Sussita entrepreneur Itzhak Shubinsky driving a Sabra Sport car, from the newspaper Barkav, in the 1960s. (photo from Haifa City Museum)
For a trip down memory lane, cruise over to Haifa’s City Museum at 11 Ben-Gurion Blvd., in the German Colony, to see Sussita: The Exhibition. The display, which continues until May 25 (the opening was delayed by Hezbollah rocket fire from Lebanon), documents Israel’s failed automobile industry during the early decades of statehood.
Alas, the doorways of the museum’s 19th-century Templar building are too narrow to permit restored examples of the fibreglass shell cars to pass through. So, on hand is a stripped-down version of a Sussita, and a trove of fascinating documents and photos. Missing are full-size examples of the Carmel truck and Sabra Sport roadster that Autocars Co. Ltd. assembled at its Haifa workshop and then in the city of Tirat Carmel.
The exhibit was curated by Yifat Ashkenazi, together with filmmaker Avi Weissblei. The latter produced the 2020 documentary Desert Tested, which told the Sussita’s story.
Like Shai Agassi’s Better Place electric car company, which went through almost $1 billion in venture capital before declaring bankruptcy in 2013, Israel’s ultimately insolvent auto industry never thrived.
A Sussita Autocars Co. Ltd. advertisement in the 1960s, featuring its “5 Road Champions!” (photo from Haifa City Museum)
The Sabra’s aerodynamic curves evoke the glamour of early James Bond films. Nonetheless, even though they were jump-started by foreign firms, Haifa’s car business never quite managed to compete with Detroit.
Discussing Autocars’ 1966 Sussita at carsurvey.org, one classic car aficionado noted: “What things have gone wrong with the car?
Almost everything! It was a very cheap car made of a fibreglass body attached to a very simple welded pipes chassis, with a Triumph engine. The car was unstable, seriously dangerous, unreliable and very badly built.”
Folklore has it that camels liked to munch on the cars’ fibreglass body. But the relative paucity of dromedaries in 1960s Israel makes the truth of this story doubtful.
Founded in the mid-1950s with assistance from Britain’s ReliantMotor Co., Autocars initially assembled quirky but popular three-wheeled micro-cars. The first four-wheeled blue-and-white vehicle, the Sussita, was also designed by Reliant.
The Sussita, meaning mare in Aramaic, developed a reputation as a reliable workhorse. By 1960, Autocars was exporting the cheaply priced car – available in estate, van and pick-up models – to the United States and Canada. Rebranded as the Sabra – a genus of cactus originally from Mexico that had become a descriptor of native-born Israelis – the car sold poorly in North America due to its inferior quality.
That year, in 1960, Autocars’ owner Itzhak Shubinsky spotted the coupé Ashley GT at London’s Sports and Racing Car Show. Changing business strategy, he purchased the bodywork moulds and created the Sabra Sport, which made its debut at the 1961 New York Motor Show. The roadster car was also sold as a hardtop coupe. Fewer than 150 were exported to the United States, while a similar number were sold in Belgium.
Reliant also launched the car in Britain. Anglicizing its moniker to Sabre, the prickly cactus morphed into a swashbuckling sword.
Advertising for the Sussita: “You bought Sussita, you were not wrong.” (photo from Haifa City Museum)
Expanding production, in 1961, Autocars introduced the Carmel, named for the mountain that defines Haifa. The car featured a 1,200cc Ford Cortina engine mounted in a Reliant chassis.
By 1965, Autocars declared bankruptcy and was taken over by Britain’s Leyland-Triumph. Revamping the product line, the following year it introduced the Gilboa, a four-door version of the Carmel. In 1967, it produced an off-road, front-wheel drive utility called the Dragoon.
But the red ink continued to spill. In 1971, Leyland severed its ties with its Israeli subsidiary. Three years later, Autocars was bought by Rom Carmel Industries, which brought out its Gilboa-based Rom 1300.
Sputtering along, in 1978, the company was purchased by the Netanya-based foundry Urdan Industries. Restyled again, the Rom 1300 became the Rom 1301. But declining sales could not be reversed, going from a peak of manufacturing more than 3,000 cars annually during the 1960s to just 540 cars rolling off the assembly line in 1980, the last full year of production. In 1981, the plant shut its gates.
For more about the exhibit, visit hcm.org.il/eng/exhibitions/11128/sussita.
Light projections on the internal walls of the Tower of David, in Jerusalem, part of the Night Spectacular. (photo by Pat Johnson)
Tourism to Israel plummeted after Oct. 7, 2023. For example, January 2024 saw an 80% drop in visitors from a year previous. Those who did travel to Israel were often on solidarity missions or volunteer programs.
In March, I visited for 10 days, speaking with scores of Israelis about the situation, their grief, determination and changed attitudes, among other things. During that period, there was not a single siren in central Israel, though, days after my departure, the ceasefire ended and war in earnest began again.
It may seem frivolous or disrespectful to speak of “tourism” or “sightseeing” in moments such as these. The example of Israelis, however, is, as ever, resilience and getting on with it. Museums are open and, no matter what brings you to Israel, making time for recreation is necessary and, in many cases, adds depth to the understanding of what is happening now. A few of my destinations and choices are a bit odd – not what every visitor might choose – but others, like the Tower of David, should be on your must-see list.
Story of Jerusalem
The Tower of David Museum tells the story of Jerusalem. With a multimillion-dollar investment in new technologies upgrading the experience, the centrality of the city of Jerusalem in multiple traditions is underscored by the imagery of the city as the “navel of the world.”
From 5,000-year-old idols and 3,000-year-old stamps indicating a thriving bureaucracy, to Theodor Herzl and the modern state, the museum tells the story of a place with more history than geography.
A not-to-be-missed component is the immersive, after-dark sound and light show called the Night Spectacular. Perhaps less informative than just, well, spectacular, the 40-minute program projects the epochs of the city’s history (that is, its litany of invasions) onto the interior walls of the imposing citadel. Combo tickets to the museum, permitting evening entry for the show, are available. The effect is all-immersing, more powerful and moving than I could have anticipated. It will captivate visitors of every age.
History of Jewish militias
Like the Haganah Museum in Tel Aviv (see below), the Museum of the Underground Prisoners Jerusalem takes a politically ecumenical approach to the history of Jewish militias fighting the British in pre-state Israel.
Located in the former British Mandate-era jail, the museum tells the story of resistance fighters from the Haganah, the main defence force of the pre-state Jewish community, the Revisionist Irgun (Etzel) and the more radical Lehi (“Stern Gang”).
Jewish prisoners were captured and punished for sabotage against the British, including the smuggling of Holocaust survivors and others into Palestine. Some of the prisoners were executed in the prison yard and these lives are commemorated movingly.
Holocaust remembrance
Yad Vashem: The World Holocaust Remembrance Centre is always a moving pilgrimage. The primary exhibit space – an A-frame hall with windows at the peak, reminding us that the events took place in full view of the world (and, arguably, God) – provides a chronological history of the Shoah. The slash across the top of the Moshe Safdie-designed building also represents the permanent scar this history has left on humankind.
Like the Tower of David, Yad Vashem has had a huge infusion of money to update the exhibits and add high-tech components.
The eternal flame, at Yad Vashem. (photo by Pat Johnson)
A simple, but crucial, aspect of the exhibit is at the start, after visitors traverse the “bridge to a vanished world,” and a short film loops the story of the pre-Shoah Jewish civilization that was destroyed. This contextualizing of what was lost is an irreplaceable part of the experience.
The permanent exhibit, including the emotional Hall of Names, is what the public most often sees and it provides the history of the Holocaust for people of all levels of knowledge. The vast work of the centre remains mostly out of sight, with archives, research, recording and publication being a less visible but no less important component of Yad Vashem’s mandate.
