In Raemer’s kibbutz,Nirim,it’s between zero and 10 seconds.

Despite the regular scrambles to the shelter built into her house,the 68-year-old was happy to live in this part of the country. She loved it,in fact. And like thousands of her fellow Israelis,she wants to go back.

‘We live in 95 per cent heaven’

The region surrounding the town of Sderot,known by some as the bomb-shelter capital of the world,has doubled its population in the past seven years. Until last Saturday morning,the nearby kibbutzim and villages were thriving.

Young Israelis felt so safe in front of the looming,metres-high wall separating them from their sworn enemies in Gaza that the morning of the raid,they were deep into a dance party held virtually in its shadow. Some say the bass beat would have been heard by the Palestinians on the other side.

“We like to call it 95 per cent heaven,” Raemer says of her kibbutz. “Beautiful,peaceful,crime-free,green grass,open spaces,you don’t need to worry about your kids playing on the lawn … And then we get to the 5 per cent. And that’s where we are now.”

Last Saturday,thousands of militants broke out of their enclave into Israel andslayed 1200 Israelis using guns and grenades and kidnapped perhaps 130 more. They moved through the communities of this region with gruesome intent,piling bodies high and without discrimination or mercy.

As I was interviewing Raemer via WhatsApp,Israel’s response was gaining force. The army,ranks swelled by hundreds of thousands of reservists called up for service,were massing on the Gaza border.

Netanyahu was forming a government of national unity to conduct the war he declared last weekend. His bombers wereflattening Gaza’s poshest neighbourhood to rubble,and a ground invasion seemed imminent,intended,in his words,to make every Hamas member a “dead man”. Food,water and fuel imports to Gaza were cut off,shutting down the power station,as part of the prime minister’s “mighty vengeance” in which more than a thousand have already died.

In the tortured world of Israeli-Palestinian relations,this retaliation promised to be harsher and more dangerous than the world has seen since the state of Israel was carved out of British Mandate Palestine by a UN resolution and brute force in 1948.

And Raemer,the secular left-winger,is urging her leaders on. “Hamas and[another radical group] Islamic Jihad should be wiped off the face of this earth;the same as happened with the Nazis,” she said.

She’s one of many making Holocaust comparisons after saying more Jews were killed in the surprise Hamas massacre on October 7 than on any single occasion since Adolf Hitler walked the earth.

“Hamas are the Nazis of 2023.” Raemer says once they are gone,she will move home.

In Israel,despite the dangerous neighbours,living near a border is not just a viable option or a lifestyle choice. It’s a mission.

The view from Gaza

The Israeli citizens whose homes lie near the border with Gaza have made a choice to be there. A few kilometres away,in Gaza,on the other side of the fence,more than 2 million people do not enjoy that choice.

Even if they wanted to,the Palestinians of Gaza could not easily leave or escape the Israeli bombardment that began soon after the Hamas attack,and nor could they fleea bloody ground invasion,despite the half-baked suggestion by US President Joe Biden of a safe haven in Egypt.

Gaza resident Haneen Wishah is among them. She and her five children were evacuated from their home on Thursday after they were warned the Israeli missiles were about to rain down.

She has a different view from the Israelis just across the border about Saturday’s attacks. Wishah does not see them as a seismic event.

“Palestinians have been occupied for more than 75 years … of oppression,aggressions,tightening the accessibility of people to everything,” she toldThe Age andHerald in a WhatsApp text exchange because the internet connection to Gaza was too weak for a conversation.

“My eldest son who is 14 years[old] has witnessed six Israeli aggressions!”

“Every action has a reaction.”

“So the Hamas attack is justified?” I ask.

“Israel is always subjecting us. It’s an occupier,” she replies.

Wishah’s grandparents fled to Gaza in 1948 when their village of Beit Affa a few kilometres further up the coast,was overrun by Israelis. It’s now called Ashkelon. Two generations later,Wishah is stateless and still considered by the international community to be a refugee.

While the nature and size of Hamas’ attack on Israeli citizens does not concern her,the ferocity of Israel’s response is greater than she has seen before. She describes it as “crazy hysterical air strikes”.

Her children were “scared to death”,she said.

