos, the university canceled its main commencement ceremony in May.

Shilon felt that the tamping of hostilities in Gaza made the moment ripe for the course he was scheduled to teach, “History of Modern Israel,” which would examine the competing Jewish and Palestinian narratives about his native country’s founding.

But Columbia soon disabused him of his hopes. About 30 minutes into the first session of his seminar, four people, their faces shrouded in keffiyehs, burst into his classroom. A protester circled the seminar table, flinging flyers in front of Shilon’s students. One flyer bore an image of a boot stomping on a Star of David; another stated, The Enemy Will Not See Tomorrow.

In the Israeli universities where Shilon had studied and taught, he was accustomed to strident critiques of the country. Sometimes he even found himself sympathizing with them. Taking up difficult arguments struck him as the way to navigate tense disagreements, so he rose from his chair and gingerly approached the protesters. “You’re invited to learn,” he told them.

But the protesters ignored him. As one held up a camera to film, another stared at it and delivered a monologue in which she described Shilon’s class—which had barely progressed beyond a discussion of expectations for the semester—as an example of “Columbia University’s normalization of genocide.”

After she finished her speech, the demonstrators left the room, but a sense of intrusion lingered. Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the umbrella group that organized protests on campus, posted a video of the action, with the caption: “We disrupted a zionist class, and you should too.” The university later offered to provide security for Shilon’s class because it couldn’t be sure if CUAD was bluffing.

Over the past two years, Columbia’s institutional life has become more and more absurd. Confronted with a war on the other side of the world, the course of which the university has zero capacity to affect, a broad swath of the community acted as if the school’s trustees and administrators could determine the fate of innocent families in Gaza. To force the university into acceding to demands—ending study abroad in Israel, severing a partnership with Tel Aviv University, divesting from companies with holdings in Israel––protesters attempted to shut down campus activity. For the sake of entirely symbolic victories, they were willing to risk their academic careers and even arrest.

Because the protesters treated the war as a local issue, they trained their anger on Jewish and Israeli students and faculty, including Shilon, some of whom have been accused of complicity with genocide on the basis of their religious affiliation or national origin. More than any other American university, Columbia experienced a breakdown in the fabric of its community that demanded a firm response from administrators—but these administrators tended to choke on their own fears.

Many of the protesters followed university rules governing demonstrations and free expression. Many others did not. Liberal administrators couldn’t or wouldn’t curb the illiberalism in their midst. By failing to discipline protesters who transgressed university rules, they signaled that disrupting classrooms carried no price. By tolerating professors who bullied students who disagreed with them, they signaled that incivility and even harassment were acceptable forms of discourse.

It was as if Columbia was reliving the bedlam of 1968, which included a student takeover of the university and scarred the institution for decades. And just like in the Vietnam era, the university became a ripe target for demagogues on the right, who are eager to demolish the prestige of elite higher education. And now that Donald Trump and his allies control the federal government, they have used anti-Semitism as a pretext for damaging an institution that they abhor. In the name of rescuing the Jews of Columbia, the Trump administration cut off $400 million in federal contracts and grants to the university. Trump officials then sent a letter demanding—as preconditions for restoring the funds—a series of immediate, far-reaching steps, including suspending and expelling Hamilton Hall protesters, producing a plan to overhaul admissions, and putting the school’s Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies under “academic receivership.”

Mark Rudd, president of Students for a Democratic Society, addresses students at Columbia University in May 1968. (Hulton Archive / Getty)

And in an attempt to suppress political views it dislikes, the administration authorized the unlawful detention of Mahmoud Khalil, an alumnus who helped organize campus protests, and sent federal agents to search two dorm rooms. Another graduate student, targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, fled to Canada rather than risk apprehension. The Trump administration’s war on Columbia stands to wreck research, further inflame tensions on campus, and destroy careers—including, in a supreme irony, those of many Jewish academics, scientists, physicians, and graduate students whom the administration ostensibly wants to protect.

Trump’s autocratic presence unbalances every debate. But just because his administration is exploiting the issue of anti-Semitism does not mean that anti-Jewish activism is not an issue at Columbia. Somewhere along the way, one of the nation’s greatest universities lost its capacity to conduct intellectual arguments over contentious issues without resorting to hyperbole and accusations of moral deficiency.

On Israel, the issue that most sharply divides Columbia, such accusations took a sinister cast. Jewish students faced ostracism and bullying that, if experienced by any other group of students  on campus, would be universally regarded as unacceptable. It was a crisis that became painfully evident in the course of the war over Gaza, but it didn’t begin with the war, and it won’t end with it.

