Hope Dies Last

This month a delegation of eight women who survived Hamas’ October 7^th massacre, were brought to Santa Barbara as a delegation of “sisters” to share their accounts of what happened, and to feel the love, support and care of this community. I had the painful privilege of spending a few hours with Etti Koren, Sigal Caspi, and Yifat Zezak Dromi, three residents of Kibbutz Kfar Azza, one of the communities decimated by Hamas’s terrorist attack – a shockingly brutal killing spree that was, for Jews, second only to the Holocaust, and the bloodiest in Israel’s history. It’s taken me some time to figure out how to convey to you the essence of this conversation, and to separate it out from my own personal feelings. Which is, of course, impossible. 

It was not an easy conversation. Even a simple question like “how are you doing?” seemed loaded and dumb for people who’ve lost so much, so suddenly, and so horrifically – friends, family, their homes, their community, and a once undying faith in the possibility of peace – no small thing for those who chose to raise their children in a place surrounded by neighbors whose leaders are their sworn enemies; a place where deadly incoming missiles are a common occurrence. 

Before I continue, I’d like to clarify a couple things. First, I have no intention of swaying anyone’s opinion on Israel’s response to October 7^th, nor on the region’s unendingly complicated and convoluted politics which long predate the attack that has unleashed millions of TikToks, protests, and otherwise expressed passionately held opinions – including calls for peace that seem anything but peaceful. And far fewer helpful ideas on how to resolve this mess. Second, and for whatever it’s worth, I’m terrified (that was the point, wasn’t it?) by all that this has wrought, and every night before I go to sleep and every morning before I check the news, I pray for peace. 

That said, I want to share with you some of what I heard that day from Etti, Sigal and Yifat, because I think it’s important to remember that at the center of what happened on October 7^th in Israel and what continues in Gaza, are human beings who have little or no say in the political decisions, maneuvers, perversions, corruptions, and chess moves made by their leaders. That’s true for Jews, Palestinians, Russians, Ukrainians, Americans and so on. One of the ironies being that those leaders are protected by impenetrable bunkers and security details prepared to take a bullet for them. Like in chess, everything is sacrificed to protect the “king.” But it’s the average civilian, the pawns like you and me, who must absorb the devasting impact of these geo-political decisions. 

Here are some snippets from our conversation, including a few that left me speechless. 

Sigal Caspi: 

On 7^th October, we woke up and we saw the red color alarm that there are rockets coming. And we go – the family, me, my husband, and two boys – to the safe room. And we think… “Two minutes and it’s finished, but the light stuck. It did not stop. The red color is a code that we hear when rockets are coming from Gaza to Israel and in our direction. It did not stop.

Exactly at that moment, my youngest son, Raphael, got a video message with footage of a parachute, like a drone coming down with someone with a weapon into the kibbutz. So, you recognize the area, and you know it’s in our place. We start hearing the shooting, not rockets.

… Most of the houses in Israel have a shelter, especially new houses. But our shelters don’t lock from the inside. They’re supposed to protect us from rockets, not from active shooting or terrorists in your home. They’re designed that way so that you can’t lock them in case something happened to you, it’s going to be easy to rescue us later. 

We all enter our shelter. We turn off TV, the air conditioning, every noise … the lights, and we sit, and we sit for 22 hours. 

… We start hearing someone breaking the windows in our home; people were inside. 

My older son, Omer, is a medic, and at some point that morning he and my husband Amir opened a field clinic in our kitchen to help some badly wounded people. Meanwhile, terrorists were on the roof next-door, and they continued shooting on our house. We were with the shooting until 3 am the next day. By that time, I already knew that some of my friends were dead. 

When I finally left home, I thought, “Two days, I will be back. But when I saw the house when I left, I understood there’s nothing to go back to. I saw bodies on the grass in the backyard, burned to ashes.

Etti Koren: 

Since October 7^th, I don’t have house. This is my house. It’s destroyed.

Etti shows me a photo of a burned pad where a house once stood.

10 terrorists were in my home, burned my home down, broke everything. Me, my husband, Shamur, and my dog were in the safe room for 36 hours. 

At 6:30 am we start hearing the alarms and the rockets, the noise. This is a different noise than we’re used to. So, we understand something is different. My husband had just made coffee and a small glass of lemon water and he said, “Go to the shelter room.” … This is all we had to eat or drink all these hours, and no restroom. We used whatever we had to go to the bathroom, we used a bag or no, I won’t say it. We succeeded in getting out one message from our phone right before learning there’s terrorists in the kibbutz.

“Until now, I can still hear the Arabic, “Allahu Akbar,”
and the rockets and the machine gun shooting.
I can still hear it until now. I hear it all the time.”
– Etti Koren

… My husband got a belt to hold the door closed. He used the handle and tied it to the bed so that nobody could open the saferoom door from the outside. 

…Until now, I can still hear the Arabic, “Allahu Akbar,” and the rockets and the machine gun shooting. I can still hear it until now. I hear it all the time. 

… We just sat there. No electricity, no lights, like I’m in the grave. At 9:45 am we heard someone massively knocking at the door and screaming, “Allahu Akbar.” Shamur is holding the door.