Har Herzl Pathway
For a British Columbian, it is hard to fathom what Israelis call “mountains.” The Mount of Remembrance (home to Yad Vashem) and Mount Herzl (or Har Herzl) are hardly recognizable as distinct geographic places, let alone mountains.
Monument to Israeli victims of terror, part of the many cemeteries on Mount Herzl, final resting place of soldiers, leaders and the fallen. (photo by Pat Johnson)
In any event, from Yad Vashem, it is a relatively short walk to the Herzl Museum, which is adjacent to the grave in which the founder of political Zionism was reinterred in 1949 from his original resting place in Vienna.
Between these two destinations are the resting places of most of Israel’s leaders, as well as cemetery after cemetery filled with soldiers and civilians killed in Israel’s successive wars and terror attacks.
It was only by happenstance – well, if you are arriving by foot, you can’t miss it, but those arriving by vehicle might – that I discovered a memorial walking path between Yad Vashem and the Herzl Museum, snaking through these sad, chronological rows of graves.
The trail, as a distinct entity, is a bit of a mystery. A post-trip web search indicates there is seemingly not even an agreed-upon name for the path. The information at the entryway says that it was developed by Jewish youth movements but the specific groups go unnamed. The signage is likewise a bit perplexing, without always clear directions or explanations. The larger message, though, does not require plinths: Israel and thousands of Israeli families have paid an enormous price for the country’s existence.
Learning about Herzl
Having meandered through the sombre cemeteries of Israel’s war dead and the resting places of most of the country’s prime ministers, presidents and other historical greats, you arrive at the imposing grave of Theodor Herzl. Nearby, the museum bearing his name tells the story of the man with the crazy dream of a Jewish state.
Replica of Theodor Herzl’s office, including his original desk and other artifacts, at the Herzl Museum, Jerusalem. (photo by Pat Johnson)
Museum-goers are given a guided tour from room to room, following a cheesy video of a pair of dramatic impresarios didactically directing an actor preparing for the role of Herzl but who has no idea who the man was. The actor (and, not at all subtly, the visitor) is educated on the Dreyfus Affair, which was the polarizing moment when the secular, assimilated Herzl concluded the Jews would never be free without a state of their own. The displays take visitors through his activism, and we eventually join delegates at the First Zionist Congress.
The museum includes the re-creation of Herzl’s home office and many important relics of his life.
Connecting past, present
Gush Katif Museum is an unexpected little museum in Jerusalem’s Nachlaot neighbourhood, which tells the story of the 17 Jewish settlements that were evacuated during the “disengagement plan” from Gaza in 2005.
The Israeli government withdrew from Gaza two decades ago in hopes of allowing a sort of pilot project in Palestinian self-government. In the process, and amid (yet another) emotional national dialogue, Jewish settlements in the enclave were evacuated.
With a decidedly political agenda, the museum finds relevance today, as many Israelis look at the situation in Gaza and, with 20/20 hindsight (or something like it), question every decision that may have led to today’s realities.
In an interesting thought experiment, a Jewish resident evacuated from Gaza, speaking in the museum’s introductory film, inverts the common perception of Jewish settlements in the area. Rather than the probably prevailing view of Jewish settlements as an imposition on Palestinian land, he makes the case that Israel gave 90% of Gaza to the Arabs and some still wanted to erase the Jewish presence entirely. (Ignoring the ideological point and contesting the details, Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip took up something around 20% of the land in the small area.) It’s a perspective that challenges the idea that, even absent a negotiated two-state solution, the Palestinians deserve 100% of the occupied territories. Presumably, it is just this type of questioning the museum hopes to engender.
The Gush Katif Museum explores more than modern history, of course, going back to the earliest Jewish settlement in the area, and the successive expulsions by the Romans and the Turks.
Origins of the IDF
Moving on to Tel Aviv, the Haganah Museum tells the story of the Jewish militia that morphed, upon statehood, into the Israel Defence Forces.
The museum is located on Rothschild Boulevard, in one of Tel Aviv’s oldest buildings, originally the home of Eliyahu Golomb, a founder and ideological leader of the Haganah.
The home of Eliyahu Golomb, founder and ideological leader of the Haganah. This was the site of many clandestine and pivotal meetings of the underground resistance. (photo by Pat Johnson)
While there were other military operatives, the Haganah was the de facto militia of the Yishuv, the pre-state Jewish community. The museum, though, takes a broader view, beginning with the role of “tower and stockade settlements” on the peripheries of the proto-state, through the First World War Zion Mule Corps, the Jewish Legion (which helped the rise to prominence of Revisionist leaders like Ze’ev Jabotinsky), and touches on the roles of Revisionist Etzel (the Irgun) and its breakaway group Lehi (the “Stern Gang”) in taking the fight to the British. In an ideological and military skirmish after independence, these groups would be forcibly unified into the IDF.
The museum includes the crucial role the Haganah played in the Aliyah Bet, the illegal migration of Jews into pre-state Israel during the period of British blockade of Jewish refugees.
At the entry to the building is a relief mural by Israeli sculptor Moshe Ziffer, with figures in traditional kibbutz-style clothing, linking the movement to the pioneering Zionist ethos, as well as fighters shielding and defending Jewish families. There are also ancient symbols in the artwork, implying the Maccabean revolt, and including modern symbols of the transition to statehood, in 1948.
Statues of David Ben-Gurion and his wife Pola, by artist Ruth Kestenbaum Ben-Dov, on Tel Aviv’s Independence Trail. (photo by Pat Johnson)
Independence Trail
The Haganah Museum is a central part of the cobbled-together tourist route branded “Independence Trail.” What would ostensibly be the centrepoint of the trail – Independence Hall, the home of Tel Aviv’s first mayor, Meir Dizengoff, and the place where David Ben-Gurion read aloud Israel’s Declaration of Independence on May 14, 1948 – is surrounded by scaffolding amid ongoing renovations without a set date for reopening.
An easy-to-follow map of the ambling tour is available at the tourism kiosk in the pedestrian boulevard between the Haganah Museum and Independence Hall. The tour begins (if you want to do it in un-Israeli orderly fashion) at the city’s first kiosk, a restoration of which still serves refreshments to Tel Avivians and tourists.
The site of the first kiosk in Tel Aviv. The location is still a destination for refreshments. (photo by Pat Johnson)
The walk continues past the Nahum Gutman Fountain, which depicts the history of Jaffa and its sister-city-come-lately Tel Aviv, from the setting-off place of Jonah on his way to the fish’s belly, through Egyptian invaders, Crusaders, Napoleonic forces on up to Herzl and to the Declaration of Independence that took place a few steps away.
Other stops on the trail include the site of Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium, the world’s first modern Hebrew-language high school; the Palatin Hotel, the resting stop for famous names of the 20th century; Tel Aviv’s Great Synagogue; several buildings that are notable more for being examples of the Bauhaus or International Style of architecture than for historical import; the Tel Aviv Founders Monument; a statue of Dizengoff, astride his horse; and several others. The map and trail provide a quick and easy guide to important sites that you might otherwise overlook in a small area of central Tel Aviv.
Tragic walking tour
An unusual, if not terribly uplifting, activity is the Tragic Tel Aviv Walking Tour, which visits sites in the city centre where terror and even Second World War attacks killed civilians.
