In the video: The last residents are evacuated from Sderot/Yinir Yagana
It is not customary in TV reviews, but I would like to start with a greeting: congratulations to Roni Mishderot, for the Bat Mitzvah.
May you have years of joy and health, success and confidence.
Don't be afraid to return home and don't live under the threat of alarms.
You deserve much better.
I think that everyone who watched you last night, in Tamir Steinman's article in the edition of News 12, wished you the same thing in their hearts.
A girl celebrating a Bat Mitzvah is not a news story in a normal country.
Not in a national edition nor in a local one.
In Israel such articles are for some reason widespread, and not for good reasons.
Usually, this is something that is put at the end of the edition to somehow end on a good note, a kind of kitsch pill that will soothe the headache that is life in Israel in the year 2024. Usually, this is the product of an inferior journalistic genre, a waste of the public's screen time at worst, time check messages on the phone at best.
Usually.
But every rule has an exception.
Yesterday's article, just a few minutes long, was not some kind of saccharine candy to soothe the wounds.
On the contrary: she is a social indictment.
She is a vivid illustration of the impossible reality in which boys and girls grow up in the Gaza Envelope, in the past and since October 7 in particular.
She is an illustration of the courage and strength of 12-year-old girls who grow up during war.
To the huge injustice done to them by their country, which suppresses all this, and to solidarity and friendship, the only values that still hold this place from lacrosse.
You can cry in front of the screen, you can rage, you can go crazy.
comfort?
impossible.
Steinman and Roni at the Bat Mitzvah/screenshot, News 12
Roni was evacuated with her family after October 7 from Sderot to Kfar Maccabiah, where she celebrated her Bat Mitzvah.
This is not the first time she and Steinman have met.
He interviewed her exactly four years ago, not long before Purim 555. Then, as an eight-year-old girl, she told him how afraid she was of the alarms. She then bought a "Wonder Woman" costume, perhaps to feel strong and resistant to danger. While they talk , a red alarm sounds. Again, the only moment in which one can fantasize about strength and security - is interrupted by the impatient reality.
Now they have met again, and this time, too, what should be a completely normal celebration - navigates in impossible conditions. From the fresh trauma from Black Saturday ("I saw full Killed, friends, family," said Roni, "It's like my whole black dream, in one day"), until the party itself - far from home, in temporary residences, and especially without the friends who were evacuated to Eilat, and whom Roni has not seen for months. The event is held with the help of Good people, but the joy wasn't complete until the best friend came as a surprise. Roni can't hold back the tears from excitement, and it's really a moving moment. It's far from the most moving scene of the last months, but actually it's the result of everything, the story of the nut shell wrapper This is what "the day after" will look like for us: even months after the catastrophe, the fight for normal life, for every moment of sanity, continues more and more all the time.
More in Walla!
In an evening full of tears, the article by Amit Segal and Ben Caspit was particularly poignant
To the full article
Steinman describes it with the words "for one evening to put aside the pain".
Why should a 12-year-old girl find one evening without pain?
How is that even possible?
It only makes sense in a country that abandoned its citizens for years, allowed a routine of death to hover over them until it exploded last October in an ever more terrifying stream of violence.
It's easy to think of October 7 as a one-time catastrophe in the lives of the residents of the Western Negev, a hell that surfaced for a moment and disappeared, but that's not true - it's just the culmination of many years under constant threat, constant fear of death, and trauma upon trauma upon trauma .
Think of a normal growing up, a succession of happy days, and now dip them in this pool until you discover that it stains every such moment.
A wonderful life is coming to the lovely Roni and her family.
Her Bat Mitzvah should have been broadcast during peak viewing time.
Escapism?
This is not a suppression pill, on the contrary.
She is a small reminder, from the very wise eyes of a girl celebrating a Bat Mitzvah, that we once promised Yona.
in small:
Last night "The Next Star" tried to forcefully press the tear gland in a special that included videos for the contestants during the performance.
In such terrible days, there was something rough about this experience.
Thank you very much, we don't need to be spoon fed.
Prefer to be excited by the performance, not by this very unrefined manipulation.
The evening was over, the performance was over, and right after that came a punch in the stomach.
The program aired early auditions of three contestants, who were murdered in Nova not long after.
In the presence of their parents, the videos were shown, with a few words about each of them.
So talented, so full of life, so many dreams that didn't come true.
The family of one of them placed his picture on an empty chair.
And in the face of this absence, the magnitude of the loss is revealed.
After a long evening of talks and greetings and hugs and Eurovision and nonsense, it was really the moment when there was nothing left but to cry bitterly.
More on the same topic:
Tamir Steinman
Sderot
the next star