The story of American Jewry can be told, in part, by the history of Columbia’s admissions policy. At the turn of the 20th century, when entry required merely passing an exam, the sons of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe began rushing into the institution. By 1920, Columbia was likely 40 percent Jewish. This posed a marketing problem for the school, as the children of New York’s old knickerbocker elite began searching out corners of the Ivy League with fewer Brooklyn accents.

To restore Anglo-Saxon Protestant demographic dominance, university president Nicholas Murray Butler invented the modern college-application process, in which concepts such as geographic diversity and a well-rounded student body became pretexts to weed out studious Jews from New York City. In 1921, Columbia became the first private college to impose a quota limiting the number of Jews. (In the ’30s, Columbia rejected Richard Feynman, who later won a Nobel Prize in physics, and Isaac Asimov, the great science fiction writer.) Columbia, however, was intent on making money off the Jews it turned away, so to educate them, it created Seth Low Junior College in Brooklyn, a second-rate version of the Manhattan institution.

Only after World War II, when America fought a war against Nazism, did this exclusionary system wither away. When I attended Columbia for four blissful years, a generation or so ago, the school was a Jewish wonderland, where I first encountered the pluralism of American Jewish life. I became friends with red-diaper babies, kids raised in Jewish socialist families. I dated an Orthodox woman who had converted from evangelical Christianity. Several floors of my dorm had been nicknamed Anatevka, after the shtetl in Fiddler on the Roof; they had kosher kitchens, and on the Sabbath, the elevators would automatically stop on each of those floors. I studied Yiddish with a doyenne of the dying Yiddish theater and attended lectures with Yosef Yerushalmi, one of the great Jewish historians of his generation. At Columbia, for the first time in my life, I felt completely at home in my identity.

I also imbibed the university’s protest culture: I briefly helped take over Hamilton Hall in the name of preserving the Audubon Ballroom, the Upper Manhattan site of Malcolm X’s assassination. Columbia wanted to convert the building into a research center. The leader of our movement, Benjamin Jealous, who went on to head the NAACP, was suspended for his role; I was put on probation.

Nostalgia, however, is a distorting filter. Long before the October 7 attack by Hamas on southern Israel that sparked the subsequent invasion of Gaza, there were accusations of anti-Semitism on campus. I tended to wish them away, but after the Hamas attack, the evidence kept walloping me.

Although protests against Israel erupted on many campuses after October 7, the collision between Zionists and anti-Zionists was especially virulent at Columbia. Less than a week after the attack, a woman was arrested in front of the library for allegedly beating an Israeli student who was hanging posters of hostages held in Gaza. (The Manhattan district attorney found that the woman hadn’t intentionally hit the student and dismissed the case after she apologized and agreed to counseling.)

Soon after the war in Gaza began, the Columbia Daily Spectator interviewed more than 50 Jewish students about their experiences: 13 told the student newspaper that they had been attacked or harassed; 12 admitted that they had obscured markers of their Jewish identity, tucking away Star of David necklaces and hiding kippot under caps to avoid provoking the ire of fellow students.

To Columbia’s misfortune, the university had a new president, Minouche Shafik, who’d arrived by way of the London School of Economics. Any leader would have been overwhelmed by the explosion of passions, but she seemed especially shell-shocked by the rancor—and how it attracted media, activists, and politicians, all exploiting the controversy for their own purposes. Panicked leaders, without any clear sense of their own direction, have a rote response: They appoint a task force. And in November 2023, Shafik appointed some of Columbia’s most eminent academics to assess the school’s anti-Semitism problem. (Shafik had hoped to have a parallel task force on Islamophobia, but Rashid Khalidi, a Columbia historian and the most prominent Palestinian scholar in the country, called the idea a “fig leaf to pretend that they are ‘balanced,’” and the idea never hatched.)

In “listening sessions” with students, task-force members heard one recurring complaint: that administrators were strangely indifferent to Jewish students complaining about abuse. Rather than investigating incidents, some administrators steered Jewish students to mental-health counseling, as if they needed therapy to toughen them up. Students who had filed official reports of bias with the university claimed that they’d never heard back. (To protect the privacy of listening-session participants, the task force never confirmed specific instances, but it deemed the complaints credible.)

