A Clear Blue Sky Over Israel; What one survivor of Hamas’s October 7 atrocities saw at the Nova music festival

 City Journal (city-journal.org)

"The hundreds of millions of dollars in aid that the world gave Gaza was used to build tunnels and rockets, not feed, house, and clothe civilians. “We can live side by side with Arabs,” she said. “Israeli Arabs live among us. But we can’t make peace with people who want to wipe out the Jewish people. We must do whatever is needed to ensure that Hamas never again poses a threat, never again.' ”

"The contrasts are what haunt Millet Ben Haim when she thinks about Hamas’s October 7 attack. As she lay on the ground, hidden in brush, with the sound of bullets and rockets growing ever closer, she looked up at the sky. It was clear blue—and then she saw a butterfly. “It was so beautiful,” she said. “I thought I was going to die, but that the world would go on. There was beauty around me, along with the butchery.”

"She was panicked but occasionally calm. She wanted to live but prayed that a rocket would hit her. “I had been in the army,” she said. “So I knew what would happen to us if we were caught—rape, torture, a slow death.”

"A small, slender beauty with long, ash-blonde hair and large, grey eyes, Ben Haim, now 28, spoke in a virtual monotone as she recalled how she and four friends survived the Hamas attack at the Nova music festival in southern Israel, in which 364 mostly young Israelis died. Hundreds more were wounded, and 40 were taken hostage.

"Ben Haim and I were speaking at the Palm Beach Synagogue—a sanctuary of beauty and peace a galaxy away from the horror of that terrible night in the Negev desert near Gaza. Through determination and luck—mostly crazy luck, she called it—she made it through the frenzied slaughter. But she doesn’t feel lucky, she says. In fact, she doesn’t feel much of anything now. She doesn’t sleep much and doesn’t know whether she will ever return to her studies in Israel to become a therapist. “I try not to look in the mirror because I don’t recognize the woman I see. I don’t know who I am now. I mourn my old self.”

"Partly as a form of therapy, and partly as a “voice for those who can no longer speak,” she has been touring Europe and the United States for the past two months, recounting at synagogues, Hillel Houses, and college campuses, to reporters and to anyone else who will listen, her chilling story of escape and survival. “I know that I’m often speaking mostly to the converted,” she says, “but I want as many people as possible to understand what happened that day.” . . .