Can Israel Win Back What October 7 Took? The choice to clear out an entire part of the country will be remembered as one of the most fateful decisions of this war. Matti Friedman reports from Galilee. By Matti Friedman
https://www.thefp.com/p/can-israel-win-back-what-october
“This was a lesson that Jews learned when they were exiled millennia ago, after which the Land of Israel became a ghostly place in mind and memory—and then learned again, when pioneers like the teenagers at Hanita in 1938 put down physical roots, built a wooden tower, and declared they’d never leave. Right now, as Israeli soldiers advance into Lebanon, and as the evacuees wait in their hotel rooms and temporary apartments, it feels like a lesson being learned again. ”
KIBBUTZ HANITA, Israel — In the late 1930s, when the land that is now Israel was under British rule, a young intelligence officer named Anthony Simonds spent time in Galilee, in remote hills that would eventually become the Israel-Lebanon border. He recorded memories of his time there in a colorful but unpublished memoir now kept in the Imperial War Museum in London. Rereading the officer’s recollections now, a year into the war that has devastated northern Israel and southern Lebanon, is an eerie exercise—a reminder of what Jews created in Israel, then lost last fall, and are now fighting to reclaim.
As I write these lines, Israeli infantrymen are pushing into Lebanon to clear Hezbollah guerrillas from the vicinity of the border while the air force, in strikes throughout southern Lebanon and in Hezbollah’s stronghold in the southern districts of Beirut, is methodically killing the group’s commanders and destroying the vast arsenal supplied by Iran. A direct Israeli strike against HezboIlah’s patron, the Islamic theocracy in Iran, seems imminent.
None of this would have made sense to Simonds of the Royal Berkshires: When he was a young man in uniform more than 80 years ago, Iran was a distant monarchy ruled by the shah, and there was no Hezbollah and no state of Israel. Lebanon was ruled by France.
“I have driven my car on rough tracks, sometimes in the Lebanon and sometimes in Palestine,” wrote Simonds. On one page of his typewritten memoir he recalls coming across a new frontier outpost. This kibbutz had been established one night in March 1938, and was inhabited by about 100 young Jews, many of them refugees from Europe, who had erected a wooden tower and stockade in a matter of hours on a plot purchased from Arab landowners by the Zionist movement. After their arrival, the pioneers faced an attack in which two of them were killed by Arab guerrillas. As they dug in and farmed in subsequent months, becoming symbols of Zionist pioneering, eight more of them fell.
The place left a deep impression on Simonds. The little community, he recorded, was meant to mark the future border of the Jewish national home, provide early warning of guerrilla attacks, and serve as a way station for Jewish refugees arriving on foot from the north. “I have stayed there,” he wrote, “and it was an eye-opener to me to see the armed sentries patrolling the boundary fences of the settlement, of whom nearly 50 percent were pretty young girls of 15 years to 16 years of age!”
The pioneers named the kibbutz for an ancient Jewish village that once existed in these same hills: Hanita.
When the state of Israel was founded 10 years later, in 1948, Hanita was one of the points that set the northern frontier, which sat a stone’s throw from the pioneers’ homes.
Today, on the steep road that leads from the lowlands of Western Galilee up to the hilly country along the border, there’s a re-creation of the wooden tower from the heroic night of Hanita’s founding 86 years ago. A sign by the tower informs visitors that the first pioneers in 1938 “stayed at Hanita and despite the Arab attacks, which began that first night and recurred frequently after that, the community held fast.”
When I visited three weeks ago and climbed the ladder to the top, the Mediterranean was visible to the west. Just to the north were the slopes burned by Hezbollah rockets and debris from Israeli interceptors.
Today, Hanita is abandoned. A year ago, on the morning of October 7, 2023, there were 700 residents. But then Hezbollah opened fire on northern Israel in support of the Hamas offensive out of Gaza, marking the beginning of the multifront war against Israel by the Iranian proxy alliance. When I arrived, the only people here were members of a security team: two men guarding the gate, a few on patrol, and a few others drinking coffee in a kibbutz building now fortified with vertical concrete slabs. The kindergarten sat empty by a mangled swing set and a playground blackened by the impact of suicide drones.
The same scenes repeat along the entire length of the Israel-Lebanon border.
On October 8, 2023, Israel experienced widespread panic following the Hamas massacres, along with fears that Hezbollah was preparing a similar attack across the border with Lebanon. So the Israeli government ordered the evacuation of the entire northern border area. (Those fears have since been proven justified, according to the Israeli army, by the seizure of enemy positions, weapons, and plans showing that Hezbollah was planning an invasion.)
On the first anniversary of the war, more than 60,000 Israelis are still displaced, their towns abandoned, many of them heavily damaged. An area equivalent to 2.5 percent of this small country has been transformed into a civilian-free zone, and for an entire year Israel’s border has effectively been set by Hezbollah.
Most attention in the past year has been on the southern front in Gaza, where the bulk of the fighting has taken place, and where 101 Israeli hostages remain in Hamas hands. This has helped obscure what is, for Israel, a development without precedent in the north. The meaning of this development has not always been fully appreciated by outside observers, some of whom view Israel’s remarkable offensive against Hezbollah in recent weeks as an escalation—as if the evacuation of sovereign territory is a new normal that Israelis are supposed to live with.
The decision to clear out an entire part of the country will be remembered as one of the most significant Israel made in this war, marking both the collapse of a Zionist principle and the realization of the fantasy of Israel’s enemies. The northern retreat has been part of the key Israeli experience of the year that began on October 7, 2023—namely, an overwhelming sense of fragility. Reversing this state of affairs—literally and psychologically—is at the center of the next stage of the fighting, the one now underway as Israeli soldiers move into Lebanon in force for the first time since 2006.
