COLUMBIA, S.C. — War is taking place in the Middle East as deadly attacks continue over the Gaza Strip. The most recent escalation happened over the weekend when a militant group known as Hamas launched an air and ground attack into Israel.
The modern day portion of this conflict dates back to the 1940s when the United Nations adopted a plan to divide land in the Middle East into Arab and Jewish states. The state of Israel was created and the first Arab-Israeli war began. Since then, there has been conflict over this land known as the Gaza Strip.
"It’s heavy because I have Israelis in my community," Columbia Rabbi Erik Uriarte says. "I have members who have Israeli family in my community, all desperately trying to make phone calls in contact to see if people are safe. People are missing. If people are, God forbid, dead."
Uriarte is a rabbi at the Tree of Life Congregation. Uriarte says with only about 15 million Jewish people in the world, about 7 million are in the Middle East with many others here in the United States.
"When you talk about globally such a small Jewish community, if we don't know people in Israel, than we know people who's got…who have friends and family in Israel," Uriarte shares.
The strikes made by Hamas on Israel, and the resulting retaliation by Israel, have left at least 1,600 people dead.
"The temperature has just been coming to a boiling point," Linda Robinson, a senior fellow at nonpartisan research group Council on Foreign Relations explains. "With this massive attack on civilians in Israel by Hamas, that really means there is no current prospect for that peace process to come back to life. There is going to be war, it is war now."
War that’s affecting people in the Middle East and here locally. Kirk Wisemayer with the Columbia Jewish Federation says that impact is felt all over.
"Everybody in Colombia and in South Carolina needs to understand that this is something that affects not just israel, not just the palestinians, but really the international community," Wisemayer says. "When something like this takes place, it has a ripple effect through all levels of society and civilization."
"It is so important for non-Jewish neighbors and friends to just check in and not offer any kind of solutions or explanations, but just say, ‘I'm here to listen to you and I can't imagine what you're going through right now,’ because we all too often feel isolated," Uriarte adds. "I think that whenever any strongly banded together community experiences a tragedy like this, we want to at least know that other people are concerned about us as individuals, because we're not okay and just having a phone call to say, ‘I don't understand what's going on, but I'm here if you need to talk’ means a lot."