In recent days, many videos have become symbols of the catastrophe that has struck Israel. Two of them attract particular attention. In the first, the viewer is blinded by a striking orange: Shiri Bibas and her two red-haired sons, wrapped in a blanket, are filmed on video as they are kidnapped to Gaza. The second shows an older woman, also wrapped in a blanket, looking cautiously, surrounded by a group of euphoric young Palestinians driving a golf cart typically used by old kibbutzniks.
“That’s my grandmother! Kidnapped to the Gaza Strip without anyone there to prevent it,” wrote her granddaughter Adva Adar the day after. “Her name is Yaffa Adar, she is 85 years old! My grandmother, who built this kibbutz with her own two hands, who believed in Zionism, who loved this land that she had left only to be taken away from it. Probably stowed away somewhere, in terrible pain, with no medicine, no food, no water, dying of fear, alone.”
Bibas and Adar are members of Kibbutz Nir Oz, one of the settlements on the Gaza Strip border in an area called the “Gaza Envelope.” The true extent of the disaster in these small, ancient settlements is not yet widely known. The utter devastation is already clear. Hundreds of kibbutz members were murdered along with their children in their homes, on the paths and on the lawns; Many were killed as they tried to stop the terrorists from going door-to-door in their killing spree. When they could not be stopped, the terrorists slaughtered and dismembered adults, children and babies and burned houses while the residents were still inside. Dozens of people from these settlements have been abducted and their fate is still uncertain.
“My 72-year-old father pulled out the pistol that used to belong to his father…”
– Bar Heffetz
The sense of devastation comes not only from the terrible losses, but also from the sheer scale of the failure, perhaps the worst in Israeli history: the kibbutz members waited for hours for the IDF, and the IDF did not come. The kibbutz movement, whose flag was flown at half-mast on Thursday, released a statement a few hours after the attack: “More than ten hours have passed, and our many friends in the kibbutzim are fighting alone against bloodthirsty terrorists.” More than 10 hours of heroism and helplessness. Children, small children and older people are left to their fate for more than 10 hours. We demand that the Israeli government and the Israel Defense Forces overcome their shock, attack and liberate the kibbutzim, moshavim and cities of the south!
“The kibbutz movement mourns its sons and daughters, men, women and children who were murdered in cold blood in their own homes. Words cannot express the pain, horror and shock we feel at this loss of life. Our hearts are torn and crying.”
A few days after the attack, I read a Facebook post by Bar Heffetz, the agricultural director of the groves at Kibbutz Nirim, where, among other things, avocados and lychees are grown. It was addressed to Benjamin Netanyahu.
“Hello, Prime Minister,” he wrote. “I think that over the last four days I have earned the right to give you some advice on what you should do next.
“Leave the management of the war to the General Staff. Stop posting pompous posts and tweets for a day. Take a military helicopter and follow the route: Start in Eilat, with my daughter and her friends who are burying their friends. From there we continue to the Isrotel Yam Suf. Take off your shoes and go to each of the families in Nir Oz. Hear the stories of the abandoned mother, the grandfather whose entire family was murdered, the old guard whose entire life’s work just went up in flames. To ask for forgiveness.”
Nirim is one of the settlements originally called the “11 Points in the Negev”: 11 kibbutzim and moshavim built on legally acquired land in a single night after Yom Kippur in 1946 to reduce the Jewish presence in the south of British Mandatory Palestine strengthen.
First of all, the Zionist movement was diverse in its activities and ideologies. It included socialists, liberals, rich philanthropists and farmers. Of these, the founders of the kibbutzim – as illustrated in the 11-Point Operation – were those who physically drew the outlines of Israel’s future northern, eastern and southern borders on the territory of the British Mandate of Palestine. The kibbutzim are actually the edges of the map of Israel.
Second, Europe had forbidden Jews from farming the land for centuries, so they had to become bankers and moneylenders – a condition that helped fuel anti-Semitism. Zionism had sought to revolutionize the Jewish self-image, and the kibbutznik was the face of that revolution: a peasant, firmly rooted in the soil of the homeland, no longer a person making a living from “business in the air” (a Yiddish one). Idiom describing various types of speculative monkey business) and subject to the national whims of a non-Jewish country of residence. This ethos of rootedness produced qualities such as practical wisdom, agricultural and industrial entrepreneurship, and military creativity, which led many kibbutz members to become soldiers and commanders in the special forces. This is particularly glaring given the army’s recent failures.
“The catastrophic consequences of this failure continued for hours after Hamas breached the border.”
In addition to the revolution of the body, the kibbutz also symbolized a revolution in Jewish society. While Jewish communities were scattered across Europe, the kibbutz held its members and communities together: they lived as a collective, sharing money, housing and ideology.
At the time of the founding of the original kibbutzim, approximately 80,000 Muslim civilians lived in neighboring areas to the west, primarily in the city of Gaza. After the 1948 war, around 200,000 Palestinian war refugees poured into the Gaza Strip. The area became a huge refugee camp.
On the other side of the border, additional kibbutzim and moshavim were founded in the 1950s, now collectively referred to as the “Gaza Envelope Settlements.” They lie within Israel’s internationally recognized border and most of their population leans toward the center-left politically. They belong to the kibbutz movement, sons of the very secular pioneers who built Israel, and represent in Israeli culture the archenemy of the right-wing Likud camp, now embodied by Netanhayu.
“Explain how you failed them for a decade because you preferred to consolidate the voter base in Judea and Samaria at their expense,” Heffetz wrote. “That you chose to fund a terrorist organization; and that every time there was a real international willingness to reach an agreement, you rejected it because you preferred to drive a wedge between Gaza and the West Bank. Promise that you will do everything in your power to bring her kidnapped relatives back alive.