Perhaps, early on, one could imagine benign explanations for the weak response. But in June, as the task force went about its investigation, The Washington Free Beacon reported on a series of text messages fired off by four Columbia deans as they attended a panel on Jewish life at Columbia. (A panel attendee who had sat behind one of the administrators had surreptitiously photographed the text thread over her shoulder.) Instead of sympathetically listening to panelists discuss anti-Semitism, the deans unwittingly confirmed the depth of the problem. These officials, whose role gave them responsibility for student safety, snarkily circulated accusations about the pernicious influence of Jewish power. “Amazing what $$$ can do,” one of the deans wrote. Another accused the head of campus Hillel of playing up complaints for the sake of fundraising. “Comes from such a place of privilege,” one of them moaned. After the Free Beacon published the screenshots, Columbia suspended three of the administrators. Not long after, they resigned.

A month later, at the beginning of the academic year, the task force published a damning depiction of quotidian student life. An especially powerful section of the report described the influence of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the organizer of the anti-Israel protests. CUAD was a coalition of 116 tuition-supported, faculty-advised student groups, including the university mariachi band and the Barnard Garden Club.

CUAD doesn’t simply oppose war and occupation; it endorses violence as the pathway to its definition of liberation. A year ago, a Columbia student activist told an audience watching him on Instagram, “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.” At first, CUAD dissociated itself from the student. But then the group reconsidered and apologized for its momentary lapse of stridency. “Violence is the only path forward,” CUAD said in an official statement. That wasn’t a surprising admission; its public statements regularly celebrate martyrdom.

When groups endorsed CUAD, they forced Jewish students to confront a painful choice. To participate in beloved activities, they needed to look past the club’s official membership in an organization that endorsed the killing of Jews and the destruction of the world’s only Jewish-majority country.

According to the task force, complaining about the alliance with CUAD or professing sympathy for Israel could lead to a student being purged from an extracurricular activity. When a member of the dance team questioned the wisdom of supporting CUAD, she was removed from the organization’s group chats and effectively kicked off the team. A co-president of Sewa, a Sikh student group, says that she was removed from her post because of her alleged Zionism. In an invitation to a film screening, the founder of an LGBTQ group, the LezLions, wrote, “Zionists aren’t invited.”

I’m not suggesting that Jews at Columbia feel constantly under siege. When I gave a speech at the campus Hillel group last spring, many members, even some who are passionate supporters of Israel, told me that they are happy at Columbia and have never personally experienced anything resembling anti-Semitism. The pro-Palestinian encampments included Jewish protesters, some of whom received abuse from their fellow Jews. To the task force’s credit, its report acknowledges many such complexities, but it brimmed with accounts of disturbing incidents worthy of a meaningful official response. Unfortunately, that’s not the Columbia way.

Had I been wiser as an undergrad, I could have squinted and seen the roots of the current crisis. In the 1990s, Israel was a nonissue on campus: The Oslo peace process was in high gear, and a two-state solution and coexistence were dreams within reach. But the most imposing academic celebrity on campus was the Jerusalem-born Edward Said, a brilliant professor of literature, who had served as a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s legislative arm.

During my years at Columbia, Said, who was battling cancer, was a remote figure. A dandy who loved his tweeds and was immersed in the European cosmopolitanism that he critiqued, he taught only a course on Giuseppe Verdi and imperialism.

Still, he bestrode the university. His masterwork, Orientalism, was one of the few books by an active Columbia professor regularly included in the college’s core curriculum. That book, by the university’s most acclaimed professor, was also a gauntlet thrown in the community’s face. Said had convincingly illustrated how racism infected the production of knowledge in Middle Eastern studies. Even if scholarship paraded as the disinterested study of foreign cultures, it was inherently political, too often infected by a colonialist mindset.

To correct for that bias, admirers of Said’s book concluded, universities needed to hire a different style of academic, including scholars with roots in the region they studied, not just a bunch of white guys fascinated by Arabs. The Middle Eastern–studies department filled with Said protégés, who lacked his charm but taught with ferocious passion. Because they were unabashed activists, these new scholars had no compunction about, say, canceling class so that students could attend pro-Palestinian rallies.

Joseph Massad, a Jordanian-born political scientist who wrote a history of nationalism in his native country, became the most notorious of the new coterie soon after arriving in 1999. His incendiary comments provoked his ideological foes to respond with fury and, sometimes, to unfairly twist his quotes in the course of their diatribes. But his actual record was clear enough. Writing in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram in 2003, he accused the Israelis of being the true anti-Semites, because they destroyed the culture of the Jewish diaspora; the Palestinians were the real Jews, he argued, because they were being massacred.

