‘All they want to do is murder Jews’: The Israeli peace activists slaughtered by Hamas
There used to be a saying among those Israelis who lived in the communities next to the border with Gaza, commonly said with a shrug as missiles flew overhead: “We live in paradise 95 per cent of the time. The other 5 per cent is hell.”
The paradise was all too clear for them: loving communities where those living next door felt more like family than neighbours; gorgeous scenery overlooking the arid majesty of the Negev desert; a still quietness that would only be pierced by the laughter of children playing.
People walked around barefoot, didn’t lock their doors, shared almost everything. They would eat together, party together, share cars. People cared about each other and also about the greater good.
“We used to sometimes say it was like living in a country club,” says travel agent Irit Lahav, who has lived her whole life on Kibbutz Nir Oz, which until last month counted 400 people in a community just a mile from the fence with the Gaza Strip. “We had the pool, the football field, everyone would ride around on bicycles. Everyone knew each other,” she added.
The other 5 per cent represented the danger of where their paradise was situated. In particular, the rocket attacks that would sometimes go on for weeks. The attacks were launched from such close range that there would be just 15 seconds to run to a bomb shelter. Residents of Nir Oz could see Gaza – and even hear the imams’ call to prayer. And when the rockets fell silent they also saw the retaliatory attacks from a Right-wing Israeli government most of them felt precious little love for.
For many of the kibbutz-dwellers were Left-wing campaigners and activists devoted to a peaceful settlement with their Palestinian neighbours. When Israel struck back, many felt a pain inside, knowing that people they cared about in Gaza might be hurt; all too aware that their communities shared a bond of pain as well as a love of the land.
Among them was Vivian Silver, 74, one of the country’s most famous peace activists, who had long fostered cultural and economic links with Gazans through her group, Creating Peace. Until this week, she was one of many people declared missing after Hamas’s Oct 7 attacks, thought to have been snatched from her home near Gaza in Kibbutz Be’eri. But now DNA tests on human remains have finally proved that she was killed that day.
After the attacks, and before he learnt of her death, her son Yonatan continued to insist: “If we had listened to people like my mother before, we might not [be] at this point.”
After the news of Silver’s death broke, the writer Anat Saragusti called her: “A woman of infinite, deep, ongoing compassion, humanity and dedication to Arab-Jewish partnership and peace. Yes. Peace.”
Silver was just one of several peace activists who were slaughtered. Hayim Katsman, 32, who worked with Palestinians in the West Bank, was killed in his home in Kibbutz Holit, a mile from Gaza. Yocheved Lifshitz, who gave lifts to sick Palestinians from Gaza to medical centres in Israel, was taken captive by Hamas and released in late October; her husband, Oded, also involved in peace work, remains captive.
It is the grimmest of ironies that while many on the global Left seem to blame Jews for their own slaughter, crying “outrage” and “occupation”, a great many of the people murdered on Oct 7 were those Jews who were fighting hardest for a two-state solution and peace – and who thought they knew their neighbours across the border.
“I feel betrayed,” says Ms Lahav, 57. Her small kibbutz Nir Oz was one of the worst hit. Between a quarter and a half of its residents are either dead or missing.
Ms Lahav was one of several peace activists within her community – her mother was best friends with Mrs Lifshitz, who stunned the world when she shook the hand of her Hamas captor as she was released. The two families were next door neighbours.
Almost every week she would go with others to the Gaza border to pick up the ill and transport them to hospitals in Israel. “If you are going to live in a kibbutz, it means you trust and respect others, whether they look like you or not,” says Ms Lahav. “Everyone is equal and we saw the Palestinians as our siblings.
“With others I volunteered to drive six Palestinians at a time to Israeli hospitals; people with cancer or for kidney dialysis. I speak a bit of Arabic, they’d know a few Hebrew words, we’d use some English; these were very sick people but we’d communicate.