“It’s different,the aggressiveness in targeting civilians,destroying complete neighbourhoods. I have evacuated my house in the middle of Gaza City,and it’s horrible when I see pictures of my place ... it’s turned into a ghost city.”

The West has tried to differentiate the actions of Hamas from the actions of ordinary Palestinian citizens,and to blame Hamas for the destruction raining down on innocents. Wishah is having none of it.

“The blame goes for Israel as it’s the occupier,” she says,and the international community for failing to protect people under its occupation.

When I see pictures of my place ... it’s turned into a ghost city.

Haneen Wishah,who lives in Gaza

Palestinian-Australian playwright Samah Sabawi,whose parents fled Gaza in 1967 when she was a baby,recognised that Israelis considered the events of last weekend to be an order of magnitude worse than the normal,deadly back-and-forth.

The Hamas attack,she said,had breached the “infrastructure of walls,surveillance and permits” – an asymmetry of power that,in her view,had both “lulled them into a sense of false security” and enabled Israel to maintain the “invisibility and subjugation of the Palestinians”.

“For Palestinians the suffering,killing and displacement is a daily event,that’s why they see it as part of a continuum.”

Dancing with the bible

Sderot is 15 seconds by missile count from the border wall with Gaza. It’s the biggest town in the region,a commuter hub (45 minutes to Tel Aviv on the train),and billions of Israeli government dollars have been poured into protecting it.

The infrastructure of security that Sabawi refers to has allowed it to grow.

For 20 years,Hamas and its predecessors have been lobbing missiles – undirected,home-made projectiles that can nevertheless kill,maim and traumatise – over the border fence toward people living nearby.

Every house has a safe room,courtesy of the Israeli state. In many families,that’s where the children sleep. Every bus stop is a bomb shelter. In a park in the centre of town,a caterpillar doubles as a safe haven for children. A sign on its side in Hebrew reads:“When the red alert alarm sounds,you must get to safety beyond the orange line.”

Above that again is the Iron Dome,Israel’s missile defence system. When a rocket launches,it’s spotted then,ideally,intercepted midair by an Israeli counterstrike and blown up before it can cause damage. It is not infallible,but it is good.

Under the Iron Dome,Israelis felt safe – or safe enough. They formulated a kind of dark humour:joked they were so close that most of the rockets flew over them;gave a campaigning US Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama a Sderot T-shirt with a rocket rather than an arrow piercing the heart. They were prone to gathering on nearby Parash Hill for what was once dubbed “Sderot cinema” – watching and cheering as Israeli missiles lit up Gaza during various earlier confrontations.

In return for the feeling of safety,they populated the border regions. This was no mistake – it was government policy. Apart from the train line,the bomb shelters,the beautiful parks and the cheap land,there were generous tax incentives to move to this area.

Mechi Fendel describes herself as “mother of seven,grandmother of 24,high-tech professional,teacher of Torah”. She’s lived in Sderot for 30 years,the last 22 of which have been blighted by regular missile strikes.

She’s religious – her husband leads a Talmudic institute,a Yeshiva,which also has a women’s program. On Saturday morning she was preparing for the holiday of Simchat Torah,which she described as “dancing with the bible”.

“Most of the year we study it. This holiday we dance with it,we hug it,we kiss it and how much it means to our lives,how much it’s our connection to God,all the morals that the Judaic ethic has brought to the world. We look forward to that.”

But the attackers had other ideas. They went straight through the allegedly impregnable wall and slipped under the technological miracle of Iron Dome. The safe rooms,Raemer said,could be opened from outside so that people could be let out after a missile strike. This made them vulnerable to personal attack. Residents were gripping the inside door handle in the attempt to stop attackers from entering.

This time,the threat came house to house,bed to bed,room to room – a low-tech solution to Israel’s high-tech protections.

“Sending the missiles,we got used to it,it’s horrible,but we got used to it,” Fendel says. “Now we’re talking about terrorists with machine guns … rape,kidnapping. We haven’t seen such a thing. The world hasn’t seen such a thing.”

A grand bargain

Fendel is now living with her extended family in a high school dormitory but is already talking about rebuilding and returning. She describes living on the border as “a mission”. In Israel,in her view,being a nationalist and religious are the same thing.

“When you put on your uniform and you go to the army you’re like the high priest doing his service in the high temple,” she says. “When giving to the city it’s also about building the city … we’re making a big difference in the whole area.”

