“If it weren’t for the cows, I would have left too,” admits Israeli Marcelo Wasser, born in Buenos Aires 65 years ago. “We have lost personal security. The army arrived very late,” he recalls the morning of October 7, when 50 Hamas militiamen attacked the Nirim kibbutz (agricultural cooperative), 135 kilometers south of Tel Aviv, where they killed five people and kidnapped four others. Dressed at all hours in a protective anti-shrapnel vest, Wasser is the only one of the 500 inhabitants of the kibbutz who remains in charge of the dairy farm, caring for more than 600 Holstein cows and about 350 calves. Nirim is now a war zone, a closed military perimeter whose entrances are lined up with battle tanks and artillery pieces.
“I had never thought about going to live in Tel Aviv or anywhere else, not even in the slightest,” he expresses a blunt rejection with the powerful speech of Argentina, where he left at the age of 18 months after the military coup of 1976. “I had never been afraid In Israel. I never thought all this could happen. Before, rockets fell from time to time,” he recalls previous conflicts in the Palestinian strip, “but a massive massacre, like the one that occurred at the Supernova music festival, 15 kilometers from this kibbutz, was something inconceivable.”
“We live in fear,” acknowledges this veteran soldier of the 1982 Lebanon war. “At my age, I am thinking that perhaps it is time to retire and start another life after more than 40 years on the dairy farm.” [granja lechera]. But I am not going to decide anything as long as this war is not over,” he confesses in the office on the ground floor of the farm’s central building. Wasser, manager of the farm, had started the conversation in the main office on the first floor, but advised continuing it in a place closer to the air raid shelter, a reinforced concrete igloo in the outside patio.
Eight minutes into the conversation, the alarm on his cell phone goes off, while an intermittent red light flashes. “We have 10 seconds, better eight; “We are less than two kilometers from the Gaza border,” he warns as he heads steadily towards the shelter and the four volunteers who are currently helping him on the farm and the photographer who accompanies this special envoy arrive at a run. . Shortly after, several sharp impacts are heard dozens of meters away.
It’s routine for Marcelo Wasser. “I’m in a dilemma: continue with this or change,” he reiterates his existential doubt. “Life is like this now, under the bombs, we have just seen it. For me, it’s between five and 10 runs to the shelter a day,” he argues leisurely a little later, while he walks confidently, with his eyes focused on the stables. “At the kibbutz, the owner of the cooperative farm, they asked me to stay. It’s a pretty delicate topic for me. In the situation we are in, I am wondering if I should start another life with my wife, already retired at 62 years old and also of Argentine origin,” the last of Kibbutz Mirim reflects aloud.
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Marcelo Wasser arrived at this end of the Gaza border after abandoning medical studies at the age of 18 to do the aliyah, immigration that guarantees Israeli nationality to all Jews in the world. He was put to clean manure on the kibbutz farm and, after serving in the military as a stretcher bearer for almost three years, he studied Economics and joined the management of the cooperative. He has been the manager for three decades. “Those were other times, of collective effort. Now everything has been privatized,” he clarifies.
“In Israel, kibbutzim with farms were set up in border areas for strategic reasons,” he explains. “When you have animals in your care, you can’t move as easily and are less likely to leave. The cows can’t run away and the population settles,” she details with a wink. He highlights the strong ties of mutual support in education and healthcare expenses among those who continue to inhabit the kibbutz. “We maintain a high degree of solidarity. “Before we contributed 36% of our salary to the common fund, now the contribution for community services is limited to 2,500 shekels (about 590 euros) per family per month.”
“This dairy farm is my life, but a month ago I was about to lose it right here,” he says while shaking his head. “On October 6 we celebrated the 78th anniversary of the founding of the kibbutz. Two of my children and one of my grandchildren came to spend the Sabbath night with me,” he recalls. At 6:30 the next morning the anti-aircraft alarms were activated. “We are used to it. We went down to the safe room in my house. But it was impressive, projectiles kept falling.”
Help calls
The Thai farm workers alerted him. “I got on the electric golf cart that I use to get around the kibbutz,” he says. There were a dozen dead cows and many others injured, so he told the Asian employees to hide in the shelter with water and food and returned to his house. We still didn’t know what was happening. Then he connected his cell phone and began to realize what was happening in Nirim.
“Something extraordinary happened to me. I heard inside my head the voices of the calls for help that I read in the text messages,” she remembers. “They said: Please send help. Let the security people come. They are shooting at my house. They want to break the door of the safe room. They are burning it. Smoke comes in.”
“I realized that what had happened was exceptional and I exclaimed: ‘The (sic) fucking mother. I just got saved,” she stirs with memories. “Later we learned that there were 50 terrorists loitering in Nirim. We were hidden for almost 12 hours, until the army took us out.” In the nearby Nir Oz kibbutz, with 400 inhabitants, one in four was declared dead or missing. Among the more than 5,000 young people who danced at dawn at the Supernova music festival, there were hundreds of fatalities and dozens of kidnapped people.
In Nirim, only Marcelo Wasser remains, who takes turns managing the farm with his deputy so he can rest a few days a week with his wife, in an apartment in the Tel Aviv area that friends have lent him. He also remains on the periphery of the compound, along with the troops, a person in charge of relations between the kibbutz and the army, which has planted checkpoints and barricades on the roads in the area.
“Go back to Argentina? No, no… there is a lot of insecurity there,” she jokes. “I really like my mother country… dulce de leche, mate – my wife drinks it -, Mendoza wine – I drink it -, the language, but… I will stay in Israel, although in another place. don’t worry”. Wasser assures that she remains on the dairy farm “because of professionalism and responsibility,” and “because of the volunteers who come from the cities to help.” “They play it. “Me too,” he concludes somberly, “but they come for a few days and leave, and I continue almost all the time.”
Mirim was a kibbutz of the Zionist left. “I also thought that peace could be made. I voted in 1992 for the Meretz party (pacifist left) to support Labor’s Isaac Rabin’s plan for the Oslo Accords. Now I feel like I’ve been betrayed. But it’s not like that. Apparently, I was wrong,” he wonders. “With Hamas, nothing can be done now, only eliminate them,” he settles the issue. “With the Palestinian National Authority it may be possible. I do business with Palestinians from the West Bank. I sell them cows. They ask me for advice for their projects. But after what happened, trust has been broken. I argued before with many Israelis to defend that peace must be given a chance. But on October 7, they came to the kibbutz to kill people.”
“This is the most difficult situation of my life. “You can’t live with that fear,” acknowledges Nirim’s latest. “I no longer know if I will find a gun pointed at me when I return home. “I’m thinking about leaving.”
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