They fled kibbutzim after Hamas attacked. Now, many Israelis must decide whether to go back.
For a few minutes on a recent afternoon, the sun-bathed silence that fills Nadav Tzabari’s neighborhood could almost be mistaken for peace.
Then shelling from Israeli tanks dug in across the fence line in Gaza erupts again, sending shudders through the vacated homes and overgrown gardens of this long-resilient farming community, emptied for months of nearly all its people.
“This is my house,” says Tzabari, a 35-year-old teacher, arriving at a small stucco building with a red tile roof near the center of Nahal Oz. It is so close to the bombed-out buildings on Gaza City’s eastern fringe that before Hamas swept in last October, residents could see their Palestinian counterparts driving through the streets.
Next door, Tzabari recalls, the attackers shot dead his 75-year-old neighbor and wounded her husband as the couple clung to the door of their safe room. Beyond an orange tree in his own yard, a tarp stretches across a gaping hole punched through the roof by one of thousands of rockets fired from Gaza in the months since. Inside, the blast layered every surface in dust and grit.
Yet as soon as Tzabari reenters its cracked facade, he is confronted with vivid memories of Nahal Oz as it was — and vexing questions about what it might yet be.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do. It changes every day,” says Tzabari, who fulfilled a dream with his husband when they bought a home in the kibbutz, but are deeply conflicted about returning. “It doesn’t matter how you twist it or what angle you look at it. This is going to be a really, really long, hard and complicated journey.”
Five months after Hamas slaughtered 1,200 people in an early-morning assault, triggering
a massive invasion by Israel that has killed more than 30,000 people in Gaza, those who fled ravaged border communities are wrestling with whether, how and when to go back.
The choices are fraught and deeply personal. The trauma of seeing family members and friends killed and others taken hostage remains raw. The attack, which trapped many residents in the dark for 17 or 18 hours, left homes in some communities beyond repair. Artillery fire and the roar of fighter jets make clear that Nahal Oz and nearby towns, built decades ago on or near the sites of former Palestinian villages, are extensions of the war zone.
Many older people, including Nahal Oz’s founders, pledge to return and a small number of residents have gone back to some communities. But the future of the cooperatives, known as kibbutzim, depends on younger families.
“One day you say, ‘No, no, no, I don’t want to go back.’ The next day you wake up and you say, ‘I want to go home’,” says Raymond Reijnen, standing outside the dairy barn where a handful of residents have come back to work a few days each week. The other days, he and his wife deliberate whether Nahal Oz, where their children ran barefoot for hours, can ever again be home.
“It’s a really difficult question,” he says, as two Israeli
soldiers just beyond the cattle shed point machine guns toward Gaza. “Is the kibbutz going to be the same place with the same people? Nobody knows.”
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Most of the communities near the Gaza border were home to just a few hundred people. But in a country whose short existence has been defined by war, kibbutzim played an outsized role in staking Israel’s territory. Mass evacuations following the October attack have, for now, sharply reduced its inhabitable footprint.
“It’s a practical problem,” says Shlomo Getz, who leads a center for kibbutz research at the University of Haifa, noting that the communities accounted for most of the population on Israel’s side of the border.
“If the kibbutzim … will not come back, no one will come,” he says. “That means we are losing our country.”
The story of Nahal Oz is central to understanding that connection.
In 1951, a newly independent Israel was two years removed from a fierce war with Palestinian fighters and neighboring Arab countries. Palestinians had constituted a large majority of the pre-war population. But by the time fighting ended, about 700,000 had fled or been expelled.
Many, pushed from Arab villages just across the armistice line, ended up in Gaza, where today three-fourths of all residents are refugees or their descendants. Israeli leaders moved to solidify control by establishing communities along the border with the narrow strip, then occupied by Egypt.
To Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, the moment called for soldiers trained to farm as well as fight. The new corps was dubbed Nahal, a Hebrew acronym for “Fighting Pioneer Youth,” and planted its first outpost on land sloping gently toward the border. Two years later, a second group turned it into a kibbutz, Nahal Oz.
“We lived, more or less, half as military and half as citizens,” says Yankale Cohen, who was 19 when he and few others founded the kibbutz. “But in the meantime, we developed a community.”
A month after the kibbutz was launched, Egyptian soldiers killed a resident. Three years later, Roi Rotberg, a soldier in charge of security, was patrolling on horseback when he was ambushed. His death at 21 drew wide attention.
“Have we forgotten that this small group of young people dwelling at Nahal Oz is carrying the heavy gates of Gaza on its shoulders?” Israeli military chief Moshe Dayan said in a eulogy at Rotberg’s funeral.
His words alluded to the Old Testament’s story of Samson, who pulled down the gates of Gaza and carried them to a hill some believe is the one overlooking present-day Nahal Oz. But it was more than a metaphor for Dayan, who noted that Palestinians had watched as Israelis transformed “the lands and villages where they and their fathers dwelt.”
Nahal Oz was built closer to the border than nearby kibbutzim, less than a mile from Gaza’s Shejaiya neighborhood, a Hamas stronghold on Samson’s hill. Kibbutz farmers seed crops to the fence line.