Easily missed: A monument to one of Tel Aviv’s many terror attacks. (photo by Pat Johnson)
On Sept. 9, 1940, Italian war planes operating from the island of Rhodes, made sorties over Haifa and Tel Aviv, killing 137 people, with many more injured. The attacks targeted no Allied (that is, British) military infrastructure and shattered what, to then, had been a feeling of relative isolation from the European war among the residents of pre-state Palestine. The monument to the bombing in Mikhoels Square, at the corner of Levinsky and Aliyah streets, is modest and easily overlooked if you are not explicitly seeking it – or even if you are.
Led by former Torontonian Jeffrey Levi, the tour then proceeds through sadly seemingly endless locations of suicide bombings and other terror attacks, many of which took place during the Second Intifada. In some cases, the historical events that left Israelis dead or wounded are not commemorated at all, or are marked by likewise inconspicuous markers.
If there is an uplifting message in this tour, it is in the innocuous manner in which most of these historical tragedies are commemorated (or not). As Levi recounts the devastations of the past, Tel Avivians hustle by, literally and figuratively moving past the past.
With Air Canada’s announcement of the resumption of flights from Toronto and Montreal to Tel Aviv, it will be much faster for Canadians to fly to Israel. But will it be cheaper?
The Canadian national carrier is set to resume its routes to Tel Aviv on June 8 with four weekly flights between Pearson International Airport and Ben-Gurion Airport. From August, it will fly from YUL Montréal-Trudeau International Airport once weekly.
Since 2022, when El Al Israel Airlines halted its flights to Canada, there have been no direct flights between Toronto or Montreal and Tel Aviv. Air Canada suspended its Israel operations following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack on Israel. It resumed services just before the Iranian missile attack on Israel on April 13, 2024, then again suspended flights, repeatedly extending the suspension, until announcing that flights would not be resumed until further notice.
“We are looking forward to booking direct non-stop flights from Toronto and Montreal again,” said Toby Soil of Toronto’s Peerless Travel. “During these very difficult times, we were booking flights from New York with El Al, which did an excellent job, or booking flights with Air Canada, El Al and other European airlines through Europe with a stop-over.”
Air Canada has undertaken an extensive safety analysis, which will continue leading up to and after June 8, said Soil. The airline will continue to monitor the situation in the region and adjust its schedule accordingly, including future service increases as warranted. Prices will depend on availability, class of service and season, she explained.
Other North American carriers that have announced they are resuming flying on the Tel Aviv-New York route include United Airlines, which scheduled flights beginning on March 15, and Delta Airlines, on April 1. Delta had ceased flying to Israel at the end of July 2024.
Air India resumed its long-haul flight services from Delhi and Mumbai to Tel Aviv on March 2. Similarly, China’s Hainan Airlines will resume twice weekly direct flights between Tel Aviv and Beijing starting April 10.
European airlines that have recently announced the resumption of flights to and from Israel include Air France, which resumed flying to Ben-Gurion Airport on Jan. 25; Iberia, which will start on April 1; Air Baltic, on April 2; and KLM and EasyJet both beginning on June 1.
By the summer peak season, three North American airlines will be operating flights to Israel after months in which only El Al scheduled direct flights between Tel Aviv and New York. That near-monopoly allowed El Al to raise its fares. Last November, the airline posted record quarterly profit and revenue. The Israeli airline drew criticism from customers in Israel and abroad for alleged price-gouging.
David J. Rotfleisch is a Toronto lawyer who made aliyah two-and-a-half years ago and now lives in Jerusalem, but commutes regularly to Canada.
“In October 2022, the month after I made aliyah, El Al stopped flying directly to Tel Aviv from Canada,” he said. “That left Air Canada as the only option for a direct flight. Post-October 2023, Air Canada canceled its flights, meaning there was no way to fly directly to Israel from Canada, which I need to do, both because my law office is in Toronto and to visit friends and family.
“Now, with the resumption of the Air Canada flights, a direct 12-hour return flight for the holidays, leaving in September and returning in October, is around $2,300 Cdn in basic economy. Flying Polish LOT Airlines via Warsaw will cost about $1,600 Cdn return in basic economy and will take 19 hours or longer depending on the connections.”
Last September, Rotfleisch was forced to fly Ethiopian Airlines to Addis Ababa to reach Israel for Rosh Hashanah.
With high demand and limited capacity, travel experts don’t forecast a fall in prices during the Passover holiday or summer season.
“Services by foreign airlines are going to gradually grow and we are going to gradually see prices come down, but they are not going to be down dramatically for Passover or the August period, when most Israelis are looking to book vacations with their families,” Yaneev Lanis, co-founder of online booking site Secret Flights, told the Times of Israel. “Passover period is always an expensive period to travel, and especially this year, when there is still going to be less supply than usual.”
He said, “Passover ticket prices are going to be higher, and I wouldn’t expect prices to drop, as demand will be very high and foreign airlines are planning to come back in a low capacity, which means that they will easily be able to fill up their planes and there is no reason for them to reduce prices.”
Overall, ticket prices to and from Israel have more than doubled at times since the Gaza War broke out on Oct. 7, 2023.
Gil Zohar is a writer and tour guide in Jerusalem.
Volunteers with Sar-El in Israel last March. (photo from Marina Sonkina)
Last year, about this time, I was in Israel, volunteering with Sar-El, an organization that connects the Israel Defence Forces with volunteers from more than 30 countries, who provide the army with non-combat support. So many others had wanted to help after Oct. 7 that I had to wait several months for my documents to be processed.
The mood was understandably sombre. Not just the trauma of the Hamas terror attacks, with hostages captive, but also the antisemitism that engulfed the Western world like fire.
I asked some of my fellow volunteers why they had come to Israel during such a dangerous time. The answers I got, especially from non-Jews, both surprised and comforted me. A Christian volunteer from Detroit wanted Israel to know that it did not stand alone. A middle-aged Australian had been sponsored by her church in Sydney to help people of the Holy Land under an attack. Two Romanian girls didn’t speak a word of Hebrew or English, but answered me in Italian: “Aiuto” (“Help”).
“I had a very good life. I had a chance to travel all over the world. But, until now, I’ve been traveling horizontally,” a Parisian Jew of Algerian descent told me. “Now, it’s time to travel vertically,” she said, raising her eyes to the sky. “This land is sacred. I feel it here like nowhere else. And now it’s in peril.”
In spite of rockets being fired into Israel from Lebanon, Gaza and Yemen, the volunteers felt more protected in Israel than they did back home. Many felt relieved that, finally, there was no need to conceal one’s true feelings or to hide one’s Jewishness.
“I don’t feel safe in the US anymore,” said a New York lawyer who had been attacked from behind in the streets of Manhattan, his yarmulke yanked off his head.
A German woman from Munich was on her 10th visit to Israel. “I’m not Jewish, and I can’t explain it,” she said. “All I know is that I love people here. Love their warmth. Chaos? Yes! They talk loud, they are emotional, but I don’t mind that. I plan to spend half a year here once I retire.”
Initially, I wasn’t sure how we, civilians, could help the IDF fight Hamas in Gaza, but my first day at the medical military base near Tel Aviv made it clear. Hundreds of different medications and medical devices that had come from warehouses across the country had to be sorted out, their expiration dates checked. Those who accuse Israel of racism should see these medicines, each labeled in four languages: Hebrew, Arabic, English and Russian. (Thanks to Soviet antisemitism and, lately, to Putin’s war on Ukraine, 15% of Israel’s population comes from Russia.)
On the military base, I saw clearly what is best in Israel: its people. The IDF mirrors the diversity and inclusiveness of a society that, in its short history, has accepted refugees from more than 100 countries.
