Finding Innocence in the Trash

Atrocities span history. They even extend to ancient texts like the Bible. Violence lasts too long if it lasts a second, but sometimes it does go on for years—the World Wars, the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide. Others seem endless, like the upheaval in Haiti.

And some last just a day and then appropriate the date for their name. The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the U.S. became 9/11, and now October 7 denotes the October 7, 2023, terrorist attacks on the region of Israel bordering Gaza.

As part of their multi-site attack on the so-called Gaza Envelope in Israel, Hamas militants assailed the town of Netiv HaAsara by paraglider and automobile, ultimately killing more than 20 community members, including security officers, and leaving one person missing but taking no hostages. Netiv HaAsara is an Israeli moshav, a type of cooperative agricultural town wherein residents each have an equal-sized plot of land on which to farm and use the produce or the profits for themselves.

Netiv HaAsara is located 100 meters from the northern border of Gaza, making it the nearest community to that territory among the Israeli communities that make up the Gaza Envelope. About 360 families, many of them avowed peace lovers, lived in Netiv HaAsara on October 7, but only parts or all of about 13 families were living there when I visited in early May 2024, courtesy of my Israeli hosts, who drove me there from Tel Aviv so that I could bear witness at another ground zero in my role as a disaster psychiatrist.

Omer and Yorem were among the few remaining residents of Netiv HaAsara and took time to host us while working as Israel Defense Force (IDF) reservists activated to protect their town. Our visit started at Yorem’s home, which we entered via a front door framed on one side with a large spray painted red “8” by which the IDF had marked his home free of terrorists during its belated house-to-house search. Hamas also left its own mark on Yoram’s home by way of a missile that managed only to etch out a depression in the wall above the door. Living alone, since his wife and kids were too afraid to return, Yoram laid out warm cinnamon buns and bourekas for us at the kitchen table across from a stack of Army green military gear leaning against the wall.

Our tour of homes on the other side of fate began with one that had literally been burnt to the ground. All that was left was the foundation and a shed out back that had served as a painter’s studio. No one knows how Hamas managed to send an entire home into oblivion, but it was enough to also incinerate Netiv HaAsara’s one missing person. Rescue and recovery teams never identified the remains of the woman artist who lived there with her husband, parts of whom they had found. Even the ultra-Orthodox had come and scoured the property with sifters and strainers trying to find a shred of her body with which to provide a proper burial—without luck.

We next saw the ransacked home of a family with kids who cowered in their safe room just off their living room while the terrorists exploded a bomb to blow the door off. The explosion gutted their living space but somehow its force jammed the lock on the door so that Hamas still could not get into the safe room and left after trying to kick in the door one more time, a feeble act memorialized in the white footprint in the middle of the black scar of the explosion. The family survived and apparently plans to return. Meanwhile, the overturned living room and adjoining kitchenette waited together for them amid the heat, the rancid smell of spoiled meat, and the clicking camera phones of uninvited guests like us.

Alberto had been widowed well before October 7 but that day lost two sons who lived with their families elsewhere in Netiv HaAsara. We encountered him outside of his home with his dog doing a zigzag of a dance around him to the tune of his own barking. His home somehow unbreached and untouched even though Hamas militants passed through his yard, Alberto talked of being glad he had originally had four sons, as, he insisted, he knew long ago that he would need “spare parts” one day. He even insisted he could not feel too badly about October 7, as he knew the risks of moving to Netiv HaAsara in the first place. Besides, he blamed it not on Hamas but on Israeli policies.

The drive to find some lesson from what we saw and learned about in Netiv HaAsara that day risks drawing conclusions about someone else’s story. Some of the facts we carted away could even be wrong or incomplete in their details even if not their essence. But hopefully, our visit entitles us to our own story, even if we had the luxury of seeking its source material rather than having it crash through our front door.

A round white trash can in the young family’s kitchenette somehow beckoned for my attention as we left their house. Garbage had bubbled into a froth beyond the reach of the black garbage can liner, and it could easily have been the victim of neglect after a family tussle over who was going to take out the garbage after Shabbat dinner on October 6. Maybe it was a draw and everyone just went to bed. Or, maybe it was a much more peaceful and no less familiar, “We’ll do it in the morning.”

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That trash can has left me with a benign lesson from that most malignant of days. One could piece through its contents and begin to piece together something about the lives of the family—what they ate; whether they kept kosher; what vegetables or fruit they grew; whether they got take-out; whether they composted; whether they wasted food.

But one needs not embark on any such detective work to see how that overflowing trash can represents innocent lives interrupted. Lives that meant no one harm and wished and prayed that no one meant them harm; lives where yelling over domestic chores was as far as aggression went.

What Hamas wrought on October 7 reveals our capacity for destruction and violence. Yet, days like October 7 fill the news and go down in history while every day, everywhere, trash cans fill with the remnants of usually humdrum activity unworthy of the news, and someone just needs to take out the trash.

We can all be lazy, rude, joyless, indignant, hurtful, spiteful, and sometimes even violent, but mostly we are remarkably unremarkable. Like 9/11 and other historical atrocities, it would be too easy to draw from Netiv HaAsara and all the events of October 7 and the ensuing war another reminder about man’s potential for inhumanity and his tendency to live a life that is “nasty, brutish, and short.”

Instead, I see in it a reminder of our overwhelming innocence. Somehow that trash can remained upright and on task despite everything that did happen the next morning. Not even Hamas’ explosives toppled it.