And I sit in the bed and start to pray … And then quiet. We didn’t know what happened, but we understand something very big is happening. 

Etti asks me to please close my eyes for a moment. 

Can you close your eyes for a second? Now think you’re in a small room and all you hear is shooting, screaming, Arabic speaking, and you’re closed in this room, and you can’t leave, and the shooting is not stopping.

At a certain point they banged at our door, and I began having thoughts of the end of my life. I thought to write a letter to say goodbye to my boys. But then I decided no. I want to live.

We have a dog, Georgie. He’s always barking, but this time he was silent. 

Sigal: All the dogs were silent, my dog also. They understood the situation, and they lie down. Even if they were big or small, they all find their spot in the shelter, and with no food or water and no bathroom, too.

Etti: We didn’t sleep in the night, and all the time – I’m praying, I’m praying. One hour has passed, and another, and another, and the noise, it’s terrible. All the night, it didn’t stop. The house was shaking. I didn’t know if a rocket hit my home.

On Sunday at 11 am it’s been 30 hours almost, my husband decided to open the door just a little to bring water. He opened the door a crack and we saw that we don’t have a house. It was burned to the ground. Immediately, he closed the door. We decided we have to do something, but we cannot use our phone. We have no reception. So we opened the window a crack to try to get service. And we called my son in Tel Aviv … we said “Otem, we are alive, but our house is destroyed. They burned it down.”

Otem, was in special Forces. He has friends still in the Army and he called them. They were in the area. He gave them direction to our house. But you have to understand there are a lot of terrorists around the house. The soldier knocked on the window. We opened the door. A lot of shooting, and I go first after the dog, and, as soon as we enter a shielded vehicle, I melt down, I fell apart. When I was in the shelter, I was in survival mode. But when I went out, I saw all the cars were broken, bodies were on the road …

… I am living in the kibbutz for 45 years. It was a beautiful place; my children grew up there; a lot of the people in the kibbutz want this. They don’t want to kill Arabs. The people in our kibbutz want peace. A lot of people from my kibbutz go every week to Gaza to take people to the hospital in Jerusalem. We are people that want peace, but what happened 7^th October is catastrophic. And not only terrorists came in, also just people from Gaza. They just came in to see what was going on. Just civilians from Gaza crossed over and took tractors and kidnapped people. Seventeen-year-olds. Palestinian boys.

Etti showed me footage from her Nest Cam … of what looked like teenagers taking their bicycles, riding around, having fun. Playing in the street. Dozens of them. One breaks a window.

For 20 years we live with rockets. I’m a kindergarten teacher for 37 years. I go with the children when rockets come. I tell myself, “How can it happen? How will it happen?” I’m angry at myself for believing that something is changing. That there could be peace.

A while ago my husband said, “Let’s renew our house in the kibbutz,” and you know something? My intuition was that I didn’t want to because for 20 years we had been living with rockets … every morning I would start the day by saying: “God please give me to arrive to the night safely.” I don’t let myself dream. I don’t let myself have expectation. I just want the day to go by and to be safe. 

Yifat Zezak Dromi:

Saturday morning is my husband, Guy’s time to take my dog for a walk. He usually leaves around 6:30 am and takes him for a long walk in the fields near our kibbutz. This Saturday we were lucky that he took another sip of his coffee and didn’t leave exactly at 6:30. I was still sleeping, but I woke up from the red code alarm, we go into the shelter room where my girl is sleeping. The shelter is her room. I have one daughter, Noa and one boy, Omer.

We all quickly go into the shelter. Guy comes with the dog and the shooting starts. I find myself saying, “this isn’t regular shooting.” And then I think how crazy it is that there is something called “regular shooting.” That for 20 years we lived under regular shooting. How did I do that? How did I raise my children under regular shooting? How can shooting be regular?

“I want to still believe in peace. But I have anger. I lost any trust.
But I understand that war is not going to help. We need to talk
with our biggest enemies (not the terrorists),
and we need to make peace.”
– Yifat Zezak Dromi

Gwyn Lurie [GL]: How do you answer that? 

Yifat: We were fools. We trusted. We believed in peace. We trust there’s people there. We trust this is just a few, and we wonder more than once, what’s going to happen if everybody in Gaza starts walking through the border, are we going to shoot them all? Probably not. Right? And this is kind of what’s happened. 

… We have an app that beeps when there’s something happening. But it didn’t stop beeping. You saw it was all over Israel. And we heard a different kind of shooting. For 20 years I worked in a summer camp in America – in New York. We always had active shooting drills. And on that morning, I acted by the protocol of active shooting that I practiced in summer camp. I barricaded the door in my house. I shut down everything. I was like, “Guy, go. Do that. Do that.” I barricaded the door. I barricaded the shelter door. I found myself a weapon, I just took an Ikea leg that they screwed on, like a pipe. I put my kids away from the door and told everyone to get down low and to stay silent. And I texted one message to the camp director in America: “Thank you for everything you taught me in camp.” And then we were silent for more than 22 hours until they came to rescue us at 3:30 am the next day. We didn’t talk. Our dog didn’t bark. All we did was send text messages that started with words and ended with dots; I just send dots.

