Eyal Gilad's words have a harsh tone.
Humor with spikes like those that characterize the shell of the lobsters that once, in another life, he tried to raise in cages on the shores of Sinai.
A marine biologist who grew up in Haifa and after the army decided to study architecture, work with father in the office.
But Prof. Shlomo Gilad, one of the greatest architects of his generation, informed the boy that he would do well if he directed his love of life to the benefit of studying biology and not walking around between his legs.
After school, together with his beloved wife, he went down to Sinai to establish a field school.
There, along the bay, he conducted his experiment, which focused on the blue spiny lobster, the one that tastes like Eden and whose distribution includes the Red Sea.
"The experiment went great," he says, "saved people a lot of money. You can't raise this animal in cages! Even the Japanese didn't succeed," he concludes, and I refrain from going with the paraphrase that climbs in my head, about humans in a cage on the shore of the sea the high school
Anyway, we just met.
A tough tune.
Eyal Gilad, photo: Eric Sultan
The last time I visited "Mekneh Dekal", the farm he established after a Chinese evacuation, not far from Moshav Dekal, he was not there.
That's when I met Itamar, the eldest of his four sons and daughters and his successor, the one everyone calls Itush.
The boy born in Sinai was 5 years old when his parents moved to the north of the Negev, and at the age of 14, during the Gulf War, when the shepherds fled from the terror of the missiles, his father sent him to tend the sheep.
He hasn't left the farm since.
Every animal and bird learned in it, to conduct a war of minds with hungry wolves, how to communicate with the powerful pigs and how to ride on bulls.
The laborers from Thailand were like family to him, they taught him the tastes of a distant cuisine, a poor moral that is not even seen in the rodents of the region.
Until recently, he lived on a farm with Tal, today a pilates instructor, and with their four children, but the bureaucracy, on its way to regulate the individual farms in the northern Negev, put an end to that.
Now the formal family home has moved to Dekal.
Itush still remembers how he and his brothers would drive ten minutes to the equal beach of Gaza, and the Mizrahi Bank branch in Rafah, by which they would sit on the sidewalk and eat delicious falafel, until Father Eyal deposited the checks.
Remembers Yosef, also Marfih, who was like a big brother to him.
Worked with them on the farm, shared joys and pains.
"The last time I spoke to him was 15 years ago," says father Eyal, "it was a conversation that broke my heart. Yosef said that he does not see human eyes, only laces. He is afraid that if he crosses eyes with someone, they will send him to dig a tunnel or Something like that. He told me then, 'I can't educate the child about what is right, what is right and what is forbidden. If I tell my child that what Hamas says is not true and that the Jews do not drink the blood of Arabs, and he says this at school, they will kill me and my family '.
"It was a conversation that finished me," Eyal continues, breathing and saying something about Ithush making me coffee.
As if that way they wouldn't show him the sadness.
"That's the problem. Everyone under the age of 35 was raised by Hamas," says Itush, who serves me a nice espresso.
"Let's talk like leftists for a moment, and believe me I'm not, with their interpretation of the Koran it's clear to me that I can't live together with them.
"This stupidity of investing all the money in tunnels instead of development makes me angry, but there are two million people here who have been bombarded for 15 years. Sometimes 24 hours a day. They are the ones who endanger and they are the ones who hate Hamas more than you. Hamas is really hurting them, not you. When it's over and Hamas disappears, they'll tell us, 'Are you idiots?! For 20 years they've been slaughtering us, raping us, stealing from us - why didn't you help us?'"
Take the gun out of the safe
Even the horror of the seas can't match the beauty of the place where Eyal arrived with a Magnus sled at the height of the rain.
Green carpets are a reward for their winter in the region, which in the 1980s knew no law and order and no fences, only the Bedouin who saw them and their ilk as invading their property, sometimes also an unwanted interference with smuggling routes.
A kind of Wild West where the first settlers built infrastructure, fended for themselves for life on this beautiful land.
