RE’IM, Israel — On July 11, a group of us were taken by our hosts, Vered and Itzik Benayoun, to visit the site of the Nova Festival, now a memorial to the nearly 400 mainly young participants in the all-night dance festival who were murdered or taken hostage in the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas pogrom. They were part of the 1,200 killed, thousands wounded, and more than 250 abducted in southern Israel that day solely because they were Jewish or associated with Jews.
Wherever we turn, we witness a sea of photos of the victims with biographies of their lives, achievements and contributions cut short by the massacre. The main stage, the dance floor, the “Little Bar.” The dumpster in which people sought shelter, only to be shot through the casing. The camp site of hundreds of tents where women and men were tortured, subjected to rape and other sexual violence, starting at 6:29 a.m. and continuing for hours.
We cannot fail but imagine the blood-soaked ground, the hell inflicted by the Nazi-like Hamas death squads and leaders who planned and organized the assault with their sponsors and financiers at the top levels of the counterrevolutionary capitalist regime in Iran.
We approached the site by car along Highway 232, the highway of death from Gaza. We stopped at the tiny shelter by the bus stop near the Re’im kibbutz, where the lives of 27 people seeking refuge were ruthlessly ended.
The Nova Festival site continues to be visited by busloads of visitors. Our group — including Socialist Workers Party members Rachele Fruit and Lea Sherman, and Ólöf Andra Proppé and myself, members of the Communist League in the United Kingdom — made the trip on a Saturday. We’ve been in Israel to take part in the July 7-9 Contemporary Antisemitism Conference at the University of Haifa. (See coverage in a coming issue.)
Pretty well everyone we talked with at the Nova site were Israelis. Some were visiting for the first time, some had come many times. “Some Israelis still cannot come — it’s simply too painful,” Sergeant Schmuel Moshe told us. Moshe is a member of the army unit that permanently guards the site. He is also head of security for the nearby Yashe community. He’s talking with an Israeli couple, formerly from Argentina. They brought their cousin, who had just arrived in Israel with his soccer-playing son, for the Maccabiah Games.
Other military fortifications around the site perimeter are under construction to guard against any attack on visitors, Moshe tells us. A large sign reads: “Please note this area is under the threat of rockets, the time available here to reach the shelter is 15 seconds. If you receive an alert — lie on the ground and protect your head with your hands for 10 minutes.”
The day before, we visited Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center and History Museum in Jerusalem, another experience you don’t want to pass up if you visit Israel. Although on a different scale, the parallels are striking.
Both visits underline the class reality that the decisive defeat of Hamas remains a precondition to open space for Jews, Palestinians and other workers and oppressed peoples here and across the region to find a way forward, together. To forge a road through common class struggle; to build a revolutionary workers party; and to join in the worldwide battle to defeat the capitalist rulers and their imperialist order, a crises-wracked system dragging humanity toward another Holocaust for the Jews and a nuclear World War III.