Without Moshe, for example, we would have had no idea how to sort the truckloads of medications arriving every day. Having come to Israel from Bukhara (in Central Asia) as a child, Moshe kibitzed in three languages, instructing us by means of his hands while talking on his cellphone. From his easy smile, I would never have guessed that his wife had recently died of cancer, that his two sons were fighting in Gaza and that, every day after his work with us, he went to a synagogue to pray. One morning, Moshe directed us to place boxes in long rows on the floor, in an unusual configuration. The next morning, a group of children with autism and down syndrome came to finish the sorting, also helping their people’s army.
Paul, a mathematician who came from France, was in charge of the military base’s math department. Ruth, who had made aliyah from the Netherlands as a teenager, was serving as one of the madrichot (female soldiers tasked with organizing and looking after Sar-El’s volunteers); after the army, she hoped to become a specialist in Japanese culture.
On another military base, about 20 kilometres from Gaza, in the Negev Desert, one of our tasks was to assemble care packages for soldiers spending Passover at the front, away from home. In two days, we filled 15,000 boxes with grape juice, matzah and other traditional items. Asoldier with a distinct Californian accent came to help us. He was a “lone soldier,” a soldier who has no family in Israel. Various families take turns welcoming lone soldiers for Shabbat, feeding them and giving them a sense of home.
The cover of a Haggadah that Sar-El volunteers inserted into thousands of Passover boxes that were sent to Israeli soldiers in Gaza. It shows the multicultural character of the Israel Defence Forces. (photo from Marina Sonkina)
Once, an officer joined us, helping make up the boxes, which was unusual, given his rank. Later, I saw him in the mess hall speaking in Hebrew to the base commander, who was originally from India. I found out that the officer was Druze. Living mainly in the country’s north, in the Galilee region, the Druze community enjoys all the civil rights of other Israelis, while maintaining their Arabic language and customs. Many Druze reach high echelons in the army, in medicine and other professions. When a Hezbollah rocket struck the Druze town of Majdal Shams, killing 12 children playing soccer, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu went there, addressing community members as “brothers and sisters.” He promised that Hezbollah would “pay a heavy price” for killing their children, and he kept his word.
When I think of the soldiers I met and talked to, one thing sets them apart from young people of their age in North America: a seriousness of purpose, and the burden of responsibility. They know that the survival of Israel lies on their shoulders. They also know that, while defending theircountry, they may not survive. Death lurks behind every corner in Gaza and Lebanon. It has hidden in an effigy of a child pleading, in Hebrew, for help, but booby-trapped with explosives. It was underground, in the tunnels, some going 50 kilometres deep. It disguised itself in doctors’ scrubs, inside Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza, which was appropriated by Hamas terror operatives.
Every fallen soldier is loved and mourned as one’s own child. Army service acts as a social glue in a country into which millions of refugees, speaking different languages, have poured. The IDF is still the backbone and pride of this society.
At a party for troops just returned from Gaza, I saw a religious Jew in a yarmulke (skullcap) and tzitzit (prayer shawl) hanging from under his uniform, with a baby girl in each arm and an automatic rifle dangling behind his back. I talked to a medic, a corporal who was more outspoken than many – a college history teacher in times of peace, he had three young children at home.
“Is there any possibility of peace between Palestinians and Jews?” I asked him.
“Before Oct. 7, I supported a two-state solution because I wanted peace, but the Palestinians do not want peace,” he responded. “We’ve tried it many times in the past. They want only one state, an Islamic Caliphate with Sharia rule. We, Jews, are in their way and they want us dead…. We have to fight – if we want to survive.”
“What about your children?” I asked. “Will they have to fight, too?”
“Yes, them, too,” he said. “They’ll be left with no other choice.”
I shook my head in distress but said nothing.
“Look,” said the man, “illusions cost us very dearly. We can’t afford them anymore.”
I remembered Golda Meir’s words, spoken in 1957: “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.”
There is a truce in Gaza now. But, while some 20,000 Hamas fighters have been eliminated, 10,000 armed fighters are still at large.
Marina Sonkinais a fiction writer, and teaches in the Liberal Arts Program 55+ at Simon Fraser University.
A photograph of Gen. Lewis Cass taken by Mathew Brady, circa 1860-65. In 1837, Cass dropped the anchor of the USS Constitution off Jaffa. (photo from US National Archives and Records Administration)
President Donald Trump’s unconventional proposal on Feb. 5 to annex the Gaza Strip isn’t the first time the United States has expressed territorial ambitions in the Middle East.
In 1837, Gen. Lewis Cass (1782-1866) dropped the anchor of the USS Constitution, “Old Ironsides,” off Jaffa. (Until British dynamite cleared the rock-strewn harbour in the 1920s, rowboats connected the port with the ships anchored offshore.) Together with several US Navy officers, Cass proceeded inland, planning to survey the uncharted Dead Sea – the lowest point on earth – but the poorly equipped mission was a failure. Ill from sunstroke and dehydration, the sailors barely managed to return to their vessel alive.
A decade later, Lieut. William Francis Lynch (1801-1865) of the US Navy led a better-provisioned 17-man expedition to explore the Jordan River and Dead Sea. Camels hauled the prefabricated boats specially manufactured of copper and galvanized iron overland from the Mediterranean Sea to Lake Kinneret (Sea of Galilee). Lynch then ventured down the Jordan River, which is a creek by most standards. In tandem, a party proceeded on land. The mission mapped the Jordan’s hitherto unknown 27 rapids and cascades. Though it is only 100 kilometres from the freshwater Lake Kinneret to the Dead Sea, the Jordan River’s winding course was 322 kilometres long. Lynch described the Jordan as unsuitable for navigation, calling it “more sinuous even than the Mississippi.”
Lieut. William F. Lynch, circa 1861-62. In the mid 1800s, Lynch led a 17-man expedition to explore the Jordan River and Dead Sea. (photo from Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph Collection, NH 367)
While advancing “the cause of science,” Lynch was also at “the service of American commerce with the region.” He reported “an extensive plain, luxuriant in vegetation and presenting … a richness of alluvial soil, the produce of which, with proper agriculture, might nourish a vast population.”
While Congress shelved Lynch’s report recommending colonization, it helped spark the United States’s fascination with the Holy Land – and led to the establishment of American colonization projects in Jaffa and Jerusalem.
At Tel Aviv’s south end is a cluster of wooden clapboard buildings straight out of New England known as the American Colony. The story begins shortly after the American Civil War: on Aug. 11, 1866, 157 members of the Palestine Emigration Colony – including 48 children under the age of 12 – set sail from Jonesport, Me., for Jaffa on the newly built, three-masted vessel USS Nellie Chapin.
George Jones Adams (1811-1880), leader of the 35 New England families, hoped to develop the Land of Israel in preparation for the biblically prophesized return of the Jews. This would hasten the second coming of the Christian messiah. Adams had been a follower of the Mormon Church, but quit the religion following the assassination of Mormon founder Joseph Smith in 1844. Most of the congregants of the Church of the Messiah that Adams founded lived in Maine.
Departing the United States, Adams stated: “We believe the time has come for Israel to gather home from their long dispersion to the land of their fathers. We are going [to Jaffa] to become practical benefactors of the land and people, to take the lead in developing its great resources.”
Proto-Zionists, their purpose was not to missionize but to assist the Jewish people in returning to their ancestral land. However, though equipped with the latest agricultural tools, 22 pre-fab houses and religious fervour, the colonists’ mission was doomed. Arriving in Jaffa, they learned that Adams had not yet purchased the land on which they planned to settle. Instead, they pitched their tents on the beach near a cemetery where the victims of a recent cholera epidemic were buried. Within six months, 22 of the 157 settlers, including nine children, were dead.
Disease was not the settlers’ only problem. After finally buying the property for their neighbourhood, the first outside of Jaffa’s Ottoman ramparts – Tel Aviv would only be founded 43 years later, in 1909 – the pioneers quickly learned that farming in the arid Middle East was nothing like agriculture in rainy New England.
