OCT. 7’S OTHER VICTIM: HOPE

IN TOUR OF NOVA FESTIVAL SITE, RE’IM HERO PONDERS FUTURE.

Harel Oren saved dozens, possibly hundreds, of lives on Oct. 7.

Harel Oren guided me around Re’im, the kibbutz adjacent to the Gaza Strip that his father helped found in 1949.

On Oct. 7, 2023, Oren, his colleague Ilan Cohen and fewer than a dozen other Emergency Response Team members held off about 80 Hamas terrorists who arrived in a convoy of pickup trucks at dawn. Waiting 10 hours for military backup, the tiny group of defenders prevented what could have been a mass murder at the kibbutz. By engaging scores of invaders, the Re’im team may have prevented even greater atrocities at the nearby Nova music festival and other communities along the Gaza border. It is impossible to measure a thing that didn’t happen, but Oren and his colleagues certainly saved dozens of lives — possibly hundreds.

Oren, Cohen and their cadre have been heralded as heroes. Catching the terrorists off guard with their instant response, the kibbutzniks managed to put the invaders — each of whom apparently had a designated task in a carefully organized assault — on their back foot.

After messaging the 450 kibbutz residents to take shelter, the response team sprung into action. In the end, seven kibbutz members were murdered and four people were kidnapped from the community. In the battle for Re’im, 12 police and IDF soldiers were also killed. Tragic as these numbers are, neighbouring kibbutzim lost exponentially more residents.

The kibbutz is a short distance from the site of the Nova music festival. It is not known whether Hamas was aware of the music festival, or whether the terrorists stumbled upon it by accident. In either event, the diversion of many of the terrorists to the festival site may have given the kibbutz residents a fighting chance.

Nothing, though, can take away from the heroism of the response team who, outnumbered at least eight-to-one, kept the terrorists largely at bay throughout that horrendous day.

Armed with personal weapons and limited gear, they quickly mobilized and returned fire, killing several terrorists, which seemed to disorient the remaining attackers.

Reports since that day have credited the defenders for their efficient responsiveness under a clear chain of command, which allowed them to act quickly and decisively. The layout of the kibbutz and the immediate detection of the invaders assisted in the defence.

By contrast with Re’im’s seven murdered residents, nearby Be’eri saw 102 residents murdered and 30 others taken hostage. At Kibbutz Kfar Aza, 64 were murdered and 19 kidnapped.

After Oren showed me around the kibbutz and explained how the battle had unfolded, we trundled through orange groves toward the Nova site. He pulled his truck over on the side of the dirt path and we picked oranges from the trees. This sort of ordinary activity — picking and eating fruit from groves through which young people had fled for their lives — was surreal. Nearby, tractors moved through the farmland as the small number of kibbutz returnees tended the crops, which continue to grow undisturbed.

Emerging into the festival site — an open field with nowhere much to hide and that had no bomb shelters or safe rooms at the time — is an even more surreal experience. Here, 364 people were murdered, the locations of their deaths marked by plinths, posters, written memorials and shrines of various sorts. Forty festival-goers were taken hostage.

Vancouverite Ben Mizrachi, a 22-year-old medic, escaped the scene but returned to help save the lives of victims when he was killed. I didn’t know Ben, but hearing from those who did, I grieve the loss to the world of an extraordinary individual. In the Talmud, it is written: “Whoever saves one life, it is as if they saved an entire world.” We cannot say how many lives Ben saved. We do know that 1,163 worlds were destroyed on that day in Israel.

On the memorial to Ben near the centre of the festival site are the words, “He was a legend in his life and a hero in his death.”

Tour buses disgorge Israeli schoolkids and foreign visitors, who wander through the commemoration to horror in dazed and largely silent witness.

Israel is a small country in every sense of the term. There are not seven degrees of separation between every person, but two or three. While probably most Israelis knew someone murdered or kidnapped from the kibbutzim in the Gaza envelope area, the Nova festival is the site from which the tentacles of terror truly reached into every community in the country. Young people had come from all across Israel to attend the trance music festival. Among the terrible ironies is that trance music attracts people, among other reasons, because its hypnotic, repetitive rhythms provide an emotional and physical release for people who, like all Israelis but especially the young who serve in the military, face excessive stress.

While families across the country tried, too often in vain, to reach the sons, daughters and siblings they knew were at the festival, a number of observant families discovered only upon learning that their family members were murdered or kidnapped that they were there in the first place, at a dance festival on Shabbat and the Simchat Torah holiday.

For Oren, the repercussions have been personal and political. He recalled the relationships his kibbutz had with Palestinians across the line before the 2005 Israeli disengagement and the ascent of Hamas as a terror regime there. The Oct. 7 invasion by Hamas terrorists was unimaginably devastating, obviously, but the parade of “ordinary” Palestinians who followed through the broken border barriers to join in the raping, killing and looting is what really shook Oren’s faith in any future reconciliation.

“We’ve been betrayed by the other side,” he told me. “We were believing that there was a chance for mutual life and to be able to do something together. … We were asking for a peaceful life, to grow our children, to grow our crops, and we did everything that we could to prevent this violence that was happening on the 7th of October, including evacuat[ing] all our population in 2005 and leaving them to be in the Gaza Strip.”

Oren said his belief in a peaceful coexistence shifted 180 degrees that day. Residents of his kibbutz and others in the region had employed Palestinian workers, raised money to get medical assistance for Gaza residents, even drove them to and from the border to medical appointments in Israel.

Oct. 7 destroyed human lives. But it destroyed the hope of coexistence, too, in Oren’s mind.

“They just broke it down,” he said.

The fact that the terrorist invaders were followed by waves of almost twice as many “ordinary” people is what Oren returns to.

“The arrivals of civilians from the Gaza Strip shows, in a way, that there are no uninvolved people in Gaza,” he said. “Many of them just took advantage of the situation, came to the Israeli area and slaughtered and raped and burned, burned houses and the people inside.”

The attackers were determined not just to kill, but to humiliate, said Oren, and the victims of their rampage did not need to be Jewish.

“They were harming all the people that were on the Israeli side, whether it’s a Bedouin or a Thai worker or children or women — everyone was to kill, and that was their goal,” he said. “If they could, they would take over the whole country. This is their dream. They would take over the country and they would expel us out.”

He doesn’t have the answer, but the status quo ante is unthinkable, said Oren.

“The situation we are living in for the last 20 years cannot be going on further even one day,” he said.

Does he see any place for hope?

“I think there is a generation that has to pass away and then maybe,” he said. “It’s a matter not of a few years. It’s a matter of a few decades.”

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