The two wrote letters to obtain permits for the farm and pasture, but no one answered, and Eyal, like other farmers in Moshav Dekal, started growing flowers.
At the end of two years, when he had already stopped waiting, the approval came and with it the stipulation that he must obtain a herd within three months.
And he, a marine biologist, who knew nothing about farm animals, found himself with an area of nearly 7,000 dunams and with 40 sheep.
The flock of sheep grew and improved, in 1997 the Gileadites also began raising cattle.
The first time I got there, when I stood with Itush on the hill, behind us Nahal Hashur and in front of a cattle pen stretching from horizon to threshold, it reminded me of a scene from a western, just before the bad guys or the good guys ride in to frighten the silence.
"I just wanted to dance."
Itamar (Itush) Gilad, photo: Eric Sultan
On October 6, before a hellfire broke through everything, Eyal and his wife went to a memorial in the north.
Tal and the children were in the seat, Itush finished his Friday dinner and went out with a couple of friends to dance in Nova.
"On Saturday, at 06:29, I see three Kasams among the trees, and I just want to keep dancing," he recalls, and in his beautiful eyes you can go back for a moment to the joy that was there.
"A minute after that I see thousands of missiles in the sky and I say 'Fuck! This is the big war. We've been waiting for it for a long time, we knew it would come.' Let's go back to dancing. She looks at me like I'm drugged."
In the midst of the excited chaos came the phone call that saved their lives.
"My friend's daughter, 12 years old, who was at home with two younger sisters, called him and said, 'Dad, we're at the hospital and I'm shaking.'
And she doesn't tremble at anything, she grew red all her life.
He said to me 'Itush, I'm going home'.
"I hallucinate what was there. Thousands of people running everywhere and screaming about nothing. There are no terrorists, no red paint. A girl is hugging a fence, screaming, and I tell her 'everything is fine, it's above us, it's shooting to the north. Comical!'
A man with tattoos hugs a eucalyptus tree with his nails stuck in the trunk. Next to him, his friend tries to convince him to come. 'Uri, come Uri.' If you're scared, lie down in the wadi.' No one listens. Nine minutes of everything I describe to you until I'm on the main road, driving relatively slowly, taking pictures of the missiles. My sister is calling because there's a rumor of a massacre at a Nova party. 'Let go,' I say. To her, 'everyone there is turned on'".
When he still does not understand what is happening, Itush decides to go to the farm first, to calm the Thais down.
This veteran is not found on Saturdays and there is one who just arrived from Thailand and he must be scared and confused.
Only when he arrived at the farm and reports began to arrive from the emergency room of Ein Hashur and calls for the doctor to come to the secretariat because there were wounded, he began to understand.
But then a war is already raging on the road and he can't get to Tal and the children, so he calls her to take the gun out of the safe and asks his Jonathan to explain to his mother how to step on a gun, like he learned from video games."
A prisoner for nine hours
We drive through the farm when Itush says that God took care of him that day.
In the corral, piles of beets and potatoes offer themselves to cows and calves.
Some of them, frightened by the war, came into the world prematurely, but now, it seems, they have all gotten used to it.
"I was definitely being watched from above. The whole time. From the moment I left the party. I was a few minutes ahead of the terrorists without knowing they were coming. If I had delayed five minutes, there would already be 80 terrorists here at the intersection.
"When I arrived, the Thai told me that he was with the sheep by the road and saw Four white vans with a lot of policemen on them.
After them, he explained, seven motorcycles passed and the last one that passed shot him with a rifle.
He demonstrated to me how we lay down on the dog, and how the sheep got scared and ran away.
He explained that the policeman must not have wanted him to approach the road with the sheep.
And the second verb translates and laughs, because even in Thailand policemen don't just shoot like that."
Itamar "Itush" Gilad: "From the moment I left the party, I was a few minutes ahead of the terrorists without knowing they were coming. If I had delayed five minutes, there would have been 80 terrorists here at the intersection."
