Scarred but unbroken: Galilee evacuees quietly plan their return

Annat Zisovich Charitt and her family at Kibbutz Yiftach in the Galilee, August 2023. Photo courtesy of Annat Zisovich Charitt.

By CANAAN LIDOR

JNS

A 25-pound porcupine has dug a lair under the front porch. Ants have raided the pantry. Rats have infested the neighbor’s home, and there’s no running water.

These were just some of the issues that awaited Ruti Arbel, 78, on Monday, Dec. 9, during one of her first visits back to her home in Kibbutz Yiftach since she and her husband, Oded, were forced to leave in October 2023 due to the outbreak of war with Hezbollah in nearby Lebanon.

Concerns

“It’s nice to be back, but I just look at this place and the amount of work that needs to happen to make it livable again and, well, it’s just a little daunting,” Ruti, a retired teacher, told JNS on her porch. Like many of the approximately 60,000 Israelis who have been evacuated from the north to state-funded accommodations, the Arbels are staying at a hotel until they move back.

As northerners begin to prepare to return to dozens of empty, scarred and neglected locales in that region, the physical destruction they encounter is dwarfed by deeper concerns about their personal safety. Their once-thriving communities’ ability to rehabilitate themselves socially is also on their minds.

In Ruti and Oded’s case, rebuilding the community will need to start at home. Their daughter, who used to spend entire weekends at their place with her children, recently told them that she would no longer be visiting because she fears for their grandchildren’s safety, said Oded.

“Hearing something like this, that you can’t host your grandchildren at your home, that’s jarring,” said Oded Arbel, a longtime member of Yiftach who used to work here as a community developer. Throughout the war, he has visited Yiftach each week, but Ruti only recently started joining him. Oded used his recent visit to process olives that he’d pickled in Yiftach some weeks ago.

A Targeted Kibbutz

To people familiar with the kinds of threats facing border-adjacent communities, their daughter’s concerns are understandable. Yiftach is a relatively small kibbutz, with about 500 residents, situated less than a mile from the border with Lebanon and with a direct line of sight to the Lebanese village of Blida.

This means it can be targeted with rockets, mortars and precise anti-tank missiles. It’s also within striking range of cross-border raids. Indeed, Hezbollah terrorists are believed to have identified Yiftach as the central target in a three-pronged invasion plan from Lebanon into Israel’s Galilee panhandle.

Hezbollah’s ability to carry out cross-border raids, for which it had trained for years, has been severely compromised during the war, if not outright eliminated.

The war on the northern front began on Oct. 8, 2023, when Hezbollah started firing rockets into Israel from Lebanon in solidarity with Hamas’s invasion down south the previous day.

In September, Israel ended its containment policy regarding Hezbollah fire and escalated its actions against the terrorist group, killing its top command in targeted operations, preemptively striking its officers and finally driving its gunmen back from the border.

On Nov. 27, a weakened Hezbollah entered into a ceasefire with Israel whose terms include a blanket ban on its presence within about 20 kilometers (13 miles) of the border with Israel. The collapse of Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria does not bode well for the future of its ally Hezbollah.

Risk Assesment

But the damage inflicted on northern Israel during the fighting, estimated at more than $500 million, was vast and unprecedented.

Metula, a picturesque town established 128 years ago, is in ruins with more than 60% of its homes severely damaged by rocket fire. In Kiryat Shmona, a city of some 30,000 that is the panhandle’s largest municipality, each neighborhood had many hits. At the central bus station, three shrapnel-damaged buses stand alongside a platform since a rocket struck near them in November.

One resident of Yiftach, Staff Sgt. Gal Hershko, 20, died in the war fighting in Gaza, and his death “had a devastating impact on all of us,” Oded Arbel said.

In nearby Dishon, a moshav that is located even closer to the border than Yiftach, “there was constant rocket fire,” said Natan Malka, a resident who returned to Dishon with his wife two months ago.

“Even with the rocket fire, it was better to live at home than at the hotel,” he explained. “Look at this place. It’s paradise,” he said, gesturing at the mist-shrouded rocky slopes, where winter’s arrival has triggered the blossom of carpets of cyclamens and daffodils amid ancient oaks.

Returning was relatively easy for Malka, who opened a burger restaurant in Kiryat Shmona just days before the war, and his wife because they don’t have children, he conceded. “Our risk assessment is completely different to a parent’s,” he said.

Yiftach suffered a few hits but a fire caused by rockets consumed much of its prized pear and nectarine orchards and packing house, climbing up the hillside until it almost spread among the homes of its newest neighborhood. The kibbutz’s emergency team of 20 people contained the flames on the houses’ edge.

Israeli troops took over the overlooking village of Blida, uncovering massive amounts of weapons in residential homes there, according to Annat Zisovich Charitt, a mother of two who heads the kibbutz’s emergency services team. “Even though there was tension, we had quiet on the border with Blida. So we used to look across the border and basically see neighbors. Now that image has changed,” she said.

In many Lebanese villages along the border, Israeli troops razed Hezbollah forward positions, often in or on residential buildings. “But I look over into Blida, and I still see buildings,” Zisovich Charitt said. “I never thought I’d wish to see other people’s homes destroyed or feel relieved by it. Yet this is the nature of war forced on us.”

Residents Will Return

Oded Arbel recalled the period, which ended in 2000, when Israel and the South Lebanon Army controlled Southern Lebanon, and residents of Blida would come into Israel to work at his kibbutz’s marble factory. “They were our neighbors in every sense of the word. There were joint cultural events. And to this day it hurts to see the devastation on their side of the border, too,” he said.

Zisovich Charitt, an agronomist, has been returning to Yiftach weekly from Ginosar, a kibbutz on the shores of the Sea of Galilee that houses a hotel where most of Yiftach’s residents have been living since October 2023. She does this in the framework of her duties. She estimates that currently, about 50 people live here, as well as about 20 members of the emergency team.

But the vast majority of residents will return, she said. Only five to 10 families of Yiftach’s 150 are planning to leave, according to Zisovich Charitt. “Things are returning to normal. There’s more traffic on the road. There are more hikers. And there are more residents, making preparations for an imminent return.”

Stronger Communal Ties

She and her husband would return “tomorrow” if there were buses to take their children to school and back, she said. Her children, aged 9 and 14, attend regional schools with other northern evacuees, most of whom they know. But the evacuation has been a “major upset” in their lives, she said.

As for the adults, some of them have developed stronger communal ties than before the war, several locals said. At the Magdala Hotel in the town of Migdal, Ruti has bonded with other evacuees in ways that reminded her of the days that Yiftach had an operating communal dining hall—a one-time hallmark of kibbutz life that Yiftach abandoned in the 2000s.

Zisovich Charitt’s family “formed a very strong bond of mutual care and support with several other families” during the evacuation in Ginosar, she said.

This presents an opportunity for Yiftach, Zisovich Charitt opined.

“When we return, we should leverage this newfound closeness and attachment and incorporate it into communal life. We’ll not only be back after the war, but stronger for it,” she said.