“Occasionally I’d wonder what was happening with all the money that the European Union was sending to them – billions. I’d wonder why they were still so poor when they had so much money being sent. I couldn’t understand it – why didn’t they use the money to build hotels over the beautiful beach they live on? I didn’t realise then that the money was being spent on guns.”
She had a rude awakening on Oct 7 when she was shaken from sleep at 6.30am by the missile alarm. She then spent 12 hours in her safe room, fashioning a lock out of an oar and a vacuum cleaner, which – incredibly – held steady as terrorists tried to force their way in during what she describes as the longest eight minutes of her life.
She and her daughter Lotus, 22, had whispered their goodbyes to each other. But, although they survived, by the time they were liberated by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), both Nir Oz and their entire worldview were changed irrevocably. Over those 12 hours, Ms Lahav could only listen to her neighbours being slaughtered, their pain being lived out on the kibbutz WhatsApp group as they screamed for help. And the constant, unremitting sound of guns.
“I realised that this was not just a small group of terrorists but hundreds and hundreds who came to our kibbutz,” she says. “There were teenagers, there were women; it felt like a nation had come over to kill us. And they had an endless supply of money to accumulate all these weapons, which they did not stop firing.”
After Hamas broke into Israel by breaching the border in at least six places, they knew exactly where they were heading. Detailed maps of the kibbutzim were found on at least one dead combatant. They had 22 targets, up to 10 miles from Gaza, but the ones they attacked hardest were those closest to the border – most within one or two miles. After the murder, there was pillage.
“When we finally left our safe room, we saw they had stolen my daughter’s phone and wallet and destroyed our house,” says Ms Lahav. “My first thought was: ‘Those poor people who are desperate enough to do that.’ And then my second thought was: ‘Even if I was so poor, I was starving, would I kill and torture people and then steal from them too? No!’ It made me realise that it wasn’t just Hamas terrorists, but it was an entire nation that just wanted to kill us.”
There is an adage in Israel that the more times a community is attacked by terrorists, the more Right-wing they become. The kibbutzim and the moshavs – small farming communities – on the border with Gaza were always exceptions to that rule. During the last election, when the Left-wing parties Labor and Meretz polled around just 8 per cent nationally, in Be’eri they won 52 per cent of the vote, in Nir Oz 25 per cent.
The kibbutzim are the last vestiges of the original idealistic Zionist dreams. Created mainly by young socialists who left Europe in the 1920s and 1930s in the hope of a life where they could cultivate the land and be free from anti-Semitism, the countryside they lie on in the south has always been uncontested because, up until their arrival in the 1940s, it was more desert than anything else.
The communities started off in farming. Gradually they branched out into industry too – Be’eri, founded in 1946, houses a huge printing factory, while Nir Oz, founded in 1957, makes paint that is sold around the world. It may be no surprise that two of the hardest-hit kibbutzim were also two of the wealthiest. But despite their capitalist success, in Nir Oz they still share all their earnings, while Be’eri was due to start a new model of part-private earnings and part-shared just a few days after the Oct 7 massacre destroyed almost the entire thing.
During the history of the region, relations with the neighbours have been sometimes friendly, sometimes fraught. From 1948 to 1967 Gaza was under Egyptian control. After the Six-Day War in June 1967, when Israel won the land from Egypt, it was under military occupation but the borders were open – people from Gaza worked both in the border communities and further north, up in Tel Aviv. Israelis would head the other way, going to the beach in Gaza and making friends there. It felt like a home from home for the Israelis who were refugees from Arab countries and could converse freely with their neighbours.
Relations changed with the First Intifada, or uprising, which started in 1987 amid growing anger over the occupation. Strikes and boycotts turned into acts of terrorism and violence. A fence was built that, as the problems between Israel and Palestine grew worse, became ever more fortified. During the second Intifada in the early years of this century – when those who wanted peace on both sides saw the promise of the 1993 Oslo Accords slip away – there were multiple acts of terrorism or attempted terrorism.