Itush, who has known operations for 15 years, calculated that 40 minutes had passed since the Thai had seen the terrorists and that soon the IDF would take a helicopter into the sky and shoot at them. Most of them would be hit, but others would flee to the vantage points, hide in the orchards that surround the farm or among the reeds in the stream. The imagination began to run wild
He went up to the hayloft, hides among the bales of straw and watches the prey of the world, thinks about how he will return to the party to save people, and about the weapon he didn't get, and wishes he had now. He hides the cell phone under the sleeping bag, so they won't see the light
.
It was a night from hell, crazy heat, mosquitoes ate him - and endless shooting.
In the morning, straw and itchy bites all over the body, the excited Thai came to him, announcing that there was an Arab at the gate.
"I am the only citizen in the State of Israel who owned a prisoner for nine hours," he tells what he had not told before, adding that all he was interested in was that he would reveal to him where he hid his weapon, because on Sunday morning, in the surrounding settlements, the hunger for weapons prevailed over everything.
He didn't tell him where the Arab weapon was, only that his name was Khaled, a chubby man around 50 years old. When I ask if he entered with all the lust for revenge, if he thought of killing him, Itush seems almost surprised.
"When you grow up with animals, death is part of your life, but you don't do anything on purpose. An animal will only kill if it's hungry. And yet, when they came from the Shin Bet, one of the investigators said he was reporting on me."
What was the whistleblower about?
"I asked. They didn't say. There was only one thing I could think of. I told him to undress and tied him with a rope. I gave him water, I smoked a cigarette with him, shacht by shacht, and when I applied iodine to his wound I put it on myself first, so he wouldn't think I was poisoning him or something.
"Maybe he thought he was dealing with a sucker, so he asked me to drive the flies away from him. It made me cry. All my life I've been surrounded by flies and I've never complained. So I broke an egg on him. Let him see what flies are. That's the only thing I did wrong."
Kind of wild west.
"Mekna Dekal" farm, photo: Eric Sultan
Itush says that for two weeks he walked around the area like a sheriff, participating in the search for survivors, but when darkness fell he would start shaking.
He built a hiding place in the haystack, spent one night in the Thais' quarters because their dogs guard better.
He slept there on a mattress that no one had slept on for 20 years, he woke up in the morning with pieces of crumbling sponge in his nostrils.
"After two weeks, two 17-year-old girls from Samaria came to work here, to help me with the litters. I told them to sleep in straw because it's scary here at night, and they said, 'Excuse me?! We came to work here, you are the owner, you have to instill confidence in us. They stopped my tremors.' ".
Since then he has been sleeping in the farmhouse.
Tal doesn't come, still scared.
When one of his daughters came to help with the flock, he went to Be'er Sheva to get her.
Sometimes, on the way, the tears come.
He's lost so many people in the last few months, and this soon-to-be 46-year-old man who never cried says he's now grateful for that release.
And when I ask if he's angry, he says he's only angry at one person, but he doesn't know who he is.
"I am angry at whoever took the weapons from all the fighters in the area."
Get lost in the anger
The rabbis in Otef went out to demonstrate at the time about the decision to collect the weapons, they tell me around the table at Havat Tsan. Havah felt that her days were going back to the 1960s, when the beautiful Ruth, who was born in Jerusalem, arrived for a year of service at Kibbutz Magen and put her heart into that of Haim Nebo, who worked as an employee in the kibbutz's farm. From this love story the farm was born next to Highway 232, not far from Nahal Hashur, where the two pitched a tent and began cultivating the good loess soil of the northern Negev. They traveled by horse harnessed to a cart, without running water or electricity, and grazed a herd sheep for meat.
In 1971, the eldest daughter, Tzala, was born, and the tent was for the bus and the couple was for the family.
A year after that Eshel was born, the earth grew, the sheep raised meat, until life was torn apart when Chaim died.
