The American Jewish political scientist and philosopher Michael Walzer (89) wrote: “Terrorists are like killers on a rampage, except that their rampage is purposeful and programmatic. It aims at a general vulnerability. Kill these people in order to terrify those. A relatively small number of dead victims makes for a very large number of living and frightened hostages.”
The utter futility of terror hit me like a punch in the gut. I visited the memorial site of the Supernova Music Festival near the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip almost a year after the October 7 pogrom. It was an unprecedented celebration of nearly 3,500 young people between the ages of 20 and 40, mostly seekers strongly attracted to spiritual experiences. A weekend of 24/7 electronic dance music from three stages, flashing lights, hang-out areas, and seminars—all at the large camping area along Route 234 between the kibbutzim Be’eri and Re’im.
There is still hard work going on to further adorn the memorial site—a silent place where you are stared at by hundreds of beautiful young people who are no longer there. Interspersed here and there are red and white plaques bearing the photos of festival-goers who may still be alive in the subterranean caverns of Hamas. “Bring Guy Back Home,” I read at the memorial of Guy Gilboa Dalal, 22. Forty people from the festival were abducted that day and dragged to Gaza.
Shani Louk called her mother early Saturday morning and told her that terrorists were storming into the festival grounds and that there was almost no place to hide. Initially, it was thought that she too was being held somewhere in Gaza. But she was killed during her escape attempt. One of the first videos Hamas released showed Shani’s body being driven on a pickup truck through the streets of Gaza City with a gaping wound on her head. Frenzied Gazans shouted “Allahu Akbar” and spat on her lifeless corpse. Much later, IDF soldiers found her body in a tunnel. She was buried on May 19 of this year in her hometown of Sigrim.
This is just one of many horror stories from the Palestinians’ attack on the Nova Festival and on the kibbutzim along the Gaza border.
And when you stand there as a peace-loving Christian from the peaceful Netherlands, it dawns on you how fragile that peace is. Of course, I was also deeply moved in Auschwitz, but not nearly as much as I was in Israel this year. Young people like my children and grandchildren, beautiful souls searching for the meaning of life. With a final cry before their passing, the Shema heard here and there: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is One. Blessed be the name of His glorious kingdom forever and ever.”
I also visited the car cemetery at Tkuma along Route 25, not far from the festival. All the burned, battered and bullet-riddled cars that were abandoned both at the Nova Festival and at the kibbutzim that were attacked have been collected here. I stood as if nailed to the ground. Thousands of cars neatly parked in a huge meadow, and around them, completely burned cars stacked on top of each other like you see at scrap metal yards. And right at the entrance are the cars along with the story of the failed escape attempt—festival-goers who tried to get away and were killed in their vehicles. All those cars will soon be buried because it’s not feasible to secure the DNA remains. After all, even the smallest hair or skin flake of a human being is worthy of honorable burial. So, let’s bury the whole car.
That is Jewish ethics!
We read how desperate people that morning did everything they could to save their fellow human beings. Aner Shapiro threw back a Hamas grenade seven times after it was tossed into a concrete shelter where survivors were sheltering. But on the eighth time, it was too late, and he died a hero. Four of the people in that shelter were kidnapped to Gaza, one of them Aner’s best friend, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was murdered on September 1 as the Hamas terrorists fled from the advancing Israeli army. Hell is not over for all the hostages still alive.
Or the farmer who lives not far from the festival site and decided to help Oz Davidian. Fifteen times, he drove his jeep back and forth to pick up wounded young people while being constantly shot at. He defended himself with a rifle he had managed to take from a dead terrorist.
The futility of terror is something one should not want to unravel. Israel chooses life. Am Yisrael Chai. That is the only answer to terror. And the festival-goers now gather regularly as “The Nova Tribe” to remember and to learn to dance again.
God is there!
