We submitted our manuscript one month before our world came crashing down. For us, two Jewish-Israelis, life before October 7, 2023, is prehistory. As we enter our fourth month of this war, our reality is one of endless pain and deep sadness, existential fear, anger and hatred, trauma, uncertainty, and disbelief.

I (Julia) live in Kibbutz Urim. My community is in the Eshkol Regional Council, in the western Negev. This Negev region, nicknamed Otef Aza (“The Gaza Envelope”) shares a border with the Gaza Strip. Since 2001, our area has known too-many-to-count wars, military operations, and rocket attacks. While the Hamas and Israeli governments were never willing to engage in a peace process, none of us imagined the brutality that the Hamas and the Islamic Jihad unleashed on us on that Black Saturday. On the other side of the border are our neighbors: approximately 2.3 million Palestinians. These neighbors are caught between craggy boulders – Israel and Egypt, which have sealed their borders from this population for years, leaving them with no way out and no future – and a hard place – the fundamentalistic Hamas regime, which, since 2006, has ruled them with an iron and frightening hand, doing little to nothing to improve their lives.

In other words, we are two civilian populations living precarious lives. The past decades robbed all of us – here and there – of the hope of attaining a safe and good future.

At 6:30 a.m. on that Black Saturday, those of us near the border awoke to relentless air raid alerts, booms, and shots. We received WhatsApp message after WhatsApp message: “Lock all your windows and doors. If you have a safe room, lock yourself in it. If you don’t, hide in the safest spot in your house.” As the rockets rained down on us, an estimated 1,500 Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists poured into Israel, from the air, land, and sea. They butchered babies, children, teens, young women and men, old women and men. They decapitated some of their victims, burned people alive, and raped women. They took 240 civilian hostages (the most recent estimate, as of this writing [late January]), including grandparents in their eighties and babies. They came prepared with massive amounts of sophisticated weapons, destroying kibbutzim, invading moshavim, massacring young people in an outdoor music/dance festival, and roamed the streets of Sderot and Ofakim, overrunning homes and killing victims. On that day alone, the terrorists killed approximately 1,200 people, and wounded nearly 4,000.

In response, Israel’s air force began bombing Hamas and Islamic Jihad strongholds in the Gaza Strip, which has also been accompanied by a ground invasion. However, since these organizations store their weapons in, and launch their rockets from, mosques, schools, hospitals, and civilians’ houses, and due to the population density in that sliver of land, thousands of innocent Gazan citizens – of all ages – have been killed and wounded, with the numbers alarmingly increasing every day. The humanitarian crisis that characterized the Gaza Strip before this war has worsened: Most people lack water, food, medicine, and electricity. Close to 2 million Gazans fled their homes from the north and Gaza City, which were bombarded around the clock, in desperate attempts to find some small degree of safety and humanitarian aid in southern areas.

While we know how this war started, part of a long and bloody history, none of us know how and when it will end. Will Hezbollah become heavily involved, adding a northern front? Will Egypt, Jordan, and/or Syria come to the aid of Gaza? And what about Abu Mazen’s fragile regime? Will Palestinian forces in the West Bank join the armed struggle? The bigger questions focus on the part that Iran, the United States, and other nations will play in this war. Will October 7, 2023 go down in history as the day that World War III began, eventually claiming millions of lives around the globe?

While we lack answers to these questions, what we do know is that this war will eventually end. Those of us left standing – here and there – will then have to pick up the pieces. It will be our joint task to promote human dignity – here and there – something that we have failed at miserably thus far. When that day comes, we hope that the psychosocial understandings we present in this book will help us–them in our–their work toward a sustainable peace. The first step must include listening deeply to Palestinians’ and Israelis’ personal narratives of the horrors that we have faced. In order to move forward, we must learn what ordinary people experienced, using their–our stories to help light our path out of this darkness.

We now turn to our book written in our “prehistoric” world. While we know that life – here and there – is no longer what it once was, we believe that our ideas fashioned in those distant times have relevance for the world in which we so desire to live.