“Welcome to what’s left of Kfar Aza,” says Zoha Shbak. He’s a lawyer, but looks straight out of the Israeli TV show Fauda, with his tanned stubbly pate, automatic weapon casually slung over his black military T-shirt.
He briefs us at the palm-fringed bus stop of the kibbutz before he shows us the sights. The armoury. The concrete shelters — chocolate teapots when it came to Hamas terrorists, as they had no doors. Ditto safe rooms you couldn’t lock from the inside. The incinerated houses, pocked by hundreds of bullets, the burst and bloodstained mattresses. The house where his son’s best friend, Netta Epstein, was murdered aged 21. He has a tattoo now of the two boys he has known since birth on his right shoulder blade. “My only tattoo,” he said. “They were born a week apart.”
This hamlet is a mere click from Gaza, inhabited by dreamy-sharey Lefty-liberals. It’s one of the most sought-after kibbutzim, with a long waiting list and a joining fee of $50,000. “We used to watch the sunset over the strip and listen to the muezzin in the mosques. As kids we’d go into Gaza to see friends and go to the market for 7Up,” Sharone Lifshitz, whose 89-year-old father Oded is still a hostage, told me. “You couldn’t get 7Up in Israel…”
I’d hear the outgoing crump of a rocket and think with pity of the Palestinians who’d die when it landed
That was then. On October 7, 63 men, women and children from Kfar Aza were killed and 19 taken hostage.
So far, 153 days into the war, just two families have returned to Kfar Aza. Meanwhile, up to 160,000 Israelis have been displaced and evacuated from the north, the hot border with Lebanon, and down south in the Gaza envelope, where terrorists and then a second wave of 3,000 Palestinians breached the security fence in 60 places and launched attacks on several dozen communities just like this one. Since then, the loud cry has gone up around the world: what about the children, what about the deaths of so many thousands of innocents in Gaza, what about the “genocide?”
What about the fact that Israel has added an additional 100 locked internal iron gates to the 600 checkpoints in the West Bank, blockading the territory into an economic lockdown?
As 7/10 recedes, previously supportive voices — Kamala Harris, Lord Cameron — are raising these questions, tacitly declaring that nothing that happened on 7/10 can justify the slaughter that followed. Here in Israel — where a majority is now in favour of a prolonged ceasefire and hostage exchange — there are no apparent answers in the Knesset to these insistent questions, save doubling down on both its occupation and Hamas elimination strategies.
As Ramadan approaches, so does boiling point — not helped, of course, by the way Al-Jazeera’s Arabic channels have not even acknowledged the atrocities. In Gaza only a quarter of the population believes 7/10 happened. In the West Bank, only seven per cent.
We finish the tour. I take photos of the mended security fence, and the houses where innocent kibbutzniks became captives.
Before we leave, there’s a long queue of Israeli reservists in green khaki uniform waiting to use the unisex bathroom facilities. My turn. At crotch height, a large round bullet hole stares at me like a Cyclops eye. My cubicle is yet another crime scene. Five months ago, someone died here, just where I’m sitting.
The closest I got to Gaza was the Erez crossing, but from the kibbutz I could see the coastal enclave: the minarets, the apartment blocks, and every so often hear the outgoing crump of a rocket. I’d think with horror and pity of the Palestinians who would die when it landed, seconds later. And I’d pray that this asymmetric war might end in a just and symmetric peace.
“Tell everyone,” Zoha said, as we hugged goodbye hard. “Tell everyone what happened.” I promised him I would.
Because the most dangerous thing for Israel right now is not fighting. It’s forgetting.
