The extent of the horror left by the terrorists in Kibbutz Kfar Azza/Avi Rokach is exposed
Here I am "in the delivery room" with memories of my past life: not in my sleep, but out of a semi-sleepy Saturday morning walk, I groped my way toward the electric kettle and began to prioritize in my head my morning tasks that separate me from the idleness of Shabbat. From afar, I thought I could hear the thunder of a distant autumnal storm.
The dog was horrified, as is the habit of dogs, at the sound of "booms," but I still classified them, perhaps due to the drowsiness of those who had not yet sipped their first morning coffee, as a purely climatic phenomenon. It wasn't until the first alarm sounded that I realized it was man-made, a phrase that would take on a much deeper meaning later that morning.
For the first half hour, the television channels went silent, until the continuous news studios opened, from which we were not weaned even after four weeks.
Although I had already woken the rest of the household to the second alarm, my reflex, like all of us, was to assume that this was another round from the one to which we had become accustomed in recent years.
I remember still proofreading a column I had written in the wake of what seemed to be the great storm of our previous lives. I wrote there, apropos of the resumption of political activity after the holiday break, that the most difficult task these days is not to hate those who think differently, not to play into the hands of those who seek to profit politically from the rift.
I soon had to say goodbye to the text that now seemed to have been written in another era. On television, there were still individual fatalities, then dozens, but anyone exposed to a slightly less institutionalized media understood that the reported numbers were only a preview of the unimaginable numbers of dead and kidnapped.
What we may not have realized then, on the morning of October 7, is that in a sense we all died, and at the same time were born again.
If the delivery room of the veteran Israeli was the courtyard of Tel Hai, accept the delivery room of the new Israeli: the burnt southern settlements/Reuters, Ilan Rosenberg
The illusion of normality
On October 7, the third period of the State of Israel's remarks also began. We will roughly divide our lives here into two main periods: the first 19 years, until the Six-Day War, and the remaining 56 years that followed.
In the first part, the immediate need was to grow fast, to be strong, to remove the threat of annihilation – which was still fresh in the collective memory – and to win by trickery, like David versus Goliath.
The second part, even when the glorious victory in the Six-Day War eroded (during the long days of attrition and especially during the Yom Kippur War), was marked by the removal of the existential threat to the State of Israel. Even the shock of the blow on Yom Kippur, which turned 50, only intensified, in retrospect, the sense of security:
Here we are so strong that even when we were caught by complete surprise, attacked by trained armies with armored and air forces, and their soldiers equipped with the best Soviet equipment - a surprise blow managed to hit us, but not knock us to the planks.
In retrospect, it seems impossible to analyze every political and social change that took place during those 56 years – between the Six-Day War and the attack of October 7 – from settlement on every inch to the occupation, without understanding that what was at its base was the knowledge, in retrospect, of the mistaken assumption that the State of Israel was done with its war of existence.
Yes, we knew it had to be alert, yes – we reminded ourselves that in the Middle East we had to sleep with one eye open and a gun under our pillow, but in general we thought that an existential danger lurked in the form of an Iranian atomic bomb: several thousand terrorists with vans and motorcycles might have been under our noses, but out of sight.
For "my" camp, this period will be remembered as the days of the yearning for normalcy, sometimes the illusion that it exists. It's the years of Start-Up Nation, the Silicon Valley of the Eastern Hemisphere.
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Pro-Palestinian demonstration in London. Many have asked themselves whether they are citizens of the world more than they are citizens of Israel. Since October 7, the answer is clear/Reuters
The whole world is against us
I abandon the national sphere for a moment and return to my personal gathering. I have many acquaintances abroad – from distant relatives to colleagues to Manchester United fans who shared beers with me near Old Trafford during the years I subscribed to the club's games. Like many Israelis, I sometimes wondered whether the threads connecting them and me hadn't become thicker than those connecting me to other Israelis.
Here are parts of my old ID: I am a secular professional, a father of three children (adults), who is also responsible for the welfare of a mixed Canaanite dog. I am a culinary and alcoholic beverage enthusiast, travel abroad several times a year - not on business, but also try not to be low-cost.
I live in Tel Aviv by choice, even though life there is very expensive and pluralism is celebrated around me: pride flags are hung from many balconies in the neighborhood, and on Saturday nights this past year, my street looks like the entrance to a football field, with masses marching with flags in their hands towards Kaplan Street.
In such an atmosphere, it is clear why I began, like many whose lives are more like mine than I am willing to admit, to wonder where I belong more, to my ethno-national group or to a neighborhood that is not geographically bounded by the center of the global village?
Do I belong to a country characterized by a flag, anthem, torch-lighting ceremony, tradition and maybe even religion, or do I feel more like I belong to my counterpart in the West? Both he and I grew up on the same music and the same iconic TV series, we wear similar clothes, the education we have acquired over the years is quite similar and for the most part our outlook on both local and global politics.
On the margins of this camp, these ties unraveled even more: in the era of remote work, living abroad seemed like a reasonable option for quite a few Israelis. For some - as a professional relocation, studies or anything that has a degree of impermanence. For others - as an option for permanent residence, which became more reasonable by the day, mainly due to a real or imagined feeling that the State of Israel they knew was changing its face and becoming more conservative, more religious and less tolerant.
Menorah on a windowsill. The State of Israel is the Bari of Western countries, even if some of them will not admit it/Reuters, Ronen Zevulun
Israel is the Bari of the West
Go explain to your friends in the West why it is impossible to even talk to you today about children in Gaza, simply because as far as you are concerned, after the act that distinguishes us from the murderers, which is expressed in sending an explicit warning to the residents to evacuate, there are no more children in Gaza, only targets.