The idea of populating inhospitable areas,of making the desert bloom,and above all of inhabiting the country to guard against the aspirations of Palestinians and Arab neighbours,has been stitched deep in the Israeli psyche since it was formed.

“You can’t run away from terror;you can’t run away from borders,” Raemer says. “You can’t have empty borders with no one living there.”

There is a bargain here – embodied by Iron Dome and safe rooms and the walls that surround Gaza and the occupied West Bank – that the state must play its role too. In a story in The Atlantic,Amir Tibon,who lives in the Nahal Oz kibbutz,about four seconds’ rocket flight from Gaza,described his disgust that his elderly father,a retired general,had been the one to rescue him when the police and army had not.

“We had a contract with the state that communities like ours protect the border,” Tibon said. “This is why people live there … We kept our part of the contract. We lived on the border … And so the contract was:We protect the border,and the state protects us.”

He declared himself “ashamed of my government”.

Noam Bedein,a former long-time resident of Sderot,said his faith in the state of Israel had also “100 per cent” been shaken by the attack.

“This is going to shake the entire politics,everything,” he said.

The blow-back on Netanyahu has been instant. A right-winger whose political persona was built on toughness and the promise of security,he isseen to have taken his eye off the ball,focusing instead on an attempt to nobble the country’s Supreme Court that split the country and weakened its military.

An editorial in the left-wing newspaperHaaretz argued that the prime minister had “completely failed to identify the dangers he was consciously leading Israel into when establishing a government of annexation and dispossession”,and by embracing a foreign policy that “openly ignored the existence and rights of Palestinians”.

For most Israelis,the response is a dramatic reassertion of another defining Israeli trait:defiance. The tool of this defiance is the military to which almost every Israeli gives three years full-time service and many more as a reserve.

In their anger,the Israeli population is egging on its government and army to conduct a swingeing retaliation,whatever the cost.

“We certainly don’t want to kill ordinary civilians,but if used as human shields for these terrorists we’ll have no choice,” says Mechi Fendel,the Sderot resident.

A sense of duty in the face of danger does not only reside in Israel. In Gaza,Wishah feels it too. I ask if she would consider trying to flee with her children ahead of the coming storm.

Never,she replies. Her grandmother who lost her home in 1948,in what Palestinians call the Nakba (meaning catastrophe in Arabic),had always wished she had stayed in her village all those years ago and never fled to Gaza.

“If she had the chance once again she would never leave her house,and would rather die at her place. I had many chances to get out of Gaza,but this is not my choice. I’m the landowner. Even now I’m registered as a refugee,but still,I have the dream,hope and determination to go back to my land.

“If I left Gaza,and others do,who will stay to serve people and to protect the right of return?”

The competing claims to this country are where this whole saga begins and remains stuck.

Sabawi,the Palestinian Australian,says her family in Gaza are expressing “a deep sense of dread” at what’s to come.

“I got a message from my cousin:what’s going to happen to us? … They know the punishment,the rocket punishment,this is worse,as if,‘We’re done for’.”

“From their end it doesn’t look like Israel is defending itself. What they see on the ground is revenge killing.”

On the other side of the wall,Raemer says of her kibbutz,Nirim:“My parents are buried there. My husband is buried there. My children are born there.” She weeps as she adds:“And our children will be able to play out on the lawn again without the fear of terror.”

But before then,she says,hardening her voice,this small,claustrophobic part of the world needs the Israeli army to bring about a reckoning.

More coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

• Surprise attack:Hamas terrorists fired up to 5000 rockets from Gaza into Israel on October 7,triggering a declaration of war.Read our guide to the militant group and why it’s at war with Israel.
• The Iron Dome explained: How did Hamas breach Israel’s sophisticated anti-ballistic missile system? And why didn’t Israel’s intelligence servicessee these attacks coming?
• Tragedy in Israel:A 66-year-old Sydney woman has been killed and is thefirst known Australian casualty. Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong says the woman’s family in Israel and Australia is receiving consular assistance.

• What’s next:International editor Peter Hartcherjoins thePlease Explain podcast to analyse the escalating conflict in the Gaza Strip - and explain why a much bigger conflict is afoot.

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