Songs of Survival and Hope - Review

 Kibbutz Nir Oz, Israel

*****

(This review was first published in Times of Israel)

 

 

Sagui Dekel-Chen

                                          

On a warm August night before an audience of thousands at Kibbutz Nir Oz, a place that sits almost adjacent to Israel’s border with Gaza, Sagui Dekel-Chen hosted Songs of Survival and Hope. A concert that once seemed barely imaginable created an evening that saw the Negev dance.

Born and raised on Nir Oz, Sagui was 35 when he was kidnapped into Gaza on October 7th 2023. Taken amidst scenes of murderous carnage, that saw nearly all of his fellow members of the kibbutz’s defence team killed by Hamas terrorists and which left him with bullet wounds in his shoulder and leg, Sagui was to spend 498 days in captivity before his release on February 12th last year.

It was while he was held hostage that Sagui began to compose songs. These were to help him hold onto his mind while locked away in Gaza’s terror tunnels, and it was amidst the beautiful bright lights of this concert, that Sagui both told his story, and paid tribute to his most dearly loved ones.

The concert comprised some nine songs composed by Sagui, together with guest appearances from some of Israel’s leading music performers. Throughout, Sagui made it clear that his songs had not been written as words of “goodbye”, but rather as words written by a man who always knew and believed that he would one day be going home.

Simply dressed in black t-shirt and jeans Sagui opened the gig apologising for the fact that he was not a singer. He did himself a disservice. The evening was the definition of hallmarked excellence, for not only was Sagui’s singing a delight, but throughout the affair, from the staging, to the light show, to the drones and cameramen and not least the 11-piece band, the whole concert dripped with professionalism and talent. Sagui may not have been a singer when he emerged from the tunnels – but boy does he have a gorgeous voice now!

Understandably, the evening’s melodies danced with all of our emotions. My Corner had been written by Sagui in the dark depths of his captivity and spoke of how he had occasionally, and very rarely, caught sight of himself in a mirror during those months. Skeletal, broken, unkempt and unshaved the song painfully described his torment. It is worth noting that the Sagui that appeared on stage at Nir Oz is truly, physically at least, a man who has undergone remarkable healing and who looked fabulous!

Sagui Dekel-Chen and his wife Mili

More than just a beloved son of the kibbutz, Sagui is a husband to Mili and the father of three young girls, Bari, Gali and the youngest Sachar Mazal with whom Mili was pregnant when Sagui was captured. As the evening unfolded, we were offered a glimpse of the pain that Sagui suffered when, having seen so much slaughter on October 7th, he had resigned himself to his supposed tragic inevitable reality that Mili and the girls were dead.

When news eventually reached him that his release was imminent, Sagui told of how he started to prepare himself for attending their funerals – and when he heard at that time, over a terrorist’s radio, a snatch of Fields Of Gold by Sting, he resolved that that would be the music to be played at the funerals. As that song was played during the concert it was hard to stop the tears, recognising the sheer immensity of the physical and emotional trauma that Sagui had endured.

Miraculously, Mili and the girls all survived the horrors of October 7th, and that all five were re-united shortly after Sagui’s release, was another of the evening’s powerfully poignant themes. The evening’s painful ironies were spotlighted again when Sagui asked everyone in the audience who had held Sachar Mazal, before he had been able to, to raise their hands. Sagui had composed individual songs for each of his family, that spoke of speaking of their strengths and their sweetness. In listening to both himself and Mili speak of their daughters, the love that clearly exists within the Dekel-Chen family is beautiful and tangible.

The line-up of supporting artists was impressive with performers including Idan Raichel and Hatikva 6 joining Sagui on stage. Perhaps the most uplifting guest performance came from Marina Maximilian Blumin’s (almost) closing number, Back Again, a song that defined the spirit of Sagui, his family and the whole of Kibbutz Nir Oz.

Two weeks ago in London and in the face of a tsunami of hate, Boy George defiantly sung that We Will Dance Again. This week, at Kibbutz Nir Oz and inspired by Sagui Dekel-Chen, we danced!

Sagui Dekel-Chen and Marina Maximilian Blumin

Sagui's album can be downloaded here 

Credit for all images: Orit Pnini

The Nova Exhibition Comes To London

A burned out car wreck, recovered from the Nova site  (c)Nova Exhibition

October 7th 2023 saw Hamas terrorists from Gaza enter Israel to murder 1,200 souls and take a further 250 hostage. At the time of the terrorist attack the Nova Music Festival, a celebration of dance and trance was in full swing just a few miles from the Gaza border.

