The paths here are lined with flowers and small bushes and even trees that provide a bit of shade. It’s quiet. There is a small butterfly. A green lamp-post. Small houses line the path on one side. Here and there are other paths, where one can choose to go right or left.

I make a right through more foliage and a field and come to another house. This is where a surreal scene unfolds. A young man and woman are wearing camouflage and holding black M-16 style rifles. They peer around the side of a home. On the path, a woman is walking her dog. The soldiers smile as she passes. A moment of near levity. Then the seriousness returns.

The people in camouflage are part of the security team, or kitat konenut, here in Nir Oz. Security teams – civilian emergency standby squads – are composed by armed members of the various Israeli communities. They are usually former IDF soldiers and their job is to protect the community at a moment’s notice. 

Life under guarded quiet in Nir Oz

On Oct. 7, thousands of Hamas and other terrorist groups invaded Israel in a massive attack. They penetrated the Gaza border fence at dozens of locations and landed like a tidal wave on several Israeli communities. All along the Gaza border on that dark day these communities found themselves under attack, surrounded, and cut off from one another.

Nir Oz was one of the hardest hit communities. It had 386 residents that day. A total of 69 people were killed: 47 of them were killed on Oct. 7 and others while they were held in Gaza. In all, 76 were kidnapped to Gaza. In terms of massacres, this was one of the worst in the history of the Jewish people. 

According to an IDF report published by Kan, the community had a nine member kitat konenut on Oct. 7, four of whom were killed. This small team of fighters faced off against an estimated 450 terrorists.
 
Today, the community is still trying to recover. A key to recovery is security. 

Communities on the Gaza border and all over Israel need security. This is also the case in northern Israel and throughout communities in Judea and Samaria, the area known as the West Bank. It is also true in the Negev and elsewhere. An armed and trained populace is a safe population. That much has been clear to Zionist pioneers since the beginning. Jews have had to arm themselves because of attacks.

On May 4, I drove to Nir Oz. The new security team was taking part in a training program run by a group called Magen 48, that takes its name from the 48 members of security squads who fell on Oct. 7. 

Its co-founder, Ehud Dribben, described how his organization is helping train security teams along the Gaza border and across the country. He has done this for decades and Magen 48 is the result of his long background in security and war fighting.

“Magen was established to stop the next Oct. 7,” Dribben says. “On Oct. 7 I saw the communities that had volunteer security teams that were prepared survived, those that didn’t were wiped out. My life mission is to train every city, every village, every town in Israel, so that if the next Oct. 7 comes, they will be ready.” 

Ari Briggs, also a co-founder of Magen 48, notes, “We learned on Oct. 7 we can’t wait for help, we need to help ourselves.” He says Magen 48 is now building a national training center for volunteer security teams. “We have trained 67 communities, 1,500 local security [personnel].” 

The drive from Jerusalem to Nir Oz is one I’ve done many times, visiting Gaza border communities over the last two decades. 

Back in 2004, I drove the same route to Netzer Hazani in what was then the Jewish area of Gush Katif. In 2005, I was near Kissufim during the Gaza Disengagement. 

Wars followed, endless Gaza wars in 2009, 2012, 2014, and 2021. Then came Oct. 7. The road that runs along the Gaza border, Route 232, became a killing ground. As the tidal wave of Hamas terror spread along the border, it engulfed the 232, leading to the massacre at the Supernova music festival near Reim.

Every part of the 232 now holds memories of Oct. 7. The concrete armored bus shelters, for instance, are covered with stickers for the fallen. A bench on the side of the road marks where a young woman was killed. This was a road of death.

But it is also a road of life. Life has returned here. The seasons have come and gone. After Oct. 7, the entire area was evacuated; tens of thousands of people had to leave communities that had existed since the 1940s. They have slowly returned. 

Each kibbutz and community faces its own struggles. Some of these communities were poor before the war, others were more economically successful. Some were small like Nir Oz, and others larger, with up to 1,000 residents.

On Oct. 7, the massacres here unfolded differently in each place. 
At Kibbutz Magen, which is a slight hill east of Nir Oz, the security team was able to repel the Hamas attack. It had been alerted quickly and was trained and prepared.