“Ground troops are now operating in southern Lebanon dismantling infrastructure that Radwan forces were going to use for a land invasion of northern Israel,” said Lt. Col. Jordan Herzberg, a reserve officer who accompanied me to Hanita before the invasion began. (Radwan is the name of Hezbollah’s elite strike force.) “The IDF will continue its operations in the northern theater until conditions on the ground allow for the 60,000-plus residents to return to their homes in a safe and secure manner.”
That finally seems possible given the brilliant Israeli successes of recent weeks—the detonation of the organization’s pagers and walkie-talkies, followed by the killing of Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s charismatic leader, and much of the group’s leadership in targeted air strikes. But even if the invasion meets its goal of clearing the border area and allowing residents to return, it will be years before the north recovers a sense not just of prosperity but of permanence.
A few steps away from the mangled swing set at the kibbutz is a chair with a hole in the back made by a fragment of drone shrapnel on April 13. The guard who was sitting in the chair is still being treated for the wound. Inside the homes, instead of the ordinary smells of food and soap is the odor of mold. In one kitchen, atop an open fridge with remains of food inside, a white cat with red and black spots glared at a few unexpected visitors; she was a stray, maybe local, maybe Lebanese. On the walls were a stopped clock and a Gustav Klimt print.
There were glass shards from a rocket blast on the second floor, but it wasn’t the damage that stood out. It was the overwhelming sensation of abandonment and desolation.
My visit evoked others—to Kraków, or Cairo, or Marrakech—the kind of places where the guides tell you that Jews once lived here, but not anymore. I thought of this evacuation as temporary, but that’s not the way it feels when you’re here. It felt like the landscape was slipping from our hands. Impermanence is the Jewish nightmare, one that was supposed to be solved by Zionism and Israel, as embodied by the people who founded Hanita. I wanted to ask them about it, but there was no one here.
By evacuating civilians from 200 square miles of northern Israel, the government meant to save lives, and it did. But it also effectively declared that the communities here, denuded of residents, are legitimate targets. This reality may be changing now, as the Israeli offensive gains steam, but it hasn’t changed yet.
In the city of Haifa in mid-September, I met a couple who’ve been living in a hotel for a year. Their real home is at Kibbutz Dan, on the border. But that’s not what they said when I asked where they’re from. They said, “South Lebanon.”
At Hanita, the home now occupied by the cat belongs to the Adar family, whose son, Erez, is in charge of the security team. After reaching the kibbutz with an army escort, I met Erez, 47, outside the kindergarten. His wife and three daughters were evacuated with everyone else and are now in Nahariya, the northernmost town on the coast that hasn’t been emptied. My parents live there, too. Nahariya is relatively safe, with residents going about their lives with the resilience that characterizes Israel. But rocket sirens sound regularly, and a few weeks earlier a Hezbollah suicide drone struck an apartment building, leaving a black burn mark on the white wall of the fourteenth floor.
Erez’s grandfather, Aharon Givon, reached the kibbutz in 1942, at the height of the Holocaust in Europe. His family has been here ever since. I asked Erez what the veteran members, living out of suitcases for the past year, think about the evacuation of their home. “The old people think it’s a mistake,” he said. “They can’t believe it’s happening.” We heard a thump not far off—a Hezbollah strike against an army post three miles away.
From Hanita, a half-hour’s drive takes you to the town of Hurfeish. The 7,000 residents here are Israeli Druze, members of an Arabic-speaking religious minority loyal to Israel. The Druze are disproportionately represented in the army’s combat ranks, and a visitor arriving at the town’s entrance is greeted by posters with the faces of nine Druze soldiers who have died in this war, including three from this town. Another Druze soldier was killed by Hezbollah later the same week.
Hurfeish is within easy range of rocket fire or a cross-border raid; Lebanon is clearly visible barely two miles away. A year ago, the residents of Hurfeish received the same urgent evacuation order as everyone else along the frontier. But the people here believe that leaving your home and land is a shameful act to be avoided at nearly any cost. So no one left.
As a result, unlike the Jewish ghost towns just up the road, the main drag in Hurfeish was busy, with businesses open and kids on the sidewalk. At a shawarma place, El-Kheir, I spoke to the proprietor, Tamir, a 25-year-old with a computer-programming degree who asked me not to use his last name. He wore the baggy pants, mustache, and white skullcap of religious Druze men. Like many Druze, his relatives include army commanders, and a cousin is one of the country’s most senior firemen.
The residents of the town are well aware of the dangers, he said. Twelve Druze children from a different town, Majdal Shams, were murdered by a Hezbollah rocket that hit their soccer field in July.
Hezbollah regularly fires at Israeli military posts nearby, and the possibility of an errant strike is real. Business is down, he said. Tourist traffic is gone. Residents are tense, and many now keep guns in their homes. But they’re here. Israel’s evacuation of civilians, Tamir believes, has only encouraged Hezbollah to treat the abandoned communities as targets.
A shawarma joint in a Druze village seemed an unlikely venue for a lesson in Zionism. But the principle is clear, he said: “You never leave the land.”
This was a lesson that Jews learned when they were exiled millennia ago, after which the Land of Israel became a ghostly place in mind and memory—and then learned again, when pioneers like the teenagers at Hanita in 1938 put down physical roots, built a wooden tower, and declared they’d never leave.
Right now, as Israeli soldiers advance into Lebanon, and as the evacuees wait in their hotel rooms and temporary apartments, it feels like a lesson being learned again.
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