As the sun rose on that terrible October day, the terrorists swarmed the festival massacring 413 predominantly young people and taking 44 hostages. Many hundreds more were wounded leading to the Nova Festival becoming perhaps the bloodiest of that day’s countless atrocities.

This week the Nova Music Festival Exhibition opened in central London. A remarkable tribute to that day’s victims, the exhibition  “06:29AM – The Moment Music Stood Still”, conceived and curated by artist Reut Feingold, offers a thoughtfully created recreation of aspects of both the festival itself, alongside deeply respectful displays of the day’s unimaginable barbarity.

Arriving at the exhibition, visitors are first ushered into a short movie screening describing the essence of the festival. The joy, happiness and exhilaration as the young people danced the night away is vividly recreated. As the sun rose over the Negev that morning, the carnival was to become carnage and visitors to the exhibition leave the screening room to enter what has been recreated as a typical festival campsite.

Trees and sand make up the room’s landscape, with individuals’ festival pop-up tents amidst the palms, all strewn with the messy mundanity of young people camping out for a couple of days … books, magazines, tubes of toothpaste, a backgammon set…the usual clutter. It’s a brilliant creation, for nestling within these tented collections of discarded personal trivia – all genuine artefacts, recovered from the Nova site – are video displays and mobile phone screens playing looping clips of the day’s violence in actual footage that had been recovered by the IDF from both the terrorists’ Go Pro cameras and the victims’ mobile phones. Within the clips the deceased have been treated with respect, these harrowing rolling extracts being blurred where necessary so as not to identify the victims.

A wall, lit by flickering memorial candles, displays pictures of all the victims – on another wall, images of those taken as hostages. Some of the names are familiar to us from events of the last 2 1/2 years. Above all, it is the sheer number of these beautiful young people, cut down as they danced, that is chilling. And that they were all someone’s child or sibling or parent reminds us all of how fragile and precious their lives were.

Other tableaux in the exhibition tell of the nightmare of that day – burned out car wrecks; an immaculately recreated festival bar, complete with a credit card swipe machine that we are all familiar with, only this one bears a bullet-shattered screen; and tables and tables of the victims’ shoes, sandals and clothes. To the side of the exhibition, a small room documents the rape and sexual torture that the terrorists inflicted that day. The heartbreak is overwhelming.

And yet, amidst this devastation, my visit to  “06:29AM – The Moment Music Stood Still” also offered a truly humbling glimpse of the finest in humanity. Travelling with the exhibition are a group of remarkable volunteers, each prepared to share their own experiences of the impact of what happened at Nova that day and in the months following.

Amongst the dozen or so of these noble individuals, I spoke to Taryn Thomas, a student from Stanford University in the USA and who had flown in to London from California that morning. Taryn is neither a Nova survivor nor a relative. Rather, she is an example of the power of the exhibition to effect change.

Up until 2024 Taryn had been a prominent and outspoken leader of pro-Palestinian rallies on campus. When the Nova Exhibition came to Los Angeles, the production team extended an open invitation to students to come and see it for themselves. Taryn came. She spent three hours inside and came out changed.

Taryn told me: “I was a part of the pro-Palestine encampment at Stanford University. October 7th of 2023, I was a sophomore and I think what kind of drew me to the movement was a sense of belonging and a sense of purpose.

And fast forward, one of our protests had definitely gotten out of hand and caused about $700,000 in damages. 12 students had received felonies having spray-painted disgusting things such as “Death to Israel, Death to America” And I think that was my first time thinking that I just didn’t understand how this was liberating Palestine or saving anyone. And so I took a step back from the movement because so many students were suspended. And then, months later in October of 2024, I received an email inviting non-Jewish students to visit the Nova Exhibition.

I had heard about this festival, and I went with the purpose of looking for Zionist propaganda. I went with a closed mind and I thought I knew what I was going to see. I was looking almost to validate and strengthen my position as I looked for the Zionist lies. So I went, and I saw all of my assumptions being broken. I was just completely astounded by how horrific the events were.

And this was my first time ever seeing the October 7th footage and this was like a year later.

So I went in looking for propaganda and there was none. The exhibition didn’t argue with me. It showed me kids my age being hunted and I could see myself in them and that could have been me at a music festival dancing, and then fleeing for my life the next moment.

