Israelis must decide whether to go back to kibbutzim
For a few minutes on a recent afternoon, the sunbathed 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 ma- chine guns toward Gaza. “Is the kibbutz going to be the same place with the same people? Nobody knows.”
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 threefourths 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.
Residents gradually built a tidy village of single-story homes, shadowed by a grain silo and surrounded by cultivated fields. They turned the kibbutz's first building into a pub, where younger residents gathered for beer and music. Whimsical statues of eggplants and peppers sprouted outside a visitor center that bustled each spring, when Israelis flock to see wildflowers carpeting the fields.
Over time, people in the kibbutzim and in Gaza — captured by Israel during the 1967 war — settled into a sort of tacit acceptance.
Thousands of Palestinians crossed daily to work on Israeli farms. Cohen, who earned the nickname “Mr. Potato” for crop expertise developed over decades, advised Gaza farmers on planting and processing. Many older Israelis recall regular drives to Gaza for shopping and medical care.
That changed after the first Palestinian intifada erupted in 1987, a divide cemented when Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and Hamas seized control two years later.
Tensions in Gaza simmered as recurrent wars and a longstanding blockade, meant to keep Hamas from stockpiling weapons, left the economy in shambles. Many Israelis paid little heed to conditions in Gaza and were largely unaware that border kibbutzim were built on the sites of former Palestinian villages. But rocket attacks were a constant reminder of that dynamic in Nahal Oz and neighboring communities.
During a 2014 war, Palestinian fighters emerged from a tunnel near the kibbutz to kill five Israeli soldiers. Weeks later a mortar shell exploded in Nahal Oz, killing a 4-year-old boy.
Afterward, 17 families abandoned Nahal Oz, dropping the population to about 250. With its future threatened, the kibbutz began housing teens preparing for military service and college students.
Leaders also invited families, attracted to an oasis where neighbors gathered on porches for evening chats, homes were far more affordable than in Israeli cities, and — the threat of rockets notwithstanding — most nights were so peaceful, Cohen says, that you could practically smell the quiet.
Soon Reijnen and his wife, Mirjam, who had left careers as firefighters in their native Netherlands, arrived with their three children.
Tzabari, a former soldier battling post-traumatic stress disorder from the 2014 Gaza war, recalled the beauty of the kibbutz he'd visited during forays across the border and came to stay.
Matan Weitz, boarding in a courtyard filled with fellow students, felt so welcomed by kibbutz elders he decided to build a life there after graduation. Often, he'd walk to an old guard tower to gaze over the countryside.
“It's a beautiful place to sit alone and when friends came by to see the kibbutz… we'd climb up and see the sunset over Gaza,” he says. “I was never afraid when I was there.”
By last fall, Nahal Oz's population had topped 450. The kibbutz was 95% heaven, residents told one another, even if the threat of rockets made it 5% hell.
The tradeoff seemed worth it, until Oct. 7.
—On the first Friday last October, kibbutz residents stayed up late, stringing lights around the pool and arranging chairs on the grass. The following day was a Jewish holiday. In Nahal Oz, though, it was planned as much more — the 70th anniversary of its founding.
Nahal Oz's location means that alerts warning of possible rocket attacks give residents just a few seconds to hide and a few more to wait before it is considered safe. The first alert that morning came around 6:30. But the barrage that followed felt endless.
It sounded like “the loudest thunders, multiplied by a thousand,” says Naomi Adler, a nurse who hunkered down with her husband and three sons in the reinforced saferoom built into each house, and routinely used as bedrooms or home offices.
When it ended roughly 10 minutes later, the couple decided it was OK to emerge for water. The gunfire began as their phones started buzzing.
Lock your homes and stay in your safe rooms, warned a message from the kibbutz security director, Ilan Fiorentino. Hamas is at your back door, warned another from the Adlers' neighbor.
Crouched in the saferoom with his husband and their dog, Tzabari heard shouting in Arabic and the staccato of rifles. When it quieted briefly, he dashed to the shed, grabbing gardening tools that might serve as weapons.
Inside the Reijnens', Raymond tied bedsheets from the window to the door of the saferoom that, like others, did not lock because they'd been designed to protect against rockets, not invasion. With an Army base next to the kibbutz, help was minutes away, the couple told each other. Later they learned that Hamas had overrun the installation, killing dozens of soldiers.
The initial barrage had been a distraction. After plowing through fortifications Israeli officials had billed as virtually impenetrable, dozens of attackers breached the fence around the kibbutz before assaulting neighborhoods.
In a video livestreamed on a phone snatched from one resident, they marched 15-year-old Tomer Arava from his home at gunpoint, forced him to coax neighbors from hiding, then opened fire.
Arava, his mother, and her boyfriend were killed. The boyfriend's daughters were taken hostage, released 51 days later.
Next door to Tzabari, gunmen burst into the home of Yonatan and Shoshana Brosh, who had taken to mothering the new arrivals. She was killed by shots fired through the saferoom door.
Ariel Zohar, a 12-year-old resident out for a run when the assault began, was rescued by Fiorentino, the security director. Later, Zohar's sisters, mother and father — a former AP video journalist — were found dead in a bedroom, their arms wrapped around one another. Fiorentino was also killed later, trying to fend off the assault.
In all, 15 people from Nahal Oz were killed, including a Tanzanian intern just arrived to study farming. Two of the seven taken hostage are still being held.
The toll extended to the fields, where attackers destroyed computers regulating the irrigation system and broke the pipes. They shot up the kibbutz's new $1.4 million dairy barn, killing cattle, and stole nine tractors.
“They came to kill us, to burn us alive, to take all the agriculture down and to make us not want to come back,” says Moran Freibach, 53, who was raised in Nahal Oz and oversees farming operations.
When Israeli forces finally reached homes that afternoon, they ordered residents to continue hiding. It was well after dark before soldiers returned, giving residents minutes to pack.
In her kitchen, Tami Halevi, 86, had a fleeting thought: How long would it be before they could return? She rushed to divvy a pot of stew prepared for the anniversary celebration, shoving containers into the freezer.
Nearby, Tzabari and husband Rotem Katz hurried for the door with their dog, Tom, leaving behind all the trappings of home — a hammock in the backyard, the fish tank in the hall.
Outside the Reijnen house, Mirjam and her children clambered into the bed of a military vehicle packed with neighbors and belongings. But what had become of her husband?
Then Raymond appeared with a basket filled with his daughter's stuffed animals and climbed aboard. As the vehicle sped down a road littered with bodies and burned-out cars, the kibbutz where his family had made a new life grew fainter and fainter.
Then, the Nahal Oz of memory vanished in the darkness.
Weeks after the attack, inside an assisted living complex near Tel Aviv, Tami Halevi gratefully appraised the bare walls and basic furniture she'd been offered. There was no way of knowing how long it would take before she and 16 other elders who'd arrived together might get back to Nahal Oz.
“One of my friends here told me: `I'm bringing nothing. I don't want to feel at home,” says Halevi, a grandmother of 14, welcoming a visitor. The embroidered armchair one of her grandsons retrieved from the kibbutz beckons from the center of the small living room. Framed drawings by a friend decorate a spot over the sofa.
“I'm living here. I don't know for how long. And I want a few pieces of my life,” she says.