Ben Haffetz and his girlfriend Tal
Courtesy of Bar Haffetz
“Go back to the helicopter and fly to the Dead Sea where the evacuees from the Be’eri ossuary are. Ask them to forgive you for calling them traitors and quitters, not to mention the dirty talk that bubbles out of the cups of your lackeys and attack dogs. From there you fly on to Rahat. Ask for forgiveness from the families of the fallen Bedouins and those who stood under fire for hours to evacuate the survivors of the Nova music festival.
“And then you can go on to my father. My hero father, who was with and without you in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Syria, who took a bullet during the conquest of Hermon on the Syrian front. My father, who at the age of 72 had to wait for hours with a handgun for the army to arrive, while his three grandchildren were locked in the security room behind him and terrorists roamed the village paths.
“After you’ve done all this, hold a press conference. Are alone. The way you answer questions. Ask everyone for forgiveness. And then you get on a plane and get out of here. We will drop the trial, the commission of inquiry. Just don’t come back.”
On Friday evening, Kibbutz Nirim celebrated the anniversary of the founding of “11 Points”. “Just after 6 a.m. we woke up to the sound of an alarm siren,” Heffetz, who now commutes between Tel Aviv and Nirim, told The Daily Beast. “We ran to the safe room that normally serves as my 15-year-old teenage daughter’s room. Alarms are part of our everyday lives, but this time they were different. Another siren and another, more and more, for more than 15 minutes. Around 7am, people started posting in the parent WhatsApp groups that this was something big. Shortly after 7 a.m. we heard shots. Shortly afterwards we heard shouts in Arabic.
“In such a case, the local emergency unit will be called into action immediately and will protect the kibbutz for 20 minutes until the army arrives. Under no circumstances should it last longer than 20 minutes. We were sure the army was coming, but sometime after 8am we received word from the local security team that they had no idea what was going on. And then we realized: something very, very unusual was happening.
“To deal with the fear, we turned ourselves into an operating room. I was on WhatsApp, my sister was on Twitter and my partner was on the news sites. So we realized that things were similar in the neighboring settlements. My 72-year-old father, a veteran of Sayeret Matkal, pulled out the pistol that used to belong to his father. My father used to be a great fighter, and when he did that, my sister and I looked at each other and breathed a sigh of relief. He told us to lock ourselves in the safe room and sat us armed in the living room.
Bar Haffetz in a lychee grove
Courtesy of Bar Haffetz
“Fortunately, three members of the task force managed to somewhat prevent the terrorists from entering the houses. At 1:40 p.m., after hours of waiting, the first soldiers arrived and established contact with the three emergency services. Their first step was to clear the path to three other squad members who were locked in their safe rooms with their families. Together they fought the battle for the kibbutz. Towards the evening they moved hundreds of kibbutz members into public buildings and secured them. A little later, some members were moved to the ‘children’s homes’ because of the large number of people.”
During the Gulf War, Kibbutz Nirim decided to abolish communal child-rearing. Since then, the “children’s houses” – once the main house for the children in the kibbutz who lived and learned together – have only served as kindergartens and school classes. In the age of communal child-rearing, “children’s houses” were the center of the world for kibbutz children like me. Heffetz and I belong to one of the last generations to grow up together.
Although the kibbutzim have been largely privatized and their current residents are no longer the pioneers of their grandparents, they are still a family, in the deepest and most visceral sense of the word. The kibbutzim are a tribe, even if they don’t know each other personally. A kibbutznik views any harm done to another kibbutznik as if it had been done to himself. The horror surrounding this event is as if someone were breaking into a safe in a shared database of memories, images and sounds.
In 1980, a terrorist group entered Misgav Am on Israel’s northern border, took over a “children’s home” and held the young children hostage. This became a key event in the nightmares of us children in collective housing and burned into the memories of many Israelis – a memory now recalled by the sight of children and toddlers from the kibbutzim being kidnapped or murdered after they were had hidden in the safe rooms for hours. However, Heffetz is more practical. He does not consider the removal of some of the besieged kibbutz members to the children’s homes to be symbolic. “They’re just safe buildings,” he says.
Neighboring kibbutzim have suffered immense losses. In Nirim, about five members were killed and five or six others were kidnapped. “Nirim benefited from a combination of an emergency response team that functioned correctly and very fearful people who immediately went into the safe rooms – and did not leave them,” says Heffetz.
What does he think happened in the hours he spent waiting for the IDF? “We need to go further and understand the IDF’s security concept for the Gaza border,” says Heffetz. “The settlements on the northern border look north and see an army, the Hezbollah army. If we look west, towards the border with the Gaza Strip, there is not a single Hamas soldier in sight for miles. The army and the government said to themselves: We will move the army outposts back to avoid conflicts on the border and equip the fence with the most modern technology we have. And so there were no outposts on the border with flesh-and-blood soldiers policing the area.”
But the disastrous consequences of this failure continued hours after Hamas breached the border, while planes from neighboring army airfields were able to be sent to protect the collapsed fence. What does Heffetz think will happen now? “Israel has no choice but to eradicate Hamas. It must demand the unconditional return of the kidnapped women and children and only allow the exile of the Hamas leaders to Qatar after the return of the kidnapped soldiers. And then it has to bring the Saudis, the Egyptians and Mahmoud Abbas together and achieve what no one ever wanted to work on regarding Gaza: an agreement.”
Hefetz’s prediction fits his own character: practical, proactive and collected. But the recovery and rehabilitation of this community will take years, and this latest disaster will always remain a defining event.