When he describes the horror, his voice does not tremble. To recount the death of his son, Yaacov Godo keeps his chin high and his gaze fixed on the large beige brick building where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sits, in Jerusalem. On his white t-shirt, the face of Tom, 52, murdered by Hamas on the morning of October 8. “With his wife and three daughters, they had been waiting for help for twenty-five hours in the secure room of their house,” says the septuagenarian. “My son held the handle to prevent Hamas from entering. So, they fired on the door and two bullets hit him.” In a panic, Limor, his partner, opens the window of the secure room and throws their daughters – aged 4, 6 and 11 – outside. All four will run for several minutes before coming across a group of soldiers, who will escort them outside their kibbutz.
A peace activist who helped Palestinian children
Today, Limor and her daughters live in a hotel on the shores of the Black Sea, like thousands of refugees from southern Israel. Tom was buried just after the deadly Hamas assault, while rockets from Gaza were flying in the Israeli sky. At his grave, his father made him a promise. “I assured him that, despite all my sadness, I will go and sit in front of the Prime Minister’s office until this government goes away,” recalls Yaacov Godo. “After what they did, they will not should never be in charge again.”
After the thirty days of mourning imposed by Judaism, this peace activist set up his tent on a sidewalk in Jerusalem, in the heart of Israeli power, between the Knesset and Netanyahu’s office. The latter concentrates all his anger and Yaacov takes care never to pronounce his name. “In one year, his government caused terrible damage to Israel, it divided society to bring judges into line with its reform of the judicial system, breathes the peace activist. Then my son died, like 1,200 other Israelis, massacred in the worst cruelty. And denies him any responsibility, preferring to blame the whole world. This shows the type of man he is and how dangerous he is to the very existence of Israel.”
Every day, several dozen Israelis come to support Yaacov on his Jerusalem sidewalk, bringing him a meal or a little word. In recent years, he took advantage of his retirement to come to the aid of Palestinian breeders threatened by settlers in the Jordan Valley. It also transported children from the West Bank and Gaza Strip to Israeli hospitals for cancer treatment. At the mention of the war, the septuagenarian freezes. “What our country is doing in Gaza… This will not solve anything. Some Palestinian children that I was able to help have undoubtedly died today, either from the bombings or because of the cessation of care. They were already suffering because of of Hamas, it is not normal to make them suffer in turn.”
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