A Facebook event planned for late November is gaining popularity as Israelis learn about the event from friends, relatives, or their Facebook feeds.
The event, hosted by Yonatan Shwartz, is planned for November 30 at 4:00p.m. and titled, "Beer at sunset on Gaza Beach." It is scheduled to take place on the beach west of Gaza City.
"We'll meet for beer on the beach at sunset, marking the conquest of Gaza," the event's description reads.
As of 1:00a.m. on Sunday morning, 38.6k people had marked themselves "interested" or "going" to the event. By 8:40a.m. on Monday morning, 45k people had marked themselves "interested" or "going" - a rise of 6.4k in just over a day.
Shwartz, who is 30 years old and married with children, is a farmer in the city of Katzrin in the Golan Heights. According to Facebook he has not hosted any previous events.
He told Israel National News-Arutz Sheva, "I wasn't thinking too much when I created the Facebook event, 'Beer at sunset on the Gaza Beach' to mark the end of the last war in Gaza."
"After two weeks experiencing a whirlpool of feelings: pain, sadness, anger, and again pain, sadness, and anger (and 'maybe we'll buy a one-way ticket'), the basic desire for peace and quiet and a feeling of security - just to 'sit with beer on the beach of Gaza' just burst out of me - expressing, symbolically, that feeling of security.
"If on the beach of Gaza, the city which brought about the deaths of the largest number of Israelis in the past decades, the city which has become a symbol of the Jewish blood which has been spilled - I can sit comfortably on the beach and drink beer, then that says everything. The place from which evil winds blew became a place where the wind blows softly on people sitting on the beach, the place which caused Israeli children to run in fear to a safe place became a place where children roll in the sand dunes... I didn't share it, I didn't publicize it, I just created an event."
Shwartz added, "I wasn't prepared for it when a few days later I discovered that 40 thousand people had marked that they would participate in the event (now it's almost at 60 thousand people). I was shocked for a moment, but suddenly I felt my heart expand, and a ray of hope awakened inside of me."
"The meaning of this is clear: The nation of Israel wants Gush Katif back! The only thing that will bring us back a sense of security, the certainty that we have a future here, is a single result of the last war in Gaza: that every Jew will be able to walk around there, without fear."