Magen 48 believes that training is key to survival. 
For the trainers, such as Dribben, this goes back decades in terms of knowledge and experience. Magen 48 points to the example of Kibbutz Erez on the Gaza border near Sderot. In that community, seven members of the local security squad faced off against more than two dozen terrorists.

Briggs says that after Oct. 7, the founders of Magen 48 discussed how they could help train people to avoid a similar massacre. The concept they came up with was Magen 48 and its training program of eight sessions a year for the communities. 

Magen 48 partners with the army in this undertaking. “It wasn’t just about training. People weren’t coming home, so the regional council said: ‘People won’t come back until they feel safe,’” Briggs explains.
 
Nir Oz is the latest community of 67, which is undergoing training. The aim is to train around 600 communities across the country. 

“To do that, we need our own facility. We are building a training facility in the center [of the country] and then a satellite facility near Gaza,” Briggs notes.

The concept is to take the security teams, some of them new, like the one at Nir Oz, and provide them with the necessary tools. This means rifles, vests, helmets, and other equipment. “It’s about saving lives and bringing people home; once you have a feeling of security then people will come back,” he says.

The new head of the team, who can only be identified as “Y,” discusses how he moved here and is helping rebuild the place and prepare for the future. 

“We are in the process of recruiting and re-establishing the response team. And honoring those who came before us,” he says. 

The volunteers are faced with the challenge of striking the right balance here. New members are now joining the community. “As the head of security here, it’s an incredible asset for us as a community and kibbutz. We need tangible means [of support, such as] equipment, [providing increased] certainty for the future and coordination.”

Many practical aspects are changing. The volunteers will now be provided with increased rounds to shoot in practice. More shooting means more accuracy and competence with the rifles. Although it was quiet while I was in Nir Oz, the residents say that they hear the “booms” from Gaza, of ongoing operations there. The security team was preparing for its day of practice. They are highly motivated to protect their homes and community. They have a weight on their shoulders.

This team in Nir Oz was completing its second session of the eight sessions to take place throughout the year. The other communities are already ahead of them. Dribben speaks of making the team into a fighting force. This involves teaching them what each person should do in any given scenario. They learn to work together, to assemble as a group and coordinate; to begin with one and then bring two together and coordinate a response.

Dribben speaks about his 30 years of training various forces. He speaks about the analysis of the type of threat and of building a response. “Like a lot of people, I went straight to war [on Oct. 7], I saw the community and saw what happened and said we need to do something so this doesn’t happen again; I saw the helplessness and the communities broken; every city, village, and town.”

I asked Dribben about other, larger communities, such as the communities on the fringes of Jerusalem. He spoke about having the same needs as a larger town or city, of understanding the streets and where to maneuver and how to assess and create a tactical solution. “You don’t win a war alone, you learn to create a team and do it with command and control and find a solution to the problem you encounter at your level.”
 
Jews in the Land of Israel have learned this the hard way. One can’t fight a one-person war. In the 19th century, much of the Jewish community lived in only a few old cities, such as Jerusalem, Hebron, Tiberias, and Safed. There were some Jews in Gaza, Jaffa, and other places.

The first Jewish community outside the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City, Mishkenot Sha’ananim, was founded in 1860. More communities followed, notably Petah Tikva in 1878; Zichron Yaakov four years later and Kibbutz Degania in 1910. By that time, the first Jewish self-defense organization since the time of Bar Kochba’s revolt had been founded in 1907 in the basement of Yitzhak Ben-Zvi’s home in Jaffa. Called Bar Giora, it became the roots of another organization called HaShomer and later the Haganah. The early members of these organizations carved out security amid many threats.

Carving out this security cost many defenders their lives. Alexander Zaid, commemorated by a statue of a horse and rider overlooking the Jezreel Valley, was killed in 1938 by a Bedouin. Four years later, the Palmach killed the man accused of the murder. Such was the way things were done and how they continue to be done today by the IDF in Gaza and Lebanon.

Today’s volunteers harken back to that earlier era. The kibbutzim here on the Gaza border were mostly founded in the early days of the state. The goal was to create a line of Jewish communities along that border. In those days the threat was from infiltrators known as Fadeyeen (“those who sacrifice themselves”) from Gaza who would rampage over the border. The government would call on famed units, such as the 101 and the Paratroopers, to take control of the situation and enact reprisals. 

