Day 1: Israel, the South

During a layover en route to Tel Aviv yesterday I shared my thoughts about why I do this and why I’m going to the war. I hope that people watch this, if they watch nothing else I’ve ever made. It seems a lot of people already have, and some people are very angry, because they really don’t like the idea of a Jew who lives. But then other people watched it, and found it spoke to them. I wonder why…

It’s amazing that the more I post, and the more I share, including today — real-time footage of modern day Holocaust atrocities — the more I am publicly stoned. But it doesn’t work. It only reaffirms the purpose of this. They deny it. We live it. Please pay attention. Because it’s the same as it ever was.

Same as it ever was.

I’ve seen crazy things.

This is an extraordinary experience. And it is deeply Israel. On the ramp into the arrival hall at Ben Gurion airport are lines of hostages images; this is the only place in the whole world where these posters are respected and safe from defacing, from erasure. This is why Yad Vashem is in Jerusalem; the only guarantee that one museum will remain in the world that will always document what happened in the Shoa. This is now a country shell-shocked by a return of the type of evil it was built to prevent. And yet I felt the tension of a strange world immediately leave my body the second I arrived here.

Ex-fucking-hale.

And when we headed south to the border as soon as I touched down this morning, I saw something. I saw the Holocaust museums come to life. I went into a burned down house of a woman who was once a peace activist, Vivian Silver. There were burned parchment papers from a Hebrew book lying in the rubble of her home. I’ve never walked across broken roof slats instead of pavement before but that is an entire kibbutz here. Broken roofs. Torched floors. Blown-out walls. We found Vivian’s diaries. I found children’s toys covered in soot. Life. This was not an army base. It was not a place of power. It was a simple kibbutz.

It could have been in black and white behind a glass case. But it was real. It was now. Villages of Jews burned to a cinder. You can still smell it in the air. And the booms going off constantly next door - Gaza is less than a mile from it. And my heart shakes with every boom, I feel it in my feet. In one house I found only a pack of Lurpak left and some unsmoked cigarettes.

A survivor, Hugo, from kibbutz Be’eri took us to the destroyed houses of all his friends. He lives in a hotel now - for months. They’ve all been evacuated.

Hugo turned to me and he said: “I thought the Western world said: never again! What is this then, if never again?” And I gave him a simple response: “I’m afraid the world lied to you, and your community, and all of us.” And nobody cares. Nobody cares about us. They only care about us to the extent that we mirror some sort of morality or Christian value in themselves, but if they can’t see a mirror in us, then to hell with us. I realized today that “never again” was not for us at all. It was for them. To alleviate their guilt. To avoid what they let happen. Never again was actually a sociopathic form of global gaslighting. Empty words. Empty promises. Let’s dump “never again”. It’s a stupid slogan that has protected a new, more insipid, and even more terrifying form of antisemitism, masked as Palestinian liberation.

Be’eri is just 4km from Gaza. The edges of this beautiful kibbutz are lined with Jojoba tree farms. You can imagine what it was like before this destruction. Potted plants now fallen over denote that there was so much growing here. Plants, flowers, neighbors next to one another, in rows of houses, sharing community. Three generations side-by-side. They were not afraid to live here, next to their Palestinian neighbors. They believed in peace. The day before on October 6 they had a party to celebrate the kibbutz, first established on October 6, 1946. Now the entire village is burned to the ground. Erased. As though it never breathed life. Rooftops replace driveways. The air raid siren went off and we ran to one remaining door entry because there are no safe rooms left. Luckily the bombs were coming from “us” and not at “us”.

I remember as a teenager visiting the Holocaust museum in Berlin. And there is a memorial in which you stand in a tall shaft; a dark tall prism with a light in the very top, signifying a hope that even in the depths of hell there is light. But I saw that memorial again today. A replica of that exact memorial in real time.

The memorial didn’t work. It didn’t work. The woman who died in this house wasn’t saved by the light from the window. She died in the darkness. Just like the Holocaust.

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Next to the border there are volunteer-run army pitstops. The Israeli government have failed the people here so catastrophically that the civilians of Israel in true Zionist socialist spirit took matters into their own hands. They’ve built these beautiful little areas for soldiers to come rest, eat, dance and sing before they go back over the border. They were playing Ben E King and Amy Winehouse and making crepes. Everything here is self-funded. The owner of this spot is a full-time volunteer. He told us he doesn’t even accept donations from Coca-Cola. It is all community run. Like the good old days.

