One Year Since October 7th - with Amir Tibon
As we arrive at the grim one-year anniversary of 10/07, we are featuring a dedicated series in which we take a longer horizon perspective, asking one guest each week to look back at this past year and the year ahead. If you are listening to this episode on a podcast app, please note that this episode was filmed before a live audience and is also available in video form on our YouTube channel.
For the fourth installment of this special series, we sat down with Amir Tibon, who is an award-winning diplomatic correspondent for Haaretz and the author of the newly released book: “The Gates of Gaza: A Story of Betrayal, Survival, and Hope in Israel’s Borderlands.” You can order Amir’s new book here: https://tinyurl.com/4khzaxab
Amir is also the author of“The Last Palestinian: The Rise and Reign of Mahmoud Abbas” (co-authored with Grant Rumley), the first-ever biography of the president of the Palestinian Authority.
From 2017-2020, Amir was based in Washington, DC as a foreign correspondent for Haaretz, and he also has served as a senior editor for the newspaper’s English edition. He, his wife, and their two young daughters are former residents of Kibbutz Nahal Oz but are currently living as internal refugees in northern Israel. His book tells the harrowing story of his family’s experience on October 7th as well as the history of Israel’s Gaza Envelope communities and of the Gaza Strip.
Finally, we have received a number of requests for recommendations of organizations in Israel to donate to on this one-year anniversary of 10/07. There are so many organizations doing important work to help Israelis rebuild from the events of the last year — and the ongoing war. This list is by no means comprehensive. It is simply an opportunity to highlight four groups whose work has moved us and who deserve additional support (we will add additional recommendations in the days ahead):
-IDF Widows & Orphans Organization (IDFWO), an Israeli non-profit organization dedicated to supporting the spouses and children of Israel's fallen heroes. They provide emotional care, financial assistance, educational opportunities, and a community for those affected most by Israel’s wars. — https://www.idfwo.org/en/
-Since October 8, Hezbollah has fired thousands of rockets, anti-tank missiles, and explosive UAVs at Israeli civilian and military targets in the north. As worries mount, Rambam Medical Center has cared for the wounded and prepared for war. This 1,100-bed medical center in Haifa has transferred its critical medical care to an underground emergency hospital. Rambam’s underground hospital – capable of housing 8,000 people — will play a critical role going forward in treating wounded soldiers and civilians; protecting and caring for the needs of medical staff and their families; and protecting and caring for the residents of Israel’s Northern Region. — https://aforam.org/
-Leket Israel, Israel's largest food rescue operation, is committed to leading the safe, effective and efficient collection and distribution of surplus nutritious food in Israel to those who need it. To pick just one inspiring example: since October 7th, Leket has committed itself to providing healthy food to the 250,000 displaced Israelis, many of whom have been residing in hotels for the last year. Leket has installed produce stands in hotels across Israel, providing evacuees with a consistent supply of fresh fruit and vegetables, free of charge, which Leket purchases from struggling Israeli growers. — https://www.leket.org/en/
-Kav L'noar's therapy services have provided essential psychological support to communities in the South directly impacted by the war and the October 7th massacre. Their therapeutic interventions are tailored to address the unique emotional and psychological challenges faced by individuals affected by the war, empowering survivors to navigate the aftermath, rebuild resilience, and foster a sense of collective strength. — https://www.kavlnoar.org/israelatwar
Full Transcript
DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.
AT: 6:30 AM, a crazy barrage of mortars falls on our neighborhood. And then we start to hear something we've never heard before during our years in Nahal Oz. We start to hear automatic gunfire and at first, it's a little distant. And then it gets closer. It’s like now it's inside the kibbutz. Then it's in our neighborhood, and at 7:15 AM, basically we've got a cell of Hamas terrorists on our front porch firing through our living room window into the house and trying to break in. Everybody's writing, I have a terrorist in my house, I have a terrorist in my backyard, they're trying to break into my home, I see them breaking into my neighbor's home. And you understand the magnitude of it. It's not one cell of five terrorists who are just outside our house. You realize we are being conquered. And everybody's asking one question. Where's the military?
DS: It's 7:45 PM on Wednesday, September 24th here in New York City. It is 2:45 AM on Wednesday, September 25th in Israel as Israelis get ready to start their day. But this Israeli is here with me in New York City; Amir Tibon, who is the author of this book, The Gates of Gaza: A Story of Betrayal, Survival, and Hope in Israel's Borderlands, which we are going to talk about today. We're going to have a whole conversation about his book, his day on October 7th, as we arrive at the one-year anniversary, the grim one-year anniversary of October 7th. And we will get to at the end, we have some questions that many of you have submitted, which we'll get to, some of which deal with current events, including what's happening up in Israel's north. But mostly, I just want to welcome Amir, who is a journalist, long time journalist, long time friend from Haaretz newspaper. He's a prolific writer, not only in Haaretz, but he also wrote a biography of Abu Mazen a number of years ago. And I really just want to welcome him not only to this conversation, but to this amazing Call Me Back community that I got to say it is quite moving for us to see all of you here tonight. So, thank you for being here. Amir.
