It is 7 October.
Three years ago, on a Saturday morning just after half past six, while the last of them were still dancing in a field near Re'im and the kibbutzim along the fence lay asleep, several thousand men crossed the border with weapons and a task they had chosen themselves, and which they filmed themselves, because they wanted us to see it.
1,200 people were killed that day.
In their beds, in their cars, in shelters where they held the door shut with their hands until they could not hold it any longer. Many of them were not even allowed to die quickly, for they were mutilated while their own looked on, raped, humiliated and tortured, and all the way through there was laughing and jeering and spitting, so that the last thing they heard in this world was the joy of those who did it.
251 were dragged back. The youngest, Kfir, was eight and a half months old and could not walk yet, and the oldest were eighty-five and could hardly walk any more. Forty-four of them were already dead when they were loaded onto the truck beds, for the bodies had to come along too, they could be used for bargaining, after all.
The rest disappeared underground, and what we know about what happened down there we know from those who came up again, and from the films Hamas itself sent out. Chains around the ankles for months. Tunnels where you could not stand upright. Hunger, rationed out so that in the end a young man could be filmed digging his own grave, as emaciated as something we thought belonged in black-and-white photographs. Women who have come home and told stories about what was done to them that will keep you awake for the rest of your life. Six young people who were shot in a tunnel a few days before they could have been found.
Forty-one died in there. Kfir and his brother Ariel, who was four, came home in coffins that were first put on display on a stage with music and spectators, and their mother did not come with them, for in her coffin they had put someone else.
It took 843 days before the last one was home.
I write it this flatly because that is how it is, and because the strange thing about the three years that have gone by is how hard it has turned out to be for quite a lot of people to leave those sentences alone.
That same evening people from the Samidoun network walked along Sonnenallee in Berlin handing out baklava to passers-by, and they posted the pictures themselves, because they were proud of them. The day after, the young socialists of the American left stood in Times Square applauding a speaker who made merry over the festivalgoers who did not get away, and the day after that flags were burned and Roman candles lit in front of the Opera House in Sydney, while a sheikh in a suburb had already said it from a stage so no one could be in any doubt - that he was smiling, and that it was a day of victory.
All of that happened before a single Israeli soldier had set foot in Gaza - so it was not the war they were reacting to.
It was the morning itself.
And since then I have heard all the clever additions from the media machine and the Experts™.
The context. The history. The little word that always comes right after the comma, and that makes it sound as if you are just being nuanced, while in reality it does something quite different - namely shifting the weight from those who did it onto those it was done to.
You can think what you like about everything that came afterwards. Many do, including many I care about, and I will gladly have that conversation another day.
But not today.
Today there is only that one morning, and there are not two sides to it.
The one who shot a mother in front of her children did not have a cause that explains it. The one who phoned home and bragged did not have a childhood that excuses it. And the one who still today cannot say that it was evil without drawing breath for a continuation has told me more about himself than about the Middle East.
I hope they keep following the trails, year after year, until not one single one of those who took part goes free.
That is not revenge, for it has another word.
Justice.
And then there is the test, which anyone can take with themselves tonight, entirely without witnesses.
Say the sentence out loud, and notice whether you can stop at the full stop.
❤️🔥🪽
