The Nova Exhibit

Note: The publication of this rant was put on hold due to COVID. Please also note that my editor did not have input on this.

I had the opportunity to see the Nova exhibit yesterday.  To refresh your memory, the Nova festival was music festival/wave held in the Israeli desert near the border of Gaza.  Close to 4,000 people attended from 36 countries.

On October 7, 2023, Palestinian terrorists (and an unknown number of “civilians” crossed the border and attacked the people attending the festival.  The terrorists murdered 364 people, wounded hundreds more, kidnapped 40 people and left 3,882 survivors traumatized the  brutality – the rapes, the mutilations, and the murders.  Although the Nova festival attendees were mostly in the 20-40 age group, the elderly and the very young in attendance were not spared.

The Exhibit, put together by 5 survivors tells the story by personal testimony, video captured on phones, before and after pictures, and artifacts like the burned-out cars and the intercepted phone call of one terrorist to his mother (Hey, Mom, I killed 10 Jews!)  The exhibition also had video of the absolute joy of the folks dancing to the music before it all unraveled in horror.

I have been to the National Holocaust museum in DC, I have been to Dachau, I have been to Yad Vashem, and I have been to other, small holocaust museums in the US.

This was different.  This was contemporary times, not the past.  This was personal, one-one-one listening to the survivor sitting not 10 feet from me describing that her partner of 8 years and her nephew drove 2 hours to the festival.  12 hours later, her nephew was dead, her partner kidnapped, and she was wounded.  She talked of running into a “safe house”  (really just a reinforced above ground concrete bunker with no door for use during rocket attacks) and cramming 29 people in a space built for 10.  She talked about what happened when a few terrorist found them, took a few hostages and then proceeded to machine gun the rest.  A few survived because they ended up on the bottom of a pile of bodies.

Her vignette is almost identical to the stories of Jews escaping after the Germans has machine gunned hundreds in pits they made the victims dig themselves.  The description of the attack and killing reminded me of the stories my grandmother told about the Cossacks in Russia.

She talked about when help arrived, many hours later, they saw what can only be thought of as an abattoir.

But out of all of that, two things really stood out to me.  The first was the before and after pictures of the woman who recounted her story.  Before, she was smiling, healthy, strong.  After, she was shrunken, withdrawn with a shaky voice. And that is 485 days after the event.  The contrast even more stark with the recently released hostages.

The second thing was a maybe 40 second video of multiple terrorist shooting indiscriminately into a long row of porta-potties.  They did not know if anyone  was in them, but shot bullets just in case.  The exhibit showed a couple of those shot up porta-potties riddled with bullet holes.  These terrorists had no care for their victims, that the only purpose was to kill and maim innocents, and to accord their victims no dignity.

From 1933 to 1945 the German propaganda machine convinced many Germans that they had been ‘stabbed in the back’ by the Jews in WWI.   And in those few years they convinced a nation.

The Palestinian Authority and Hamas, aided and abetted by UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) have been educating young Palestinians for decades.  In Gaza, run by Hamas since 2005, the gospel of Jew hatred is a key part of the curriculum.  We know for a fact that a) many UNRWA employees were also Hamas operatives, and b) we know for a fact that the Palestinian Authority has and is doing the same thing in their schools.

How any group of young people so educated would have any chance at wanting “peace?”  What is going on is a purposeful strategy to raise generations of people who hate Jews, hate Israelis, and want to do them harm.

We also know that crowds of Palestinians celebrated the killing, kidnapping, and rape of Israelis.  We know they assembled crowds to intimidate the hostages being released.  We know that they lined the streets to cheer on the kidnappers with their abused hostages brought back to Gaza. Was this all Palestinians?  Of course not.  But enough to believe there is still support for Hamas in Gaza.

Anyone who thinks such people want peace is simply kidding themselves.  They do not want peace (or at least their government does not), they want to keep killing Jews.  They have refused peace a multitude of times.  Their leaders sit back in their luxurious Qatari homes while directing Hamas, and their Palestinian supporters to commit murder.  That’s why no one, not Egypt, not Jordan, not Lebanon, will accept Palestinians.  They are a blunt instrument to use against the Israelis.  And no one in the middle east wants that to go away, except the Israelis.

That’s why there is no peace in the middle east.

To all of the “pro-Hamas” folks masquerading as “pro-Palestinian,” you are aiding and abetting the murder, rape, and torture of innocent Jewish civilians. You can not believe it, you can refute it, but that does not make it any less true.

The Nova exhibit was put together by 5 survivors mentioned above. These survivors were also responsible for putting on the Nova Festival  But before the exhibit, they founded the “Tribe of Nova” a non-profit organization dedicated to creating a place that the survivors can see as a safe space to call home to regain their strength, and cope with the trauma together. The Nova motto:  “We Will Dance Again.”

Since October 8, The Tribe of Nova have engaged in the following:

• MEMORIAL EVENTS :  250,000 attendees at events for murdered friends and family.
• SURVIVORS’ PARTICIPATION:  2,800 survivors attended at least one of our events in the past six months.
• HOSTED EVENTS: ​130 memorial events, including with extended family members.
• COMMUNITY GATHERINGS:  20 gatherings focused on healing and resilience.
• HEALING WORKSHOPS:​  71 alternative healing workshops offered, with significant community engagement.
• GOVERNMENT BENEFITS:  60M NIS ~$ 17M secured for survivors.

The Tribe of Nova Foundation remains committed to supporting our community through healing, commemoration, and advocacy for the rights of survivors and bereaved families. The Tribe of Nova Foundation