I read the goodbye messages and the last “I love yous” and I just felt like my heart broke. One of the main things that made me open my eyes was the audio clip of the terrorist calling his dad to celebrate that he had killed 10 Jews. And these were the ‘Palestinian martyrs’? This was ‘the resistance’ that we were calling for ‘by any means necessary’? This was who we were supporting? I couldn’t rationalize and even understand the actions of what I was witnessing.”

I asked Taryn what the impact had been upon her life, of so fundamentally changing her perspective on the pro-Palestine movement?

“It’s been incredibly hard. I lost pretty much every single friend that I had. I went to Israel in 2025 and posted about it and my best friend asked, “Is this you?” And I was like, “Yeah, do you want to talk about it? ” And she immediately blocked me.

I thought there would be an argument or a fight and I was wishing that had happened, I thought I would be given a chance for a conversation. Unfortunately, the pro-Palestinian ideology has people so wrapped up in it that they attach their identity, their morals, everything. And if you dissent at all, you’re persecuted socially. It’s like a social suicide.

It started with my best friend and then it turned into my classmates who posted on their social medias that I’m a genocide apologist and calling me a spineless loser. And it was really hard because I knew them. Of course, that’s their tactic, to shame and to silence. Any dissent, or question is to risk your social life.

And I think especially for every college student, that’s your whole world. It feels existential. And so I think going through that and losing that many people, I don’t know, but I feel like for every person I lost, I gained. I was welcomed with open arms in the Jewish community in ways that I would’ve never had imagined. I was invited to Shabbat dinner at Chabad and Hillel and made two of my best friends.

I just never knew that our movement was hateful. We had JVP [Jewish Voice for Peace. A left-wing, grassroots, activist antizionist organization in the United States composed of Jews who advocate for Palestinian rights and the liberation of the Palestinian people] alongside us and so I thought this was what Jews thought. I came to realize how antisemitic our movement was and how antizionism is antisemitism.”

I asked Taryn how she thought it may be possible to enlighten more people, particularly young people, who currently hold the misguided beliefs that she had once shared?

“I think it’s going to be an uphill battle. It is sad that it took me so long, but without people welcoming me with open arms, I wouldn’t be here today. And so I think there’s a silent majority that are scared to speak up, scared to admit that they were wrong, or they made a mistake. So if we want people to be deradicalized, we need to build an off ramp and let them know it’s okay to change your mind and to have nuance”.

"06:29AM – The Moment Music Stood Still” is an astonishing and, sadly, unmissable exhibition. It stands not only as humbling documentary evidence and witness to the diabolical terrorism of Hamas on October 7th, it also frames a narrative of hope for the future. It is only in London for six weeks, but just go. If you are already familiar with the events of October 7th, still go – the exhibition will teach you more.

But even more importantly, take someone with you who has yet to learn of the horrors of that day.

The exhibition runs until 5th July 2026. You can buy tickets here

hOWL - Review

*

Written by Howard Jacobson

In perhaps one of the most shamelessly exploitative works of fiction, and arguably an extremely unfunny comedy, Howard Jacobson’s hOWL charts the journey of Ferdinand Draxler MBE, a Jewish headteacher from south London as he navigates his world following the massacres of October 7th 2023.

Draxler is a character whose credibility quite simply defies belief. Married to a non-Jew, their daughter Zoe is a staunch antizionist, his brother Isak who had emigrated to Israel also harbors a skeptical view of the Jewish state. Draxler’s Deputy Head, Axelberg, is a Christian man who converts to Judaism so that he too can assume an Israel-critical stance. Draxler’s mother is a survivor of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where she may, or may not, have had a sexual relationship with the camp’s Nazi commandant.

Notwithstanding this eclectic array of characters, Jacobson subjects his protagonist to the raft of de-humanizing experiences that have befallen the diaspora since October 7th. Many readers will have found themselves facing ghastly antisemitic challenges in recent times. Draxler experiences almost all of them. De-platforming, raw hatred, Banksy’s murals, heck, even Glastonbury gets a mention. It is as though Jacobson has worked his way through a checklist of antisemitic/antizionist tropes and abuses, ensuring that as many as possible can be woven into the threadbare tapestry of his prose.

The book drifts in and out of reality, Jacobson perhaps having intended his blurred use of timelines to reflect Draxler’s loss of reason as the narrative unfolds. In reality, this blurring by the writer masks an overall incoherence that is found to be liberally sprinkled with gratuitous sexual references. Other than for prurient sensationalism, or a (very) cheap laugh, why else does Jacobson feel the need to let us know that as a teenager, Isak masturbated into his shirt drawer?