Facing starvation and soaring mortality, Adams sought solace in alcohol. Within two years after their arrival, all but two dozen or so members of the American Colony had returned to the New World. Their buildings were sold to newly arrived German evangelical Christians. Known as Templars, the Germans developed seven colonies across Palestine until being arrested by the British in 1939 as Nazi sympathizers. They were deportedto Australia or sent back to the Third Reich in prisoner exchanges.
Among the Americans who remained was Rolla Floyd (1832-1911), a pioneer of Israel’s tourism business. In 1869, he opened the stagecoach service from Jaffa to Jerusalem on the newly paved road. The journey from the coast to the mountains took 14 hours: today’s high-speed train covers the same distance in 29 minutes, with a stop at Ben-Gurion Airport.
The Maine settlers were not forgotten, thanks to Reed Holmes: in 1942, the historian met an elderly woman who had been 13 when the Nellie Chapin dropped anchor. After four decades of research, Holmes published The ForeRunners. Around the same time, he organized a tour of Israel. Among the participants was Jean Carter, a licensed contractor from Massachusetts. Touring the former American Colony, she was aghast to learn that the decrepit, historic wooden houses were about to be torn down.
Raised in a Protestant church, Carter had a master’s degree in Jewish studies and was fluent in Hebrew. She persuaded the Israeli government to declare the former colony a heritage site, received a promise that any structure that could be preserved would be spared demolition, and got the Tel Aviv municipality to erect a plaque on the beach where the Maine colonists had landed.
Holmes and Carter fell in love and eventually married. In 2002, they purchased Wentworth House – one of the remaining American Colony buildings. With the help of specialists in 19th-century building preservation techniques from Maine, the couple spent two years restoring the ruin and removing later additions. Today restored as the Maine Friendship House, it houses a museum about Jaffa’s American Colony.
The Holmes, who live in Peace Valley, Me., were honoured in 2004 by the Maine Preservation Society – the first time the group recognized a project outside of New England.
Unrelated to Jaffa’s American Colony is a Jerusalem settlement of the same name. The eponymous luxury hotel where foreign journalists like to belly up to the bar was founded in 1881 as a commune – Israel’s first kibbutz – by members of a Protestant utopian society led by Horatio Spafford of Chicago (1828-1888), who penned the Evangelical hymn “It Is Well With My Soul.”
Spafford and his wife Anna (1842-1923), together with a group of 14 adults and five children, expected Jesus’s second coming imminently. While waiting, the members of the pietistic settlement of Yankees and Scandinavians served the Holy City’s many destitute by opening soup kitchens, hospitals, orphanages and other charitable ventures.
Horatio Gates Spafford and Anna Spafford, circa 1873. In 1881, a Protestant utopian society led by Horatio Spafford founded the American Colony in Jerusalem. (photos from Manuscript Division, Library of Congress)
Much of that charity was funded by the American Colony Photo Department, which became the community’s primary income. Many of those early images fall into the category of Orientalism, for which the West had a seemingly insatiable appetite. But part of that artistic achievement was due to fortuitous timing – the colony’s photographers began operating at a time when tourism to the Holy Land, especially from America and Europe, was beginning en masse.
Moreover, “with the advent of halftone printing in the 1880s, images were now becoming more accessible to the public via printed matter – books, magazines and newspapers – where they were now reproduced alongside text,” notes Tom Powers in his 2009 work Jerusalem’s American Colony and Its Photographic Legacy. (Before that, photographs could only be pasted into books by hand, as individual prints.)
A third factor was getting off to a good start, thanks to plain luck. The first sizeable project of the American Colony documentarians was the1898 state visit of Imperial Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II and Empress Augusta Victoria to the Holy Land.
Interested in seeing the American Colony Photo Department’s 22,000 historic photographs archived at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC? Visit loc.gov/pictures/collection/matpc/colony.html.
Thomas Hand and the survivors of the massacre at Kibbutz Be’eri hope to return home in 2026. (photo by Gil Zohar)
Kibbutz Hatzerim, eight kilometres west of Be’er Sheva, best known for its drip-irrigation plant, also houses the newly established quarter here for the survivors of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of more than 130 of Kibbutz Be’eri’s 1,071 residents. Emily Hand and her Dublin-born father Thomas, 64, are among the 200 refugees living there. In 2026, they hope to move back to rebuilt homes in their community alongside the Gaza Strip.
“We’re still in the stage of demolishing the houses beyond repair,” Hand said. A quarter of Be’eri’s housing is unsalvageable.
Some vegetation has been planted around the new temporary bungalows at Hatzerim, and the site is beginning to resemble a kibbutz neighbourhood. But little else is normal.
The Hands marked the anniversary of Emily’s release from imprisonment in the tunnels of Gaza on Nov. 26. A week earlier, the Irish-Israeli celebrated her 10th birthday. Thomas no longer allows his daughter to be interviewed by the media. The probing questions she faced raised horrific memories of captivity that she is still struggling to process, said her father. She has engaged in various therapies, including seeing a psychologist weekly, horse riding and puppy love with their pooch, Johnsey.
“She’s living day to day, enjoying every day,” her father said.
The Hands moved to their home at Hatzerim shortly before Rosh Hashanah and Emily started the new school year there. Before then, they had been sheltered at Kibbutz Ein Gedi’s hotel by the Dead Sea.
Like his daughter, Hand too is struggling. In the days after Oct. 7, he was initially informed his daughter had been murdered. After a month, that assessment was revised to missing. After more uncertainty, she was then declared a hostage – and finally released in a swap for Hamas gunmen and other terrorists.
The Hand household is still decorated with balloons from Emily’s recent birthday party. Among the guests were fellow hostages Noa Argamani, Ra’aya Rotem and Hila Rotem Shoshani, who surprised Emily with a cake and candles. Argamani, who was imprisoned with Hand, was rescued on June 8, after 245 days in captivity, in a joint operation by the Israel Defence Forces, Shabak (Israel’s security agency) and Israel Police.
Hand said Emily is adjusting “incredibly well.” But then he contextualized what that means: “She still sleeps with me. Usually in my bed.”
“She was captured from a MaMaD [safe room]. And that’s a trigger,” he said.
The constant roar of jets flying overhead to and from the nearby Hatzerim Air Base adds to their ill-ease. Hand’s conversation is punctuated by sighs and tears. “Don’t mind me,” he said. “It’s just part of the process.”
None of the kibbutz’s protected spaces had bulletproof doors, he noted. His own MaMaD wasn’t equipped with a lock, he added. “I just had to hope and pray.”
Other general tactical mistakes included storing the kibbutz’s guns and ammo in a central location rather than having them distributed among people’s homes. Half the members of Be’eri’s emergency response team were gunned down trying to reach the armoury, Hand said.
His first concern on Oct. 7 was for Emily, who was sleeping over at a friend’s house 300 metres away. With bullets flying, there was no chance to run there to attempt to rescue her, he recalled.
He left his shelter at 10 a.m. Armed with his pistol, two magazine clips and a bullet in the chamber, he positioned himself by his kitchen window, which offered a wide field of fire. The Hand family house was relatively untouched apart from shrapnel damage.
“While I couldn’t protect my daughter, I was able to protect three houses,” he said.
Hand remained at his post until 11:30 p.m., when IDF soldiers arrived.
“The amount of guilt that I felt at not going to save her [Emily] even at the risk of my own life…. But I knew I would be dead, and she would be an orphan. It was a very big thing afterwards. At the time, I was just in survival mode.”
