The Blogs: My visit to Israel, March 2025, Part 2

Yesterday

I started with fragments

as that is both

how my memory works

and the experience of my visit

the dust motes in the novel I am reading

(My Russian Grandmother and her American Vacuum Cleaner/Meir Shalev).

I left you with mention of the viper

although before that

my brother and I travelled north to Metula

a small village that is juxtaposed

with the Lebanese border.

There wasn’t much to see

beyond a few bombed-out houses

and a post-apocalypsis with empty streets and houses,

Everyone relocated south.

A few stalwarts were working to reconstruct

and yet,

How do you repopulate a remote town that is both

situated in a place of peril

(The Hezbollah tunnels are likely still in place)

and without a critical mass to re-establish basic facilities such as kindergarten, school, health clinic or village store.

Today, despite a cease-fire that lasted until yesterday, very few have returned.

Afterwards we stopped for pita and humus preceded by a welcoming shot of Arak from the friendly owner, ‘I’ve been here all along,’ I heard his telling one of his customers, a young man with knitted kippah, wearing red t-shirt, joggers and an M16 slung over his shoulder.

We reached the Tel Dan nature reserve, the supposed ancient site of the Tribe of Dan, where we found the oldest know stone archway (see picture below), build – supposedly (I don’t know how they know these things) by Cannanites in 1750 BCE as well as a temple constructed by Israelites in 1000 BCE.

The place was very quiet, with only a couple of other visitors; most have not yet returned to the north – residents and tourists remain displaced.

I marveled at the beauty of the early spring mustard that fills the hills and the mellifluous bubbling of the Dan River and early source of the Jordan.

That night was already the beginning of Purim and people were starting to wear fancy dress, mostly children although adults too.

For those of you who don’t know the story, Purim commemorates an episode in the life of the Jewish people following exile from The Land of Israel to Persia (circa 500BCE), they managed through the intervention of the Jewish Queen Esther and her uncle Mordechai to circumvent the evil plan of the King’s advisor Haman to destroy all the Jews.

This echo of the past seemed particularly prescient in a country that was still reeling from the massacre in the south.

On Thursday we travelled first to an incredible site in the Negev desert – Ashalim to see the sun-projection power station; this is an array of hundreds of mirrors all focused on a tower of salt (seems very biblical in hindsight) that super-heats water to drive turbines and create electricity.

Then the Nova site.

The place where young people were celebrating the festival of Simchat Torah (Happiness of the Torah), enjoying nature (it is a beautiful place with sun-dappled shade amongst groves of young eucalyptus), dancing to other-worldly trance music when all hell erupted at 629am on the morning of the 7^th of October.

You have seen the images.

The site is now a memorial to those who were murdered.

Each victim has their picture and a story of who they were.

Almost all were young – people in their 20’s and early 30’s.

All beautiful, innocent, murdered in horror.

Some remain imprisoned in Gaza today, 16 months later.

Seeing the individual faces made the numbers real. It is all too easy to consider collective death as one-thing; 400 people, one big tragedy, when the reality is that there are 400 different tragedies and grief that is felt by those left behind – the mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters and in many cases grandparents; that bitter inversion of the natural order with the young predeceasing the old.

It is silent, with visitors walking, often in pairs, reading the narratives, many of which were written by relatives, parents or friends, with the most poignant, the most moving, describing the person in the present tense; written by the traumatized who have not yet accepted the reality that those who died will always be in the past.

I walked to the ‘Yellow dumpster’ which describes an event that I hadn’t heard. On that morning, a group of young people hid inside the dumpster, underneath piles of garbage – a notion for me that recalled a scene from the Holocaust; they could hear the Hamas outside, they stayed silent, texting their families and friends.

Initially it looked like they would survive; a group of Hamas passed by and did not notice them; didn’t think to look beneath the bags of refuse. Only hours later, one terrorist returned and checked the bin to find the people cowering inside. He fired his gun at those trapped, those who had been hiding for hours and killed nine (Ron Yehudai, Amit Levy, Einbar Shem Tov, Yiftach Twig, Elkin Nazarov, Maia Biton, Eliran Mizrahi, David Naaman and Hadar Printz), wounding four others.

We left an hour or two later. Silent and reflective.

There is more.

I want to tell you about my reunions with O, J and Y.

My steering a sailing boat on the sea off the coast of Israel, not far from Gaza City, and there is the snake and the visit to Jerusalem.

And yet, what I have just written has dried me up.

It has left me sad.

In need of a break.

Let’s just hold this moment and remember those who have died; it doesn’t really matter if you want to think about those at the music festival or those killed in front of their families in the Kibbutzim; you can reflect on the needless lives lost in Gaza – either innocent Palestinians or Israeli soldiers defending their homeland.

It is a sombre time.