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Stirrings of Life Amid the Oct. 7 Wreckage of Nir Oz

(Wall Street Journal) Tunku Varadarajan - In February I went to Kibbutz Nir Oz, just over a mile from Gaza, where Hamas and hundreds of "civilians" from Gaza murdered 46 people and abducted 71 on Oct. 7, 2023, more than a quarter of the community's population. Only four houses were undamaged. Only eight people have come back to Nir Oz so far. Yoav Bazer, 22, who survived on Oct. 7 by hiding, is an overseer of the kibbutz's agriculture. The pomegranate trees are dead, their irrigation system destroyed. But the hardier avocado trees still yield their fruit, and I find Bazer and a team of volunteers picking them. The dozen volunteers come from all over Israel, working in weeklong shifts. They range in age from 18 to 72. Rina Yakuel Kerzner, a charismatic grandma, says, "My job is to do anything we need to do for Nir Oz. If it is the avocado, if it is preparing in the kitchen, whatever Nir Oz needs, we are here to serve them." Eyal Kalasquin, another volunteer, is a lawyer in his late 20s. He says, "To walk around here and think that this work was supposed to be done by people that got murdered...it's something very harsh....We sleep in the wreckage of this beautiful place." The kibbutz is still a dark world of blackened houses and shattered windows, with the debris of violence everywhere. We meet Nili Margalit, 43, a pediatric nurse who was abducted by Hamas on Oct. 7 and released on Dec. 1, 2023, as well as Mor Tzarfati, 42, who survived Oct. 7. They both now live in Kiryat Gat. Neither wants to return to Nir Oz. "I will only come back," says Tzarfati - whose brother and his wife were shot dead on Oct. 7, their three children dying of smoke-asphyxiation - "if the people of Gaza won't be there next to us. We can't live next to people whose aim is to destroy Jews, whose education teaches them to kill us." Both women have moved notably to the right after the Hamas attacks. Nir Oz was one of the most leftist of Israel's kibbutzim. Its residents spoke habitually of peace, and often had workers from Gaza help in the fields and with construction. But unless a radical solution is found to shift the Gazans elsewhere - or, perhaps even less likely, transform them into peaceful neighbors - Tzarfati won't be back. "Everyone from here who now lives in Kiryat Gat thinks like this," she says. The writer is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at NYU Law School's Classical Liberal Institute.
2025-03-11 00:00:00
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