Almost halfway through the novel, Jacobson reveals a worrying (possibly autobiographical?) sentiment. In a letter that Draxler is penning to his daughter in an attempt towards an ideological reconciliation, he writes: “I won’t say the baby-murdering, land-grabbing Jew you march against does not somewhere exist, but he is not me.” In that one sentence Jacobson single-handedly pours petrol onto the fires of one of the oldest antisemitic tropes, the Blood Libel, and for that, Howard Jacobson, one of the most celebrated Jewish writers of our time, is to be condemned.

The book’s jacket bears a quote from Patrick Marber, lauding hOWL that reads: “A howling comic masterpiece”. In those four words Marber brings the classic children’s fable of The Emperor’s New Clothes, bang up to date. To be clear, Jacobson has not written a comic masterpiece.

To have released – what the book’s publishers Jonathan Cape describe as – a ‘tragicomedy’, in the wake of October 7th, a day so horrific that many of its survivors have yet to fully address the impact of its trauma and more than 1,200 families mourn their murdered relatives, and as world Jewry faces murderous antisemitism on a scale not seen since the Holocaust, stands as possibly the most crass, insensitive and shamefully opportunistic decision in the hitherto noble history of Anglo-Jewish literature.

The writers Eli Wiesel and Eli Sharabi, who both survived the horrors of the infernal depths of antisemitic Jew-hatred, are amongst the most qualified to write of those desperate times. In their shadow, Jacobson is but a literary pygmy. He should donate any income earned from this execrable work to a charity that supports the rebuilding of those devastated Israeli communities within the Gaza Envelope.

hOWL is available from all the usual bookselling outlets.

Voices From The Tunnels

The entrance to the London tunnels

At an unmarked location in east London, Voices From The Tunnels was a week-long event that reported the inhumanity that Hamas is wreaking upon the hostages kidnapped from Israel on October 7th last year and who continue to be held in a network of subterranean tunnels. This horror story is ongoing for the 136 remaining hostages, not forgetting the continual anguish that their loved ones are suffering. Organised by the 7/10 Human Chain Project and working closely with Israel’s Hostages And Missing Families Forum the 7/10 team have aimed for authenticity in their displays, based upon a range of sources of evidence, including from a number of the hostages that Hamas have freed in recent months. 

Entering a derelict warehouse, one is confronted with a row of hospital beds, a stark reminder that so much of the maze of Hamas’ tunnels has been constructed underneath Gaza's hospitals and other humanitarian sites such as places of worship and schools. Under the Geneva Convention such places should not be used deliberately for combat purposes, nor should civilians be used as human shields. But the world is already aware that Hamas cares little for the rules of war, with Voices From The Tunnels proving a testimony to the terrorists’ disregard for the sanctity of life. Walking past a scooter similar to that used in the witnessed-by-the-world kidnapping of Noa Argamani, one descends a damp staircase to the warehouse’s cellars...

Hospital beds above the tunnels

These cellars are no fairground attraction, the damp and crumbling rooms having been painstakingly transformed into chambers of horror. We learn of 12 year old Eitan Yahalomi, forced in his captivity to watch a looping video of the atrocities of 7/10. Of Mia Shem whose injured arm (she was shot on 7/10) was operated on in the dungeons by a vet, without anaesthetic and of the appalling degradation meted out to the old and the young. The cellar's final tableau is of the sexual violence that Hamas has inflicted on the hostages, mostly (but not exclusively) upon the young women from Israel that have been held captive. 

The scenes are horrific, but Aviv who was guiding my small party around the cellars told of even more harrowing detail. That of the women hostages released so far, three were found to be pregnant by their Hamas rapists and had been able to undergo abortions in Israeli hospitals. A number of young Israeli women remain held in the tunnels and a pervading fear (one of many) is that some of them too may be pregnant through rape and forced to take their pregnancies to full term. The barbarity of what is being perpetrated in the Hamas tunnels, like so much of the carnage of 7/10, defies comprehension.

A further sobering thought is that these tunnels, now identified by the IDF to criss-cross the length and breadth of the Gaza Strip, have cost millions of dollars to construct and be fitted out with utilities such as electricity and plumbing together with furniture. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA) funds, together with cash from other sources, that should have been spent on improving Gaza’s social infrastructure – schools, hospitals and the like -  has instead been diverted into building this fabric of terror.

