Is this the predictable denouement of a struggle for survival that was inevitably going to involve heartbreaking numbers of civilian casualties and suffering, and the resulting criticism? Or is it the product of a war waged with such heedlessness toward humanitarian concerns that Israel has squandered whatever public sympathy was initially inclined in its direction?
Is this the bitter fruit of years of Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians and mistaken policies in the disputed territories? Or does it reflect the ugly reality that much of the world has never accepted the existence of Israel as a Jewish state?
A short visit — I came here on a trip organized by my synagogue — cannot answer these questions. But it does suggest a different, and more layered, perspective than from the comfort of the suburban Maryland kitchen table from which I ordinarily write.
To visit the sites of the Oct. 7 atrocities, as well as to speak with survivors, feels as gut-wrenching as visiting a concentration camp, but it’s as though the Holocaust were only months in the past, and the enemy as yet undefeated.
To bear witness is to come to a nearly deserted Kfar Aza, the kibbutz just a few miles from the Gaza border, with the smoky skyline of Gaza City visible past the barbed-wire gate and empty fields. It is to see the youth dormitories pockmarked with bullet holes and burned by Hamas terrorists — and to understand how shattering Oct. 7 was even for those who had become inured to rocket fire and warning sirens.
It is to meet with a farmer who displays the chair, broken by rambunctious grandchildren and stashed in a Kfar Aza safe room, that saved his family. On Oct. 7, the farmer’s son jammed the chair under the handle of the door of the safe room, designed to protect against rocket attacks, not terrorists in the house.
Elsewhere in the kibbutz, his son’s brother- and sister-in-law were not so lucky. The terrorists murdered them — and his son has now adopted their 10-month-old twins, who remained safely out of the line of fire, crying together in a single crib before being rescued 14 hours after the attack began.
And it is to come here to Re’im, the site of the music festival where 364 concertgoers were murdered, and walk among the individual memorials to each of them, 364 saplings planted in their memory.
It is to light yahrzeit memorial candles and recite Kaddish for the dead underneath a grove of olive trees, with the intermittent boom of Israeli artillery shells sounding unnervingly nearby, and to recognize: This threat is not remote — it is palpable and accompanied by anxiety over the potential for an even more dangerous war erupting on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon.
None of this dictates answers, but it provides essential context about the degree to which Israelis experienced Oct. 7 as a threat to their existence and continue to believe their country will remain in peril if the enterprise of destroying Hamas’s military capabilities is left unfinished.
At home, I mourn the deaths of innocents, especially children. I worry that the toll of casualties, whatever the correct number and whatever the mix of terrorists and civilians, has become too great to accept as moral and justified. I understand concerns about humanitarian assistance being diverted to help Hamas, but I fear that Israel’s stance has been unnecessarily counterproductive — even before the horrific killing of the World Central Kitchen workers who were feeding Gazans.
Here in Israel, my worries remain, but they are tinged by the understanding of how vulnerable this tiny country is and how present the threat. On the surface, much of ordinary life has resumed, but with a mournful pall. On Easter weekend, Jerusalem’s Old City, normally thronged with pilgrims, was disquietingly empty.
Tens of thousands of Israelis are still displaced from their homes near Gaza and the border with Lebanon, many living in hotel rooms. “Have you recognized how sad we all are?” asked one Israeli friend. People profess optimism but ask a few questions, and it is hard not to hear the lingering anxiety and trauma.
Some surprises, both welcome and disappointing, about the Israeli response:
On the positive side, I was not prepared for the gratitude that members of the Israeli public would express to us Americans simply for visiting. This reaction — we had done nothing to merit praise beyond a long plane ride — occurred across the political spectrum, from what remains of the Israeli left to more conservative precincts, and most unsettling of all, it included soldiers thanking us for our non-service. But it illustrated Israel’s deepening sense of isolation — including, most disturbingly, from American Jews.
On the less attractive side, I did not realize the extent to which the Israeli public resists providing humanitarian aid to Gaza while the hostages remain in captivity. From the moment you deplane, you see posters of the hostages’ faces, so many, so young and so old, under the banner of “Bring Them Home.” Though missing, they are everywhere.
This has brought out the worst in the Israeli public, with some protesters going so far as to block aid convoys. An overwhelming majority of Israeli Jews say the suffering of civilians in Gaza should be taken into account to a small extent or not at all — a hardening of the heart that, to me, feels fundamentally un-Jewish.
And yet, to be here, to witnesses the effectively zero degrees of separation between the public and the hostages, is to better understand the imperative to do whatever it takes to bring them home now — Achshav! — even if that means inflicting suffering on other innocents.
So, I am haunted by that phrase: “existential loneliness.” Few other countries have had to worry, for so long and with such new intensity, about their very survival. Few have felt so isolated in that enterprise.
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