‘We Will Never Forgive Netanyahu for What He Did to Us’

Communities in Israel’s south were hit hard by Hamas’s terror attack on Oct. 7, during which more than 1,400 people were slaughtered and over 200 kidnapped. Many in those communities have lost loved ones in recent weeks and are fighting for the return of their family members held hostage in Gaza, but how do they view Israel’s retaliatory airstrikes in Gaza, which have killed thousands? And what will it take for residents to move back to places they once called home?

While his personal story of survival has been documented, Foreign Policy spoke to Haaretz journalist and Nahal Oz resident Amir Tibon about how he views the Netanyahu government in the aftermath of the attack, his community’s response to the destruction in Gaza, and what he would consider a successful outcome to the Israel-Hamas war.

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Foreign Policy: Amir, describe your community of Nahal Oz.

Amir Tibon: Nahal Oz is one of approximately 20 small, tight-knit communities that are situated along the border and mark the place where the state of Israel begins and ends. Most of these communities have a more liberal, left-leaning political tendency.

The residents of these communities have said for years that if we want to have a better future, Gaza needs to have a better future. That’s a big part of the tragedy of what happened on Oct. 7. The communities that were attacked are the same communities that advocated to build new industrial zones on the Gaza border, to bring workers from Gaza into Israel, to bring international investment into Gaza. Now we are at a loss of words after what happened to us.

FP: Did southern communities like Nahal Oz feel that the government had neglected them before Hamas’s attack on Oct. 7?

AT: There is a clear difference between how Israeli governments over the years have dealt with attacks on our communities and attacks on larger, more populated areas in Israel. For many years, Hamas or the Islamic Jihad fired rockets toward our communities and the government responded in a very tactical, limited way. Whereas if they shot a missile toward Tel Aviv, that garnered a much tougher response. It’s absurd because a missile launched at Tel Aviv is less dangerous than a missile shot toward our community, because Tel Aviv is protected by the Iron Dome, which could block the rocket in most cases. The communities on the border are not covered by Iron Dome because we’re too close to Gaza. An attack on our community was always treated as not that strategic or worth it in terms of a military response.

Hamas used that in a very smart way, because in the weeks leading up to the Oct. 7 attack, they kept testing the Israeli military along the border fence with nightly demonstrations in which they would rattle the fence and try to cut parts of it, and the military did not respond in a very forceful way. It allowed it to happen.

FP: Would you have ever imagined that this was possible?

AT: When we first moved to Nahal Oz, the biggest threat was the cross-border tunnels that Hamas had dug underground in order to enter Israeli territory and attack military bases. When we first moved, there was always a group of 20 combat soldiers stationed inside the kibbutz. That gave us peace of mind because we knew if a group of Hamas fighters popped out of the ground, there would be a battle, and they would not be able to overtake the community.

The biggest mistake that successive governments led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made was to spend billions constructing an underground wall to block the tunnel threat, and then removing the soldiers out of those communities, saying they were no longer necessary since there was a wall. There was opposition to it from the southern communities. We wanted those soldiers present in case the wall didn’t function properly.

We never imagined Hamas militants would just take a tractor and SUVs and run over the border fence. Had there been 20 soldiers inside each community, it would have been a completely different scenario, because wherever Hamas was met with an armed and prepared Israeli force, they failed to cause massive damage. The places where they caused massive damage are the places where they were met with no opposition. That’s where they managed to kill dozens or hundreds of people in some cases. It was a terrible mistake to remove the soldiers from the communities as a result of an overreliance on this magic underground wall.

FP: How is your community holding up right now?

AT: Since Oct. 7, while government and state institutions have collapsed, there has been an amazing revival of civil society. Nahal Oz, a community of 500 people, is being hosted by a kibbutz in north-central Israel called Mishmar HaEmek, close to Haifa. They opened the door and their hearts to us. They emptied a boarding school on their property, and that’s where we have been sleeping. They are operating a dining room with three meals a day, a kindergarten for our children, and they’re now working on putting our older kids into the regional school. I’m not wearing my own clothes right now. These are clothes that I received from people who donated clothing.

FP: Comparisons have been made to the Holocaust. What is the trauma like within your community right now?

AT: Fifteen people out of a community of 500 were killed by Hamas terrorists. Approximately 10 people are still missing. Some of them will probably end up being announced dead, and some of them are kidnapped in Gaza.