Violence, when directed at Jews, never seemed to bother him. This moral vacuity was on full display in the column he wrote in response to October 7, which he called a “resistance offensive,” for The Electronic Intifada, a Chicago-based publication aligned with the more radical wing of the Palestinian cause. His essay used a series of euphoric adjectives—“astonishing,” “astounding,” “awesome”—to describe Hamas’s invasion, without ever condemning, let alone mentioning, the gruesome human toll of the massacre, which included rape and the kidnapping of babies. In fact, he coldly described the towns destroyed by Hamas as “settler-colonies.”

Massad has long been accused of carrying that polemical style into the classroom. In the course description for a class called “Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Societies,” he wrote in 2002: “The purpose of the course is not to provide a ‘balanced’ coverage of the views of both sides.” On the one hand, that’s an admirable admission. On the other hand, Jewish students complained that he treated those with dissenting opinions as if they were moral reprobates, unworthy of civility.

In 2004, a pro-Israel group in Boston put together a low-budget documentary called Columbia Unbecoming, which strung together student testimony about the pedagogical style of Columbia’s Middle Eastern–studies program. To take two representative incidents: After an Israeli student asked Massad a question at an extracurricular event, the professor demanded to know how many Palestinians he had killed; a woman recounted how another professor, George Saliba, had told her not to opine on Israel-Palestine questions because her green eyes showed that she couldn’t be a “Semite.”

In response, Massad denied ever meeting the Israeli student; Saliba wrote that he didn’t recall the green-eyes comments and that the student might have misconstrued what he was saying. But Columbia’s then-president, Lee Bollinger, instantly recognized the problem and appointed his own task force to examine the complaints. But it would have taken more than a task force to address the underlying problem. The emerging style of the American academy, especially prevalent at Columbia, viewed activism flowing from moral absolutes as integral to the mission of the professoriat. But a style that prevailed in African American–studies and gender-studies departments was incendiary when applied to Israel. With race and gender, there was largely a consensus on campus, but Israel divided the university community. And as much as Bollinger professed to value dissenting opinions, his university was ill-equipped to accommodate two conflicting points of view. And the gap between those two points of view kept growing, as Said’s legacy began to seep into even the far reaches of Columbia.

If I were writing a satiric campus novel about Columbia, I would have abandoned the project on January 29. That’s the day the Spectator published lab notes for an introductory astronomy course, written by a teaching assistant, that instructed students: “As we watch genocide unfold in Gaza, it is also important to tell the story of Palestinians outside of being the subjects of a military occupation. Take 15 minutes or so to read through the articles ‘Wonder and the Life of Palestinian Astronomy’ and ‘In Gaza, Scanning the Sky for Stars, Not Drones.’ Remind yourself that our dreams, our wonders, our aspirations … are not any more worthy.” At Columbia, a student couldn’t contemplate the Big Dipper without being forced to consider the fate of Khan Yunis.

This was a minor scandal, but a representative one. Over the years, the subject of Israel became nearly inescapable at Columbia, even in disciplines seemingly far removed from Gaza. For a swath of graduate students and professors, Palestinian liberation—and a corollary belief that Israel is uniquely evil among nations—became something close to civic religion.

In 2023, at the School of Public Health, a professor who taught a section of its core curriculum to more than 400 students denounced Jewish donors to the university as “wealthy white capitalists” who laundered “blood money” through the school. He hosted a panel on the “settler-colonial determinants of health” that described “Israel-Palestine” as a primary example of a place where the “right to health” can never be realized. Several years ago, the Graduate School of Architecture, Preservation and Planning offered a class on “Architecture and Settler Colonialism” and hosted an event titled “Architecture Against Apartheid.”

By insisting that Israel is the great moral catastrophe of our age, professors and graduate students transmitted their passions to their classes. So it is not surprising that Jewish students with sympathy for Israel found themselves subject to social opprobrium not just from their teachers, but also from their peers. In its September report, the task force that Shafik had convened described the problem starkly: “We heard about students being avoided and avoiding others” and about “isolation and even intimidation in classrooms, bullying, threats, stereotypes, ethnic slurs, disqualification from opportunities, fear of retaliation and community erosion.” This was the assessment of Columbia professors, many of them unabashed liberals, who risked alienating colleagues by describing the situation bluntly.

