How Portlanders are reacting to the Israel-Hamas war
Add Axios as your preferred source to
see more of our stories on Google.
Illustration: Brendan Lynch/Axios
Portlanders with ties to Israel and Gaza say this month has been filled with sleepless nights, difficulty taking breaks from news and working to help friends and family thousands of miles away.
Driving the news: Saturday will mark three weeks since Hamas' Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel and Israel's subsequent declaration of war.
Why it matters: Portlanders are feeling the pain — and closely watching the politics — of developments in Israel, Gaza and Washington, D.C.
What's happening: The last three weeks have been "hard and confusing and disappointing," Jahed Sukhun, a Palestinian American and recently retired board member of Portland's Muslim Educational Trust, tells Axios.
- Cousins on his mother's side still live in Gaza "and five of them passed away" in the recent violence, he says.
Separately, "it's been a long three weeks," the president of the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland, Marc Blattner, tells Axios.
- "Many frustrations, much anger and I'm worried about my friends and people I know in Israel."
By the numbers: Blattner says Portland's Jewish Federation has raised $1.8 million since Oct. 7, with the money going toward a variety of humanitarian organizations that are helping Israelis.
- It's an outpouring of support he calls "overwhelming" — especially because research the federation released earlier this year found less than half of Jewish Portlanders feel "emotionally attached" to Israel.
Meanwhile, Asma Taha, a Palestinian American pediatric nurse who lives in Portland, was scheduled before the Oct. 7 attack to go on a trip to Gaza next week with the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund, a group that regularly sends teams to provide health care that is otherwise unavailable there.
- The trip was canceled because movement of aid into Gaza is severely limited now. Taha, who headed the Portland PCRF chapter for seven years, shifted to help the group organize shipments of humanitarian supplies.
- "We have raised quite a bit of money, but I'm afraid the need is going to be greater than we have raised," she told Axios.
Threat level: The Islamic Society of Greater Portland asked Portland police to investigate a recent threat it received, and Portland's Muslim Educational Trust tells Axios it has received a number of threatening phone calls since Oct. 7.
- Blattner says he is not aware of a rise of antisemitic incidents locally in the past few weeks.
Of note: Ken Sanchagrin, executive director of the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission, tells Axios he'd "be surprised if there wasn't" an uptick in both antisemitic and anti-Islamic incidents that will show up in local data later.
- The commission's 2022 bias crimes report found the "vast majority" of anti-religion bias reports were antisemitic.
The big picture: President Biden has called for a "concentrated effort" to work toward a two-state solution once the current violence is over.
- Portland's Jewish Federation "has always been on record" in support of that, Blattner says. "When or how that happens" he leaves to the Israeli and U.S. governments.
- The Biden administration is "the same as other administrations in the past," Sukhan says. "They are on the side of Israel."