Minute by minute, hour by hour, what happened at the Nova Music Festival in Israel on 7 October 2023? As I watched the news reports in the days after Hamas fighters attacked last year, information still coming piecemeal, I imagined (because I needed to) something fast; a heinousness that was as swift as the hundreds of rockets that were fired across the sky that day.
But it seems that I was wrong. All of us? We knew nothing. The true horror of 7 October was its unbearable duration. A woman spends so long hiding in a refrigerator she can no longer breathe. A man lies in undergrowth for so many hours he finds he can hardly walk when the coast is clear. Yet another man is among bodies: they’re piled up like sacks of corn. There is nothing to do but to stay among them, hoping that the men who murdered these people do not come back. The morning ticks by, and with it, his dawning awareness that he is not the person he was yesterday.
I can’t, in any ordinary sense, recommend Yariv Mozer’s 90-minute Storyville documentary Surviving October 7th: We Will Dance Again. It will destroy you; sleep was impossible for me afterwards. But it is an astonishing thing, almost beyond description.
Nearly every moment of the hours that followed the rockets that arrived in Israel as cover for the Hamas fighters at 6.29 on the morning of 7 October was filmed, on the mobile phones of those at the festival, or by the terrorists, who wore body cameras. The woman in the refrigerator? She filmed herself, trembling, gasping. The man in the undergrowth? He filmed himself, eyes screwed up in terror. The bodies I mentioned, piled up? A camera was on these, too. If the young people felt that they would only be able to believe what was happening to them if they recorded it, they understood, too, that their footage might be useful one day; that it could help bring the perpetrators of this devastation to justice.
I won’t write of the war in Gaza here. The film is part of a group marking the anniversary of 7 October; another edition of Storyville will focus on the horrors there. But several of those Mozer interviews recall seeing the fence that separates the Strip from Israel as they arrived at the festival. It was so close. Such memories aren’t, as some will insist, callous; it is only that these young people, with their tattoos and their piercings and their fondness for ecstasy at sunrise, have grown up with certain realities – a situation born of the decisions of previous generations. This situation is not their fault. As they talk, you’re struck by their trauma – dull eyes, facial twitches, unnatural stretched smiles – and by their kindness and hopefulness. Liel, Eliya, Aner, Ben, Naom, Ettan, Tamir… So many names. Almost without exception they are in their early twenties.
I watched in a kind of zombie state, covered in fear. I spent part of my childhood in Israel, and their Hebrew jabbed at my heart: the memory of what was, and what might have been – and in my lifetime. Impossible to take notes. Fragments are all that remain. The glee of the terrorists. “Here’s another dog, kill it,” they say, laughing.
In Israel, small concrete shelters line the roads, refuges for emergencies. But on 7 October, these boxes became coffins, those cowering inside them either shot, or blown up by grenades. A terrorist throws a grenade inside a shelter, a young man picks it up and throws it back out; a game of ping-pong that can only end in death. Women run into gunfire because they would rather be shot than raped. “I’ve lost my hand,” says someone, trying to tie it off. A woman hides in a skip. She wants to cry, her boyfriend is dead, but she must not make any sound.
In the dry, dusty open spaces that surround the spot where the festival was held, hundreds of people move ever outwards. It is like the Book of Exodus. Someone says it, but I’m already thinking it. Is there a prayer for this? Or should we just memorise the numbers? The Nova Music Festival was attended by 3,500 people. It was, everyone agrees, beautiful. Music, companionship, a rising feeling of possibility. They danced all night, in each other’s arms, on each other’s shoulders. The sun came up, and then the music stopped. By the time it was all over, 364 of them had been murdered, 44 had been taken hostage, and hundreds more had been seriously injured. And yet even this, as we now know, was just the beginning.
Surviving October 7th: We Will Dance Again
BBC iPlayer
[See also: A Very Royal Scandal is the latest surreal instalment in the Prince Andrew multiverse]
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This article appears in the 02 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The fury of history