Temporary security fencing surrounds the Capitol grounds on July 23, 2024, before an address by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to a joint meeting of Congress. (Valerie Plesch/The Washington Post)
Ayman Nijim walked toward the stage with a kaffiyeh around his neck and looked out at the thousands of people in front of him.
Gripping the microphone, he told the crowd that he hadn’t been able to talk to his mother in the Gaza Strip for 200 days.
The night before — just blocks away on the National Mall — Aviva Siegel spoke to dozens of people about the terror of Oct. 7. She ticked through the details of how Hamas militants abducted her and her husband, Keith, and brought them to Gaza as hostages. In November, she was released. He was not.
Nijim and Siegel are both appalled at the human suffering in this war and are outraged with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Both spoke at demonstrations in D.C. last week with groups demanding Netanyahu sign a cease-fire deal.
While they have rallied closer to home — Nijim in Boston and Siegel in Tel Aviv — they thought Netanyahu’s visit presented a new opportunity. They saw D.C. as the place where their advocacy would carry power, and the possibility for change.
Ultimately, they would both leave disappointed. No deal to release more hostages. No cease-fire to end the bombing in Gaza.
Nijim drove his family from western Massachusetts to D.C. Siegel’s flight and hotel were funded by the Israeli government, according to her daughter Elan Tiv.
The main pro-Palestinian protest that Nijim attended was organized by several groups, including the ANSWER Coalition, which receives donations through its fiscal sponsor, the Progress Unity Fund — a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization that received more than $797,000 in revenue in fiscal 2023. Code Pink, which brought in more than $1.2 million in revenue in fiscal 2023, and the
People’s Forum, which brought in more than $4.4 million in revenue in fiscal 2022, were among other groups behind the protest.
The protests triggered a massive police response. “Hamas is comin’” was spray-painted on a monument. Inside the U.S. Capitol, six family members of hostages were arrested.
Nijim and Siegel knew tensions would be high. But they wanted to broadcast their own message — one more personal and nuanced than the images that would be shown across television screens or go viral on social media.
Siegel, 63, came with a plea during a rally Tuesday night: “I’m begging Bibi Netanyahu, there is a deal on the table, and you have to take it. … We need this world to be a better world for everybody. For the people in Gaza that are good. For the people in Israel that are good.”
Nijim came with a plea, too. He wants an enduring solution, one that makes war protests unnecessary.
“We come to achieve peace,” he said. Siegel heard the horror first.
At the sound of missiles on Oct. 7, she and her husband, Keith, who is 65, went to a small shelter. Messages from their neighbors in Kfar Aza, a kibbutz community near the Gaza border, started coming in. Then, someone wrote: “There’s terrorists on the kibbutz.” Siegel was kidnapped and held with Keith, whose ribs were broken, in a tunnel with barely enough oxygen to breathe. She said she watched her husband be beaten and humiliated and become frail. She prayed she would die before him.
Then, she had to leave him behind.
After 51 days, in November, she was freed as part of a pause in fighting.
“I’m still in Gaza,” she said. “All the time. Sometimes I get out of Gaza for two minutes, and then I’m back, thinking about Keith, thinking about what I went through with Keith.”
Blocks from the U.S. Capitol last week, before Netanyahu’s speech to Congress, she recounted the horrors.
“I’m here to share. I’m here to talk. I’m here to scream,” she said. “And I’m here to stand on the table.”
Siegel met Keith, who was born in Chapel Hill, N.C., when he was visiting his brother in Israel. They have been married for 43 years and have three daughters, one son and five grandchildren. Siegel called Keith a “person’s people,” who studied Arabic to talk with people from Gaza who worked on their kibbutz.
She didn’t attend Netanyahu’s speech before Congress because the only thing she wanted to hear from him was “Keith is coming home.” Instead, she used her time in America to appear on national television, criticizing her government.
Nijim looked at his 4-year-old son waving a Palestinian flag on Pennsylvania Avenue and thought of his family’s history.
His grandfather was a Palestinian farmer who was expelled from his home in Ashdod during the 1948 war that created Israel, which Palestinians refer to as the Nakba, or “the catastrophe.” Nijim’s grandparents took refuge in Gaza, where his family has remained.
Nijim left Gaza when he was about 28 to pursue his education in the United States, with the goal of helping children with trauma, including those in Gaza.
He has protested in D.C. before, including during Netanyahu’s last address to Congress, in 2015. But this time was different. His three children, ages 13, 12 and 4, were with him, and he wanted to teach them the importance of using their voices to make the world a safer place.
He told the crowd he was the plaintiff in a now-dismissed federal lawsuit against President Biden and others for their alleged failure to prevent what he described as Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Nijim said the rally was invigorating, but that it was difficult to feel present when he knew his family was suffering in Gaza.
“My head actually was in Palestine,” he said.
His family left before thousands amassed at Union Station, where protesters lowered American flags and set one ablaze. A protester climbed the Christopher Columbus fountain and wrote “Hamas is comin.’”
That phrase made Nijim shake his head. “That is not representative of our struggle,” he said.
Nijim doesn’t want anyone separated from their families, including the hostages. He said he wishes people had compassion to worry about both the hostages and the tens of thousands of Palestinian children and families who have been killed and wounded in the war, as well as Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli jails.
By the time he made it back to his Alexandria hotel on Wednesday, it was 11 p.m. Sitting alone in his car in the parking lot, Nijim pulled up Netanyahu’s speech on YouTube.
He watched as the man he describes as a war criminal stood in front of Congress and received standing ovations.
The next day, Nijim drove to western Massachusetts and Siegel stepped onto a flight back to Israel. There were hours of travel ahead, time spent ruminating over the questions that plagued them. Were they doing enough? Did they make a difference?
Netanyahu’s nearly hour-long address to Congress came as the war in Gaza grinds on for the 10th month. In Tel Aviv, hundreds of Israelis accused Netanyahu of dragging out the war to further his political survival.
In his address, Netanyahu was defiant. He vowed retribution.
It was disturbing to hear, Nijim said. So he is left to continue writing, seeking to understand the violence from Israel that permeated his childhood and continues today. The topic of his dissertation as a doctoral student at Saybrook University in Pasadena, Calif., is the infrastructure of genocide, focusing on how mass death is normalized and how to heal from it.
“This is what I can do for humanity,” he said.
By the time Siegel got to her apartment in Gazit, a kibbutz in northern Israel, she told her daughter she felt empty. She had done all the interviews, sat through all the meetings. But she was still alone at home - and Keith was still somewhere in Gaza.