A savvy hobbyist came to this farm in 1975.
A young man born to immigrants from Germany who grew up in Rishon Lezion, and after the army he informed his parents that they would get him a horse, because he was going to start a farm.
When he returned home, a broom stick with a wooden horse's head was waiting for him, and he realized that this dream would have to run on its own.
When he heard that there was a farm in the northern Negev that was looking for working hands, he made a deal with Ruth that the work would pay him bataliyas that one day, he thought, would raise his herd.
But the heart has its own plans, and to this day Hovav remembers the conversation in which he informed Ruth that he had to leave because he was falling in love with her, and he even wanted to have his own farm in the north.
In the end he didn't go anywhere, he became a second father to Tzala and Ashel, the farm grew and became established, the bus was at home, and two more children were added to the family, Nirit and Avihai, who, like Tzala, still live on the farm today.
Each of them established a home and a family there, and only Eshel, who fell in love with an Australian farm girl, built a life far from the Negev.
"Just here - something opens."
From the right: Hovav, Tzala, Raviv and Nirit at "Havat Tsan", photo: Eric Sultan
A cold wind blows on the balcony of the house.
Ruth went to run errands and a lover rushes to the train.
His arm is bandaged.
"Stupid bike accident," he says, "I was sure you had a fight," I reply.
It was close, it turns out.
On Saturday morning, when the sky was raging and news of terrorist infiltration began to arrive, the children with Tzala entered the shelter and the men of the farm, armed with guns, split up to protect her. Raviv, Nirit's husband, on the west side, Amnon, Tzala's husband, on the roof , from where he would later see three terrorists on civilians on the way to the farm, whom they caught and handed over to the army. In Otef, it turns out, there were quite a few terrorists who, as the hours passed, felt that their lives were in danger and took off their uniforms, got rid of their weapons and said something about the fact that they had come to look for work. Hovav, who left by car On the north side, he was mistakenly identified as a terrorist, and a few moments of massive shooting passed until the emergency room of Ein Hashur was called to say that there was a mistake in the identification. He miraculously survived.
Nirit even danced at a nature party in the Arabah, and when the alarms started she told everyone that it was nothing and that they wouldn't stop the music.
She is a kindergartner on sabbatical year, a wash of rest will no longer come out of her.
A beautiful woman who nothing about her or her vibe can tell that they are around the age of 50. He is a safe ben who was a DJ at her Bat Mitzvah and occasionally, on Friday evenings, still plays at the parties they have in their yard for friends.
"It hurt me the most when Raviv told me he wasn't sure he wanted to come back here," she says.
"We travel a lot, in Israel and abroad, but when I just start getting closer to home - something opens up.
There is no place that compares to sitting on my balcony.
there are no such things.
No abroad and no nothing. When I wandered between friends' houses at the beginning of the war, from Makmurut to Eilat, I just wanted to come here."
And the children are not afraid to return?
"On the contrary," the two sisters answer me at once.
To sum up what I understood on the balcony at the sheep farm, individual farms are nobody's children.
"Maybe the fact that we don't appear on the map saved us. Maybe that's why the terrorists didn't enter here, not even after they were repelled at the gate of Ein Hashur which is next to us," says Tzala, who for years operated a small shop with a cafe on the farm, selling her cheeses alongside the produce of the region .
In Corona, when I got there for the first time, she was selling picnic baskets.
Now it is the army that sits in the building and it is forbidden to approach, certainly not to take pictures.
She says that their father always said that one day there would be an infiltration of terrorists through the tunnels, "but then they blew them up and built a fence that seemed to calm us down. I am angry with myself that for years I sent my children to study in schools located three and a half kilometers from the border fence."
Nirit from "Sheep Farm": "We travel a lot, in Israel and abroad, but there is no place that compares to sitting on my balcony.
When I wandered at the beginning of the war between friends' houses, from Makmurut to Eilat, I just wanted to come here"
Raviv says he knows how to get angry at one person.
