The Symphony of Sderot

Dispatch from Israel, Dan Savage makes me stammer, and I draw some heat from Walter Kirn over... Viktor Orbán?

I’ve never worn anything that said PRESS while in the midst of reporting. I did once, sent on the fly by the New York Times to cover a school shooting in Santee, CA, take a piece of neon orange paper, imprint it with the word PRESS, and stuck it in my windshield in order for it to get the photographers and me past the throng of security. (It worked.) When I went to Ukraine, I used my printer to make a press pass, issued by Paloma Media, the little outfit we ran out of my apartment for a year. That photo was cuter than the one on the Israel press pass - a real one - I applied for and received for the reporting trip last month, and in which I look like I work for East German intelligence, circa 1982.

For the Israeli government to approve this, I needed a signature of a legit publication, saying they were taking responsibility in case, I don’t know, I went rogue or got killed. It was pro forma, still, I was and am very grateful to the Reason peeps for agreeing to sign, and for running the three pieces I have so far filed, including this morning’s Dispatch from Israel: the Symphony at Sderot, which included a stop where the Nova music festival was held and which is now a memorial:

…"Unbelievable," Avi says under his breath, seeing army trucks guarding a newly secured area, which would never have been the case before October 7. The Nova festival was a rave in an avocado grove, for God's sake. Scanning for something to be happy about, Yael points to some tiny red flowers poking up through the mud.

These will turn out to be the only happy things for the next hour, or however long it is people stay at the memorial of 364 dead young people, who have no choice but to stay here, to be remembered at or near where they were shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, burned. It's tempting to say this is the worst thing, and it is the worst thing. But there are other worst things, including, one imagines, being asked to supply a photo of your dead daughter, to represent everything you know and love about her. This photo will be affixed to a post and sunk into the dirt. It will be decorated by you, perhaps by others, with the usual totems: flowers, candles, aphorisms. You may seek to make it personal, as you can see others have done for their murdered loved ones, with a scrunchie, a keyboard, a karate medal. But the question is, how do you pick the photo? Is it the one of her at age 5, hands held into anticipatory fists as she stands over a plate of cookies? Is it the high school graduation? Is it the most recent one, onstage accepting an award, her hair shining like a mirror and the lifetime she'd put into deserving that award making her glow? And if you can decide, how do you leave her in that field alone? How do you not curl yourself around the pole every night and say, "Just leave me here. I'll stay here."

We carried on to Kfar Aza, where, as I write in the piece, “the air smells of burnt wood and something else: gunpowder.”

I did not publish many images with the piece - there are additional ones after the break. But when it comes to these young people… it’s very hard.