On October 7, the whole country was shocked by the battle.
We didn't believe it.
We underestimated.
We thought it was fake news - but it happened.
While we are burying the dead, trying to understand who was kidnapped in Gaza and who is still missing and trying to digest horror videos that burned us - we begin to come out of the shock and understand and discover that the writing was actually on the wall.
I have lived in Kibbutz Nir Am, which surrounds Gaza, for more than 15 years, and manage two "Sushimoto" restaurants in the south - one in Sderot and the other in Yavne.
That's where my wife and I built our home and raised our three children until about four months ago.
At the moment, against our will, we have become non-full-fledged Tel Avivians.
Even though the municipality of Tel Aviv and its residents give us a warm and loving hug - we miss home.
But what is home actually?
Will we be able to live there again?
Is it even responsible as a parent to go back and raise his children in the same place we call home?
I have been asked several times in the past, long before October 7, why do you live in the south?
And I always answered that it is because I believe that change will come, and that if not there - then nowhere in the country.
Because a citizen in the State of Israel should feel safe anywhere in the country.
We don't live beyond the green line, and shouldn't have Molotov cocktails and rocket fire.
To all the articles in the Kool project that wraps up
to return home, not only me, but the whole country needs to sober up from the naivety it has fallen into.
I don't mean the concept or the people we are dealing with on the other side.
I mean the naivety among us, the one that brought upon us the most terrible disaster in the history of the country and the one that will bring upon us, if we do not sober up immediately, an even greater destruction and disaster.
How will it be possible to return to the surrounding settlements if we do not settle the internal conflict?/Uri Sela
The voice of the envelope!/Photo processing, photo: Ziv Reinstein, Studio Walla!
October 7th is just a symptom, just as the legal reform is a symptom, just as endless election rounds are a symptom of the true and more rooted problem - our identity crisis.
It is nice and beautiful to shout "it's us or them" towards the Gazans, when we are not closed about "it's us or them" within Israeli society.
How can you even expect the government of a country, still relatively young and full of conflicting desires, to formulate a policy towards something?
Certainly not security policies or obvious war goals.
We have been trying to avoid settling these gaps since the establishment of the state.
At first, we may not have felt it because there was one channel and hegemony was in control, but it was always there - an identity crisis that we avoided addressing.
Like a smoker who is aware of the self-harm of his actions and postpones the break until "tomorrow", so we ignored the dangers and postponed the end until we got black lungs in the form of sooty houses in Otaf settlements.
In order for me to be able to return home and live there, I need the State of Israel to immediately wean itself from its addiction to "togetherness against the enemy" - and find and redefine its "togetherness" itself.
You are the common denominator that connects us so that we really win.
For this to happen, the objectives of the war should become the return of the abductees all point.
We will come back and overthrow the Hamas government later.
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Nir Shohat, Kibbutz Niram/Courtesy of those photographed
For 20 years we sat on the fence, neither here nor there - until one morning it was breached, and we were slaughtered/Uri Sela
To that end, we must resolve the identity crisis between us, and understand what a Jewish-democratic state actually is and how the two values coexist.
After 75 years, we have reached an age where we need to decide what defines us as a people, so that we can create a policy towards the threats beyond the fence.
For two decades the State of Israel failed to produce a policy with the purpose of firing at Hamas, only protection and more protection.
For 20 years we sat on the fence, neither here nor there - until one morning it was breached, and they massacred us.
Now, in order for us to go back to living at home, I not only need to feel that the Otaf is the most protected and safest place in the country, I need, in fact must know that a clear policy has been formulated.
I really don't care so much what it will be, all-out war or a political agreement.
The main thing is not to sit on the fence.
More on the same topic:
the enveloping voice
Gaza war
War of Iron Swords