I had heard of Nir Oz, on October 7 and its aftermath. Along with Sderot, Nahal Oz, Be'eri, and the killing fields of Re'im - over 360 revelers massacred, after a long night of trance music, shot like rabbits, helpless, so helpless, how many of them violated, raped, kidnapped to Gaza.

Mostly, I thought of my friends in Sderot - had they been evacuated with the others, I thought of our walk, seven years ago, with the group of women in white (Women Wage Peace) led by Vivian, Vivian Silver, who lived in Be'eri.

I thought of the weird objects these peaceful people of the Gaza Envelope collected in their gardens, and kept in their yards, for some of them, as fateful reminders that something was dead wrong with the neighbourhood to the West.

I thought of the shelves in the yard of the police station in Sderot, where they also kept all the rockets that had been aimed at them (painted black by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad). Then came October 7, and a number of gunmen in vans from Gaza breached through the border. They first attacked a mini bus of senior citizens on a tour, stuck with a flat tire, and massacred the fifteen pensioners, point-blank, with the female driver. All in the name of "resistance", and "Allah. They then headed to the police station, overpowered it with superior firepower, and killed everyone inside.

That was what was left of the station the next day, when it was recaptured by the army. When I went there I could not find it. It had been razed.

Nor could I recognize a number of places, stores, houses. So many stores were still closed. There were so few people on the streets. I could not even get to my friends' home. I was lost. It was bound to be the same city of some thirty thousand people, most from Morocco, Russia, and Ethiopia, but without the majority of its inhabitants it had an eery, spooky air. Like in some scary film, bad acid trip. I knew Sderot was the key to it all, and yet it was jammed, it did not open onto anything.

I had to move on. Further down South. To Be'eri. For Vivian. Nobody knows anything about Be'eri. Even in Israel, most people tend to ignore, close their eyes.

Yet you had a thousand people in Be'eri, until October 6, 2024. It was one of the wealthiest equalitarian communities in the land, still sticking to its original ideal of a cooperative model. Politically, Be'erites are known to be "to the left of Meretz" -  Meretz being the most socialist of secular parties in Israel. Their main source of pride and income : Dfus Be'eri, the first printing house in the Negev. But their deeper source of sense and success is related to the special fund they created to give financial help to their neighbours in Gaza, and the number of volunteers among them who would drive sick Palestinians from the border to hospitals in Israel.  Vivian Silver was one of them. Born in February 49, a peace activist for most of her life, Vivian was in her home that morning. She took refuge in her shelter, and her last words on WhatsApp were a promise, a surreal promise that she would keep a big knife in her shelter if she survived.

A hundred people were massacred in a few hours. When the attackers could not kill point-blank, or seize as hostages, they would set fire to the house. For weeks we thought Vivian had been taken hostage to Gaza. She was finally identified from her DNA in the charred remains of her body, at the morgue of the Shura base.

I could not enter Be'eri. It was under military closure. I had to drive on.

Somehow it was both too late and too early to take care of the dead.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/10/opinion/israel-national-crisis.html

https://www.timesofisrael.com/kibbutz-beeri-declines-independence-day-torch-lighting-role-rejecting-heroism-theme/