Kibbutz Nahal Oz: As a young boy, Danny Rahamim had a dream. To live in a place where money didn’t matter and community was everything.
In his teenage years, he discovered through books that such places existed in Israel: the agrarian kibbutz communities where utopian socialist ideas were put into practice. They also served as a human buffer, entrenching the new state’s boundaries.
While serving as a young army officer on the Gaza border in 1975, Rahamim came across a kibbutz called Nahal Oz and knew he had found his home.
“I thought, this is exactly what I’m looking for,” he says, as birds chirp in the trees surrounding us. “There is something special here that magnetises people.”
From its founding in 1951, the kibbutz faced ambushes from across the Gaza border, just 750 metres away. But Rahamim would regularly cross into Gaza to buy jewellery, eat hummus and catch up with Palestinian friends, including some who attended his wedding. However, the eruption of violence in the late 1980s known as the First Intifada, the emergence of the Islamist group Hamas and the construction of a barbed wire fence largely severed the two sides of the border from each other.
Still, Rahamim remained a committed peace activist, even after a 2014 mortar shell fired by Hamas killed a four-year-old boy from the kibbutz.
Then came October 7, 2023, the day Hamas terrorists stormed over the border and killed some 1200 people, taking another 251 hostage. Rahamim, 71, and his wife, Siobhan, spent a whole day trapped in their home as the terrorists roamed around the kibbutz, shooting dead anyone they could find.
As the hours crawled by, there was no sign of the supposedly mighty Israeli army. Fifteen members of the kibbutz were killed and eight taken hostage into Gaza. The toll would have been higher had Noam Tibon, a retired army major general, not raced down the highway from his home in Tel Aviv, armed only with a pistol, to save his son Amir, his daughter-in-law and two grandchildren who lived in Nahal Oz.
Tibon joined with an elite commando unit and took control of the kibbutz after engaging in close-quarters combat with the Hamas militants. “He saved many lives; he was brave,” Rahamim says of Tibon’s daring rescue.
Three years later, Tibon has embarked on a new mission: winning a seat in the Israeli parliament and driving Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, from power.
‘Jump into the mud’
Tibon, who was happily retired and had no political ambitions on October 7, is running as a candidate for the Together party led by two former prime ministers, the centrist Yair Lapid and right-wing Naftali Bennett, in Tuesday’s elections.
“October 7 changed Israel forever; it will not be the same country,” Tibon says. “The country is controlled by Netanyahu, who is taking us to hell, and we need to get Israel on track again. I realised I can’t sit on the fence any more; I have to jump into the mud.”
Tibon is one of at least nine Israelis running for election who were drawn into politics by a personal involvement with October 7. Another is Shira Shapira, whose son Aner emerged from the deadliest day in Israel’s history as a national hero.
The 22-year-old hip-hop fan was attending the Nova music festival with friends when it came under attack. While hiding in a roadside shelter with other festival-goers, Aner, a member of the Israeli military’s elite Nahal brigade, realised the terrorists were likely to throw grenades inside the shelter. He managed to catch and throw back at least 10 grenades to protect the others huddling inside, even after a rocket blast severed one of his hands. The final grenade he caught killed him.
“On October 7, our whole world collapsed and we had to build it again,” his mother says at a cafe near her home in Jerusalem. As we talk, her phone keeps pinging with messages, lighting up a wallpaper image of Aner. In her grief, Shapira emanates pride. Something essential was revealed about her son that day, she says.
“I think it’s shallow to say he was brave. This was not a spontaneous decision. His whole life led to this moment.
He had a strong sense of right and wrong. He cared for people he didn’t know. Nobody was there telling him what to do.”
Like Tibon, Shapira had no plans to enter politics before October 7; the trained architect loved her career as a civil servant in the heritage department. But after being courted by an array of parties, she is running for former military chief Gadi Eisenkot’s centrist Yashar party (meaning straight or honest in English).
She felt a connection with him given his son died while serving in Gaza. “It’s like a family of loss,” she explains.
Eisenkot and other opposition leaders have vowed to establish a far-reaching commission of inquiry into the October 7 attacks – similar to an Australian royal commission – if they unseat Netanyahu.
