NAHAL OZ, Israel — A tractor plows a dusty field in this Israeli kibbutz as a plume of black smoke clouds the sky over Gaza, just half a kilometer away.

A fuel truck is inspected by an Israeli solider at a checkpoint close to Nahal Oz fuel terminal, January 7.

Only about 50 of the 300 residents and workers at the Nahal Oz kibbutz have stayed during the Israeli military assault on Gaza, including Benny Sela, who is in charge of security on the collective farm.

His wife and children keep in regular phone contact from a safer location in Israel. But Sela has stayed behind to protect the farm workers, who are helping to run one of Israel’s oldest collective farms, a vital part of the Jewish state’s economy.

In Sela’s front yard, an olive tree stands.

“You see the sign of peace?” he says.

The Nahal Oz kibbutz has been a regular target of mortars and rockets launched from Gaza for the past eight years. Days after Israel launched its military operation in Gaza on December 27, a rocket strike killed a kibbutz resident — one of three Israeli civilians killed since the Gaza offensive was launched.

A handful of farm workers continue to plow the wheat fields and tend to the hundreds of dairy cows, seemingly unfazed by the periodic claps of thunderous rocket fire going into Gaza.

Sela is constantly monitoring the kibbutz — which is surrounded by an electric fence — in his armored Land Rover, checking on wheat fields that stretch all the way to the Gaza border. The fence is connected to a beeper to alert Sela if anyone crosses the wire.

Near the wheat fields are Israeli tanks, waiting to cross into Gaza.

Sela believes economic action is the only long-term solution to the tattered relations between Israelis and Palestinians in Gaza.

“A lot of business we can do here, but you know the Palestinian people they are very poor and they don’t have power, you know, to resist the Hamas terrorists,” Sela said.

The latest conflict is not the first time Nahal Oz has been at the center of Israeli-Palestinian tension. In 1956, Nahal Oz attracted national attention when then-Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan delivered one of his most powerful speeches after a kibbutz worker was killed by Egyptian soldiers.

The farms had become a buffer between displaced Palestinians in Gaza and their land in Israel lost in 1948. Dayan warned Israelis against complacency,
of hoping for peace in the face of so much Arab anger.

“This is our life’s choice, to be prepared and armed, strong and determined, lest the sword be stricken from our fist and our lives cut down,” Dayan said.

Sela, who has lived in Nahal Oz for 21 years, said he supports the Israeli army’s current fight to stop Hamas rockets, but worries the impact these policies are having on the next generation — particularly his son.

“He said all the Arabs, they are very bad,” Sela said of his son. “I said… not all the Arabs. There (are) good Arabs and bad Arabs.

“Alternately, there (are) good Jewish and bad.”