… In the world, you say neighbor is someone you know. In the kibbutz, your neighbor is your family you have and the family you choose. My mother-in-law lived there; and my sister-in-law with her husband and two little kids. And Guy, my husband’s sisters and her two kids that live in the over 18 area. And we have another cousin that is nine months pregnant. And we are all writing to each other to make sure we are alive. 

Yifat strolls through her texts with continued incredulity.

We start by just … this is a happy life before! And then … Just tell me that you’re okay. 

… Guy’s sister from Tel Aviv said, “Go to Mom so that that she’ll not be alone,” and I said, “We can’t go. We can’t go.” And Guy wanted to go, and I say, “Guy, if you go out, you don’t come back.” And I write to my mother-in-law, “Stay in the corner furthest as you can from the door, and be quiet, and put your phone on silent. Don’t go out in any circumstance. Even if they tell you that everything is fine and you can go out, do not go out until you hear my voice. I will come to take you.” 

… In a different kibbutz they took a child and they put a gun to his head and go house by house to tell them, “Go out. Go out. Tell them to go out.” And they shot them. And then the child. 

My niece was calling me, “Go to Shaha. Please call Shaha.” He’s the person responsible for security in the kibbutz … And I said, “You can’t speak with Shaha. We already know that Shaha got hurt and he’s not alive.” They start saying, “They’re everywhere. They’re everywhere,” and then we begin to just text a sign, and slowly it became just texting dots to make sure people were still alive.

Because everybody started calling me from around the world, I decided to text one person in America, and you see I’m just texting, and he sent me a heart. This is our conversation for many hours, which then became our conversation after. For weeks I did not have words, and for weeks he sent me a heart and I sent back a heart. I couldn’t speak for two weeks. October 16^th, I got back from a funeral. This is the only words I had, and then look. I sent him “have a happy birthday” with a sad face. This went on until the 25^th when I finally found my words.

GL: How do you feel about the future?

Yifat: Every moment I have a different answer. The future is not clear for us. The only thing that is clear is that we don’t have a house to come back to.

There are days I say I want to go home. And some days, it can be a minute later, I say, “Do I want to live in a cemetery? Can I live in a place that everywhere I will walk I know that my friend is not there anymore? Can I sleep at night? Can I send my children to the school? Can my children continue living there with friends in Gaza, and friends who were murdered?” Even my dog, his friend was murdered. They murdered dogs. 

We buried some of our friends in Shafayin, the kibbutz that now hosts us. Every morning, I go to the fields to walk, as I used to, only now I go near Shafayin, in the cemetery there where we buried our friends. And I say boker tov (“good morning” in Hebrew) to each of their tombstones, like I used to say when I would walk my dog and see them. I say: boker tov to Shaha. Boker tov to David. 

Yifat pauses and looks up at me.

I’m fucked up. I know.

In the weeks after the attack we were dead people walking. It took time to bury our friends because the bodies were unrecognizable. They had to take DNA. And with some there was nothing to find and nothing to bury. They killed parents next to their kids. Raped people. Burned them alive.

Everybody knows someone who died. In the lobby where we are staying, there was a memo board that listed the funerals, with names of who they found and who we can bury. Every day we had more than three funerals. We had to choose where to go.

It took time for the outside world to understand what happened, but we felt the hug, stuff started coming. People started coming and everybody offered help. People took care of us.

But we also hear the other voices around the world. It’s very bad. Nobody cares about us. A lot of the governments are hypocrites. I don’t think there’s a country or a state that would let one rocket enter their territory … What happened in Russia and Ukraine? Where is the world there? 

Now we understand that when we are protecting ourselves or defending ourselves, the world says, “Stop it. Stop it. Stop it.” There’s probably no other country that with any rocket they fire, their army first warns people in the streets with leaflets … But the truth is it’s been complicated for many, many years. We try to be patient. And they keep bombing us and bombing us and we don’t attack back. We tolerate that. We tolerate that. We tolerate that. No other country will let “regular shooting happen.”

GL: What would you like the world to know?

Yifat: Me, I want to still believe in peace. But I have anger. I lost any trust. But I understand that war is not going to help. We need to talk with our biggest enemies (not the terrorists), and we need to make peace. We want to continue to believe, but can we? I don’t know. We have a problem. I think the whole government needs to change. We need something else.

… We are evacuated to a hotel and every few days a lady comes to clean the room, to give us fresh towels, shampoo. She’s an Israeli Palestinian. And I say, “Thank you,” and I ask her, “How are you?” She says, “Fine,” and I ask her, “Do you have a family in Gaza?” She says, “yes,” and I say, “Make sure they’re safe. That they take care of themselves.” 

But do I trust her not to kill my family a minute after? I don’t know, but this is still us. Believing there are people in there. But it’s hard. 

We miss our life, our friends, and our hostages that are still in Gaza. We don’t know what the future will bring. And the pain is so strong. But we stay alive. We had a friend that died. They murdered him and his daughter, and they kidnapped his wife, and his two boys and his girl. And I think about something he always used to say: “Hope dies last.”