Jan
It was easy to miss, amid the horrors, what answered them. In the blood-soaked weeks that started on Oct. 7, the most consequential acts in Israel and in Gaza may also have been the least noticed, carried out not by those who claimed leadership but by those whom leaders had failed. The people who pulled others out of rubble, or out of hiding, who sheltered strangers, who bent to heal wounds seen and unseen, they all answered unspeakable violence with a shared humanity. But their selflessness did more than save lives. It illuminated the connection at the heart of a contest that has preoccupied the world for most of a century, the fellow feeling that defines a community and, more broadly, a nation. Amid the negation of war, and in the absence of a state, two nations were affirmed.