Pro-Palestinian protesters march around Columbia in April 2024. (Michael M. Santiago / Getty)

In September, the task force presented its findings to Columbia’s University Senate, an elected deliberative body that brings faculty, administrators, and students into the governance of the institution. Its creation was a utopian response to the 1968 protests. But the senate session about anti-Semitism was a fiasco. Almost from the start, members began to attack the task-force report’s motives and methodology—even its focus on discrimination against Jews. “No such resources were put into covering anybody else’s subjective experience on this campus,” the English professor Joseph Slaughter said, “and I think that creates real problems for the community.” The hostility to the report wasn’t meaningless fulmination; it was evidence of how a large part of the faculty was determined to prevent the university from acknowledging the presence of anti-Jewish activity in the school.

No other university has a governance structure quite like Columbia’s, and for good reason. Most academics with busy lives want to avoid endless meetings with their colleagues, so most professors aren’t rushing to join the senate. In recent years, the senate has attracted those of an activist bent, who are willing to put up with tedium in service of a higher cause. Two members of the rules committee were allegedly part of a faculty contingent that stood guard around the encampments on the quad. They did so even though they had jurisdiction over potentially disciplining those protesters. As it happens, exceedingly few of the protesters who flagrantly disregarded university rules have suffered any consequences for their actions. Columbia didn’t impose discipline on students who stormed Hamilton Hall last spring—at least not until last week, amid Trump’s threat of drastic cuts to the university. But by then, a culture of impunity was firmly rooted.

Barnard College is integrated into Columbia, but it has its own set of rules, its own governance structure and disciplinary procedures. And it acted swiftly to expel two of the students who were in the group that burst into Avi Shilon’s class in January. (Columbia had suspended another participant, pending an investigation, and failed to identify the other.) For once, it felt as if the university was upholding its basic covenant with its students: to protect the sanctity of the classroom.

But instead of changing anyone’s incentives, Barnard’s hard-line punishment inspired protesters to rush Millbank Hall, banging drums and chanting, “There is only one solution, intifada revolution.” In the course of storming the building, they allegedly assaulted a Barnard employee, sending him to the hospital. For more than six hours, they shut down the building, which houses the offices of the administration, and left only after the college threatened to bring in the police and offered an official meeting with the protesters. But the possibility of police action wasn’t a sufficient deterrent, because a week later, two dozen protesters returned to occupy Barnard’s library.

In some deep sense, the university had lost the capacity to reassert control, let alone confront the root causes of the chaos. And looking back over the past few months, I see a pattern of events that, in some ways, is far more troubling than the encampments that received so many headlines. In November, protesters descended on the building that houses Hillel, the center of Jewish life on campus—its main purpose is to provide Jewish students with religious services and kosher food—and demanded that the university sever ties with the organization. The next month, a demonstrator marching up Broadway punched a kippah-wearing Jew in the face. In January, to memorialize the murder of a Palestinian girl, protesters filled the toilets of the School of International and Public Affairs with cement. Skewering two Jewish women affiliated with the school—its dean, Keren Yarhi-Milo, and an adjunct assistant professor at the school, Rebecca Weiner—they spray-painted the message “Keren eat Weiner,” with an image of feces.

All of this unfolded as the Trump administration launched an assault on higher education. But thus far, Columbia students haven’t bothered to protest that. Unlike Palestine, which for most students is a distant cause, the stripping of federal funding for the institution will ripple through the lives of students and faculty. But university activism has its sights obsessively locked on Israel.

That Trump assault on Columbia has now arrived, in the heaviest-handed form. Anti-Semitism on campus, a problem that merits a serious response, has been abused in the course of Trump’s quest to remake America in his image. Tellingly, the administration’s withholding of federal grants will fall hardest on the hard sciences, which are the part of the university most immune to anti-Semitism, and hardly touch the humanities, where overwrought criticisms of Israel flourish.

The indiscriminate, punitive nature of Trump’s meddling may unbalance Columbia even further. A dangerous new narrative has emerged there and on other campuses: that the new federal threats result from “fabricated charges of antisemitism,” as CUAD recently put it, casting victims of harassment as the cunning villains of the story. In this atmosphere, Columbia seems unlikely to reckon with the deeper causes of anti-Jewish abuse on its campus. But in its past—especially in its history of overcoming its discriminatory treatment of Jews—the institution has revealed itself capable of overcoming its biases, conscious and otherwise, against an excluded group. It has shown that it can stare hard at itself, channel its highest values, and find its way to a better course.