We are in a constant state of mourning. Every day, someone else is announced dead. We are living from funeral to funeral. We’re trying to support the children more than anything else and to keep them happy and safe and create a normal life for them in this completely abnormal situation. The founding generation of our community who came in the 1950s to live in this kibbutz have spent their entire lives building up this community on the border out of a strong belief that this is the right thing to do. They are now living through the darkest hour of this community with 15 dead and many others missing, or injured, and the uncertainty of whether or not we can come back home.

FP: Would you ever actually want to move back?

AT: We want to go back already, but there are certain conditions that must be met. First of all, we need to have a real sense of security. We need to see the military presence again in our area and not have forces removed for other missions. We need to have our ability to protect ourselves and not only rely on the military. Members of our security team must obtain weapons permits, and we need them to be trained and armed and ready for response. We need an investment in fortifying some of the institutions in the community, including the children’s kindergarten.

More than anything else, we need a leadership that we can trust. In the 10 months leading up to this disaster, the current government ignited an internal civil war, instead of preparing Israel for war with its enemies.

FP: Israel’s leaders have called for Hamas to be wiped off the face of the earth. How do the people within your kibbutz view that desire?

AT: There are different views within the community, but broadly speaking we’re not interested in revenge. What’s important is creating security. Hamas is not going to be part of any security framework that we can live with. The need to eradicate Hamas is not because we want to avenge the deaths of our neighbors and friends. It’s because they tried to kill each and every one of us, and given an opportunity, they will probably try again.

There is a great sense of betrayal because our community and other border communities supported initiatives by successive Israeli governments to bring workers into Israel and allow them to work in agriculture, construction, and other industries. Within our communities, we had workers from Gaza coming in every day to work in the kibbutz to provide money for their families. Some of these workers had nothing to do with the attack on Oct. 7, but others contributed intelligence. They took pictures of our homes. They wrote down details about who lives where, the likelihood of a weapon in the home, how many children, etc. Nobody in Israel is going to support this kind of initiative after what happened. Hamas caused immense damage to any prospect of a normal future between Israel and Gaza.

FP: How are people looking at the immense destruction and dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza?

AT: It’s heartbreaking. It’s sad. We don’t want innocent people to die, but it’s a war. Hamas opened war against Israel and chose a deliberate kind of war in attacking and kidnapping civilians. That has nothing to do with military combat.

Hamas knew what they were bringing upon the people of Gaza. They knew that the second they did all of those things, they sealed the fate of thousands of people in Gaza, because Israel cannot accept and must respond in the most forceful way. There is a clear understanding that Hamas is waging a war of destruction against our country. A big part of the tragedy of what Hamas did is that it opened the door to a terrible reality for the people of Gaza.

FP: How are you thinking about conflict opening up on the northern border?

AT: Without U.S. President Joe Biden’s decision to get personally involved, come to Israel to meet with Netanyahu and the war cabinet, to send the aircraft carriers and deter Hezbollah, we could have had a regional war on multiple fronts, not just an Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza. That regional war would have meant total destruction of countries like Lebanon and maybe Syria. It could have spread to Iran, and it would have led to massive damages in Israel, and it would have led to a crazy outbreak of violence in the occupied West Bank. By coming here and stopping that from happening, President Biden has saved the lives of tens of thousands of people.

FP: What would you consider a successful outcome in this war?

AT: It doesn’t matter how many Hamas militants we kill in Gaza, or the damage we will have caused to their military infrastructure. If, a year from today, I cannot put my daughters in the kindergarten in Nahal Oz and drive to work in Tel Aviv with peace of mind, we have lost the war.

If these communities are flourishing again and people are able to raise their children there, Hamas will have lost and Israel will have won.

FP: Can you imagine a scenario where Netanyahu is able to rehabilitate himself after this and remain the leader of Israel?

AT: We will not allow that to happen. The people of the Gaza border area will never forgive the failed, corrupt, dysfunctional government of Benjamin Netanyahu for what they did to us, for how they abandoned us at our time of need. Not just on that morning, but in the weeks that followed in which we’ve seen the complete collapse of the country.

If he had even a shred of integrity, he would have already resigned. He’s Israel’s Neville Chamberlain, who signed agreements with Nazi Germany thinking that he could buy time and bring peace. Benjamin Netanyahu did the same thing for years. He strengthened Hamas, allowing Qatar to bring them millions of dollars.