With self-deprecating humour, Hand remembered he only had two cans of beer in the fridge that Saturday morning. It’s a mistake he has never repeated, he said, now always having a case of suds on hand.
Another cause of guilt is not being able to work. He had previously been employed at Be’eri’s printshop, and then as a painter at its toy and furniture factory. While the workshop has reopened, Hand is unable to commute the 90 minutes there, since he must stay close to his daughter. “I have to keep her normalized,” he said.
“They’ve given me a lot of leeway,” Hand said of the kibbutz secretariat. In the meantime, he devotes a lot of time to hostage issues.
Looking wistful, he concluded: “I will not feel safe going back to Be’eri with this government in power, and without Hamas being completely crushed.”
MK Dan Illouz opposes legislation that would enshrine the exemption of Haredim from military service. (photo from Knesset)
Dan Illouz, a Montreal-born Likud rookie member of the Knesset, is making a name for himself in Israel’s Parliament by speaking against his own party’s policy of opposing the draft of Haredim (ultra-Orthodox Jews) into the Israel Defence Forces.
“Exempting such a large group of people from their obligation to serve in the IDF at such a critical time is anti-Zionist,” the freshman lawmaker tweeted recently on X.
Responding to the challenge to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s leadership, the Likud has taken steps to clamp down on internal dissent by party lawmakers opposed to legislation that would enshrine the exemption of members of the ultra-Orthodox community from military service.
The IDF’s personnel shortage has become acute in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, surprise attack on Israeli cities and kibbutzim ringing the Gaza Strip, followed by Hezbollah’s rocket campaign against the Galilee andCentral Israel that began the next day. Reservists, called miluimnikim in Hebrew, have been repeatedly called up for months at a time. But, Netanyahu must balance his party’s stability in government with military personnel considerations, not to mention growing casualties.
In a move widely seen as linked to then-defence minister Yoav Gallant’s opposition to the controversial military draft exemption legislation – which has been demanded by ultra-Orthodox coalition partners whose support Likud needs to stay in power – Netanyahu fired Gallant last month and appointed Israel Katz in his stead. The prime minister then pushed for party discipline against dissenters like Illouz, who holds the rank of captain in the IDF reserves.
Coalition whip Ofir Katz informed Illouz that he was being removed from the Knesset’s economic affairs committee and foreign affairs and defence committee due to his “statements regarding coalition discipline and his conduct in recent days,” a spokesperson for Katz said.
In a further slap on the wrist, Illouz was barred from submitting private bills for six weeks.
Illouz has long spoken out against efforts to pass new legislation regulating exemptions for yeshivah students following a High Court ruling in June that they must enlist in the IDF unless a new bill is passed.
Digging in recently, Illouz announced his opposition to the coalition’s Daycare Bill, which seeks to circumvent a High Court ruling preventing state-funded daycare subsidies from going to the children of ultra-Orthodox draft dodgers.
“Exempting such a large group from the duty to serve in the IDF in such a critical period is a non-Zionist act that is unworthy of us as a nation – whether it be called ‘the enlistment law’ or ‘the daycare law,’ whose purpose is to cancel the daycares sanction and restore the funding,” Illouz declared.
The Daycare Bill was removed from the Knesset agenda last month after it failed to garner sufficient coalition support.
A member of the Quebec and Israeli bar associations, and a former legislative adviser to the Knesset’s coalition chair, Illouz previously served in a legal capacity at Israel’s Foreign Ministry. He is a graduate of McGill University Law School and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s master’s program in public policy.
Drawing on his legal expertise, Illouz co-authored a law banning any Israeli interaction with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), due to some of its members’ being involved with Hamas in general and in the Oct. 7 massacre in particular.
Humanitarian aid and services to the two million people in Gaza must now be based on alternative agencies such as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the UN International Children’s Emergency Fund and the World Food Organization, said Illouz. (More than 200,000 Gazans have fled to Egypt and elsewhere since war broke out in their coastal enclave 15 months ago.)
Born in Canada to Moroccan immigrants, Illouz made aliyah in 2009 after completing his law studies. Like all newly elected MKs holding foreign citizenship, he was required to surrender his second passport before being sworn in as a member of Israel’s Parliament.
Illouz continues to serve as the chair of the Knesset delegation to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and be a member of the Knesset delegation to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, an international body that brings together parliamentarians from 180 countries.
Gil Zohar is a writer and tour guide in Jerusalem.
Pro-Israel activist Eylon Levy speaks with an audience member before his Oct. 30 talk at Schara Tzedeck, which was presented by StandWithUs Canada. (photo by Pat Johnson)
The terrorists who perpetrated the Oct. 7 attacks were products of schools paid for in part by the Canadian government, according to Eylon Levy, a former Israeli government spokesperson who addressed an audience at Schara Tzedeck Synagogue last week.
“The Oct. 7 terrorists all went to Canadian-funded schools,” he said. “That is outrageous. It’s disgusting. You need to hold [the Canadian government] accountable and say there are consequences.”
Most schools in Gaza are run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which is funded by UN member-states, including Canada.
Levy spoke here Oct. 30 as part of a cross-Canada tour sponsored by StandWithUs Canada, a pro-Israel educational organization focused on campuses.
Levy said Israel’s recent announcement that it was banning UNRWA from operating in Israel was the right move because the agency exists to perpetuate the Palestinian refugee problem, not resolve it, to keep the Israeli-Arab conflict alive, to indoctrinate Palestinian children and to provide the financial safety net terrorists need to engage in violent attacks like Oct. 7.
Israel has been widely condemned for the imminent ban, which came after Israel repeatedly informed the UN that UNRWA’s staff includes known terrorists, some of whose names were provided to the UN by Israel.
“They just don’t care,” Levy said of the UN’s response that terrorists are on their payroll. “Now they claim UNRWA is irreplaceable. Well, you should have thought about that when Israel gave you the evidence that it is riddled with terrorism and you chose to deny that it was a problem.”
According to Israeli authorities, 12 UNRWA staff members actively participated in the Oct. 7 attacks, with allegations that more than 30 additional UNRWA workers were involved in activities such as facilitating hostage-taking and looting. Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant has alleged that, of the 13,000 UNRWA employees in Gaza, at least 12% are affiliated with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror groups.
In conversation with Michael Sachs, Western regional director for Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, Levy said many people are inverting right and wrong when it comes to the Israel-Hamas war and they are trying to sway young people especially.
“The world is trying to tell them that the cause of their generation, the great cause of this century, is the fight for Palestine, which means the destruction of the state of Israel,” Levy said.
Contesting these messages is tough, he said, especially when the agencies that represent the moral high-ground are on the wrong side.
Levy recalled a debate he had against broadcaster Mehdi Hasan.
“I knew he was going to come on the stage and say, ‘Well, the UN agrees with me, Oxfam agrees with me, Save the Children agrees with me, Red Cross agrees with me. How is it possible the whole world is wrong and you are right?’” Levy said. “That’s Jewish history: the courage to look around and say, ‘You’re all crazy. This isn’t right.’”
Levy noted that UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres issued a statement on social media mourning the death of Muhammad Abu Atawi, who was killed by the Israel Defence Forces.
Atawi was an employee of UNRWA but, according to Israel, he was also a Hamas terrorist who led the attack on the bomb shelter near the Nova music festival, in which Hersh Goldberg-Polin and others were sheltering.
“This is a leader I’m supposed to take seriously?” Levy asked. “The Red Cross that hasn’t lifted a finger to try to save the hostages is an organization that I am meant to take seriously? The NGOs that wouldn’t even shed crocodile tears on Oct. 7, that never tried to do any sort of campaign for the hostages, they are the ones I am meant to take seriously?”
Young people and other activists in the West who insist they are anti-Zionist and not antisemitic are deluding themselves, Levy suggested.