AT: Hi, good evening to everyone here.
DS: Amir, we're going to get to October 7th, 2023 in a moment. Before we do, I want to just talk to you about your family's decision to move to Kibbutz Nahal Oz. Sort of the impulse behind why you made that decision, because it's a decision that doesn't really make sense, I think, to a lot of people. You would say it doesn't make sense to you.
AT: I would argue, but I get why you're saying that. Totally.
DS: So just to set the table here, Kibbutz Nahal Oz was a kibbutz that was founded in the 1950s in southern Israel. It is about one mile from… lower, less…
AT: Lower, yeah.
DS: So, I'm being generous. Okay. All right.
AT: We hope it was one.
DS: So, it's less than a mile. It's less than a mile from the border fence that separates Gaza and Israel, making it the Israeli community closest to Gaza of anywhere in Israel. And you visited this community in 2014, during the 2014 Israel-Hamas War. Amir is a journalist, and he goes to Kibbutz Nahal Oz in order to report on what he sees because at the time, it was literally the most bombarded community during that war in Israel. Now, it is one thing for a journalist to say I'm gonna go visit the most bombarded community in Israel in order to write about it. It is quite odd to then make a real estate decision based on that visit. And your wife Miri at the time, I think she was your girlfriend at the time, right? You weren't married yet. You were living in Tel Aviv, living a great life in Tel Aviv. You were hot shot journalist. She had just left university. She was pursuing her career. And you propose to make this move. I want to get specifically to the kibbutz in a moment. But before I do, you say in the book, in explaining this decision, you write, we were Zionists in the most basic sense. And you said this to me offline, if you had to boil it down at the most basic sense, this decision was about you and Miri as Zionists. So, can you just explain to us what you mean by being a Zionist in the most basic sense?
AT: Basically, 2014, what happens in Nahal Oz, like you said, Dan, is that during the war, it's the most bombarded community in the country. And toward the end of that war, there is a terrible tragedy in the kibbutz. It happens about two weeks after my visit there. I went to report on the place. I thought it was interesting to do a story about the kibbutz that's suffering the most from Hamas's rocket and mortar launches. And four days before the end of the war, a four-year-old child was killed in the kibbutz by a mortar launched from Gaza. Daniel Tregerman was his name, and he was the youngest victim of that war on the Israeli side. It became a national tragedy, his death. And the kibbutz went into a deep crisis. Something like 15 families, and this is a community of 400 people at the time, simply got up and left. Now when we talk about Zionism, one of the most important ideas that David Ben-Gurion and the founding generation of Israeli leaders believed in was that the borders of the state of Israel will be determined basically by the presence of civilian communities alongside them, not military presence alone. There are interesting experiences in the history of your country that kind of prove this point. You can have a military force in a faraway country for decades and then one day decide you don't want to be there anymore, and a week later, the military can easily redeploy. You leave some ammunition behind, you take what you really need and you're out of there. It's much more difficult to remove a civilian community with a kindergarten and a school and a clinic and a factory and people's homes and jobs and tractors working in the fields. And communities like Nahal Oz were built out of that idea that Zionism is something that you pursue out in the field, that you do with your feet. You say, I'm here, we are here. And when we saw after what happened in 2014, this community on the border within the, you know, internationally recognized borders of Israel, going through this crisis, suffering potential danger of disintegration, we thought the Zionist thing to do was to go and move there and be over there and help this community grow from that trauma.
DS: Okay, so that's the ideological reason. Now there's the very personal, practical decision. You call Miri in the middle of this war…
AT: So, I'll tell you how it went. You know, I was there in the middle of the war, and I came down there expecting to see a military fortress, right? I'm going to cover the most bombarded community in the country. You know, there are rockets and mortars falling there every day. It's important to understand because Nahal Oz is so uniquely close to Gaza City, Iron Dome does not cover the kibbutz.
DS: Okay, so this is a very important point because I think many of us who travel to Israel, we have this perhaps false, although not always false, sense of security about the Iron Dome because of our experiences in certain parts of Israel, but that don't extend to all parts of Israel. And because of the proximity of Nahal Oz to Gaza, a mortar firing off from Gaza… I mean, Iron Dome has somewhat been extended these days, but it's still, it's not as reliable.
AT: A decade ago, it was completely irrelevant for Nahal Oz. Today, you know, I don't want to go into military details, but…
DS: But when the sirens go off…
AT: You have five seconds.