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The ongoing stalemate over extending a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas has 2 million people still trapped in the rubble-strewn Gaza Strip with dwindling medical, food, and water supplies. Last week the Israeli government cut off all aid into Gaza in an attempt to force Hamas to agree to its terms. This week, Israeli Energy Minister Eli Cohen ordered all electric power cut off to Gaza, a move that affects a very crucial piece of remaining infrastructure: a desalination plant.

In the throes of war, it can be hard to keep track of any one element of harm or destruction. There are so many places to look. But for people like Marwan Bardawil, his focus on just one thing—his job—is also his salvation, “All the time, I’m run away to the issues, to the professional life, to the work just to not keep thinking on the personal issues.”

For nearly 30 years, Bardawil has worked to grow and stabilize the water sector in Gaza.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we learn more about the dire water situation in Gaza through the experience of one man who until now has managed to keep finding ways to get clean water into Gaza.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: With every day that goes by, the cease-fire in Gaza—if we can even still call it that—seems increasingly fragile. Arab countries have offered a plan. American diplomats met with Hamas. But so far, no agreement, and no consensus, and for the people in Gaza, survival is getting harder by the day.

About a week ago, Israel has once again cut off power, which is important because there are still 2 million people living in Gaza, and power helps bring them clean water, and clean water helps keep them alive.

[Music]

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic.

Over a year ago, we did an episode about a man named Marwan Bardawil. He is a water engineer in Gaza, someone who was regularly calculating inflows, outflows; reviewing plans; and engineering new ideas to keep Gazans with some access to clean water, regardless of peace, war—whatever is going on politically.

And something about this bureaucrat, trying day after day to keep the water on, really captured the growing desperation of the war. Like, he was just an ordinary guy trying to do a job that was hard before October 7 and continued to get more impossible by the day.

When we finished that episode, Marwan was still in Gaza. Like thousands of Gazans, when the war began, he and his family were displaced from the north to the south. And then recently, Marwan made the difficult decision to move his family entirely out of Gaza and over to Egypt, where our executive producer, Claudine Ebeid, caught up with him to try to learn more about what leaving meant for him and for the future of water for the Palestinian people.

Claudine, welcome to the show.

Claudine Ebeid: Thanks for having me.

Rosin: Claudine, there’s so much happening politically at this moment, but I want to step back and talk about the Palestinians themselves—the thousands who have had their lives upended during the war. I know many have left the country. What did Marwan tell you about why he decided to leave?

Ebeid: Well, just to remind listeners, Marwan is 61 years old, he’s a father and grandfather, and he and his family were living in the north of Gaza, which was where Israel first launched its retaliatory attack to the October 7 attacks. So five days into the war, under Israeli air strikes, Marwan, his adult children, and two of his granddaughters—they flee the north on foot to the south of Gaza. Then, last summer, like almost a hundred thousand other Palestinians, he decides to flee once more, but this time from Gaza to Egypt.

Marwan Bardawil: I’m one of them: no house. And when you lost—when your house has become a rubble, you don’t just lose your house. You lost your house, your memories. So it’s just—it’s like you moved having nothing; you lost everything. Just, you are here; it’s like you saved your body from physical death.

Ebeid: Many people fled to Egypt in this little sliver of a window where the border was open, and people planned to get out through basically this company—this Egyptian company—charging US$5,000 for an adult and $2,500 for a child to get people out. So, you know, it’s not an altruistic endeavor.

Rosin: Yeah.

Ebeid: Ultimately, there were two reasons that really pushed Marwan to leave. From the professional side, he was starting to get pressure—counsel, I think, is the right word—from his boss that if he could get out, he should, because his work was really valuable to them, and they needed him alive.

Rosin: Oof.

Ebeid: The second reason was this moment that he described to me, where he was driving in his car, and the car in front of him exploded. You know, shrapnel from the car busted through his windshield and injured his shoulder. And I think it was just too close of call. You know, when he described that moment to me, he said three weeks later, he and his family—they were gone.

[Music]

Rosin: How did water work in Gaza before the war? Because I recall from talking to him that it wasn’t easy, even in the best of non-war circumstances, to keep water flowing.

Ebeid: It’s true. Water was never a sure thing in Gaza. It’s a total patchwork of a system there. Basically, they have a combination of water sources.

One is coming from Israel. That’s about 10 percent of their water, and that comes from three main connection points. The rest is coming from groundwater that gets treated. So the Palestinian Water Authority says that before the war, there were 306 groundwater wells as primary sources of water. They also have three desalination plants. They’re situated along the coast, and they’re basically treating seawater. The output is not huge.

