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Noa Argamani		Shani Louk

Newsletter n°121

October 7, 2023 – December 7, 2023

The horror. Days weeping and oversleeping, stunned and dazed, paralyzed. It’s only getting worse by the days. The details of the October 7 rampage, the massive slaughter of defenceless civilians in the Gaza envelope (not 240 but 364 massacred at the Re’im rave party), the torching of homes and shelters, burning people alive, the raping, the maiming, and the kidnapping of over two hundred, they all come up more and more, from witnesses and footage – Shani Louk has been declared killed eventually, Noa Argamani is one of the twenty women still missing, kept somewhere underground.

They say the present rulers of Gaza would not release them, for fear of what they would disclose about the abuse they have been subjected to. And that was the reason the cease-fire stopped. For fifty days we counted the dead, and hoped for hostages to be freed. The double-edged anguish – for there are dear people that I know, with whom I have shared time, meals, thoughts and smiles, on both sides of the fence, in Beit Lahiya, in Sderot, in Jabaliya, in Kfar Aza, in Shejaya, in Nahal Oz… Very dear people, so human, so like the rest of us all, sometimes like the best of us all.

Vivian Silver, for one. From a picture taken before the Gaza wall, a few years ago, with the peace group she co-founded, Women Wage Peace. Checking the winds, they were sending peace balloons to the other side, beyond. She lived in Be’eri, 4 km from Gaza, always so trustful.

From then on, nothing was heard from her. We thought she had been abducted to Gaza. It took five weeks to identify what was left of her. Charred remains in her vicinity.

I am not talking here about people you’ve heard of in the news, who reached some kind of fame to propel them out from anonymity. I am talking of people you love, you deeply respect, whom you feel honoured to listen to, to hear, to hug. Human pillars, human beacons, light bearers through all times of doubt and darkness. People you can trust, because they’re there, so selflessly, so intelligently, and you know they’re there, and they always will be there – even if you’re not at times.

What they do or say, they don’t do or say for personal profit or out of status habits, conformity, career prospects. In any society, any continent, they are the salt of the earth, the lights of the world. They are supposed to live a hundred years, and keep shining gently, always.

I should have met Vivian again on October 4 in Jerusalem and at the Dead Sea peace gathering of the Women Wage Peace, Israelis and Palestinians. We would have met again on October 5 in Jerusalem, as we’d done the last time around. Then, would she have invited me with other friends to her place by the Gaza border, or would have our ways parted, and I would have gone on my own to visit my friends in Sderot, on October 6 ?

I could have stayed for the night in Sderot, and we’d have had our usual conversations, about kids, education, screens, changing patterns, lack of prospects, Time and its leaking… Take it back to 2007. Rachel was in her kitchen with her elder daughter when, for some gut reason they moved down the corridor to the bathroom. The next instant a Gaza rocket burst through the kitchen wall and blew the place up.

Barack Obama, who was a senator yet, had visited them for photo ops and all. We’ve not heard Nobel Peace laureate Obama about October 7 since, have we ? Are there any other Peace Nobel laureates we’ve heard ?

In Sderot, on October 6 in the afternoon, I would have gone to visit other people, notably the friendly, weary cops of the police station, who’ve kept storing exploded rockets from Gaza, since the Muslim Brothers seized power in Gaza in June 2007, with Palestinian Islamic Jihad. In the morning of October 7, 2023, the police station of Sderot was raided by heavily armed fighters who massacred the eighteen cops who were there.

Three thousand rockets were fired that day, from Gaza into Israel. People were sent running to shelters all day, a sacred shabbat of rest and peace if any (cumulating the coronation of the Sukot period and the celebration of Sim'hat Torah) – enabling three thousand men to break in through the fence, and commit the worst pogrom of all, nine hours of shooting, looting, slaughtering, raping, kidnapping, leaving 364 corpses at the Re’im rave party massacre, and dragging over 240 people down into Gaza’s streets and tunnels.

What does good will have to do here ? Good will, good intentions, good-doing and the like. When it rains rockets, shells and bullets, what good will a big knife do ?

Naama Levy, 19. Where is she now ? How is she treated by her captors ?

Can she even see daylight after seventy days in captivity ?

