By Howard Feldman, Synthesis
I have just returned from having spent six days in Israel. It was my first trip since the 7 October attack, and I wanted to see it for myself. With media focus largely on the situation in Gaza, I felt a need to understand what impact the war was having on Israel and its citizens. I did not visit Gaza as I would not have been allowed to enter the war zone, but I did speak to both Jews and non-Jews on the Israel side of the border.
It was an enormously difficult week.
Although a significant amount of my family was killed in the holocaust, I have never had the courage to visit the death camps in Poland. I have always felt too afraid to confront the horror of those events. And yet in the Gaza envelope, the area of the Hamas attacks, I felt as close to the holocaust as I have ever been.
I visited three of kibbutzim. One had managed to repel the onslaught, while the other two had not. In each place I met with survivors who painfully took me through the events. The most challenging for me was Be eri where our guide explained how four Hamas operatives attacked each house.
He explained how the tried to breach the “safe room” that each home has because of the constant rockets they endure from Gaza; and when they couldn’t get in, how they spread accelerants in the house and then rolled burning tyres, so that the family would either burn to death or vacate the room. Those who did, were either tortured and then murdered or taken as hostages back into Gaza.
He played us a voice note of a 13-year-old girl as she pleads for help from the outside, her mother and father having been shot. Her desperation was one of the most terrible things I have heard. To make it worse, we stood in the very same room in which she recorded them. I looked at the burned roof that she would have looked at while she begged for assistance.
The Nova music festival might have been worse. The death of 300 plus festival attendees and the rape and brutality is contrasted by the red flowers that were in bloom when I visited. Add the constant gun fire and explosions from not far, over the border, and the experience was surreal.
I met with a volunteer from an organisation called ZAKA, tasked with collecting the human remains of the victims. When I asked him about the confusion in the media about the beheading of babies, he looked at me, raised his arms and said: “These hands carried mutilated and burned babies, some of whom had been beheaded.” He didn’t care if there was denial and in understood on some level why this was the case. It was so evil that it made sense that we wouldn’t believe that man was capable of this.
I met with families of hostages who will do anything to get their loved ones back and who are tormented each moment by what is happening to them in the tunnels of Gaza. I also met with Aviva Seigel, a South African, who herself was a prisoner for more than 50 days and whose husband Keith remains there. She just wants him back alive. They anticipated living out their senior years in the relaxed agricultural community and not being dragged into Gaza as hostages.
Over the few days I met with members of the media, with government spokesperson Eylon Levy, with senior officers running the war campaign, including Brigadier General Dan Goldfuss, visited three different army bases, one of which was the rescue helicopter division. I met with Bedouins who risked their lives to save as many people as they could on 7 October and who continue to fight for Israel. We heard story after story of the events of the day and how the horror unfolded.
But it was the day spent in the Gaza envelope that gave me some of the perspective that I have, until now been lacking.
This was not a terror attack.
It was a full-scale invasion. It was meticulously planned and executed. Sixty sites were hit simultaneously, including army bases and police stations. In some cases, the kibbutzim were cut off, making it enormously difficult to reach, even had the army been not fighting their own battle. Three thousand Hamas operatives descended on a sleepy area where rifles were locked in the armories. The brutality and scale of the murders at the Nova musical festival added to the chaos and the confusion.
From the most senior officer to the person in the streets there is widespread recognition that there was a massive systems failure that resulted in the invasion. Person after person recounted the day and the process that they went through as recognition slowly dawned on them as to how horrible this was.
I asked Keith Isaacson, the man who heads up the security of the Eshkol region: “What can you do to make residents of the South feel secure, so that they will be able and confident to return and to rebuild?” His answer was not one that I was expecting. “Take away the word ‘feel’. It is not about feeling secure. It is about being secure. The residents felt secure before 7 October. It didn’t help them,” He said. When I asked what went wrong, his emotions and language expressed a heaviness that I know will never leave him.
A responsibility that although not all his, will be felt by for the rest of his days.
Israelis are shell shocked. They have been let down by a government who promise them security. But they are also resilient and determined and more united than I have seen them. They feel for innocent Palestinians who are as much a victim of Hamas as they are, but are enormously angry at South Africa and the ANC for enabling Hamas.
The suffering in Gaza and in Israel is not to be underestimated. This is a region and people in pain. The only way forward is for Hamas to return the Israeli hostages and to hand over power. Gaza needs to be rebuilt. Money needs to be monitored and not used for terror infrastructure and Gaza needs to be governed by Palestinians who care more for their own people than they do for killing Jews.
I am aware that much of the above will be denied and justified. I am aware that because I am a Jew and Zionist, I will be discredited. But denial won’t make it less true. It won’t make it go away. It won’t heal the pain. And more than that, it will do nothing to assist the Palestinian people.