The flag at half-mast, the national anthem quietly sung: The kibbutz of Sha’Ar Hagolan (central east), like the approximately 270 others in Israel, expressed its mourning on Thursday at 6 p.m. for the communities in the south of the country decimated by Hamas attackers last weekend .
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Several dozen people sang Hatikva in the setting sun with palpable emotion, some participants crying, others hugging each other, AFP reported.
The ceremony, which took place simultaneously in all of Israel’s kibbutzim, was intended to show “mourning” and “solidarity with the kibbutzim” in southern Israel, but also “to give each other strength and show that we are together,” said Gali Dror. a senior Sha’Ar Hagolan executive told AFP.
Several families came from kibbutzim in northern Israel, where they were evacuated out of fear of attacks by the Lebanese Hezbollah. Others came from the south, some traumatized after managing to flee communities targeted by Hamas.
According to Dror, Sha’Ar Hagolan, with its 500 residents, has welcomed around 150 displaced “kibbutzines” from the north and south of Israel since Saturday.
The kibbutzim were founded by Zionist European Jews who settled in Ottoman Palestine, then under the British mandate. They have long represented the dynamism of the State of Israel, which was proclaimed in 1948.
Until the 1980s, its residents shared everything and the concept of private property did not exist. This cooperative and egalitarian system, heavily indebted in the 1990s, took a more liberal turn in the early 20th century.
Last June, Gil Lin, CEO of the Kibbutz Industry Association, an organization that brings together and represents kibbutzim, estimated that they still accounted for 40% of the country’s agricultural production and 11% of its industry.
The kibbutzim were “all built on the borders of Israel” because the Zionists believed that “we cannot have a border if no one lives there and no one farms the land there,” said Gali Dror.
“There is a saying in Israel that says: If you turn off all the lights in the country and only those in the kibbutz remain on, you see the map of Israel, a map of lights,” continues the 41-year-old woman.
And this mother of four breaks down: “But now some of those lights are out in the south.”
According to local authorities, around 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, were killed in the Hamas offensive and more than 1,400 Palestinians were killed in retaliatory strikes in the Gaza Strip.
Among the Israeli victims were more than 200 people, many of them children, who were killed in two kibbutzim, in Be’Eri and Kfar Aza, a few kilometers from the Gaza Strip.