Israel fiddled while Nir Oz burned, but the kibbutz will rise again

Israel’s leaders avoid visiting Kibbutz Nir Oz.

Over 15 months after the October 7, 2023, massacre, this kibbutz on the border with Gaza remains a throbbing wound apparently too painful for them to confront up close.

On November 5, 2023, a month after the massacre, several journalists met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for a briefing. One of them asked Netanyahu specifically when he would meet the survivors from Nir Oz. “You’re meeting soldiers at different bases every day,” they noted.

At the time, the survivors among the small kibbutz’s approximately 400 residents had been evacuated to Eilat. They walked through hotel lobbies with eyes swollen from crying, still trying to figure out who among the missing had been murdered and who had been kidnapped. Netanyahu had yet to see the stunned civilians who had been abandoned amid the fire and horror.

“I’ll get to it,” Netanyahu replied. “Right now, I’m busy managing the war — it’s round-the-clock work and cabinet management. I spoke yesterday on the phone with someone from the kibbutzim.”

Fifteen months later, Netanyahu still hasn’t gotten to it. It’s doubtful he ever will, though the Prime Minister’s Office assured The Times of Israel that Netanyahu “said he will visit Nir Oz, and he intends to go there.”

Should he make good on his word, he will find a place where time has stood still since October 7, 2023, when 110 people — one out of every four residents — were murdered or kidnapped. Twenty-nine members of the kibbutz are still being held hostage in Gaza.

But unlike some other communities ravaged that day, the kibbutz has defiantly insisted on rebuilding over the ashes in the exact same location — some 1.6 kilometers (1 mile) from the outskirts of the southern Gaza metropolis of Khan Younis, now swelling with displaced Palestinians.

Many other Israeli leaders have appeared to follow Netanyahu’s lead in shunning the kibbutz.

Over the past 15 months, only a handful of visits have taken place, including one a few weeks ago by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Settlement Minister Orit Strock, both of the Religious Zionism party. Then-defense minister Yoav Gallant visited a few weeks after October 7, but he is no longer in the government.

The residents of the kibbutz recount all this without bitterness, merely as a somber description of reality. Many of them were well-known peace activists and, like many kibbutz members, leaned toward the left of the political spectrum. They were used to being given the cold shoulder, even before the war.

A quarter of its people gone, and the news can’t remember its name.

The kibbutz, located in the more sparsely populated southern part of the Gaza periphery, is given short shrift in public discourse as well.

Kibbutz members recount how media outlets and broadcasters frequently confuse Nir Oz with Nahal Oz. (Oz, pronounced like the last syllable of “Oreos,” means  strength in Hebrew.)

A quarter of its people gone, and the news can’t remember its name.

The mistakes repeat themselves time and again, to the point that when Nir Oz does appear on TV, footage is sometimes used of the Nahal Oz water tower, some 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) away.  Members will reach out to broadcast outlets and ask them to be precise: “We are from Nir Oz,” they say. “Not from any other place.”

People were murdered, the vegetation was spared

I visited the kibbutz this month and saw up close how time had stood still there. Though they plan to return, most residents cannot and will not go back to their homes for a long time.

Nir Oz was torn apart on October 7, and bringing it back to life will require completely rebuilding the kibbutz. Out of approximately 400 residential buildings, only six houses were spared. The rest were damaged by fire or were the scene of horrific violence and abductions.

Communal buildings will need to be rebuilt as well, including the kibbutz dining hall, where the main kitchen was torched.

The army never showed up during the onslaught, which explains the shockingly high toll. The lack of heavy fighting within the kibbutz also explains the dissonant survival of the kibbutz’s prized manicured gardens. The people were murdered, the flora was spared.

This thought accompanied my group as we spent hours going from house to house. This was where members of the Siman-Tov family were murdered; this was where Carmela Dan and her granddaughter Noya were kidnapped before being killed hours later; this was where the Bibas family was abducted, mom Shiri Silberman Bibas clutching her young boys Kfir and Ariel; this was where members of the Aloni-Cunio, Calderon, Katzir families were kidnapped or slaughtered. And more and more and more.

No place like home

The kibbutz’s vegetation was spared on October 7, and as the community begins to rebuild, it will need to figure out how to make sure Nir Oz’s revival does not inadvertently cause the death of its unique, protected trees, bushes and other types of plants.

Nir Oz has long been seen as an open botanical garden, a place where students could come to learn about sustainable gardening and how to create a water-efficient ecological oasis.

How do you reconstruct an entire kibbutz without harming thousands of unique plant species – a living, breathing sculpture park?

The kibbutz had refined and optimized its gardening over decades, expanding to 120 dunams (30 acres) of greenery while using minimal irrigation and reducing desert dust.

But how do you reconstruct an entire kibbutz without harming thousands of unique plant species, including a cactus garden that is a living, breathing sculpture park? These questions preoccupy the kibbutz members who hope to return.

Another concerns the type of compensation the state will pay out for Nir Oz’s relatively small homes.

Between the Nirlat paint factory and its agricultural fields, Nir Oz had been financially sound before the war, but kibbutz members opposed the construction of large houses, and the living style remained modest.

Homes were built in small clusters or as attached row houses. There were no mansions built over a former field to capitalize on real estate prices.

But there were plenty of cacti.

Outside the home of Oded and Yocheved Lifshitz — she’s a former hostage, he’s still in Gaza — still stands an expansive cactus garden that dwarfs the home of the two old-timers who helped found the kibbutz.

And then there is the matter of a memorial, preserving the memory of the massacre.

While only a kibbutz-sized memorial could capture the scope of the murderous onslaught in Nir Oz, a growing consensus among the surviving kibbutz members is that it will be impossible to sustain communal life if the entire community is turned into a monument.

One idea is to take the remaining bomb shelters, melt them down and use the material to create a single sculpture.

Outside the kibbutz, the plan is to build a museum and memorial site where tens of thousands of visitors a year can learn about the small, unique community without intruding on the lives of its residents.

Kibbutz members are currently exploring different models, including looking at Kibbutz Nitzanim, where a memorial and museum commemorating a desperate 1948 battle during the War of Independence receives about 10,000 visitors a year.

When I visited Kibbutz Nir Oz, I encountered some of the old-timers walking its paths.

Some returned to live in the kibbutz immediately after the massacre and refused to uproot themselves. These are people of a special breed — stubborn, some say crazy. “You don’t leave the land,” they say.

They watch over the place, water the plants, and welcome visitors interested in the kibbutz’s past and future. The community will recover, one said, even if not everyone returns. Some believe the kibbutz should diversify, bring in more young people, reinvent itself.

Time alone will not heal the wounds of the kibbutz. Israeli society can have a part in the process by replacing a cold shoulder with a warm embrace. When it does, Nir Oz will be there.