“You are expressing a hatred and a prejudice against the same people,” he said. “The fact that they believe that they hate the same people that their grandparents hated but it’s a complete coincidence shows a tragic lack of self-awareness.”
Getting the pro-Israel message out is especially challenging on social media, said Levy, but Jews and their allies can’t give up the battle.
Social media is problematic at the best of times – even when it is not a platform controlled by the Chinese regime, as TikTok is – because it maximizes engagement by provoking outrage and amplifies the most extreme viewpoints.
“We’re not going to win the social media battle,” he said. “But we can’t afford not to fight it.”
If the only thing that people see on social media are anti-Israel messages, what conclusion will people come to? he asked.
“But what if their friend, the person they know is a good, decent person, stands up and presents a contrary view?” said Levy. “Then at least you’ve made that person think this is complicated and there’s a case to be made on the other side. So, it requires all of us to be there, to fight the fight, to be as loud and vocal and produce as much stuff as possible.”
That battle of ideas also needs to be taken offline, he said.
It is further complicated, he added, because the Israeli government has effectively given up communicating to the world.
Levy, who was born in England to Israeli parents and made aliyah as a lone soldier, was effectively conscripted to serve as an English-language spokesperson at the beginning of the war. He was fired after a social media spat with Britain’s then-foreign secretary David Cameron. Levy cofounded the Israeli Citizen Spokespersons’ Office, which tries to fill the information gap he said the Israeli government has left.
Pro-Israel voices in the West need to change tack, according to Levy. Rather than being on the defensive and explaining Israel’s actions, Canadians and others should be calling out governments and NGOs.
“Other people owe us answers,” he said. “UNRWA owes us answers. The Red Cross owes us answers. The UN owes us answers. I think we have to go on the offensive and demand those answers from other people instead of constantly trying to defend ourselves and say, ‘I can explain.’”
Levy dismisses calls for a ceasefire. The war needs to end in the defeat of Hamas – and it’s all over but the surrender, he argued.
“Hamas has lost,” he said. “It’s game over.”
But Hamas needs the world to help it understand that fact.
“The problem is, when international actors step in to demand a ceasefire, as opposed to Hamas’s surrender, they tell Hamas to keep fighting,” he said. With Hamas on its knees, “It’s outrageous that some countries are trying to get it back up on its feet.”
Hezbollah has also been largely eliminated, according to Levy.
“All of its top leadership are dead,” he said. “The infrastructure along the border has been destroyed.”
Iran, of course, remains unbowed, even in the face of the damage Israel has inflicted on its proxies.
Levy said one outcome from the current crisis is that Jewish communities have come together. In Israel, individuals instantly mobilized on Oct. 7 to do whatever they could and, in the diaspora, Jews have united as they rarely have before.
“That sense of responsibility, that sense of solidarity, being there for each other and having each other’s backs, I find incredibly inspiring,” he said. “That awakening of responsibility and self-reliance and leadership in Jewish communities around the world has been an inspiration to people in Israel.”
Jesse Primerano, executive director of StandWithUs Canada, which brought Levy to Vancouver, said his group has 106 interns and fellows on campuses across Canada this year – an increase over past years and a happy surprise for Primerano. He was afraid for the organization’s programs this year, he said, concerned that they wouldn’t be able to recruit students to stand for Israel on campuses. The opposite happened.
“Numbers skyrocketed,” he said. “The truth is that they are not scared. They are empowered. They are emboldened … and they are so brave and ready to stand up.”
SWU has also hired more staff across Canada, including a full-time position in Vancouver funded by the Diamond Foundation.
Three students from Vancouver-area campuses who are part of the SWU Emerson Fellowship program spoke to the audience, drawing ovations.
The medical centre at Kibbutz Be’eri, where at least five people were murdered Oct. 7, 2023. (photo by Melanie Preston)
I’m sitting in the dining hall at Kibbutz Be’eri, as people begin to enter for their Sunday lunch at 11:39 a.m. Sunday is like Monday here in Israel, the work week being Sunday through Thursday.
I’d never spent time on a kibbutz until now, except for a few days on my Birthright trip, which was my introduction to Israel. But now, I’m not only on a kibbutz, but on Kibbutz Be’eri, less than five kilometres away from Gaza, less than a year after the worst terror attack on Israeli soil.
On Oct. 12, 2023, in the Times of Israel article “Be’eri’s residents are gone, but their homes attest to the horrors they endured,” there was this incredible statement by Doron Spielman from the Israel Defence Forces’ Spokesperson’s Unit: “In the same way that Auschwitz is the symbol of the Holocaust, Be’eri is going to become the symbol of the [Oct. 7] massacre. The level of inhumanity of Hamas fighters surprised even us, Israelis who had no illusions about what Hamas is.”
And, yet, here I am, bearing witness as approximately 200 kibbutz members of the 1,100 total, have returned to live here. This does not include any children, due to the war next door in Gaza, and, of course, the traumatic memories of Oct. 7.
The majority of Be’eri’s residents have just been moved from the Dead Sea-area hotels that housed them for the past year to Kibbutz Hatzerim, 45 minutes away from Be’eri, a wonderful community who rushed to build a new section of homes to accommodate them. This is where the families with children are now settling in and where school has just begun.
But there are many residents, couples with grown children, or singles without children, who have chosen to return to Be’eri. At first, they only commuted here to work during the week, but they are now choosing to stay full-time. They are determined to be back at home, to establish new routines, care for the grounds, hang out at the local pub and prove to the world and to the enemies who tried to destroy them and their spirit that they have done anything but that. The spirit in Be’eri is hurting, yes, but it is also fierce, and it will not be extinguished.
Last week, Israel’s Channel 12 aired a new documentary showing the horror that took place here on Black Saturday. It included footage from cameras all over the kibbutz, and the camera they kept returning to was right outside the dining hall in which I am writing right now.
How different it was to watch this documentary, how odd to watch the silent camera footage, how chilling, when I knew the reality on Oct. 7 was sirens blaring the entire day, due to thousands of rockets overhead, and screams from those being attacked all over Be’eri, in neighbouring communities and all over the nearby desert and forests, as young adults ran to try and escape the Nova music festival, many meeting a violent death.
I watched the tick, tick, tick of the digital clock in the corner of the TV screen on this documentary as Hamas terrorists methodically made their way through offices and the kibbutz’s medical centre, where at least five workers were massacred, and homes and children’s rooms, trapping people together and smoking and burning people to death, shooting them if they attempted escape, like Narkis Hand was forced to do when an RPG hit her home, setting it instantly on fire.
Narkis Hand was Thomas Hand’s former wife and the mother of his older children, Natali and Aiden. Thomas Hand’s younger daughter, Emily, then age 8, was kidnapped by Hamas terrorists with her friend Hila and Hila’s mother Raaya for 50 days, though he was originally told she had been killed.
The first and only time I had been to Be’eri before now was last February, when I visited with a different resident, Adam Rapoport, whose older brother Yonatan was murdered at some point between “6:29 a.m. and the end of day,” noted the documentary, as the silent clock in the upper left-hand corner went tick, tick, tick on Oct. 7.
Adam Rapoport by the Dead Sea. (photo by Melanie Preston)
Like many others from these communities, Adam will never know exactly what happened to his brother that day, other than that he saved his kids’ lives by ordering them under the bed, where they would spend 11 hours listening to the horrors taking place in the peaceful community they’d grown up in. Six-year-old Aluma and 9-year-old Yosef would later tell their uncles that Dad had said he was going out to get the terrorists money at the ATM.
