I remember the light in the Valley of Ela on the day of Shani Louk’s funeral.  It was late springtime, clear light, of the kind that you get in Jerusalem.  I didn’t get enough time to travel round the villages and the moshavim close to the city at that time, and so I wasn’t used to seeing this light reflected on greenery, rather than on stone.  There was a great silence.  Of a kind you don’t really expect in Israel, and especially not in large crowds.  And especially not at gatherings of mainly very young people, as this perforce was.  Shani had been 22 at the time of her murder by Hamas, and many or most of the people at the funeral were her close friends.  There were people from the trance scene in Israel, of which she had been part, and of which the Nova festival where she was killed had been connected.  There were young men in military uniform also.  Some in that new style combat dress that came in during the war in Gaza,  that at first looked slightly foreign and incongruous to our older veteran’s eyes.  Some bearded and with stronger tans, I suppose, from the harsher sunlight in the Gaza Strip. 

Moshav Srigim is located south of Beit Shemesh, and south west of Jerusalem,  less than half an hour’s drive from the city. The Valley of Ela, famously, is where the battle between David and Goliath is held to have taken place.  Shani Louk was born in nearby Moshav Aderet and then raised at Srigim. 

Before the funeral, I saw the house of the Louk family in the moshav.  A journalist friend of mine by chance lived almost opposite and knew the family well.  Nissim Louk, Shani’s father, was the son of Amram Louk, who had been a prominent local politician for the Labor Party in the area.  Her mother, Ricarda, was a German Catholic who converted to Judaism. 

I was aware of a kind of generational gathering, of something pivotal in the air.  Shani Louk had become a symbol for those lost at the Nova festival, in the massacre carried out by the Islamist gunmen on October 7, 2023.  There had been rumors that she might be alive in Gaza, in the first months following that day.  Then it had become clear that this was not so, after a fragment of her skull was found near the Mefalsim Intersection. And then she had straightforwardly come to symbolize for many people the tragedy of the loss of so many very young people.

 Symbols aside, tho, Shani’s family, though, were grieving like other families do, and the funeral ceremony had the usual awkward aspects.  There was that incongruity that is common at funerals where the chief mourners try to put on smiles, while the peripheral visitors do a performance of profound sadness.  Speaking to the mourners at the funeral, Nissim Louk said that “’“The blood of the murdered ones, and Shani among them, was not abandoned and cried out from the ground.”  This phrase is a biblical one, and is both poignant and disturbing.  In Hebrew it sounds less elevated than it does in English. More literal.  It comes from the story of Cain and Abel.  “Your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground,”, and the second, less well known part:  “like a voice calling for revenge.”  In the case of Shani Louk, it also had a more direct meaning. 

The murdered ones.  Shani Louk was killed execution style as she sought with her friend Orion Hernandez Radoux to escape the site of the Nova festival, where a massacre of Israeli Jews and their friends was taking place on the morning of October 7, 2023.  They were killed at the Mefalsim Intersection, as they tried to head north east, away from Gaza.  Shani was shot in the head and died instantly. Orion Radoux was taken captive.  Shani’s body was then taken to Gaza in the back of a van, paraded through the streets, and spat on and abused by the people there.  Her remains were found, under the ground, in a fetid tunnel beneath a house in the Jebalya refugee camp in northern Gaza, six months later.  The bodies of three other Israelis, Amit Buskila, Ron Binyamin and Yitzhak Gelernter, were laid beside her.  Orion Radoux’s body was found in a different location a few days later. And their blood cried out from the ground. 

A couple of days after Shani’s funeral, I was invited along with some other journalists to travel to the place where the bodies were found, and to interview members of the units that had made the discovery.  Jebalya in the spring of 2024 was a place of destruction, rubble and collapsed buildings.  Battalion 202 of the IDF’s Paratroopers’ Brigade was the unit operating in the area where the bodies of Shani and the others were located.  Captain Roi Beit Yakov, aged 22, from Eli in the northern West Bank was the one on the ground responsible for finding the bodies of the four murdered people. Roi Beit Yaakov was a squad commander in the 202^nd.  His squad were operating there and they entered the house where the bodies were located.  It’s not clear if they had prior intelligence about the area and what might be found in it.  It must have been pitch dark, humid and full of dust in the house.  The entrance to the tunnel where the bodies were located was underneath a rug, in a side room.  Beit Yaakov moved the rug and identified the entrance to the tunnel.  He reported his find to his company commander, Major Gal Shabbat, aged 24,  from Tel Aviv. 

The paratroopers then called in assistance from a specialized unit of the Combat Engineers to further investigate.  This unit, called ‘Yahalom’, (Diamond) in Hebrew, has particular expertise in dealing with tunnels.  Its abilities were in high demand in Gaza, where Hamas spent the 16 years between 2007 and 2023 building one of the largest tunnel networks to have been constructed anywhere.  The Yahalom team uncovered the tunnel lid and descended.  About 10 metres down, they entered the tunnel.  A short way into it, they discovered the bodies of the four. 

