Florit Shoihet

The film playing as you enter the Nova exhibition – which commemorates the 7 October attack – was painfully familiar to me. 06:29AM – The Moment Music Stood Still, shows smiling, carefree youngsters in festival clothes, dancing on the dry broad plains of southern Israel around the Gaza Strip. Nothing could indicate that with sunrise, some 6,000 Hamas terrorists and their collaborators would invade Israel. This Nova exhibition is perhaps the rawest, most direct and yet most respectful attempt to confront that day without abandoning Israel’s core values I also danced at parties there with friends, after which we camped in the woods and were woken by the call to prayer of the Gazan muezzin behind the border.

It is impossible to imagine the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) functioning without its female soldiers. In the last week alone, over 30 Israeli female combat pilots and navigators participated in long-range strikes on Iran. Since 2023, hundreds of women have crossed enemy lines and fought in hostile territory; among them medics who have rescued people under fire and combat dog handlers searching Hamas tunnels. On October 7 there were countless heroic stories about female soldiers. From non-combat surveillance operators (‘spotters’) who didn’t abandon their command posts until their last breath, to navy fighters who stopped much of Hamas’s naval invasion.

Before I left for the Your Party rally in Manchester, I carefully looked at myself in the mirror. My Star of David necklace and rings with Hebrew etchings were off, and I ran through, yet again, the alternative name and identity I had prepared in case anyone asked. After all, it’s not every day that a Jewish-Israeli woman sneaks alone into the meeting of a party that proudly describes itself as the ‘only anti-Zionist party in the entire country.’ The party’s obsession with Israel and Palestine was astonishing So I tried to blend in.