Fear and trauma from a world away

A Jewish and a Palestinian man both find they've been naïve in believing New Zealand to be a safe haven from hatred and abuse.Two New Zealanders, one from a refugee family with relatives in Gaza, the other a Jewish child of Holocaust survivors, talk to Sharon Brettkelly about the repercussions on their lives of a war far away from us.Today on The Detail, Sharon Brettkelly talks to Kiwis Tameem Shaltoni and Ben Kepes.Shaltoni calls himself a Palestinian-New Zealander, born in Jordan, from a refugee family with relatives remaining in Gaza.Kepes was born in New Zealand of Holocaust survivor parents, and has family in Israel.Two very different sides of the Israel-Palestine divide; two stories that come from a background of trauma; two stories that have many similarities."My grandparents on both sides were dispossessed by Israel in 1948," says Shaltoni. "They were expelled from their homes in Palestine. Subsequently my dad was born in a tent in a refugee camp in Gaza. My mum, she was born in Damascus in a refugee camp. They met and married in Jordan and that is where I was born. Then we came to New Zealand in 2014."Kepes says his parents were refugees from Western Europe, and survived the Holocaust - "so there's this huge context that has always kind of been there in the background, but after October 7 has become really acute to myself and to other Jews in New Zealand."Shaltoni says he wanted New Zealand to be his home, "and I almost believed it till March 15." "So when the terrorist attack happened it was sort of like a wake-up call, and I came to the conclusion that no matter how I really wanted to believe it, there would be always something wrong, something that is not quite right."It's not just a matter of small micro-aggressions, racist remarks, it's more serious than this and we all saw it, that there is sometimes hate that is willing to kill us. So I came to that conclusion that probably I was a little bit naïve about it."Meanwhile keeping in touch with family in Gaza is difficult."We don't know exactly what's happening with them, we don't have reliable communication with them," he says.Amongst his closed community network in Hamilton there are four families who've had people in Gaza killed in the last three weeks. The strain is showing in lack of sleep and weight loss.Last time he managed to check, his own family there was safe, although they had no food or clean water, and about 50 internally displaced people were living in one flat…Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details