The story of all this was told to us that day by Almog, commander of the 202^nd battalion, and by an un-named officer of the Engineers’ commando team, who wore a balaklava when he spoke to us.  It wasn’t possible to speak to any of the principle characters involved in the discovery of the tunnel.  A few days after the bodies of Shani and the others were located and returned, Roi Beit Yaakov was killed while operating in Jabalya.  He wasn’t killed by Hamas, or at least not directly so.  Roi Beit Yaakov along with five others from the 202^nd battalion died in a friendly fire incident.  Then, later on the same day, Gal Shabbat was killed by a Hamas sniper while operating in the area. 

So the circle was closed on the three principal characters in one of the myriad of tragedies that was the war.  The young woman killed and her body subjected to abuse and outrages.  The commander who, in the words of Shani’s father, heard her blood crying out from the ground.  And the officer who, alerted, began the process whereby her body was redeemed and returned to her family for burial with decency and respect.  Not one of them over the age of 25. 

Shani Louk and Roi Beit Yaakov came in many ways from opposite corners of Israeli society.  Shani was, according to relatives interviewed after her death, of ‘pacifist’ outlook. She had obtained a deferment from military service.  She had been living in Tel Aviv at the time of her murder, working as a tattoo artist.  Roi Beit Yaakov was from Eli, in northern Samaria, a stronghold of religious Zionism and of the settlement movement. 

I don’t know what they would have had to say to each other if they had met in a different way.  Perhaps that particular freemasonry that exists among very young people in general and among young Israelis in particular might have enabled them to have found a means of communication.  Now they are like those figures from the volcanic eruption in Pompeii. Frozen forever in particular attitudes.  Joined.   

The Islamist assault on Israel, launched on October 7 was a disaster foretold.  It was a culmination of dynamics that had been building up over the preceding two decades.  The preparations for the October 7 attack were secret, of course, and Israeli intelligence failed to locate them in time.  But the larger forces that led to the attack were all plainly visible.  This was the culminating moment for two related forces which had been growing in plain sight across the Middle East in the preceding years.  The first was Sunni political Islam among the Palestinians.  The war came at a moment when Sunni Islamism appeared defeated, and many analysts of the region had written it off. All the projects which Sunni political Islam had raised up in the region in the preceding decade had gone down to apparent defeat.  The series of uprisings and insurgencies collectively mis-named the ‘Arab Spring’ by the western media had, one by one, been thwarted.  In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, finally reaching the apex of power after 80 years of trying, lasted only a year in government before being replaced by the return of military power.  In Tunisia, after early electoral successes, the Nahda party was eclipsed by the return of authoritarianism in the person of President Qais Saed.  In Syria, the Sunni Arab uprising, dominated from the outset by Islamists, appeared to have been crushed by the Bashar Assad regime.  In Iraq, the Islamic State organization, which emerged from the al-Qaeda branch in that country, had triumphed briefly, before being destroyed by a US led coalition. 

Even Hamas itself, which had won the only free elections ever conducted in the Palestinian territories, in 2007, found itself boxed in, in its Gaza fiefdom.  Analysts had begun to consider that it was co-opted, corrupted, a secondary player. 

These conclusions, as it turned out, were premature.  Political Islam remained the choice, overwhelmingly, at the popular level in the Sunni Arab world.  It was never likely that the Arab Sunnis would quietly accept their newly found irrelevance on the political and strategic stage of the Middle East.  These facts combined meant that there was always likely to be an eruption from somewhere, at some stage. 

Israel, paradoxically, did not fail to guard against Hamas because of naivete, or because of a belief that the time of conflicts in the region was over.  Rather, the Jewish state thought that Hamas had been pacified by financial inducement.  Israel was anyway focused on a different, if related threat.  Namely, that of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its bid for regional domination.  The Iranian nuclear ambition was first and foremost among challenges in the minds of Israeli strategists and senior officials.  Indeed, it was the bon ton among some in those circles to assert that attention paid on anything else was a distraction and a waste of time and resources.  A certain shift had occurred in the course of 2023, in that it had become increasingly apparent that the array of Islamist proxy organizations that Iran commanded across the Arabic speaking world could not be ignored.  But even here, the focus was on the more powerful Lebanese Hizballah. Hamas in Gaza was regarded as a backwater, a sideshow, its leaders bought off and interested in maintaining quiet. 

In reality, the two phenomena  – the continued vitality of Sunni Political Islam, and the potent threat of the Iran-led regional alliance – were linked.  Linked in their origins, because the founders and originators of the Shia political Islam which came to power in Iran in 1979 were influenced by and had learned from their Sunni counterparts.  And of course linked organizationally, because Hamas was one of the relatively few non-Shia clients of Teheran, its military capacities largely the product of this link.  So the two challenges were branches of the same tree. 

