Exactly one month ago, October 7, as the sun was rising over my home in Kibbutz Nahal Oz, I had to tell my two daughters – 3 years old and 20 months old – that they must remain completely silent. Not a word, no crying.
It was 7 A.M. in our Gaza border community and they had just woken up in a dark room devoid of electricity, with five men shouting outside the window. These men soon began firing bullets into our home through the living room window.
They tried to break through our locked door with their guns. They sprayed our two cars with bullets. One of them held a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. Another threw a grenade toward our neighbors’ home. These men were Hamas terrorists, armed from head to toe, on a mission to get in and kill us.
Imagine yourself having to tell a 1-year-old, stuck in a dark room with no food, electricity or toys, hearing gunshots and shouting all around her, that she must be silent. That this is not a time to make any noise because it’s dangerous outside. Think about that for a second.
Now imagine having to do that for 10 hours. Ten hours in the dark, with sounds of war immediately outside your window. Not nearby, not down the street. Literally on your porch. Right in your backyard. Gunshots fired into your living room. Asking yourself: Is my dog still alive?
Exactly one month ago, when Hamas entered the civilian community where I live, they knew exactly what they were doing – and what the price would be. There are many military targets along Israel’s border with Gaza. Some were attacked on October 7. But that wasn’t enough for Hamas.
They deliberately chose to enter civilian communities and the homes of families, to murder innocent people. In my community, they shot to death a teenage girl who worked in our kindergarten. They kidnapped two sisters, ages 14 and 8, but not before murdering their father.
Had they managed to break into the room where we silently barricaded ourselves that day, we all would be dead now. My wife, a social worker who began her career helping Muslim families in southern Israel fight for their legal rights; my daughters, not old enough to hurt a soul in this world.
We survived, but many didn’t. In our community, the military arrived at a crucial moment. In one neighborhood, the terrorists had just began opening car trunks and pulling out spare tires. Why? So they could start fires in homes and force families to come out and either be shot or abducted.
Had the military arrived 20 minutes later, the death toll would have doubled in Nahal Oz. We lost 14 people on October 7, while five others (two young girls, two fathers and an 84-year-old woman) were taken to Gaza.
We survived because Israeli soldiers arrived and killed the terrorists. Not because of any moral deliberations on behalf of Hamas.
In the first days after the massacre, the eyes of the world were on our story. The horrific actions of Hamas – the killing of the elderly and the young, the kidnapping of toddlers, the torture and rape of women – dominated headlines worldwide.
But soon, Israel began its military action to eradicate Hamas in Gaza and terrible images from the other side of the border began to emerge. Images of mass destruction and an endless stream of funerals. A tragedy in every sense of the word.
I don’t want revenge on Gaza. I don’t feel any satisfaction upon hearing that civilians there have been killed. I’m as sad as it’s possible to be over those deaths. But I know that when Hamas came into my community on the morning of October 7, it knew exactly what would happen in the Gaza Strip the day after.
Hamas chose to start a war after many years in which successive Israeli governments looked for new ways to improve the economic reality in Gaza. In my own community, we were proud to employ workers from there, paying them 10 times the average wage inside the Strip. The Gazans who came to work in our community were able to build homes for their families and finance an education for their children. In a shocking act of betrayal, some of them, it turns out, provided intelligence to Hamas that helped the organization plan its deadly attack on our kibbutz.
I’m the last person to claim Israel has no fault or blame in our long conflict with the Palestinians. I have written hundreds of articles against the policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right allies, and in favor of a real commitment to Palestinian rights and sovereignty. But what Hamas did on October 7 had nothing to do with any of this.
It was a suicide mission to murder as many Israelis as possible, specifically in civilian communities, with no policy goal or endgame other than murder, torture and pain. It slammed the door shut on improving Gaza’s economy. No Israeli will ever want to employ workers from Gaza in the near future, even though only a relatively small percentage of them actually helped Hamas. The walls of suspicion will be higher than any physical wall Israel might build on the border.
When Hamas terrorists came to my home, they knew a family with young children was living there. Our baby stroller was parked outside the door as they shot through the windows. And they knew that after they completed their mission, Israel, like any other country, would have to retaliate.
On that day, they knew they had signed the death certificate of thousands of Gazans. For them, it was a price worth paying for the joy of murdering my teenage neighbor and kidnapping children. They knew Gaza would suffer terrible, shocking destruction. They did it anyway.
I have my own criticisms of the Israeli government’s response. I don’t understand what the long-term strategy guiding our actions is, and I’m afraid Netanyahu – a corrupt, failed, useless man – will try to prolong the war for personal gain.
None of that changes Hamas’ culpability.
No country in the world would have accepted what happened to my family on that awful morning – and you must multiply that by many hundreds of families. A country that doesn’t kill the people who tried to murder my daughters, and those who sent them, has lost its right to exist. That’s as true for Israel as it is for any other country on the planet.
This hasn’t changed my belief, based on a cold, calculated reading of reality, that in the long run we must find ways to share this land, provide measures of sovereignty to the Palestinians, protect their human rights. But first we must survive. We can’t do anything constructive with the Palestinian people, who deserve equal measures of freedom and security, if we’re all dead.
In order for this to even be a relevant topic of conversation, Israel must first of all defeat Hamas. This organization can’t remain an active force in Gaza after the atrocities it deliberately committed against civilians. And defeating Hamas will come with a price.
Hamas, of course, has been preparing for years, entrenching its military presence within civilian installations – schools, hospitals, clinics. Hamas has shown the same total disregard for civilian life in Gaza as it did in my neighborhood. Israel is now fighting a war against a shameless organization that is barricading itself behind innocent people in a dense urban environment. It’s an awful war to fight, but we have only awful choices. If we don’t fight this war, we are inviting Hamas to repeat October 7 in the future.
The pseudo-academic discourse around this war, with hysterical vocabulary being hurled at U.S. President Joe Biden for supporting Israel after the attempted murder of my daughters, is totally irrelevant except for the purpose of helping Donald Trump – a longtime dream of suicidal elements on the left.
This isn’t genocide or ethnic cleansing. It’s a terrible war. It’s an inevitable war at this point. It’s a war for our very ability to keep living in this land and raise our children here.
That doesn’t mean Israel should be shielded from any criticism during the war or after it. Biden should definitely use his influence and leverage to promote steps that will create long-term stability and open the door to a better future here. But if Hamas isn’t defeated and its leadership killed, nothing Biden does will have any positive impact. Hamas must go first.
Re: Hamas attacks southern Israel
Originally Posted by Ludicus
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