THEn these days of war in Israel, I am also struck by what is happening Raz Degan, 55 year old actor, director and former model in Israel was born and raised on Kibbutz Sde Nehemia. And what a very true, interviewed by Silvia Toffanin, he talks about his pain for his people and his apprehension for his relatives. Explaining that a family member is among the children missing after the rave party from which the Hamas attack began.
Raz Degan and the war in Israel
«These are terrible days for all of humanity, and for us in Israel they are nightmare days. There hasn’t been anything this serious since the Holocaust” says Raz Degan. Explaining that he is a person «who he always believed in peace, and seeing that the gun and the sword today are stronger than the voice of change hurts. I can’t imagine we’ve gotten to this point».
My father doesn’t leave his house
Silvia Toffanin asks him about his relatives who remained in Israel, his father and brother. «My father is 80 years old, our kibbutz was evacuated but he doesn’t leave the house» explains the actor. «I try to convince him but he doesn’t: ‘This is my home, I have nowhere else to go’, He says. And one of our family members disappeared: she was one of the girls who went to dance for peace and she didn’t come home.”
While Silvia Toffanin, with teary eyes, is moved, Raz Degan continues: «A week has already passed. In Jewish tradition, when someone dies, you stay at home for 7 days. They have passed, and the parents do not know where he is. Why many corpses are unrecognizable because they were burned, while other young people were kidnapped. And the parents are waiting for news.”
The Friends’ Tale: Horrible Atrocities
Raz Degan then explains that «every day friends call me, and tell me of atrocities that are so horrible, terrifying, unimaginable, that I’m afraid to even tell her. They go beyond politics, beyond war. They go beyond everything. It is the infernal nightmare of dark power, of terror.”
The former model then says that his half-sister «has four children, a one-year-old, a 3-year-old, a 5-year-old and a 7-year-old. She was very scared like any mother. They found headless children. And she comes to stay with me. It was difficult to get her out of Israel because flights are now limited.” But if the women manage to escape, the men instead “don’t leave, like my father who wants to stay there. How does he leave? Where is he going? he spent his whole life there, that is his house, with his vegetable garden…”.
Childhood on a kibbutz
Raz then talks about his childhood in the kibbutz in the north, on the border with Lebanon: «For me, childhood was often in bunkers, missiles fell on us. We were little, we spent weeks if not months in the bunkers living with 30 other children. The parents came to eat with us in the evening; then they took their rifles and went to fight. I remember dad in uniform, because he was at the front. But in the history of Israel since 1948 there has never been a tragedy of this proportion. Israel’s darkest day had always been the Yom Kippur War (from 6 to 25 October 1973, ed). But that was a war of soldiers. It was a tragedy, but it was soldiers against soldiers. This is about terrorism: it’s about going and raping women by calling their mothers to make them listen to the rape and sending them the videos. It involves kidnapping elderly people who survived the Holocaust, and who had already suffered an unimaginable tragedy as children and who have lived their whole lives trying to forget and who find themselves at 85, 90 years old as hostages dragged away like animals. I have never understood why these extremists have to exist, who subjugate an entire population for their idea of total fanaticism.”
Raz Degan: «I still hope to see peace»
Degan then remembers doing «like all the children of Israel, the military for three years: it is obligatory. But as I finished the military path I realized that my path was different, I wanted to break boundaries. I wanted to be a citizen of the world and I arrived in Italy by chance. I left many friends there, and every time I hear from them these days it is a terrible punch in the heart. There is not a person in Israel who has not been injured, who has not been affected. It’s unimaginable. 5 thousand children who were there for peace were affected. These are people demonstrating in the streets of Tel Aviv for peace and human rights, for the Palestinians themselves. Civilians, normal people disappeared, killed while sleeping, burned alive, beheaded. This is not war. I still hope, in the time I have left to live, to see peace. But it seems to me that we are seeing the opposite effect. And I’m afraid that this idea of peace will become just a memory, an idea of the past. Why Hate brings hate, blood brings blood, vengeance brings vengeance. Even those who wanted to change the world, when they lose a child, what kind of world do they want to change? I I think of my family waiting for a 22 year old girl who had gone dancing».
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