The relatives of those held hostage in Gaza are also running for parliament after being thrust into the spotlight during the war.
Sharon Sharabi, an IT procurement manager, was suddenly meeting world leaders such as America’s Donald Trump and France’s Emmanuel Macron as he lobbied for his brother Eli, whom Hamas held hostage in Gaza for 491 days.
His other brother, Yossi, died in captivity. “October 7 compelled me to embark on a personal and values-driven struggle that I never planned for,” he says.
He is running for Yisrael Beytenu, a hawkish, secular right-wing party led by fierce Netanyahu critic Avigdor Lieberman.
“We are trying to save our country. I expected that Netanyahu would take responsibility for the massacre and retire, but it didn’t happen.”
But not all the October 7 candidates are aligned with the opposition “change bloc”.
Talik Gvili, whose son Ran’s remains were the last to be returned after he was taken hostage in Gaza, is running for Netanyahu’s Likud party as a top candidate. She praised Netanyahu for securing the return of the hostages, including her son’s remains, and said she wanted a leader she could trust.
Tzvika Mor founded a breakaway movement for hostage families who opposed the end of the war and release of Palestinian prisoners, even if it secured their loved ones’ release.
He is running for Bezalel Smotrich’s far-right Religious Zionism party. It has worked to expand Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which the International Court of Justice in 2024 ruled unlawful.
Sigal Kraunik-Atiya, whose husband Arik was killed defending Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7, is running for a new far-right party called Amcha Israel. Reflecting the hardening of hearts after Hamas’ attacks, Kraunik this week engaged in a blockade of humanitarian aid entering Gaza through Israel, calling the continued delivery of aid a “national disgrace”.
“Instead of bringing aid to terrorists, the State of Israel must promote emigration from Gaza,” she said.
‘Two states for two peoples is a mistake’
These two phenomena exist at once. There is widespread anger at Netanyahu in Israel for failing to prevent the massacre.
Yet October 7 shifted Israelis even further to the right, benefiting some smaller parties that would ultimately serve in a coalition with Netanyahu.
The latest polling average by Israeli newspaper Haaretz shows Eisenkot’s change bloc on 53 seats and Netanyahu’s coalition on 50, with neither reaching the 61 seats required for a majority.
Wary of being painted as a leftist, Eisenkot has vowed to end Hamas’ rule within 18 months if elected and has ruled out supporting a Palestinian state, declaring: “Two states for two peoples is a mistake.”
Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak explains: “When you talk to Israelis, you feel that the pain from what happened on October 7 is still very fresh. The whole collective is in trauma. The blood is still boiling. You can feel the frustration, the humiliation; there are crazy calls for revenge, to wipe out Gaza, people saying there are no innocents in Gaza. There is a feeling that anything is allowed because of what we suffered.”
The Palestinian death toll from the nearly three-year Israel-Hamas war has surpassed 74,000, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
Tibon, the former major general who battled Hamas terrorists at Nahal Oz, says: “I think that we should not get out of Gaza, even one inch, before Hamas is no longer armed and are not threatening our kibbutzim any more.”
Despite the horror unleashed on October 7, Rahamim and 90 per cent of his fellow Nahal Oz residents have returned to the kibbutz.
Taking us to a vantage point next to the border fence, he points to the unobstructed view of Gaza City as a military drone buzzes overhead. He concedes some fellow progressives have become more hostile to Palestinians since October 7, despite the suffering in Gaza. “Some people think that everyone in Gaza is a terrorist, that we need to flatten the strip. They are angry,” he says. “One of the tragedies of what Hamas did is that people stopped believing in peace … What we did there was not just about defeating Hamas. It was about revenge.”
He himself had a crisis of faith for a week after the massacre. Were his decades of peace activism naive and fundamentally misguided? He decided they were not. While a two-state solution is unpopular now, he believes it remains the only long-term way to ensure Israel’s security and provide self-determination for Palestinians. He is still engaged in peace activism and has passed five decades living in Nahal Oz. “I never regret it,” he says. “This is the life I wanted.”
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