Naama, like Vivian, believed in dialogue, in listening to others, and sharing. One of the truly gentle souls, open to « the other side », trying to understand. If you want to try to understand what « Gaza » is about, you could take tips from one who knew, professionnally, for working there as a BBC correspondent three whole years, spanning pre-Hamas Gaza in 2004, until his own kidnapping in 2007. Alan Johnston.

« Gaza is battered, poverty-stricken and ovcercrowded. It’s short of money, short of hope and many other things. But it’s not short of guns.[…] There are more security men here per head of population than almost anywhere on earth, but sadly they deliver very little in the way of security [and] there are even more freestyle characters, gunmen who look after the interests of their powerful clans. And all these forces merge and rub along together in the chaos of Gaza. […] But in the end it was Palestinians killing Palestinians. » describing the Strip chaos as early as October 2006. Was it any better earlier ?

January 2006, Johnston had written about The Kidnap Craze, following the abduction of a young human rights worker, Kate Burton, and her parents. « We’d seen all this before. About seventeen foreigners have been kidnapped in the past year (2005).[…] Often they’ve been used as bargaining chips, a way for a group of gunmen to get attention.

Gaza is awash with bands of militants [… after the Israeli settlements were evacuated in the fall of 2005] the boys from the brigades  find themselves with time on their hands. »

July 2006, after a tunnel was dug into Israel, and corporal Shalit was taken down into Gaza underground (until October 2011) : « There are too many guns, too many armed factions and not nearly enough hope of something better to come. »

For a while things seemed to change when Hamas came to power, violently, in June 2007, after outgunning their secular rivals backed by the Ramallah regime. There was, indeed, a new sense of order, and it felt safer in the streets, along with a measure of hope – that a pious government would make a difference. I was there to witness it.

Still, the Gaza enclave remained stuck between two powerful neighbours, Egypt and Israel, who did not want to have anything to do with the Muslim Brothers – Hamas being an offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Nor do they want anything to do with the Iran-backed Islamic Jihad, known to be more extreme than Hamas.

Take it back to October 6, 2023. Everything so quiet and rather easy, on both sides of the fence. The Sukot festival is an eight-day reminder of the exodus of the Jewish people from Egypt. Each family is supposed to build some sort of a hut, with a roof of palm branches, and share time underneath, to remember how transient life is, how uncertain. Then, it culminated into Simhat Torah, to refocus on the Bible as the cornerstone of any spiritual, mental artchitecture. Anyway, during any shabbat, starting on a Friday afternoon, every observant Jew is not allowed to go out, drive a car, use a tool, or do any kind of business. People are all to stay at home, or join in the synagogue, for prayers, meditation, and the simplest forms of togetherness. Shabbat is an absolute commandment for the Jewish people, to forget about the external, material world, and devote themselves to peaceful introspection, avoid any loud or superficial behaviour.

Making the first weekend of October 2023 the easiest time to attack them and catch them offguard. Somehow the most cruel profanation of their rituals and spirituality.

Vivian had a mantra of her own, that she shared with her many sisters, be they Jewish, Muslim, Christian, or else : she often repeated that we’ve been living under an overwhelming paradigm all these years, that only war will bring us peace. She said that this belief had been proven false, time and time again, that we could not put up with it anymore. The saddest surge of fate being that her last words and wishes were for a « big knife », if she survived. Leaving us to face with the limits of non-violence, in the bloody wake of October 7. Beyond wishful thinking.

October 7, 2023 will remain the starkest, darkest beacon pointing to the limits of non-violence. We’re not jumping to conclusions. As of this day, December 10, 2023, we are deep into the fog of war. Remember McNamara’s late confessions, The Fog of War. There are no media to be fully trusted. You have to double-check everything endlessly. Facts get twisted endlessly, depending upon where you live, and which language you speak. It’s getting harder to find sense anywhere.

The horror. The horror is spreading, further and deeper.

It’s cold and damp in Gaza in December and January. In normal times it is the worst period of the year, with no heating devices to be used. Storms and floods the rule. The sandy yellow earth gets spongy, mushy. You don’t want to be there, if you can spare it. What, when you’ve lost everything, and you don’t have a roof and walls to protect you ?

 October 7, they have pulled the temple down upon themselves, and us all.

« But climb on your tears and be silent, Like the rose on its ladder of thorns. »

Some 120 men remain hostages, with fifteen women, in the dark, damp tunnels, along with over two million men and women of all ages, likewise hostages of a bloodthirsty power. Along with their millions of neighbours, to the East and the North.

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