But, and this is the crucial point, the Israeli system wasn’t looking.  There is a built in hostility to ideas and to conceptual thinking in the Israeli security structure.  That’s not how you’d imagine a defense structure created and manned by Jews would be.  But that’s how it is.  The disaster of the opening stages of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, for example, is attributed to something called the ‘conceptzia.’  The conceptzia, or concept in question, was the notion that the Egyptians would not seek to attack Israel for as long as total victory was clearly beyond them, or more specifically until they had integrated the means to carry out deep penetration bombing of Israel.  This concept was indeed flawed.  But the response in Israeli thinking is to find conceptual thinking of any kind to be a kind of taboo.  So after October 7, the new ‘conceptzia’, according to which Hamas had been deterred, was held up for general vilification. 

In contrast to these failed conceptions, plain, empirical thinking is held up as the ideal.  But of course, a species of supposedly non-ideological thinking had in fact given birth to both the pre-1973, and the pre-2023 conception.  In both cases, the mistake was precisely to ignore or misinterpret the conceptual thinking taking place on the other side.  In the 2023 instance, this derived from a lack of curiosity or failure to adequately grapple with Islamist ideas, and their nature, strength and depth.  In place of an ordered exploration of these ideas, and the political behavior they were likely to produce, a supposedly pragmatic outlook concluded that the Gaza Islamists were as susceptible as anyone else to material inducements and physical deterrence, and therefore a judicious and measured mix of the two could induce quiescence on their part.  This was the basic thought mistake, from which flawed policy followed.  It ended in the presence of just under 700 IDF soldiers stationed along the border on the morning when over 3000 jihadi gunmen began their assault from Gaza.  The remedy to it would have been a proper assessment as to the nature of Hamas as an ideological movement.  But this, in a system given to amused cynicism regarding the enemy and his motivations, never took  place. 

The Hamas assault, when it came, rapidly turned into a clash between societies, rather than simply between armed forces.  Because of the particular positioning of Hamas as both a Sunni Islamist group and an ally of Iran, the Iran led regional bloc mobilized, albeit in a partial and piecemeal fashion, in support of its ally.  Despite this, the October 7 massacres were a Sunni Islamist event par excellence, resembling in their details similar rampages by related forces elsewhere in the region, specifically in Iraq and Syria.  Again, the distinction is artificial.  Political Islam is one phenomenon, not two, though its manifestations may differ in the details. 

It was the younger generation in Israel who bore the brunt of the casualties, the sacrifice and the defense of Israel in the days that followed.  The Hungarian Jewish writer Arthur Koestler, in a strange phrasing, says in his autobiography ‘The Invisible Writing’ that ‘ the gods save their worst torments for the ones they love most: the innocents.’  This phrase comes to mind when one thinks of the young people who faced the worst of the October 7 massacres, and who led the way and paid the price in  dreadful fighting in the built up areas of Gaza which followed.  Both Shani Louk and Roi Beit Yaakov, in their different ways, were innocents, I think. Each of types familiar to anyone who  knows the sociological landscape of Israel.  The Tel Aviv tattoo artist and the airborne infantry officer from northern Samaria.  One should speak in sorrow for their loss, but also relate how others like them who remained went on to deliver telling blows to those who killed them.  It is my contention that the details both of the nature of the phenomenon which attacked Israel in 2023, and of how it was turned back (tho not yet destroyed) are of relevance far beyond Israel itself.  This enemy, after all, threatens not only Israel but the Middle East region and Europe also, and is part of a larger global challenge. 

To understand the dynamics and likely direction of events, one must study ideas, and the societies that adhere to those ideas, and not only military systems.  This was Israel’s mistake before, and it was its mistake in 2023, too.  But the Jewish state was hardly alone in this error.  In the west, where supporters and apologists of political Islam have been permitted to burrow deep into the key systems of political power and of the formulation and dissemination of ideas, the problem is yet more acute.  Israel may have been gravely in error and allowed itself to be attacked.  But the society that could produce people like Roi Beit Yaacov, and Gal Shabbat, and Shani Louk too possessed the vitality and cohesion to mobilise effectively in its own defense.  In the case of the west, partly as a result of the years of neglect, it is not at all clear that the same can be said.  In any case, capacities like those displayed by the 202^nd battalion of the paratroopers brigade in Jebalya, with the heavy price incurred, are of the type which only need to be deployed when something has gone terribly wrong.  The failure to take an interest in the enemy and his mode of thinking was what began the road to October 7.  The west should learn from this as well as Israel, and with no less urgency.   The old slogan of the Polish patriots was ‘For your freedom and ours.’