We travelled to the forest in Re’im, and stood where the stage was for the Nova music festival where 3,000 ravers gathered before meeting atrocious ends. We took a survivor from the festival who was going back for the first time. A beautiful 24-year-old soul named Nehari. He lost ten friends, including two girls he met partying in Brazil. They were best friends and they were buried together. He found their faces in the makeshift memorial site that’s currently there (below). These men and women should be alive. He told us that telling his story to people coming from overseas to bear witness, walking us through his twelve hours of hell, is the only thing protecting him from a life crushed by trauma. He said after running for hours through forests and open fields, like Jews in Nazi Germany, he and the people he fled with found two oranges on a tree - not ready to eat, and they split between twelve people. Like the Holocaust. He made life-or-death decisions, and now lives with the guilt just like survivors from the camps.

This is what Nehari saw before him as Hamas came from behind. And he ran into the wilderness. Like the great wars on the Western front, grass has grown here where there was previously a dustbowl, but this is where you have seen videos of thousands of revellers running for dear life. An army of Hamas behind them, with weaponry you can never believe, but which the Western world has funded, believing to be donating to Palestinian freedom.

I walked through the serene spot where the main music stage was at Nova festival, as bombs continued to explode in the background. Where there were once 20-something kids on drugs, there are now Hassidim praying for anwers.

We followed the story of the people who escaped, and we stopped in a shelter on the side of the highway miles along; a road that became a highway of death on October 7. This shelter was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever stood in. I recognized it from the Hamas bodycam footage – now burned into my skull. In this shelter, there was only death. You can see where Hamas attacked a squashed group of 30 bodies with RPGs. They threw six grenades in, so that the bodies were brutalized beyond recognition. The girl in the picture on the wall was buried with the wrong body parts. She was burned alive in an ambulance having escaped this shelter. I cannot describe what this little concrete box smells like. The stench of blood and flesh and rot. The feeling of the walls caving in. On the wall you can see the marks from where the grenades ricocheted - towards the ceiling. Where there are no marks, the grenades did not ricochet against the walls but the bodies of those inside.

The cars that were found along the highway where this shelter is located are now all in a mass grave. This car graveyard is like a dystopian after-hours stage at Glastonbury or Burning Man. But the cost was humanity. Car burned entirely by high grade weaponry, and people burned alive inside fleeing in desperation. Here I am at the site:

These festival goers parked their car for a fun weekend like we all do when we go to a music festival and they ran to their cars to escape a death cult. This is not a museum display like you see in the Holocaust museums. It is an active display. It is a site that is active. These cars are here because they are still being inspected for signs. They are still being assessed for proof of missing persons. There is barely a major music publication that has discussed the massacre at the Nova music festival. Still.

I asked Nehori when his next music festival is. And of course, he and his friends are already buying tickets for a festival in 2024. They will dance again. “Life is bigger than death,” he told me.

On October 7, Hamas and Gazans broke into the Jewish homeland and took as wide an area as they could to joyfully wreak destruction and mutilation - the most gruesome of pogroms you could never imagine - on beautiful innocent people. Because they want to kill Jews. End of story.

We cannot live in a world where the inhabitants of Kibbutz Be’eri or the festival goers of Nova are taking their lives into their hands simply by living. They lived on the border. They partied on the border. They weren’t scared. They were fools who believed in peace. There will only be peace when we stop finding copies of Mein Kampf in the UNRWA schools of Gaza. There is no peace in Gaza today and there won’t be tomorrow until we can live knowing that this will never happen again, until the mindset changes, because Israel must exist. It must. And it can. And it should.

The Jews are strong and we will be strong, and anyone who is not with us is with darkness. I cannot put into words the darkness. The world is dark and there is no choice but to be a light. Bearing witness to the atrocities of Hamas at this point in time is the most important thing I have ever done with my life. Because it’s now or never. Make no mistake about Hamas. They are Nazis. They came to hunt.

When a person needs help, you don’t have them travel to you to make it easier. You go to them. You show up for them. You arrive. Israel needs the world to come to her. Israel should not have to come to the world.

Outside one of the homes in Be’eri this morning, Hugo picked me an orange from an orange tree. An orange, full of zest. In Hebrew: תפוז. Life will grow here again. But only if Israel win this war. I have been writing about this every day for three months but I came here and I see it and I smell it and I feel it. And they’re desperate for people to see it because nobody believes it. Nobody fucking believes it.

Same as it ever was.