In June I was in this kibbutz. Now it’s a murder scene
Living adjacent to the Gaza Strip, the residents of Kfar Aza were aware of the risk of rocket attack. They didn’t expect an invasion.
I stood at the fence round the Kfar Aza kibbutz, looking at another fence, less than a mile away, marking the border of the Gaza Strip. It was June and the Mediterranean was shimmering on the horizon beyond that. Even then, with all that razor wire, and the communal bomb shelters dotted around the place, and the “safe rooms” tacked on to the backs of the cabins, you’d hesitate to describe the scene as peaceful. I certainly felt a bit twitchy, within sniper range as we were. But life then was infinitely more tranquil than it is at Kfar Aza today.
News pictures show a discarded paraglider, its canopy billowing in the breeze, on the road by the fence where I stood in June. There are also reports of a possible tunnel, dug from Gaza and used to infiltrate the kibbutz, which is home to about 750 Israelis.
Reports suggest possibly dozens of Kfar Aza’s residents have been killed or kidnapped. It is probable that some of the mostly elderly folk I had lunch with in the canteen in June are now dead, wounded or abducted. Journalists witnessed at least four civilians being taken from the kibbutz by Hamas on Saturday. For obvious reasons, I won’t name any of the Kfar Aza residents I spoke to during my visit.
The Israeli press has reported the death of the IDF major Omri Michaeli, 35, fighting to defend Kfar Aza on Saturday. Roy Idan, a photographer who took the paraglider picture, is also believed to have been shot. His wife, Smadar, was reportedly shot dead in their home. Their two elder children, Michael, nine, and Amalia, six, survived by hiding in a closet. Three-year-old Abigail is missing, believed to have been abducted.
In keeping with their austere socialist roots, kibbutzim tend to be no-frills environments, a world away from the wealth and sophistication of Tel Aviv. Kibbutzniks are often similarly serious, ascetic people. Kfar Aza was no exception. Other than the sunshine and palm trees (and bomb shelters), you could be in a mid-range north European holiday camp dating from the 1950s. Or a well-kept yet modestly priced North American retirement estate, which is effectively what it is for many older Israelis arriving at the top of the waiting list for a place. “I feel safer here than I did in Camden,” a cheerful woman in her sixties told me, her London accent enduring even after 30 years away.
Kfar Aza, one of a string of established kibbutzim stretching along the Gaza border in southern Israel, is a secular, civilian settlement, founded in 1951. Its name means “Gaza village”. Employment is provided by two factories. It is not located in the occupied territories, but within the internationally recognised borders of Israel. Some inhabitants work full-time for the IDF, but there was no sign of armed security when I visited.
The kibbutzniks live in small one-storey cabins, arranged along gravel walkways radiating out from the dining, shopping and admin block. The food in the self-service canteen is plentiful yet basic: chicken and rice, hummus and salad. The diners are, in the Israeli fashion, dressed informally in casual warm-weather clothes. The only indication of religious affiliation is the occasional kippah.
Just beyond the rows of homes, through a thin screen of trees, is a back-road entrance, unfenced and unguarded. Beyond this access road comes the first serious barrier, a razor wire-topped fence, its upper section angled towards Gaza to make scaling it more difficult. Our guide explained that surveillance – drones, cameras, buried microphones – would detect a threat long before it could arrive at the fence. Still, across this narrow cordon sanitaire, Gaza looks very close. If you did get to this fence, I remember thinking, it wouldn’t detain you long. After that, you’d be right in among those you have been schooled to regard as your mortal enemy.
The safe rooms bulging out from the cabins, their windows protected by shutters and a metal awning to deflect shell fragments, do not look as though they would withstand a determined ground attack. Some show scorch marks from previous bombardments. It seems likely Hamas fighters were able to penetrate at least some of these rooms and murder those within over the weekend.
Do these observations mean the mood in Kfar Aza in June felt complacent? Absolutely not. For one thing, the kibbutz comes under frequent rocket attack, most recently three weeks before my visit. When the sirens sound, they have seconds to take cover in one of the simple concrete shelters dotted around. Bare inside, they have outer walls that are brightly decorated by the kids so they’re less scared as the missiles fall. I spoke to one woman whose friend decided, for whatever reason, to stay outside during a raid a few years back. Shrapnel cut him in half.
Few Israelis, even those living in the comparative safety of the larger cities, need any reminder of the precarious position of their homeland. That said, during my four-day visit, I heard a great deal more about the Iranian threat than I did anxieties about a mass co-ordinated Palestinian attack. The overall sense, from Palestinian representatives as well as Israeli government people, the IDF, think-tankers, academics and journalists, was that Israel-Palestine was a contained frozen regional conflict, marked by occasional outbursts of small-scale violence yet destined to be overshadowed by far more seismic geopolitical events and movements. While there may be no viable peace process under way, at least there was no all-out war process either. That’s what I came back and told anyone interested. Totally wrongly, as it turns out.
I spoke to one long-term resident whose mother recalled cycling across the fields to Gaza decades ago, when there was no fence, no wall, nothing. “She would go to the souks and then the beach and swim,” this woman’s daughter told me. “Of course we’d like to think we could do that ourselves one day but I don’t think so. Over there,” she said, gesturing across to Gaza City in the near distance, “they want to kill us just because we are Jews.”
I was in Israel on a fact-finding trip for journalists organised and paid for by the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre, or Bicom. After this woman spoke – in starkly pessimistic terms – to my group, I recall us naively, indeed impertinently, agreeing among ourselves that she was unhelpfully hawkish. The previous day, we had met two urbane, diplomatic senior Palestinian figures in Ramallah, in the West Bank. Their charm and reasonableness had misled us. They were allied with Fatah, the less militant organisation in charge of the West Bank. Gaza, by contrast, is run by Hamas, designated by many countries, including the UK, as a terrorist organisation, committed to establishing an Islamic state in what is at present Israel. It turned out that the tough-talking woman in Kfar Aza had a more realistic view of Hamas than a bunch of liberally inclined visiting western hacks. Who knew?
The original Hamas charter, published in 1988, was committed to the destruction of Israel and infamously chock full of genocidal intent towards the Jewish people. Article seven states that on the Day of Judgment, all Jews will be killed. The revised charter of 2017 tries to separate, not entirely credibly, anti-Zionism from antisemitism. Yet shooting Jewish women and kids in their beds, and massacring unarmed Jewish youngsters at a music festival, looks a lot like antisemitism to me. That is worth remembering, as the Israeli retaliation unfolds in the coming days, with the inevitable dreadful civilian toll in Gaza. This war is not six of one and half a dozen of the other, but firmly rooted in a murderous racist attack on peaceful communities such as the one I visited this summer.