One can only wonder to what extent UNRWA was aware of how its support was being used? In such a small enclave as the Gaza Strip, it defies belief that UNRWA was ignorant of such malevolent activity. With Hamas having vowed to repeat the pogrom of 7/10 again and again and with its founding charter calling for the eradication of Jews, it is hardly surprising that Israel is now seeking to destroy both Hamas’ fighters and its hundreds of miles of hellish tunnels and fighting capabilities.

UNRWA Update 29th January 2024

The article above  was first published on 21st January 2024. 

The news of recent days has reported that at least 10% of UNRWA employees have been found to be connected to Hamas, with a number of those having a direct involvement in the atrocities of October 7th. It is believed by many commentators that this figure of 10% is likely to be an understatement. 

Click here to read my thoughts on having seen the 45 minute film collated by the Israeli Defence Forces, collated from footage taken on 7 October 2023 by Hamas terrorists and Israelis

Oct 7 2023 - Hamas Massacre – Collated Raw Footage

“7 October 2023 - Hamas Massacre – Collated Raw Footage” is a 45-minute film prepared by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) and drawn from found-footage taken from the body cameras and mobile phones of neutralised terrorists and Hamas social media broadcasts, along with media from the security systems of Israeli citizens’ homes and even, sickeningly, from an Israeli kindergarten where acts of terror were perpetrated. Footage was also obtained from the mobile phones and dashcams of some of the victims and the cameras of the Israeli rescue services. 

Much has already been written about this film, now in its 19th iteration as the IDF collate and add more evidence to this graphic and harrowing archive of 7/10. The film itself is a work of painstaking effort and detail, documenting a fraction of the depraved crimes committed in southern Israel on that day. 

The filmmakers have strived to protect the dignity of the victims. The consent of the families of the victims has been obtained and where the faces of the dead may have been clearly identifiable, these have been blurred. As a further measure, all those who have attended the film's screenings have been required to leave their mobile phones or other recording devices, outside of the screening room. 

An early extract from the film, that evidences the IDF’s editing skill, is from footage taken from the dashcam of a victim’s car that is unwittingly approaching a group of terrorists that are clearly armed with assault rifles. The dashcam captures the terrorists taking aim at the vehicle and the car's windscreen fracturing as it is hit by bullets. The fractures increase and we then see the windscreen glass being spattered by flecks of the victim’s blood. The terror and pain that the car's driver must have experienced is left to our imagination. The film then cuts to terrorist-filmed bodycam footage of the same shooting, that shows the same car approaching the terrorists. We see them taking aim and shooting, their bullets fracturing the cars windscreen. We then see the murder of the driver. 

There are so many other episodes to this short film. This lists some of them:  

• the intercepted radio communication from a Hamas commander, instructing the terrorists to bring a victim’s corpse back with them to “let the people play with his body”

• the recorded phone call from a terrorist to his mother, screaming his exhilaration down the line at having “killed 10 Jews with his bare hands”

• not just the murders that are on film, but the desecration of the victims’ bodies. On my witnessing the decapitation of a dead Israeli soldier my most overwhelming emotion, after the revulsion, was that of thankfulness that at least the young Israeli was now free of the fear and free of the pain and humiliation that his tormentors were raining down upon his body.

• the image of a young woman’s beautifully manicured nails on her now rigid and lifeless hand, her arm unscathed while her head and torso had been charred beyond recognition.

• the burnt out line of cars attempting to have fled the Nova music festival – a scene more resemblant of a Hollywood disaster movie, than a real life rave.

• the reality that however fast a victim can run, bullets travel faster.

The overarching image of the film however is the evidenced complicity of so many civilians from Gaza. A large number of the murderers appeared to be ordinary Gazans with no uniform other than, for some, bulletproof vests. So many of them clad in tracksuit bottoms and trainers, laughing and joking amongst themselves. Ordinary blokes.

And then wilfully slaughtering both Jews and non-Jews. 

Civilians were dominant too in the clips of victims being driven in pickup trucks and jeeps through the packed streets of Gaza amidst cheering crowds who were either beating the living victims, or desecrating the bodies of the dead. To our civilised Western minds, the horrors of 7/10 defy comprehension.  

This short film documents only a small percentage of the crimes perpetrated by Hamas that day. But the IDF filmmakers who have compiled the film are talented individuals whose skills transcend those usually found in post-production suites. Clearly the IDF filmmakers have laboured over footage drawn from countless sources, to piece together such a thorough narrative. The human resilience that must have been required from the IDF editors to craft such sequences is remarkable.

7/10 came from evil, but has spawned countless acts of heroism in so many ways as individuals have responded to the day’s horrors. The film unit of the IDF are heroes too.