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Ghost Town on the Gaza Border
(Wall Street Journal) Tunku Varadarajan - There was life once in the little kibbutz of Nir Oz in Israel. Men and women grew wheat and potatoes. Gaza is visible from the outer ring of the kibbutz. There were 150 houses in Nir Oz, including those that were burned down, and every one is empty now, its residents dead, kidnapped or living elsewhere as "internally displaced persons." Only four houses remain undamaged. Flowers bloom alongside charred houses. Abandoned tricycles and strollers tell of a place that was full of children. Also dead is the two-state solution - the idea of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, which would give sovereignty to the people from whose midst came those who laid waste to this kibbutz on Oct. 7. For eight hours they hunted down the kibbutzniks, murdering 46 people and abducting 71, making Nir Oz proportionately the hardest-hit of the kibbutzim that Hamas invaded. No Israeli politician of consequence speaks today of a Palestinian state, except to dismiss the idea as insane. Amit Siman Tov, 40, who walked me around her ghostly quiet kibbutz, like her neighbors, wished the Gazans well. She recalls farmhands from Gaza working the fields with her father. "He was their good friend. They used to have coffee in our house. The relationship was positive." Before Oct. 7, she would point to Gaza during bike rides and tell her kids: "There are children and women living there, just like me and you." She wouldn't say that now. "Our trust has gone. Completely gone." She escaped with her life on Oct. 7, barricaded in their safe room, though the terrorists set the house on fire. She and her husband and four children laid down urine-soaked sweatshirts at the foot of the door to stop smoke from seeping in. The terrorists killed her mother, brother, sister-in-law, 5-year-old twin nieces, and 2-year-old nephew. Like many Israelis, a senior academic who has served as a policy adviser to several Israeli prime ministers scoffs at complaints of a "disproportionate" Israeli response to Hamas' atrocities. He would tell Gaza that "if you do to me something that I cannot tolerate, I will do something that you cannot tolerate, but at a much higher level of violence." Few Israelis disagree. They reject the view that Israel must forswear force if civilians might be hurt. That would give barbarians immunity, allowing them to destroy civilization because it is civilized. The writer is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School's Classical Liberal Institute.