They can't grasp it – and they can't never, just as you, that is, I, can't understand how they still categorize the events of October 7 as another bloody round in the never-ending battle between Israel and the Palestinians, and not as an attack on all of us, when in this parable we, Israel, are the Barry kibbutz of Western civilization.
The world leaders who rushed here didn't just come here. They understood that if Israel had been attacked from every possible front that Shabbat: Gaza, Beirut, Tehran and Jenin, mushrooms would have already flown over Tehran and Beirut. World War III, which, even if it did not harm Western countries, would at least have provoked insane unrest among their Muslim citizens.
So maybe they flew here to support us, but between us? Mainly to hold us before we really don't see on our eyes.
The more I reflect on my acquaintances in the West – and as much as I wish they understood me more, I admit that it is suddenly not urgent for me to convince them: on my part that they should suppress the fact that the next massacre will take place on the outskirts of their cities, on my part that they will try to atone through me for their feelings of guilt for their well-being life, which enabled them to develop such an inclusive and annoying attitude towards every phenomenon, was achieved through centuries of colonialism next to which "Gaza prison" is what they put it, is Central Park.
In short—let them go look for their friends at Berkeley and Harvard, Cambridge and the Sorbonne—just don't try to separate me from the production I vowed on October 7 to destroy, before I get a slap in their direction as well.
Knesset Israel. The political explosion must be one that undermines the method/image processing, Noam Moshkovitz
Meanwhile, in Israel
The fact that the death and rebirth of the State of Israel on October 7, 2023 is not perceived by our allies in the West is still a controversy. What is amazing is that there are moments when the change seems to have escaped the attention of Israeli politicians as well.
Phrases like "life in a movie" or "don't realize their time has passed" have been heard in recent weeks from almost every direction, and it seems to me that this time at least they are directed not only at the government, but against the system as a whole: the system that has filled our House of Commons with nearly 120 people who are engaged in their art.
The heads of the Negev councils may also be politicians, but at least they fulfill the first condition of being elected officials and representatives. At the national level, contact with the field has already been lost: those so-called "elected officials" do almost nothing but re-elect. That is why they are waging a never-ending campaign instead of state affairs. They did this even before October 7, but then, as our American friends say, the feces hit the fan.
Say that's a generalization, because here and there there will always be some righteous person in the form of Hili Tropper, as a generic name for an elected official who is accepted by everyone, but the shock that will come after the war must crack not only the famous 64-year-old block, but the foundations of the entire system.
If anyone hoped to take advantage of the cries of "democracy" heard here at Ramah over the past ten months to carry out a change of government that would replace sex, then he was mistaken: no blockage will help here, here a root canal treatment is required.
Haim Yellin at Kibbutz Be'eri. On the right and left, villagers and townspeople, the people of action will come and go/Reuven Castro
From Bibi to Bibas
This is not a call, God forbid, to mount a 9-D on the Knesset, but it is certainly a call to shatter our party frameworks. Actually, there is no need to read: as of October 7, the blood of 1,400 murdered people cries out to us from the ground.
It may not happen immediately: even the cry of soldiers in the strongholds during the Yom Kippur War took almost 4 years to turn into a political upheaval, but in the meantime, we may get rid of the echoes of the dumbest debate in the history of Israeli politics – yes Bibi or no Bibi, that still surface from the Internet. These will slowly die out, though it's hard to know what votes will rise in their place.
My bet: The huge part of the heads of local authorities, who were then Likud youth, in the political upheaval of 1977 (which was more a protest vote against a central government that does not recognize them than a vote of confidence in the skills of Meir Amit or Simcha Erlich), will be large this time as well. A coalition of men of action will cross political boundaries that until four weeks ago seemed insurmountable. At the wheel sat, perhaps, from Haim Bibas to Haim Yellin, from Gadi Yarkoni to Tamir Idan.
Like a soldier called to the front, so the new Israeli: not exactly closed on where he is going, but don't mess with him on the way!/IDF Spokesperson
The New Israeli
The residents of the south who were exposed to the atrocities are still in a state of shock. Some of them will be haunted for the rest of their lives by the sights, sounds, smells and especially longing and pain, but even those who were in more distant circles died on October 7 - and almost immediately reborn: more Jewish and more Israeli - even if more spirited, angrier and more belligerent. He will no longer tolerate harassment from neighbors or the self-righteousness of colleagues, some of whom still do not understand what happened to their charming Israeli friend, who freaked out like this.
Whoever died and was reborn on October 7 will no longer be ready for businessmen and free eaters to make more rounds of stealing from the state budget and appointing cronies on him - and whoever intends to try the trick of "
look here is a leftist/settler/ultra-Orthodox/kibbutznik" will discover that this time our gaze does not budge from the sight of us locking on his rogue job.
On the Saturday of October 7th, we died for a moment, we were in a state of clinical death for hours, and suddenly we not only opened our eyes, but suddenly a person got up, felt that he was a people and started walking. To continue that beautiful poem, not only does he no longer call "peace" to everything in his path (he can't contain the word anymore. I mean, maybe somewhere in the future, but really not peace now) - he doesn't even want to read anymore: "Stop or I'll shoot."
This Israeli is me, this Israeli is you, these Israelis are us. Maybe we still have no idea where we'll take what has been going through our minds since the morning of October 7, we only know that it will no longer be to the places we fled: from the safe room that became a trap to the foreign passport, from the ultra-Orthodox yeshiva to Columbia University.
A new Israeli was born on October 7. I may not know him yet, but let me live so much: I dare not mess with him.
- More on the subject:
- War in the South
- Barry
- Haim Bibas