{"id":14880,"date":"2023-10-16T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-10-16T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=14880"},"modified":"2023-10-15T23:45:01","modified_gmt":"2023-10-16T06:45:01","slug":"slaughter-at-a-festival-of-peace-and-love-leaves-israel-transformed-the-new-york-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=14880","title":{"rendered":"“Slaughter at a Festival of Peace and Love Leaves Israel Transformed”, The New York Times"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By\u00a0Roger Cohen<\/a>,Photographs by\u00a0Sergey Ponomarev<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Avishag Shaar-Yashuv, Reporting from Re\u2019im, Israel, front page story, Oct. 16, 2023<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At daybreak, Hila Fakliro looked up to the sky from the vodka and Red Bull cocktails she was mixing: \u201cOh, my God,\u201d she said. \u201cLook! There are fireworks!\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A fitness instructor, aged 26, she was drawn to trance music festivals as a means, she said, \u201cto disconnect your mind from all the tension in Israel.\u201d The Tribe of Nova gathering, celebrating the Jewish holiday of Sukkot amid groves of eucalyptus trees only three miles from Gaza, seemed particularly well organized, so the fireworks struck her as no more than an extravagant flourish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her fellow bartender, whom she had met just hours before, turned to her: \u201cI don\u2019t think those are fireworks.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They were, in fact, the white flashes of Hamas rockets from Gaza, the fire at dawn signaling an attack that would turn fields full of young Israelis dancing to psychedelic music into a slaughterhouse. In this massacre of its youth, Israel\u2019s 75-year-old quest for some carefree normalcy met the murderous fury of those long-oppressed Palestinians who deny the state\u2019s right to exist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If some sinister choreographer had sought a consummate staging of the failure of Israelis and Palestinians to reach beyond hatred and war, this savage meeting of two adjacent but distant worlds in idyllic undulating countryside came close, leaving at least 260 partygoers dead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The funeral of Noa Englander, who was killed at the Tribe of Nova festival.Credit…Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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A bar at the festival site.Credit…Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

They were rounded up and shot like animals within hours of losing themselves, and the pressures of Israeli life, in thumping soundtracks of mystical peace and love. \u201cThere were these crazy maniacs with guns and people falling one by one,\u201d Ms. Fakliro said. \u201cIt was like a shooting range.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Initially, she froze. The music stopped; the cancellation of the festival was announced. She lay down between refrigerators at the bar. Carefree dancers in galaxy leggings, even a reveler looping rhythmically on a Segway, turned in an instant to a terrified, stunned human mass. All of the psychedelics and other drugs used at trance parties redoubled panic attacks and the accompanying screams.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cJust run,\u201d her colleague said. \u201cJUST\u00a0RUN!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But where? Into the trees, where some people grabbed their tents and hammocks as they fled, or into open fields? Toward her car, where traffic was already piled up, or away from that mayhem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The bodies of Israelis killed in the Hamas attack were gathered for identification at an Israel Defense Forces base in Ramla, Israel.Credit…Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Burned-out cars at the campsite where the music festival was attacked.Credit…Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

One Israeli police officer, his pistol a pitiful riposte to the automatic weapons of Hamas terrorists, screamed at her to go east, away from Gaza.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This, for many hours after the Hamas attack began through multiple breaches in the supposedly impregnable multimillion-dollar Israeli fence around Gaza, was the sum of the state\u2019s presence in the area: some 30 police officers recruited by the festival organizers to provide security. Hamas was able to kill more than 1,300 people before the Israel Defense Forces awoke.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Israel \u2014 lulled and distracted by growing acceptance in the Middle East, by lacerating internal divisions, by settlement projects in the occupied West Bank, and by the increasing marginalization of the Palestinian issue on the global stage \u2014 had switched off to the central threat against it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Fighting in Israel and Gaza, in Photos<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A surprise attack by Palestinian assailants has put Israel and Hamas at war. Here are images from the assault and what has followed.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet, just over the Gaza fence, about two million Palestinians lived in a seething enclave blockaded by Israel, a desperate place that incubated extremism in what is often referred to as \u201can open-air prison.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hamas was there, governing and inculcating hatred through the education system. It never disavowed its covenant that urges the slaughter of Jews \u201csmitten with vileness wherever they are found\u201d and the obliteration of the state of Israel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHamas strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine,\u201d the covenant says, as it casts familiar slurs on Jews as the moneyed manipulators of the world. If, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel believed, the organization could be used to undercut the more moderate Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and so bury any possibility of a Palestinian state, that tactic came at a price.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe government was sleeping standing up,\u201d said Elad Malka, who served in the Israeli military in Gaza in the early 2000s and was injured by a Palestinian suicide bomber. \u201cIts smart fence was a mirage.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n