By Zach Benjamin
Last month, I was privileged to spend ten days in Israel on a JCC Association of North America-hosted and funded series of leadership workshops for a cohort of thirteen newly-hired JCC CEOs. While the stated purpose of the experience was to use Israel and its remarkably resilient people as a case study in change management and leadership through crisis, the actual takeaways were far more profound.
I have been exceptionally fortunate to spend a great deal of time in Israel over the course of the past twenty-five years. I return home after each visit with gifts of renewed perspective on and appreciation for the miracle of contemporary Israel and its nuanced, symbiotic relationship with our diaspora Jewish communities. This visit, however, provided more than mere perspective and insight. It was utterly transformative on a variety of planes, both professional and deeply personal.
While in Israel, we spent significant time in the Gaza Envelope—the area of Israel adjacent to Gaza, which bore the brunt of Hamas’s depravity—bearing witness to the spaces and souls that were so brutally devastated on October 7. We walked through Kibbutz Kfar Aza, a nearly century-old community that was invaded and largely destroyed by Hamas, its residents’ lives in every case suspended in horrific chaos, and in many cases ended by systematic torture and murder.
We stood at the Nova Festival site, where the voices of the nearly 400 young people slaughtered in what should have been a moment of joyful crescendo—though silenced by death—nonetheless spoke volumes to us about the crimes against humanity that occurred in that now-hallowed space.
We gazed over a sea of nearly 10,000 gnarled hulks of vehicles destroyed by Hamas that morning, many of which became temporary tombs for murdered families traveling to Shabbat and Simchat Torah celebrations.
While at the “Car Graveyard,” as it has been informally dubbed, we heard what sounded like the deep, baritone growl of fighter jet engines, prompting our group to turn toward the sound and witness an Iron Dome anti-aircraft missile soaring over our heads to what we realized in that moment was a Hamas rocket from Gaza winding its way across the late morning sky. Iron Dome destroyed the small rocket seconds after launch, producing a “boom” that we felt at our physical core.
At Kibbutz Kfar Aza, we met a man named Shachar, one of the small handful of residents who has returned to help rebuild his community. Shachar spent the first fifteen hours of October 7 not only fighting off Hamas foot soldiers, but fulfilling pleas from friends and neighbors to perform welfare checks on loved ones. In most cases, he found only corpses. The constant rapport of gunfire between Israel and Hamas just 1,000 meters from where we stood provided the soundtrack of our conversation with Shachar, punctuated by the occasional explosion of heavy munitions, accompanied by visible columns of smoke rising from the Gaza City skyline just beyond the border.
The magnitude of the devastation that we witnessed far exceeded any illustration that we have received from Western news media, and even from Jewish-world media accounts of October 7 and its aftermath. Contrary to what we are led by some false narratives to believe, Hamas are not a scrappy band of militiamen resisting the Goliath of Israel’s military-industrial capabilities. Rather, Hamas on October 7 was a highly-trained para-military force, generously funded by Iran, that conducted no less than a full-scale ground invasion of Southern Israel that physically and structurally decimated entire communities. Not only was the Israeli intelligence infrastructure caught off-guard, but the Israel Defense Forces labored for fifteen hours from the time of the initial breach to beat back the invasion and secure Israel’s border with Gaza.
Our time in the Gaza Envelope served as a stark reminder that, despite the turning of the date on the calendar, October 7 is an ongoing crisis that will not conclude until, for better or worse, Hamas is eradicated, the remaining living hostages returned home to Israel, and the bodies of the deceased released to their families.
To those who would ask, “but what about the innocent Gazan lives lost or ruined?” I can only offer the fact that Hamas has not only imprisoned them within the city and its terror infrastructure, but it has also completely and utterly muzzled their voices. As seen following recent reports of protest within Gaza, Hamas has forbade any innocent civilians from telling their stories and conveying to us their truths. The few who have publicly resisted Hamas’s reign of terror have met fates similar to those that Hamas visited upon thousands of Israelis on October 7.
Further afield within Israel, the resilience that has historically served as a distinctive trait of Israelis and the Jewish people has compelled life to flourish with a vigor designed as a figurative thumbing of the nose at Hamas and Iran’s other regional proxies. I have often observed that, on a given street in Central Jerusalem, “Chabad, hijabs, and tattoos” exist in equal measure. These scenes remain unchanged, with Israelis of all cultural and religious stripes gathering in gleeful defiance of Hamas’s threats to levy further harm on the country’s civilian populations. Shachar himself, even as the very soul of his community remains decimated, expressed only optimism that those who fled would return, and that Kibbutz Kfar Aza would thrive once again.
Nonetheless, indications of a population in a continuing state of crisis are ubiquitous. The gates of Jerusalem’s Old City are now invisible under thousands of stickers bearing the images of both civilians and soldiers lost on October 7 and in its aftermath. Each weekend, tens of thousands of Israelis march to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem from across the country to rally together in support of the hostages and to demand their return. Makeshift memorials have sprouted on almost every street corner and across every public wall and fence throughout Israel. Every individual with whom one interacts readily shares personal experiences of heroism, heartache, loss, and resilience.
Like our own country, Israel also finds itself in a state of deep, potentially incurable domestic political division. However, unlike here at home, nearly all Israelis vehemently agree on one item that must be the very linchpin of any resolution to this crisis: the remaining hostages must return, as must the remains of those murdered, which continue to lie in Hamas captivity deep below the streets of Gaza.
Early in our time in Israel, our group visited the Tel Aviv high rise serving as the temporary home of the displaced residents of Kibbutz Re’im. As we walked to the room where we would meet with the community’s leader, a woman named Zohar, we passed through the makeshift school room where the Kibbutz’s children were engaged in play and learning, toys strewn about the space, with a group of early elementary-aged students dutifully reading in unison from a textbook. This scene was sweet enough until realizing the heartbreaking reality that some of these children no longer had one or both parents.
During our meeting with Zohar, I asked her what we in the diaspora could do, in addition to raising funds, to help her community and those like it through this time of protracted loss and uncertainty.
“Tell our story,” she responded. “Tell anyone who will listen what happened here. Share it with your community. It is the only way that the truth will break through.”
I and all of us at the Jewish Federation of Greater Harrisburg are committed to fulfilling our solemn responsibility to shine a light on the realities of October 7 and its ongoing fallout. We must reach not only to our Jewish community, but all whose minds are open to a reality that has been inadequately conveyed by the information available to us here at home. We will be working in the coming weeks and months to identify and leverage opportunities to illustrate to every extent possible the unimaginable atrocity and miraculous resilience that, by every measure, mirrors the very history of Israel and the Jewish people.