And then they also have a lot of small-scale desalination plants and water tankers that are, you know, just kind of filling in the gaps. So it’s not an ideal system. You have a lot of moving parts. And the source water that you’re starting with is already not a great starting point.

Rosin: How much water did make it to Palestinians with that arrangement?

Ebeid: The average person in Gaza was getting around 80 liters of water a day. And most Americans—we use about 300 liters of water a day.

Rosin: Oh.

Ebeid: So that’s what was going on before October 7.

Rosin: Right, so that was the baseline before the war. Then comes October 7, and you’ve described the intense bombing campaigns that destroyed a lot of the north. How did that situation look in the eyes of a water engineer?

Ebeid: So pipes are getting blown up, and teams are rushing out to try to repair what they can, what damage is happening in various locations, and they don’t know what they’re walking into. We do know that there were two separate occasions in which workers who were either doing a water repair or heading to a repair were killed.

So the conditions were really dangerous. And I’m sure you and many people have seen images of the destruction in Gaza. And when I was in Egypt, Marwan shared some of his photos with me.

Ebeid: (Gasps.) Oh my God. It’s rubble.

Bardawil: Yeah.

Ebeid: This is the Palestinian Water Authority office in Gaza?

Bardawil: In Gaza, yes.

Ebeid: So the office itself got destroyed?

Bardawil: Yeah, it’s destroyed.

Ebeid: By the summer of 2024, almost every connection point, every desalination plant, every sewage station had either been totally destroyed or had sustained some amount of damage.

Rosin: So what did that mean for the people who were trapped in Gaza? Because there were still about 2 million people there. How did that change their lives?

Ebeid: This kind of massive destruction of water infrastructure—it does not just affect the water supply; it also leads to diseases. So by the summer of last year, we know that about 600,000 cases of acute diarrhea were reported and 40,000 cases of hepatitis A.

And those are diseases that come from contamination of water and from having an open sewage system. And then around that same time, humanitarian aid workers become extremely concerned because they find that a 10-month-old baby has tested positive for polio. And polio is something that can spread through contaminated water. And this was the first confirmed case in Gaza of polio in a quarter of a century. So they go on a massive campaign to vaccinate kids for polio, and that campaign is still ongoing today.

[Music]

Rosin: Now we’re a few weeks into the cease-fire. Maybe it’s a precarious cease-fire. It’s not really clear. What’s the current water situation?

Ebeid: For most of the war, people were getting somewhere near 3 liters of water a day, which is so little, and that was for cooking, for hygiene, for drinking. After the cease-fire, in January, some people in Gaza were starting to get around 7 to 10 liters a day.

Rosin: So a little bit better.

Ebeid: A little bit better. You know, not a crazy jump, but it was an improvement.

Last month, when I checked in with the Palestinian Water Authority, at least one connection point with Israel was flowing again, and one main desalination plant was reconnected to Israel’s power grid. And so that was helping.

Rosin: Okay.

Ebeid: But this week, as you mentioned, Israel cut off the electricity to that desalination plant. So it’s very possible the water situation could turn dire again very quickly.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Ebeid: I will say that Marwan and his colleagues at the PWA do have a six-month plan that they have started implementing during this cease-fire. Whether they can continue to implement that plan is really up in the air at this moment.

Rosin: Even the fact that they have a six-month plan seems really important to note, because what that symbolizes is Gazans rebuilding for themselves, as opposed to the other visions, which are the U.S. or somebody else doing it for them, right?

Ebeid: Right. Trump’s vision is a “Middle Eastern Riviera,” as he called it. And in that plan, he talks about displacing all of the Palestinians that live in Gaza, and having them get absorbed by Arab countries, and then the U.S. taking ownership of Gaza. And, you know, presumably then whoever Trump wants to contract with will come in and rebuild Gaza.

However, last week, Arab countries came together in Egypt, and they agreed on a plan that could potentially include the water authority. They say their plan will cost $53 billion. It would be one that calls for rebuilding Gaza in a way that doesn’t displace Gazans, and it calls for a Palestinian government to manage the rebuilding. So that vision: very different from Trump’s vision. That vision is a vision of Gazans rebuilding Gaza.

Rosin: Okay, so there’s all this destroyed infrastructure, and there are competing visions for how to rebuild it. How does Marwan fit into all of this?

Ebeid: You know, Marwan has been building and rebuilding the water infrastructure for decades. You know, one of the reasons that I was interested in following him was that his personal life and his career really kind of let you see the track of what happened in Gaza since 1993.

