The sound of hurried footsteps and tense muttering woke me up a year ago today. I slept in late, until around 10:30AM, a common occurrence on Saturday mornings.
My friend Yona stood in her pajamas near the heavy steel door to her bedroom, which doubles as her family’s safe room during flare-ups on the Lebanese border, and as my bedroom when I come up north for holidays. She smiled uneasily, waiting to tell me something. Like me, she tends to grin when anxious.
“Good morning, there’s a war,” she said matter-of-factly, then took a seat at her desk.
I turned to my side, still groggy. This wasn’t the first time she used outrageous lies and threats of danger to shock me out of a heavy slumber.
“You’re lying, no way, you’re fucking with me,” I said with a chuckle. I was thinking about how late I would be to shul. In the rare instance I wake up on time, I accompany her mother’s boyfriend to shacharit. He had probably already left the house by now.
“I’m not lying,” she insisted. “Hamas took over a bunch of kibbutzim on the border and kidnapped, like, 40 people.” We probably went on arguing back and forth for a minute, then she logged onto her computer and showed me the running list of red alerts on her screen.
Yona’s father was just a few kilometers from the border with Gaza, she reminded me. He was visiting his mother on Kibbutz Sa’ad, where he grew up. He was not responding to calls or texts. Awaiting a call from her ex-husband, Yona’s mother — a wedding DJ deeply ingrained in the Israeli trance scene — paced from room to room while combing Facebook for updates on the Nova music festival.
The rest of our morning was confined more or less to that room. We sat glued to the news, and I remember very little from that day, save for a few isolated moments: blurry footage of a Gazan journalist reporting on Hamas’s invasion of Nir Oz; a roadside interview with a harrowed man who had just fled the Nova massacre, stuttering as he came down from his acid trip; Bibi’s downcast face in a broadcast from the Kirya military headquarters.
We flipped from Kan to Channel 12, which is where I first saw the slogan “beyachad nenatzeach” — together we will win — a blue-and-white logo at the top-left corner of the screen.
I remember gazing out a car window around mid-afternoon, listening to the Kan Radio news jingle cut through a thick silence as Yona’s mother drove us to a blood donation center in Acre. Already overrun with prospective donors, the staff turned us away. On the way back, her mother said something about Israeli resilience and unity in the face of catastrophe.
While back in the house, I tried to distract myself with my favorite chapter of A.B. Yehoshua’s A Late Divorce. Texts and calls from family in America began to pop up on my lock screen. I opened Instagram and saw friends’ stories. One particular trend caught my eye, in which people posted photos of themselves having fun in Israel to “show solidarity.”
I can’t recall the evening in great detail. Yona’s father, as it turns out, was saved by the kibbutz security team which managed to fend off the Hamas gunmen trying to storm the entrance. A friend of mine from East Jerusalem, deprived of any bomb shelters, texted me that a chunk of a rocket landed right outside her front door. ZAKA reported that it recovered 250 dead bodies from the grounds of the Nova music festival.
When I got back in Jerusalem later that week, my boss saddled me with a few story assignments. I had to write about how gap year programs were dealing with Hamas’s attack, then cover the public plea of a mother searching for her daughter who went missing in Re’im — her body was recovered five days after the massacre.
Unaware that Hamas had not kidnapped, but rather murdered her 21-year-old daughter, Ahuva Maizel begged frantically to a small group of English-language reporters.
“I’m talking to everyone who will listen to me because maybe my daughter will hear me or see me,” she said in broken English between shaky breaths. “Or maybe the one who is holding her will hear me and I’m telling you, I’m asking you as a human being to a human being: We have the same DNA, we are not animals, you can change your ways and you can bring them back.”
The next day, I took the light rail to Mount Herzl to cover the funeral of a 20-year-old lone soldier who was killed on October 7. Blaring rocket sirens interrupted one of the eulogies during the service. I decided to put the commotion near the top of my article:
“Attendees hurriedly leaped to the ground and covered their heads, while the Iron Dome could be heard intercepting rockets from on high. Soon after the sirens ceased, the funeral continued in an orderly fashion, though many attendees were clearly rattled.”
I exploited the moment to take a few photos for the article — a couple of teary-eyed British girls whimpering from a combination of fear and heartbreak, a soldier laying flat on his belly while sweating through his uniform.
Although I didn’t know it at the time, I’d go on to write many more articles detailing the miserable aftermath of that day.
Under immense pressure from the university and my parents, I returned to the US in late October, where my boss had me write countless short obituaries — two to three each day — for the over 1,200 people killed on October 7.
After returning to Israel in January, I quickly found my niche covering the protests for the hostages, organized by the families of the 251 captives whom Hamas kidnapped into Gaza.
Demonstrations outside Netanyahu’s house, the Knesset and throughout the streets of Jerusalem became routine for me. I got used to the rhythm of Israeli protests, writing news updates on the iPhone Notes app, getting shoved by cops and snacking on stale cookies at the hostage families tent in Paris Square.
Over the course of a slow and painful year, I watched most of the hostage families grow immensely disillusioned with Netanyahu and his squandered attempts at a deal. By the time I had left Israel in August, it seemed that most had lost all hope of ever seeing their loved ones again.
A week before I left the country, I was eating a salad at a cafe in Katamon when the former head of the Jerusalem Hostages and Missing Families Forum, a relative of slain hostage Haim Peri, spotted me by chance.
She sat down opposite me and told me about the right-wing youth who wouldn’t stop vandalizing the hostage families’ tent. We then discussed Haim, who was confirmed dead in Hamas captivity a couple months prior. The only hope that remained with her, she said, stemmed from her ability to keep protesting.
On October 8, the day after the massacre, I woke up at 5AM in Yona’s bed. Her mother drove me to the Nahariya train station. The world felt muted. My three-hour trip back home passed as a surreal blur. People shuffled on and off the platforms and into the train cars as I browsed my phone and wrote aimlessly in my diary. The numbers in my head, much smaller than our current reality, seemed inconceivable at the time.
“I am currently returning from Shavei Tzion. A war started here and Hamas killed 300 or so Israelis in just 24 hours,” I wrote. “In Gaza yesterday when Israel started bombing, around 160 died within the hour. It’s not even believable, or I guess it’s believable, but I just can’t begin to grasp it.”
My diary continues: “I can’t handle the intense nationalism now, I understand it, but that’s really not my reaction to this.”
Though I don’t remember it, I apparently began tearing up on the train, caught up in thoughts of “how precious life is.”
While alternating between Twitter and my notebook, I jotted down a tweet that I suppose resonated with me at the time:
“The division, as usual, is not between Jews and Arabs, not between religious and secular, but the division between those who have chosen life, human brotherhood and shared destiny and those who have unraveled every social, moral and spiritual restraint and are prepared to hurt anyone, including the innocent, for an amorphous idealistic vision. This is the only across-the-board division on the basis of which partnership and solidarity are built.”
A year has now passed since October 7, and I’m still unable to make sense of what happened. I feel the only thing I’ve gained over the past year is the sad understanding that human beings are much more cruel, much more tolerant of mass killing than I previously thought.
So while this tweet’s sentiment certainly holds true in my moral universe, I doubt that my ideals — increasingly utopian on this backdrop of baseless hatred and incessant war — bear much relevance nowadays.