DS: Five seconds.
AT: Five seconds, so you have to learn to run.
DS: So for my most recent book, we have a chapter called, 15 Seconds.
AT: That's Sderot.
DS: And that was considered pretty tough. So here you got five, seven seconds to get into your shelter.
AT: Or to just lie on the ground and protect your face or your child. But I go there. It's the middle of a war. I expect to see like, you know, a military fortress and I get into this beautiful kibbutz. Green lawns, flowers around the homes, little gardens, a lot of trees. It’s surrounded by open fields, sunflowers, everything is so beautiful. Birds are chirping. And then I meet the people it was quite empty at the time but there were a few people there holding the place together people who work in agriculture, people who work with the cows, people who are just there to make sure nothing gets completely destroyed. And I had an incredible day there, with the alarms, with the rockets, with everything. And I came back to Tel Aviv that night and I told Miri, I just met some of the most impressive people I've seen in my life, and I told her about the place. But then I kind of forgot about it because it was a war. There was a lot to write about. Other things came in and then toward the end of the war, this tragic event happened when Daniel, the four-year-old boy, was killed. And after that, there was the crisis. And that's really what prompted us to do it. It started with my visit, then it continued with the other events I described. And there was a moment, I think it was in early September, we were walking on the beach in Tel Aviv after, you know, day of work for both of us and talking. I said, you know, Miri, we used to talk about this idea that one day, you know, maybe we'll get married, and we'll move to some small kibbutz somewhere because she grew up in Tel Aviv. But she had this dream of one day moving to a smaller community, a green place, a quiet place. I told her, well, maybe we try this little kibbutz, you know, it's great. It's green. It's beautiful fields. There's just this one tiny little problem. But maybe we can get over it. And I have a very special wife, and she said, all right, let's do it.
DS: How did your families react? You have families that are rooted in survival from the Shoah. Can you talk a little bit about your parents and grandparents and how they arrived in Israel?
AT: So, I'll start with Miri's family. She's from Russia. Her family came to Israel in the big immigration, the big Aliyah wave of the late 80s, early 90s when the Iron Curtain fell. Very Zionist family. For them, being in Israel was a dream of generations. They paid a price for coming to Israel in terms of the quality of life. You know, her grandparents, he was a professor, one of the biggest universities there, award winning scientist. Her grandmother was an English teacher, which was an important job in Russia at the time. They came to Israel, and they were basically, you know, working very, very simple jobs, taking care of Miri and her sister, while the parents had to go and work double shifts. Immigration is not an easy thing. And her grandparents were survivors of the Nazi siege on St. Petersburg, Leningrad. From my side, my parents were both born in Israel. Both actually grew up in Kibbutzim in central Israel. My father spent most of his adult life in the military, served for 35 years, retired as a general in 2015. My mother is a historian of the Holocaust. She wrote two books about the history of Holocaust in Romania and, I mean, you know, the Holocaust is a very important issue in our family. Here mother is a survivor, lost both of her parents, so this is something that's very strong in our consciousness and has always affected our thinking about different things and it was probably somewhere there in the background also when we thought about this decision. At the end of the day, when we talk about the importance of borders for Israel… I know here in this country borders, you know, it's a very delicate political issue tied to immigration and other stuff. But in Israel, it's much more basic and really an existential issue. If we don't protect our borders, then the enemies will come for us and well, we'll talk soon about what happens when that kind of thing happens. But this was part of the importance of going to Nahal Oz for us. Let's strengthen this community on the border.
DS: So I want to go not to October 7th, I want to go to October 6th, because I think in your book, the way you describe what was happening in the kibbutz the night of October 6th, 2023, is not only chilling to think, obviously, now that retrospectively, we know what followed that night, but it also, I think quite beautifully, just captures kibbutz life.
AT: Yeah.
DS: So, can you just describe the evening of October 6th, 2023?