One result, which can still be seen on the Gaza border, is the Black Arrow Memorial, only 900 meters from the Gaza Strip, named for the 1955 operation led by Ariel Sharon, which targeted the Egyptians in Gaza, it commemorates the battle heritage of the Paratroop Brigade. The reason for the attack was an attack by infiltrators from Gaza targeting Rishon LeZion and Rehovot.

The line of Jewish communities established here, like Nir Oz, served as a line of defense against Gaza. On them, so it was reasoned, a wave of attacks would break, and they would establish the facts on the ground necessary for a state. Over time, things changed here.

After 1967, Israel came to control Gaza. There were moments of peace. People from Sderot would ride bikes into Gaza to buy food and go to the beach. But dark clouds formed, and the rise of Hamas in the late 1980s and 1990s gave way to terror and war. Disengagement. Oct. 7.
And here we are today. 

From border outposts to battlefield communities

On Oct. 7, the IDF did not reach Nir Oz until the afternoon, after the terrorists were gone, having plundered and murdered. 

According to Kan, quoting the IDF’s words: “The investigation determined that the military failure in not sending troops to Nir Oz was not a tactical or moral failure – but a systemic one. The troops did not fail to navigate to the kibbutz nor did they hesitate out of fear, nor did they choose not to fight.
 
“The failure was that the commandos did not understand that the situation in the kibbutz was particularly difficult, and that massacres and kidnappings were taking place there on a massive scale, and therefore did not particularly prioritize sending troops to Nir Oz at the expense of other places.”

The training by Magen 48 is aimed at helping restore confidence in and connections to the IDF. By having an NGO do the training, headed by those who have known war for decades, the new team receives professional training and can interface with the army in a novel way. 

The overall concept is to prepare the civilian response team: If an enemy meets an armed response, it loses confidence, the Magen 48 trainers explain.

“Then the enemy is in a different mindset – and then it will maneuver less and be less efficient – but if an attacker can go from one house to another, then the enemy becomes confident and can do more damage.”
 
As I walk around Kibbutz Nir Oz on May 4, watching the civilian team in their camouflage, I am reminded of Oct. 7.
 
The videos that Hamas made of that day in some of the communities show how the terrorists wandered around. They felt a sense of impunity, and the Jews were left defenseless – as in the Holocaust and in pogroms. It was pogroms like the one in 1905 in Kishinev, Russian Empire, that encouraged Jews to see Zionism as a necessary response. 

Oct. 7 has now been added to this list of tragedies that require a response.

Magen 48 has helped build the security assessment and the strongpoints and cameras, and so they are organized and synchronized with the army. One of the group’s goals is to have a training facility. This makes sense because one of the challenges after Oct. 7 was the need to retrain many of the hundreds of thousands of reservists who were called up. Some had to undergo urban warfare training. A facility dedicated to helping train thousands of members to civilian response teams is important.

Nir Oz is being rebuilt today. I heard that only four out of all the homes here survived Oct. 7 without damage. Now things are being rebuilt. Volunteers have come to help. The blooming flowers and green grass are examples of that return, though there are many missing elements. There is no sound of young children. No school. The tragedy still hangs over the place. Trust between the civilians here and the army needs to be rebuilt.

These border communities represented the early hard core of Zionism in the years after the founding of the state. This is where the desert was made to bloom. The goal now is to remake this place and regrow.

The concept of “Never Again” is in the air, but not about the Holocaust because that was a slogan we said before Oct. 7 that had less meaning on that day. Now, it is “Never Again” relating to that terrible day.

May 4, with its training, is a historic day for Nir Oz. A symbolic day.

The team practices how to clear an area of the community to check for terrorists. The two-member security teams move slowly, bounding as soldiers are trained to do, moving and clearing, communicating, clearing areas with their rifles at the ready. The trainer upbraids them, telling them to attempt the challenge again and again and again.

“Communicate! Speak to each other,” he tells them. “Can you see each other?” He describes the need to eliminate terrorists, to make sure they are down and neutralized.

“Every community must know how to protect itself,” Briggs says. “It’s the same today as 100 years ago; we need to rely on each other. These are all volunteers; they believe in protecting their community.”■