Shachar and Ayelet Kohn are the only people who have returned to live in Kfar Aza, near the border with Gaza.
More than five months after the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks, the kibbutz of nearly 800 residents is a ghost town.
Sixty-three innocents were murdered here. All the survivors, except the Kohns, are gone.
Shachar and Ayelet, both in their 50s, now act as guides for journalists like me who come from around the world to see evidence of Hamas atrocities.
Shachar could be mistaken for a suburban American dad, except for the date 7/10/23 tattooed on the inside of his forearm. He accompanies my group of various international media through the streets full of rubble.
Photographs of the dead are displayed on banners stretched over houses riddled with bullet holes.
Sivan Elkabets and Naor Hasidim were only 23 years old and had been a couple since they were teenagers. They were dragged out of the safe room of their small house and murdered on the living room couch.
The misery is suffocating.
Why would Shachar return?
“I can’t be a refugee in my own country,” he told us matter-of-factly.
If Jews cannot live freely in Israel, where else can they?
More than five months after the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks, the kibbutz of nearly 800 residents is a ghost town. (Above: Monument to Hamas victims in Kfar Aza, near the Gaza border)
Shachar (above) and Ayelet Kohn are the only people who have returned to live in Kfar Aza, near the Gaza border.
Shachar could be mistaken for a suburban American dad, except for the date 7/10/23 tattooed on the inside of his forearm.
Before visiting this great nation month, I never considered myself a Zionist (an advocate of an autonomous Jewish state).
I have long supported the Middle East’s only democracy, and although I grew up Catholic, I have always been proud of my Jewish heritage.
Still, Zionism felt a little extreme.
Perhaps I felt I was too sophisticated, too cosmopolitan, to choose sides in an ancient dispute. The Zionists were old men like my grandfather, who had shelves full of Jewish books, Ben Shahn drawings on the walls and, I thought, paranoia in their minds.
Now it is clear to me that I was the one who was trapped in irrational thoughts.
Zionism is not an option for Jews.
It’s a last resort.
Inside an Israeli military base in Tel Aviv, I am shown images of the October 7 massacres.
Many of these filmed horrors have already been written about, but they need to be repeated.
Home surveillance cameras capture the moment Hamas killers lobbed a grenade into a bomb shelter where a father huddles with his three young children.
Moments later, only two children came out.
“Dad is dead,” the 12-year-old boy tells his younger brother. “It is not a joke.”
“I know it’s not a joke,” the 10-year-old responds. He is blind in one eye.
‘Why am I alive?’ the older boy cries.
Some of the videos that the Israel Defense Forces now show to journalists were filmed by the terrorists themselves.
In this footage, these demons rejoice in macabre glee, taking selfies with corpses.
But these monsters are not singing “Free Palestine.” They are not celebrating the death of Israelis.
Sivan Elkabets and Naor Hasidim were only 23 years old and had been a couple since they were teenagers. They were dragged out of the safe room of their small house and murdered on the living room couch.
More than five months after the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks, the kibbutz of nearly 800 residents is a ghost town. (Mourner at the funeral of the murdered victims in Kfar Aza)
A soldier watches from a bullet-riddled house following the deadly Oct. 7 attack by Hamas gunmen from the Gaza Strip on the Kfar Aza kibbutz.
No, they are happy for having ‘killed a Jew’.
Israel’s enemies do not fight for their own liberation. They want to exterminate the Jews, in Israel or anywhere else.
My grandfather was not paranoid. For him, the Holocaust was a living memory, not a History Channel television show.
He understood the phenomenon we are witnessing today. That when the world is tilting towards chaos and democracy is in retreat, anti-Semitism emerges like a nauseating stench.
Jews live as a religious minority in all but one country on Earth, so they are always vulnerable to the whims of the majority when evil is afoot.
In the north, along the border with Lebanon, wearing a bulletproof vest and a helmet, I see the abandoned homes of more than 60,000 Israelis, who have been forced to flee while Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy, fires rockets across the border.
Buildings in once-quiet communities lie in rubble. Others have now become makeshift IDF army barracks.
Here is an active battle zone.
But in the United States, the Senate Democratic leader gave a speech just this month in which he undermined Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war effort.
Everyone I have spoken to in Israel, from senior government officials to taxi drivers to people in local cafes, knows that this war is a fight for survival.
As I enter Jerusalem on the last day of my trip, I think of my grandfather again. He fought in Korea and served as a rabbi in Vietnam. He traveled the world, but never set foot in this ancient citadel. (Above: Frame in Jerusalem)
Thousands of years of conflict, from the resounding fall of the Temple to the crash of the Crusade, the roar of Saladin’s scimitar and the echo of the artillery of 1948, 1967 and 1973, live and breathe in the City of David.
It cannot end without destroying Hamas. These terrorists and their allies must know that their situation will be worse after October 7, or they will attack again and again… until the Jewish State is gone.
But fickle American politics are far from this reality.
A new poll shows that 38 percent of American adults believe Netanyahu’s handling of the war has been appropriate, while 34 percent believe it is unacceptable. That three out of ten could be important for President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign.
So Democrats tell the only nation dedicated to the survival of the Jewish people to stand down from its own defense.
As I enter Jerusalem on the last day of my trip, I think of my grandfather again.
He fought in Korea and served as a rabbi in Vietnam. He traveled the world, but never set foot in this ancient citadel.
Standing before the Catholic Church of the Holy Sepulchre, I hear the Muslim call to prayer just steps from the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest site.
Thousands of years of conflict, from the resounding fall of the Temple to the crash of the Crusade, the roar of Saladin’s scimitar and the echo of the artillery of 1948, 1967 and 1973, live and breathe in the City of David.
It is a testament to the spirit of the Jews, who will never stop fighting for their survival.
For centuries, during Passover, my ancestors said, “next year in Jerusalem.”
Well, this Catholic boy got there.
And now he is a proud Zionist.