"I get angry, I break down and it passes, I move on," he explains, "but in this story there is so much to be angry about, that it is something you get lost in."
There is really no one who was responsible for the safety of the farm people on October 7th.
There is also no one who cares about them now, in all the media in front of the institutions.
They evacuated themselves, they are the ones who take care of dispersing children in boarding schools, some to the one that the Eshkol council established in Ein Gedi, some in Eilat, some in Sde Boker and some in Kfar Hirok.
They're on their own, that's part of the deal in this way of life.
And I think of all the grandchildren of the beautiful Ruth, who wrote a love scroll in the northern Negev, and of her grandchildren, who grew up together, inside this farm, and now they are part of the big bang that scattered the children of the Otaf.
An explosion in which even those who choose to return home cannot, because the schools have not yet opened in the entire region.
Workers who became family.
Thais at "Sheep Farm", photo: Eric Sultan
The sun begins to fade and the cold bites as we walk through the farm, between the barn and the cultivated fields.
Menacing rain from the sky and from the eyes when names and faces come up.
People who are part of their community.
Those who were lost, those who are dying inside Gaza.
And suddenly I see him, a rusty bus planted in the green flu, which decades ago came to this earth together with love, and never left it anywhere.
Fear of an open window
The road from Beshor to the Bolotin farm passes through the Gilat intersection, where the sky is filled with incense from barbecues that citizens spread in honor of the soldiers.
Massage stations, a traveling library, who asked to put on tefillin and didn't get one?!
Human generosity at its peak.
Those who are looking for God will find it further, further down the road from which you descend into the chamokis overlooking the past on the slopes of Nahal Patish, where the sun arranges for a spectacular sunset show over a patch of cacti.
Thorny columns rise high, soon their flowers will open in pink and white.
Each flower will bloom for one night and fall to the ground, the one covered with black flower bodies that remind me of fish.
Kubo is the name of the fruit of this cactus, which Danden Bolotin knew during the years he spent researching Indian medicinal plants in the Amazon.
A botanist, biologist, sought-after lecturer and tour guide who doesn't have a television in his house, but one season in "Survival" made him a star, taught him a lesson about human nature.
Spectacular sunset show.
Bolotin Farm, photo: Eric Sultan
Beautiful meknaf trees and albizia are carried to a height, olive vines that have not long since taken off and the oil stopped from them, flowers everywhere, and as much as one tries one cannot imagine the aridity of the summer that waited there about 30 years ago, so Danden and Lilac Levy chose this land, to plant a farm for the treatment of wild animals .
Deer, wolves, birds of prey, moose, caracals and other wild animals are gathered here to recover and get stronger, until they are returned to the wild.
In the meantime, they walk in the paradise that the couple grew, like a magnificent continuation of the animal corner that Bolotin set up when he was still a child, in an abandoned slaughterhouse in Tel Aviv.
The city where he grew up, where he met Lilach, a prima ballerina in Bat Dor, who was then at the end of her dancing career.
"For 17 years she worked with me here without running water and electricity, holding and digging the soil until she got fed up, decided she wanted to be a psychologist. Now she has a clinic in Be'er Sheva," he says about the love of his heart.
At first they left the apartment in Tel Aviv, which they would have for recreation when they came to the center to visit their parents, but very quickly they found themselves returning home each time, to the northern Negev, where the four children were born and where they began to cultivate agricultural areas and hospitality complexes.
"I'm interested in nature conservation."
Danden Bolotin at the farm, photo: Eric Sultan
Havat Havit Chaifat Haim and Permits knows that eventually the stage will come when it will be required to open its doors for hospitality.
Danden, who has been in and out of offices for years, is intimately familiar with the nature of promises given by officials and MKs, so he hastened to replace it with a B&B, a cabin and a khan, which are scattered around the area and surround the animal pens, the heart of the place.