President Bill Clinton: On behalf of the United States and Russia, co-sponsors of the Middle East peace process, welcome to this great occasion of history and hope.

Ebeid: The Oslo Accords were signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. And this was a really important moment.

Clinton: We know a difficult road lies ahead. Every peace has its enemies, those who still prefer the easy habits of hatred to the hard labors of reconciliation. But Prime Minister Rabin has reminded us that you do not have to make peace with your friends. And the Quran teaches that if the enemy inclines toward peace, do thou also incline toward peace.

Ebeid: At that time, there was hope. There was hope that this would be an area that would be able to govern itself; it would be able to build for itself; it would be able to think about its infrastructure for itself. And Marwan’s life and his career sort of map out what happened.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break: Marwan was right to be hopeful once, even though he wasn’t working with all that much. What does it look like to push through this time around, with even less?

[Break]

Rosin: Claudine, Marwan has been working on water in Gaza for, like, 30 years. So he knows how to operate with very few resources, very little autonomy. But still, I bet in the early days, like during the Oslo Accords, in the ’90s, the spirit of his work was probably really different.

Ebeid: Right.

Rosin: Did you talk to Marwan about this? Was there a younger Marwan who had a lot of energy and optimism, and was very excited about Gazans building Gaza?

Ebeid: Yeah, you know, he was born and raised in Gaza, studied water engineering in Gaza, and left for a small time to go be a water engineer abroad. After the Oslo Accords are signed, he sees this as his opportunity to come home and to put his engineering abilities to work in Gaza.

He’s there raising a family, and he describes, you know, the beginning as a very heady time. There was an idea that the Palestinian Authority was in charge, and that they were going to be able to build a water system.

Ebeid: Can you remember that time?

Bardawil: Of course I remember. And I remember we put a five-year plan, short term and long term, for the water sector in Palestine.

And I remember that I was in a team that consists of 11 persons. We had seven male and four female. And we are sitting in a hotel, and the hotel is like an office, because there was no offices at the time. We used to work ’til midnight on a daily basis.

We believed in the peace process. We believed that this process will continue and will end with something good.

Ebeid: That was the part that just hit me in my heart. When he is describing to me, like, they are young; they are full of hope. And he talks about getting plans from other small nations so that they can, you know, get an example of: What are the lessons learned? What are the things that we should be thinking about? Could you imagine? Like, We’ve studied to be water engineers, and now we get to, like, build our home’s water system.

Rosin: That’s an exciting thing. You get to do the thing that you care about most: bringing water to people, for your own people, in your own country. That’s a very powerful experience.

Ebeid: Yes, but more than a decade later, in 2006, Hamas wins an election, and with that comes a period of violence between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. Eventually, Hamas controls Gaza. But the Palestinian Water Authority was allowed, I should say, by Hamas to continue doing its work. I think this is because they knew that the PWA knew what to do. They had the engineers, and people need water. And Marwan—he essentially keeps his head down during this time.

Rosin: What is it about him that just—did you get any insight into that? Like, what is it about him that just is able to keep focused on the task in these impossible situations?

Ebeid: I think Marwan is someone who feels a great responsibility—a great responsibility to the people of Gaza and also to his own family.

Bardawil: I am talking about myself. All the time, I’m run away to the issues, to the professional life, to the work just to not keep thinking on the personal issues, because it’s like, you will be burned by just thinking—

Ebeid: This is, like, your safe place, is to think about the water issues?

Bardawil: Yes, this is the safest.

Ebeid: I think it is a safe place to be to think about the thing that you have control over and you know what to do. And it’s based on plans, and it’s based on equations, and yes, sometimes it’s based on diplomatic effort and trying to get other countries to help you.

But it’s all in service of something that is a clear human necessity, which is water. And that is not something, to him, that is political. And yet, we are at this moment where politics will be the determining factor of whether people in Gaza will have access to water.

[Music]

Ebeid: Marwan is still working in what capacity he can for the water sector in Gaza from Cairo, but how long that will last is unknown. When and if Palestinians like him will be able to go back to Gaza is unknown. And the precariousness of this political moment for Gaza it’s really hard to overstate.

Rosin: Claudine, thank you so much for coming on.

Ebeid: Yeah. Thanks for having me to talk about this.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jocelyn Frank. It was edited by Andrea Valdez, engineered by Erica Huang, and fact-checked by Sam Fentress. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

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