“There were just too many … bodies … to learn what happened, and that was just at Be’eri,” Adam told me back in February, at the Dead Sea hotel where he and other evacuees were staying, the day before he brought me here to bear witness.
This was an invasion into homes that lasted an entire day and involved such gore that I hesitate to go into detail.
It involved shooting a 3-month-old baby in the head, in front of her mother, in Kibbutz Be’eri, and burning an entire family alive from neighbouring Kibbutz Nir Oz, including all three young children.
It involved murdering parents in front of their children and then kidnapping the children – and these sons and daughters have still not returned home. Some are confirmed dead in Gaza and are bodies waiting to be brought back, like Adam’s best friend Itay Svirsky, which was how I initially met Adam and began learning about this community, while others are likely still alive in captivity, starving and suffering in ways human beings should not be permitted to suffer. But the Red Cross has done nothing for the hostages since the very beginning.
In Israel, we have waited, prayed, hoped and fought. We have gone to weekly rallies in Tel Aviv and Kiryat Gat, saying the hostages’ names and counting the days, chanting “Achshav, achshav, achshav.” (“Now, now, now.”)
We have had to silence our phones, as constant notifications appear, notifying us of the nonstop rockets entering our airspace and our cities from Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and other groups in Iraq and Syria, while ongoing predictions about whether Iran will or won’t do something big (and when they will or won’t do it) are discussed and analyzed.
But, since arriving on Kibbutz Be’eri last month, I have felt a shift.
It’s a unique kind of optimism I have never quite seen. It’s pride and it’s love and it’s strength and it’s resolve and it’s “F—- you, we’re not leaving.” It’s coming from returning Kibbutz Be’eri members, it’s coming from people like myself who have come to Be’eri since Oct. 7 to help with the land and to work, to add to the life being rebuilt here and to help heal the collective broken heart of this community.
I fell in love with Israel because I fell in love with its people. I am here in Israel to tell the stories of what happened on Oct. 7, 2023, and is still happening, at every moment of every day for these incredible people, these people of Kibbutz Be’eri and elsewhere, who have come back to their lives and are attempting “normality” on their beautiful land.
Melanie Prestonis a Canadian-born, American-raised, Jewish writer and traveler who discovered Israel at the age of 26, immigrated to the country and stayed for seven years. She flew to Israel alone on Nov. 16, 2023, from her home in Charlotte, NC, and was there to March of this year. She returned to Israel last month to continue writing about the hostages and impacts of October 7th on Israeli society. She intends to spend more time with the survivors of Kibbutz Be’eri as it is rebuilt. To support her work and read more of it, go to melanie-preston.com, or visit her GoFundMe (Raising Awareness on Israel’s War).
Vancouverite Gail Mattuck volunteering in Israel after Oct. 7. She found her placements with the help of the Sword of Iron – Israel Volunteer Opportunities Facebook group. (photo from Gail Mattuck)
They’re coming from around the world, taking a leave from their jobs to help rebuild Israel with their own hands. These are volunteers who have filled the labour gaps in the aftermath of Oct. 7, visiting farms or soldiers or hostage families; attending shivas, packing food for reservists and more.
Vancouverite Gail Mattuck is one of tens of thousands of people who have volunteered. But, if it weren’t for the Sword of Iron – Israel Volunteer Opportunities Facebook group that guided her to where she could help, she likely would not have lent a hand.
Led by Hagit Greenberg Amar and Yocheved Kim Ruttenberg in Israel, the group provides a running list to its 35,000 followers of where people can volunteer.
Mattuck chose a Chabad centre that assisted with food security, packing food for evacuees and making sandwiches for children of reservists. She also volunteered at Castel Winery, in the Jerusalem hills, to cut wires for the grape vines to grow on.
“For my friends in Israel, they were really happy to see me, of course, but they appreciated I was there to be there during that time. Lots of people just thanked me for being there. Without that Facebook group, I couldn’t have done it,” said Mattuck.
“One of my friends lives up north,” she said. “There are missiles coming over there all the time. Her sons were in Gaza fighting. It’s very personal for them. For me to be there, they appreciated it. My sense was of a country that was incredibly hurt but not broken.”
Mattuck has a close connection to one of the people killed at the Nova music festival, and made her trip in his memory.
Born and raised in Baltimore, Ruttenberg attended university in South Florida, then moved to Dallas, where she worked in construction sales. She and her brother had plans to go into real estate together after he completed his Israel Defence Forces service. He was scheduled to be released on Nov. 12, 2023.
Her brother was stationed in the south on Oct. 7, and she woke up to a text message alerting her to the attack, and his arrival in battle a few hours later. It was then and there, she felt the need to help. She intended to stay in Israel for a couple of weeks.
“I couldn’t not be here during that time,” she said. Within three days, she was on a plane, carrying 23 duffle bags of donations for soldiers, worth $17,000. Three days before her return flight, she quit her job. “I can’t go home. I need to be here,” she told her boss.
“When the war started here in Israel, we didn’t know what to do,” said Amar. “So, we started to think about what we already know how to do. We started to import. We started with battery power banks, then medical equipment, things the Marines used in emergencies. A lot of special units came to our place. Then, we met [Ruttenberg’s] brother.”
It was Ruttenberg’s brother who introduced Amar to Ruttenberg.
In the beginning, Ruttenberg corralled volunteer information from various WhatsApp groups, Google Translated them and posted them. In late November 2023, the Facebook group formally launched.
Yael Yom Tov Emmanuel joined the page on day one, and matched thousands of volunteers to different opportunities. Since then, two other team members have joined – Ariel Boverman and Sarah Emerson Halford. They have since created a Google Docs document for members, so that prospective volunteers can search by area and specialty.
The initiatives have impacted numerous lives by coordinating farm volunteers, aiding soldiers, assisting at food banks, and participating in reconstruction efforts in the south. The group has emerged as an essential resource for both residents and visitors, linking individuals with opportunities to make a difference.
“It blows me away to see how many people have done something outside their comfort zone in such a big way. People come to Israel for the first time in their lives, alone, in the middle of a war,” said Ruttenberg.
Group members are vetted carefully, something Amar says is one of the challenges in dealing with a hundred requests per hour. They have had to turf some infiltrators.
“It’s a 24/7 operation because we have people all over the world,” said Ruttenberg. “We all have our different roles. Some are more on the Facebook page interacting. A lot of my time is going into the field and meeting volunteers and interacting. But it’s a full-time job – beyond a full-time job.” No one is financially compensated for their time.
When Ruttenberg is not dedicating her time to the volunteers, she works part-time in marketing and sales consulting. She recently finished a US speaking tour and said that, while in Texas, half the room were Christians, they wept at her stories and couldn’t wait to get involved.
“People are sitting at home and feel helpless,” she said. “When your country is at war, when there’s antisemitism through the roof and you are not in the military and are not medically trained, you feel like there is no way to give back. It makes me incredibly proud to see, and incredibly proud to meet, the volunteers who are helping rebuild Israel with their bare hands.”
Amar, who lives in Ramat Gan with her three children, was previously chief executive officer of a brand and strategy company. She is now pursuing a second degree, in social work, at Haifa University, with an aim to offer therapy and mental health services.
“I think this group created a place where you could feel safe and be part of a community. There are real friendships in real life that occurred from the group. If somebody needs something, we always find someone to be with and support them,” Amar said.
“I think part of what we are doing is creating ambassadors, and changing the narrative about how people see Israel, showing Israel as a beautiful place,” added Ruttenberg. “Everyone who comes here meets soldiers and other people who are grateful. Israelis see people come from LA, just to pick tomatoes – we really appreciate that.”
Dave Gordonis a Toronto-based freelance writer whose work has appeared in more than 100 publications around the world. His website is davegordonwrites.com.