"I am interested in the preservation of nature. I sit on a huge area that I am obliged to preserve", he believes wholeheartedly that it is the individual farms in the northern Negev that preserve nature.
Surfaces are prevented from turning into a dump, from motorcycles digging up the soil, destroying every animal and bird in it.
God of War ran and on October 7 was on a trip to Madagascar.
This is not the first time that a shooting starts and he is somewhere with stuttered reception.
"Lilac called and said that there were rockets, that people were leaving the B&Bs, that rockets fell on the farm and that I should tell Eytam, our son, not to go put out the fires. After that, messages started coming from people asking us to pick up their children who ran away from the party, and I don't understand why anyone would want to run away in the middle of a party ".
Wild animal care.
Deer at the Bolotin farm, photo: Eric Sultan
The group returned to Israel, two more days passed before he got a ticket for himself.
Lilac, between Zoom lectures, says that in all these days there was only one moment she was afraid - when she found the window of the house open.
"We never leave a window open and I knew there were terrorists in the area, I thought maybe someone had entered and I didn't find their seal."
After that tell me that Danden's mother, Señora Bolotin, who is the mythical teacher who taught the children of Tel Aviv Italian, learned not to be afraid.
"This woman, who raised three crazy sons in a row, taught me that there is no point in worrying. Now is the safest time, because now no one is walking around or dares to do nonsense."
Lilac, a woman of torches, does not like the exposure.
Asks if we need anything else before she disappears back into one of the rooms.
Danden Bolotin: "Lilac called and said that they were leaving the B&Bs, that rockets fell on the farm. People asked us to pick up their children from the party, and I don't understand why anyone would want to run away in the middle of a party."
Danden tells me how two days after he came back he had to fly again, this time to sail in Antarctica.
The whole group canceled, except for one couple, who insisted.
The company said they would understand if he canceled, but Lilac told him to go.
After all, a living.
A lesson on human nature.
Bolotin Farm, photo: Eric Sultan
It was the grace of nature that shortened the trip, brought him home quickly after a huge wave hit the ship.
"Wild waves, these waves are called. A wave catches a wave and another wave and together they arrive at a crazy wave that crashes in the middle of the sea. They used to say to sailors who described such waves that they drank too much rum. Its blow woke me up in the middle of the night and at first I thought it was a missile, until I remembered where I am".
Are you surprised by what happened on the 7th?
"From the size, of course. Our eldest daughter, Ofek, was an observer of the sweepstakes. I once came to visit her and asked, 'What do you do if a hundred Palestinians come to the fence now?' With a disc saw, with a shovel. For years I've been begging for a long rifle and I've been told that 'a gun is good enough' and that 'if something happens, call the police'. Today you can't say that anymore."
Between prayer and faith
We spent that night in a B&B where we arrived accompanied by the family's dogs and a few goats.
The warrior, who maintained relative restraint throughout the day, did not stop pounding all night.
From time to time she shook the walls of the bed and breakfast, as if trying to compose the word as crushing.
When the morning rose we followed Danden to the accommodation complex, the one we saw yesterday from afar, you can see the damage left behind by the missiles.
The ceiling that collapsed in the yoga space, the irrigation pipes that caught fire, the place where he plans to build a urinal facing the view of Nahal Patish, the stairs that were once used as the lifeguard's arbor at Mitzim beach, the chairs with the copper wheels that were discarded from a nursing home and the wooden door from the villa in Ra'anana that passed renovation.
Every piece of furniture and new life he got instead.
I stood there and prayed that by the end of February, when the anemones bloom, this damn war would be over, and that in honor of my birthday I would go there with the children and they too would see this piece of God, meet the Bolotons and maybe even cook in their honor.
And maybe Danden will also let them taste the eggplants he misses and the fermented cocoa he brings from his travels, which has something reminiscent of balsamic vinegar.
And there, with a happy mouth, in front of an incomparably beautiful view, faith will come to them, my children, in this land.
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