Kibbutz Nahal Oz: As a young boy, Danny Rahamim had a dream. To live in a place where money didn’t matter and community was everything.

In his teenage years, he discovered through books that such places existed in Israel: the agrarian kibbutz communities where utopian socialist ideas were put into practice. They also served as a human buffer, entrenching the new state’s boundaries.

While serving as a young army officer on the Gaza border in 1975, Rahamim came across a kibbutz called Nahal Oz and knew he had found his home.

Bullet holes in a window at Kibbutz Nahal Oz after the October 7 attacks. Alamy Stock Photo

“I thought, this is exactly what I’m looking for,” he says, as birds chirp in the trees surrounding us. “There is something special here that magnetises people.”

From its founding in 1951, the kibbutz faced ambushes from across the Gaza border, just 750 metres away.…