More than 40 students gathered in Blanchard Hall on April 4 to hear from Shai Nahon, a former Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) intelligence officer who lives in Be’er Sheva. Wheaton College’s Center for Faith, Politics, and Economics (FPE) invited Nahon to share his personal account of the day of the Oct. 7 attack and answer questions.
David Iglesias, director of the Center for FPE who is also a retired U.S. navy captain and former military prosecutor, moderated the event.
Iglesias told the Record that the goal was to share one Israeli citizen’s perspective on the ongoing conflict and its history. He had met Nahon during a tour of Israel in 2017, and the two had kept in touch since. Nahon has been visiting churches and colleges for the last two weeks and planned to continue for another nine days after his visit to Wheaton.
“We just want people to understand that there’s always another side to the story,” Iglesias said.
On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas, a militant group designated as a terrorist group by the U.S. government in 1997, attacked several areas near the Israel-Gaza border. Israeli officials say about 1,200 people were killed and thousands more were injured or abducted. The Israeli military responded with an ongoing counteroffensive, which has killed over 30,000 people and displaced an estimated 85 percent of Gazans, according to the Associated Press.
Nahon served in the IDF as an intelligence officer from 1998-2002, and he is currently the owner of a tourism business. Nahon said he lives about 45 minutes from the Gaza border, and on Oct. 7, he had planned to sleep in and make his two daughters emoji-shaped pancakes for breakfast. When the first bomb siren woke the family up at 6:32 a.m., he said, they moved quickly into the home office that doubled as a bomb shelter.
Nahon told the audience that he and his family have become desensitized to the bomb sirens.
“Everybody that lives in the south knows the siren by heart,” Nahon said. “We’ve experienced it for years… a siren goes off… rockets, missiles, whatever it is being launched at you. We’re so used to it at this point that we don’t even freak out. We just react.”
Once the family had waited about 10 minutes, Nahon said he decided that he might as well start making the pancakes since he was already up. But several more warning sirens were issued throughout the hour, and around 7:30 a.m., he said he began to realize that something about that Shabbat morning was not normal. He called his workers to cancel all of the tours for the day, and 17 minutes later, he and his wife saw videos from northern regions where Hamas militants were attacking.
To give attendees an understanding of what the conflict means for Israelis, Nahon displayed a diagram with the amount of time Israelis throughout the region have to shelter after a rocket is fired. He showed the audience a small piece of shrapnel that he found on the ground just outside his daughters’ school. The Iron Dome, Israel’s missile defense system, is “very, very good,” Nahon said, “but when that missile explodes above your head, the pieces of these missiles are going to do what?”
Nahon said he wanted students to understand that, for Jewish people, the ongoing conflict is informed by thousands of years of persecution.
“Jews live under the impressions of trauma caused by hundreds and thousands of years of persecution,” he said. “People need to understand that Israel represents a sacred place where they can be safe and Jewish, and when that stability and that safety is stolen from them, it undermines the concept of what Israel should be from that perspective.”
Bryan Chen, a senior English major, said Nahon’s description of day-to-day life in a region of conflict left him with feelings of grief for all who are suffering.
“I now see that the situation in that region is in no way black-and-white as people often present it to be,” he told the Record after the event. “Instead of leaving the presentation more convinced by one perspective over another, I left sorrowful by the state of fear Israeli and Palestinian civilians alike live in. I think this reaction is fundamental for the church to have toward these issues: grief for the sufferings of image-bearers.”
Iglesias told the Record that another reason for the event was to help students understand the complexity of the conflict.
“Right now the Hamas PR machine is quite effective in convincing people that there’s a genocide going on,” he said. “If you look at the international legal definition of genocide, it says an intentional act. These are not intentional killings.”
Audience members asked about the ongoing accusations that the Israeli military is committing genocidal acts against Palestinians, and the International Justice Court case, in which South Africa brought forward a case for the former. In response, Nahon rolled up his sleeve to reveal a tattoo of his grandmother’s Auschwitz prisoner number.
“We know what genocide is,” he said. “We are not choosing to kill people.”
After the event, Nahon clarified his position in a conversation with the Record. He distinguished Palestinian civilians from Hamas and said Israel’s intention was to root out Hamas, not Palestinians.
“It is very unfortunate that they are there, but they are caught in the middle,” he said. “They are not the targets. The targets are Hamas. So accusing Israel of a genocide, I think, is wrong. Accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing is wrong.”
The definition of genocide, according to the United Nations, is rigid. It must involve both a physical and mental element, with an intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, or racial group. This includes killing group members, deliberately inflicting conditions of life to bring about physical destruction and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Unlike genocide, ethnic cleansing does not have a precise legal definition, primarily because it has not been recognized as an independent crime under international law. The closest the U.N. has come to defining ethnic cleansing comes from the U.N. Commission of Experts created to investigate war crimes in the former-Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The Commission defined ethnic cleansing as “rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area” and as “a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas.”
During the time for questions at the event, and while Nahon gave a historical synopsis of the conflict, many audience members gave nods and responses of affirmation. Some students responded with whispers and pointed questions.
Adam Mikhail, a freshman international relations major, said he was frustrated by Nahon’s description of the conflict’s history and the Palestinian experience.
“Frankly, as with most things related to the Middle East on this campus, I was disappointed, but not surprised by the harmful rhetoric,” he told the Record after the event.
Mikhail said he struggled with Nahon’s arguments in light of the recent evacuation at al-Shifa hospital as well as the killing of World Central Kitchen aid workers in an Israeli airstrike, both of which took place the same week as the event. He also was displeased with Nahon’s reference to the death of 30,000-plus Gazan civilians as “collateral damage.”
“There is absolutely no problem listening to the horrors of any human rights violations, but multiple perspectives on this complex issue are needed to inform interested students and faculty of the historical context,” Mikhail said. “This genocidal war is not just about Hamas. If it were, there would have been no escalation of settler violence in the occupied West Bank for the entirety of 2023.”
Nahon said he expected the opposition to his talk to be larger and more dramatic, but he noticed that Wheaton students held a range of reactions.
“I found Wheaton very respectful, and I appreciate that,” said Nahon.
He said he had been speaking at several campuses and churches for two weeks before coming to the college, and he planned to continue doing so for about nine days after. Nahon said he wanted to share his experience to raise awareness of atrocities on both sides.
“Oversimplifying these factors doesn’t do justice to anybody,” he told the Record. “I want people to understand that what they perceive as the atrocities performed in Gaza is something that I also perceive as the atrocities performed in Gaza. At the same time, I see the atrocities performed in Israel. It’s not one or the other.”
Near the end of the event, Nahon told the audience that he wants to see peace in the future, especially for his daughters as they grow up, but he is not convinced it will be during his lifetime.
“I would like my daughters to live and grow in a setting that is peaceful, that I know that everybody is happy, everybody’s content, everybody receives what they need and there’s no threat for their lives,” Nahon said. “But, I am a realist. I don’t think that in this generation we have any hope of peace. Maybe in the next one.”
