People at the site of the Nova music festival, where Hamas killed hundreds a year ago, on Monday, Oct. 7, 2024.
Photo: Kobi Wolf/Bloomberg via Getty Images
For Israelis, October 7 is, in a phrase that’s taken root in the country, “the day that never ends.” After 365 iterations of that interminable day, life in Israel is unrecognizable from that of a year earlier, reduced to a sort of survival mode.
The wail of air-raid sirens is constant. Streets are largely empty. In Jerusalem’s southern neighborhoods, where Rachel Goldberg and Jon Polin brought up their son, Hersh, his scraggly, bearded face is ubiquitous, visible on huge banners where he smiles at passersby like a talisman. Similarly, the serene, luminous eyes of Carmel Gat, a Tel Aviv occupational therapist and yoga teacher, shine from poles around town as if she were advertising her classes. Both were kidnapped a year ago, surviving 11 months in captivity before they were murdered by Hamas.
Over the course of Sunday, on the eve of the first anniversary of the Hamas attacks, Israel was hit by some 140 missiles. Most were launched from Lebanon, where Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas, has bombarded northern Israeli towns since October 8. A few were launched from Gaza, where, despite being pounded for a year by the most powerful military in the Middle East, a deeply degraded Hamas reminded Israel that it is not defeated. Even with the Iron Dome, ten people were wounded by projectiles in Haifa and in Tiberias, some seriously. A few homes sustained direct hits, and some roads were turned to rubble.
Day 365 of October 7 opened with an early-morning terror attack at a McDonald’s in Beer Sheva, the capital of Israel’s south, in which sergeant Shira Suslik, 19, a border police officer, was shot dead, and continued with funerals for nine soldiers killed in action fighting Hezbollah, as well as the burials of most of the nine civilians killed in a Wednesday-night shooting attack in Jaffa, almost all young women. For this attack, Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad issued competing claims of responsibility.
Nearly lost in the torrent of news was a crushing revelation: In a Sunday meeting with hostages’ families, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant — barely on speaking terms with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is trying to fire him — confirmed their worst fears: The cabinet, he said, hasn’t even discussed the captives’ plight in two weeks. The army, he assured the families, probably meaninglessly, would still prioritize the matter.
All in all, about 1,200 people were killed on October 7, equivalent to 40,000 Americans killed in a single day, and 365 were slaughtered on the grounds of a desert rave, a celebration of “friends, love and infinite freedom” disrupted by air-raid sirens at dawn. Another 250 people were taken hostage, some spirited into Gaza in their own cars. During a deal struck in November, 105 hostages were freed in exchange for 240 Palestinian prisoners. Taking into account the rescue of a few hostages and the deaths of several more, about 100 remain captive, and the Israeli government’s failure to bring them back is proving corrosive to the public’s trust. (More than 700 Israeli soldiers have been killed in the fighting.)
If Israelis are trapped in an endless loop, they are virtually blinded to the suffering this war has brought Palestinians. Shayke Shaked, a farmer whose land borders Gaza and who two days before the attack finally received a long-awaited permit to hire ten Gazans to work his fields, told Kann News television with a wave of his hand that the brutality of Hamas’ attack “took away my compassion.”
But Israel’s press by and large has held to a jingoistic line and has barely covered the devastation of Gaza that has killed tens of thousands. “I am ashamed of what we’ve done,” says Tom Segev, one of the country’s most prominent historians, highlighting the thousands of Gazan children killed. “Our reaction has been completely disproportional. Shame.”
While Israelis relive October 7 with every passing day, Netanyahu almost pretends it never happened. He has stymied every effort to conduct any inquiry into the disaster. His government even forgot to schedule a cabinet meeting to commemorate the first anniversary.
Israelis “acquiesced to being part of a state without examining some deep assumptions,” says Segev. “A fundamental assumption was that we can count on the state. We get pissed off at it, we complain, but we trust it’s there.” Marauding Hamas guerrillas strutting for hours on manicured lawns, posting extensive videos of themselves committing atrocities, shattered “all our basic assumptions that we are safe here,” Segev says. “That the state fucks up, okay, but it exists. To that extent, this is just a completely different thing.”
The now-commonplace question “Where is the state?” began circulating in Israel in the first few minutes of Hamas’ attack. It was asked in frantic messages by citizens who discovered at 6:29 a.m. that, confronting a massive military assault, they’d been left to fend for themselves. Many of those not killed on the spot passed the hours until their phone batteries ran out, or until they were murdered or taken hostage, whispering “Where are the soldiers?,” “Where is the army?,” or “Where is the state?” Some of those messages were replayed on commemorative television programs Sunday night.
Yaron Avraham, a Channel 12 News correspondent who last month broadcast a withering assessment of Netanyahu’s handling of the hostage crisis, says the reason, one year later, that he can’t shake off the subject of the hostages is that “they could have been any of us. All of us have at one point spent a long weekend in the south. Any one of us could have been there. They have to be returned.”
Surveys taken throughout the year consistently show that Israelis share this sentiment, but the government, apparently, does not. Two days after October 7, Yossi Shelley, Netanyahu’s chief of staff, blamed revelers at the rave for their own fate. “The party made a not-insubstantial contribution to the chaos,” he said. “I’m not casting blame, but sometimes there are cumulative conditions.”
Accustomed to low-cost escapes to European or Middle Eastern destinations before last year, today Israelis are now virtually grounded. Few airlines are willing to undertake the risks associated with a possible Iran-Israeli war. Restaurants that survived COVID, a year of unrelenting street protests against Netanyahu’s 2023 attempted judicial coup, and Israel’s longest war have in many cases severely reduced operations because many who would normally work in the kitchen or as wait staff were called up to the army; they open only for dinner or just two nights a week. The war’s catastrophic economic impact is also keeping Israelis at home. Mostly, though, it seems no one is in the mood to go out. In a survey published Sunday by Natal, the Israeli Center Trauma and Resiliency Center, about 70 percent of Israelis reported feeling sadness.
At a hastily convened meeting on Monday, Netanyahu proposed renaming the war, originally termed “Swords of Iron,” a name that never caught on, “the War of Resurrection.”
Israelis will just keep calling it October 7.
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