First you see the flowering frangipanis in the beautiful little kibbutz of Nir Oz. Then the charred remains of the home of Tamar Kedem-Siman Tov and her husband Yonatan looms into view. This smiling couple and three young children are there only in the photographs taped to what’s left of their gutted home. A quarter of Nir Oz’s population of 400, many of them peace activists, were killed or kidnapped when Hamas fighters went on a murderous rampage across southern Israel on 7 October.
“They’re here. They’re burning us. We’re suffocating.” That’s the last desperate message Ranae Butler received from her half-brother Yonatan. Her 72-year-old mother Carol was also killed in the carnage.
Butler and many other members of the close-knit community find the strength to return to this dark site one year on. The pain is still raw. The tears still flow. No one can see a way forward now, not in this grief. “How do we stop this from happening when there are people who swear to keep doing this?” Butler laments.
On a table behind us, in a jumble of memorial candles, there are posters with Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s face painted in red with “Abandoned” written across it in Hebrew – a reference to the anger in this community, and many others, that Israel’s vaunted security forces took hours to show up. And there’s still no Gaza ceasefire to bring the last of the hostages home. Until all of them are accounted, 7 October remains an open wound.
A short drive away, the fields of Re’im are now a forest of Israeli flags, flowers and photographs of smiling young Israelis and some foreigners too. This is where many young Israelis had danced the night away at the popular Nova Music festival. When the sun rose, darkness descended. Their celebration turned into a slaughter when Hamas fighters stormed across the fields, murdering at least 300 festival-goers and seizing 44 more. It’s chilling to see images of smiling faces in this memorial in the killing fields.
Loud booms of artillery firing into Gaza shatter the stillness as we drive across southern Israel. The deadliest day in the country’s history, with the murder of more than 1,000 Israelis, sparked a devastating war across the border which has killed nearly 42,000 Palestinians, according to Hamas’s health ministry in Gaza, most of them women and children, and left most of the coastal enclave an apocalyptic ruin. I wonder what veteran Israeli peace negotiators like Yossi Beilin make of these moments. His dark head of hair is now grey but his belief in peace is undiminished. “If we don’t have peace with the Palestinians, Israel is doomed,” he tells me. “This is why people like me still fight. One day we are more optimistic, another day we are less optimistic. But we will not give up.”
I point out what he already knows – that Israelis say everything changed on 7 October. He has an answer. “Before the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt, there was a huge majority [in Israel] against giving up the Sinai Peninsula. Before the agreement that I launched – the Oslo agreement with the Palestinians in 1994 – they were totally against it. And once we did it, there was a majority for it.”
Yet now there’s neither the political leadership nor the public who support that kind of peace.
I keep thinking about the first interview I did last October, just after these horrific events, with the mayor of Sderot, Alon Davidi. His community lies less than a mile from Gaza and has borne the brunt of rocket attacks for years. I asked what another war would achieve that the previous ones have not. “This time, when American and British leaders call us and say ‘Stop the war. Too many have been killed,’ we won’t stop, not until we destroy Hamas,” he had replied angrily. That’s what happened. Netanyahu even boasts about it. “I said no!” he has said many times. Israeli generals are known to believe they’ve achieved their military objectives. Many Israelis accuse the prime minister of trying to keep the war going to keep himself in power.
Last October, we kept having to use the word “unprecedented”. A year on, we’re still using it. A year on, international journalists are still not allowed to report from inside Gaza unless they enter on embeds with Israeli forces – another unprecedented thing in a time that’s unprecedented in all too many terrible ways. Now the streets of Beirut are smouldering ruins as Israel intensifies its attacks against Lebanese Hezbollah forces, the main proxy of Iran in its “axis of resistance”. Even more, Iran and Israel are now in direct confrontation – the war many, including Tehran, tried to avoid since these fires first started burning. A retaliatory attack on Iran is imminent after Iran’s 1 October retaliatory attack on Israel. “Eye for eye. Tooth for tooth.” An end to this war sometime soon would be miraculous.
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