In 2005, Israeli completely withdrew from Gaza, and then Hamas, which has never made any secret of its genocidal intentions, was voted in by more than half of the local population the following year.
Even though there have been several minor conflicts since, relations have always continued between the people of Gaza and their closest Israeli neighbours. This year, even under the Right-wing Netanyahu government, 18,000 workers from Gaza were allowed to cross the border and work in mostly menial jobs in Israel, escaping the chronic unemployment back home.
Israelis – on both the Right and the Left – thought that Hamas could be contained.
Avidor Schwartzman, 37, a media consultant, moved with his wife Karen and baby daughter to the kibbutz Kfar Aza just three months ago. His parents-in-law, Cindy and Igal Flash, were both peaceniks who had met on the kibbutz, which was founded in 1951 by Jews who had been forced out of Egypt and Syria.
“We wanted to give our daughter a kibbutz education; teach her about loving the land, loving the people – there are so many good values that you find in the kibbutzim,” he says of the kibbutz, which has both a farm and a factory making plastic compounds. “And it was beautiful. It felt like we all had no worries.”
Even the frequent rocket attacks didn’t stop him; the idea of peace was so deceptive. “I think we all felt secure because we had the [anti-rocket defence system] Iron Dome, we have safe rooms, we have a really good responding team in the kibbutz. We never expected a horde of thousands who would come to murder, rape and pillage,” Ms Schwartzman says.
Out of a kibbutz of 800 people it is believed 17 have been abducted and a further 100 are either dead or missing, including his wife’s parents – normally the type to be on the front line demonstrating against any war. Their house was taken over by terrorists; it took a week for their bodies to be confirmed from DNA fragments. “The terrorists didn’t care who they killed – even the people that cared about them the most,” he says.
Many of the residents from the communities – and in the country as a whole – are now debating whether they were naive to think that Hamas could be controlled and that Palestinians could be their friends.
Debby Sharon, 59, a British Israeli who was born in London but moved to Israel when she was five and lives on the Moshav Yated – the moshavs are more like enclosed villages than the more communal kibbutzim – says: “We were deluded as a people, as a country.” Recalling how, in the past few years there have been riots at the border fence – which the IDF now believes was done deliberately to weaken it so it could be breached – she says: “Why were we so free-spirited? Why did we let them get so close? We didn’t respect our own security.”
The moshav was attacked twice over an 18-hour period by terrorists who knew enough about the community to attempt to get into the back, less-secure gate, but local volunteers with guns were able to repel them – with only two from the 620-strong community dying.
Both Ms Sharon and her husband, Doody, who spent 15 hours in their safe room with two of their children, their son-in-law and three grandsons, know and have helped Gazans. Ms Sharon, a mother of four, is a solicitor who helped Gazans frustrated by Hamas’s poor treatment of mental illness, get psychiatric help in Israel. Her husband is a manager on the farm in Be’eri Kibbutz, which employed many Gazans.
“My husband loved his workers and I think he still does,” she says. “There were times when the border was closed down, and he would be on the phone to them, making sure they were OK. When three of them were found by the IDF hiding near Be’eri, the police phoned and asked about them. My husband knows them really well but he can’t swear they are good people. He thinks they had nothing to do with it, but he doesn’t know. What we do know is that the terrorists knew exactly who and what they were targeting. And that is the thing – or one of the things – that makes me sick.
“I think one of the biggest wounds that we are carrying is that they killed people whose whole purpose was to work things out between both sides and make peace. I think now we understand; it doesn’t matter what we do, what land we give back. They don’t care. All they want to do is murder Jews.”
Ms Sharon thinks back to a few years ago when she was among thousands from the border region who went up to a hill overlooking Gaza known as Black Arrow and flew kites to signal their desire for peace. “I feel like I was a kid – I was so stupid,” she says. “The signs were all there that we were the only ones who wanted peace.” And so now there is war. “What did they think was going to happen after they murdered and kidnapped all those people? There can’t be peace now; it has shattered everyone’s beliefs.”