AT: It's a very special night because on October 7, at 7 PM, we were supposed to celebrate 70 years to the foundation of Nahal Oz. The kibbutz was founded in October 1953. And by this point, we've been in the Kibbutz for, you know, well, seven years because we spent two years in the US in between and we came back. And so, but we're like, you know, long time residents by this point, members of the kibbutz. We have two little girls who grew up in Nachal Oz. This is their world. This is their home. And on that evening, we are going with them to the pool of the kibbutz, to the big lawn of the pool, anybody who's been to an Israeli kibbutz can imagine that big lawn, because there is a general rehearsal for the party tomorrow night, the 70-year anniversary. And Galia, our oldest daughter, three and a half years old at the time, is supposed to dance on the stage with her friends from kindergarten. So we take her and Carmel, her younger sister, one year and nine months at the time, to the rehearsal. And Galia goes up on the stage with her friends. They have to do two songs, these classic Israeli folk songs for children. Kan Beiti Poni Noladeti, This is My Home Where I Was Born, and Eretz Yisrael Sheli Yafa v’gam Porachat, My Israel is beautiful and Blossoming. The first one, she's perfect. She does all the moves, she turns around when you need to, she jumps when you need to, and we're so proud. The second one, she begins to lose her patience a little bit, she's staring at the screen, she doesn't do the moves, she's interrupting one of her friends, and so we emerge from the rehearsal a bit worried, because tomorrow night, October 7 at 7 PM, there's gonna be 600 people over there. The entire community, that's about 450, and then more than 150 guests. There's gonna be a video greeting from the president of Israel. There's gonna be a lot. And I tell Miri, what are we gonna do? She's not completely ready. And we make a plan: October 7th, Saturday morning, I take Carmel, the little one, the one year and nine months, to the playground. Miri stays at home with Galia, and she works with her on the dance until she's ready. Two hours, three hours, whatever we need. And that's the plan. That's how we go to sleep that night.
DS: So you go to sleep the night of October 6th. You wake up on October 7th to something.
AT: 6.30 AM, a crazy barrage of mortars falls on our neighborhood. It's so large, unusually large that the siren system is overwhelmed. There's no siren. And what we hear is a whistle, just a whistle. And Miri gives me this kind of elbow, we're in bed, and she says, Amir, there's a mortar. We are used to that, so we're not panicked or anything at that point. This has happened to us. You know, we've been in Nahal Oz seven years altogether. We've had many dozens of incidents like this and there's a procedure. We know what we need to do. We get out of bed, we run to the safe room. In every home in border communities like Nahal Oz, you have one room in the house which is built of thick concrete and it's supposed to withstand even a direct hit by a rocket or a mortar. And in most families, that's where you put the kids to sleep at night. That's the children's bedroom. Because then, if there's a siren at 6:30 in the morning, the parents run to the children, not the other way around. And that's what we do. We run. We run. We have to make it in five to seven seconds. We get there. We shut the door. There's this heavy iron door of the room. We hear the explosion, very strong explosion. It landed nearby. So we made it. On the wall, there's this metal plate with which you can cover the window, and we usually don't use it because we live in the kibbutz, our girls wake up in the morning with the tractors going to the fields and the birds outside on the lemon tree, but of course we realize something is up, so we cover the window with a metal plate. It’s dark in the room and our daughters are asleep. They don't wake up from this stuff, they are used to it that's how they grew up and our approach was always not to panic, not to make a big deal out of it, because that's what the children see at the end of the day. You know, the kids, they don't judge us by our words. They judge us by our actions. If you tell them, everything's okay, but you look very worried, they don't believe you. So our approach was always to keep calm. And that's what we did on that morning as well.
DS: And then at what point do you realize this is different?
AT: So all these years in Nahal Oz, we always had these, you know, operations that Israel was fighting Hamas or fighting the Islamic Jihad and there was a routine to this. You know this. I mean, a few days of back-and-forth skirmishes, rockets landing on the kibbutz, Israel bombs Gaza. We evacuate with the girls and with the rest of the community to somewhere more safe in central Israel where you have Iron Dome and all that. After a few days, the prime minister and the chief of the military, they go on TV and they say, we really beat them hard this time. They're deterred. They're afraid of us. And that's when we go back home and half a year later, there's the next round. That's what we were expecting. I mean, the first reaction between us was like, no party tonight.
DS: Right. No, you write in the book that on the WhatsApp chat, the kibbutz WhatsApp chat, someone commented like, Hamas must have been really irritated with our rehearsal last night. So this is their response.
AT: Everybody was chill about it because we're used to it. And you know what? That's part of the problem. That is part of the problem that we just accepted this unacceptable reality. But around 7 AM, while we are packing, because we're waiting for the barrage of mortars to stop, even for 10 minutes, and then we just shove the girls in the car and we drive east and north and away from, you know, toward the Iron Dome area, let's put it that way. So we're packing in the dark, the girls are sleeping, and then we start to hear something we've never heard before during our years in Acheros. We start to hear automatic gunfire. And at first, it's a little distant. It's like coming from the fields. And I'm like, well, maybe there's some battle, like some Hamas cell is trying to infiltrate the border and our soldiers are, you know, stopping them. And then it gets closer. It's like, now it's inside the kibbutz. Then it's in our neighborhood and 7:15 AM, basically we've got a cell of Hamas terrorists on our front porch firing through our living room window into the house and trying to break in.
DS: So, you write in the book, we realize that if they were right outside the window, as it sounded, then the terrorists had already seen the baby stroller standing on our front porch. Yet they were continuing their assault on our home regardless. In other words, we had to assume that nothing would stop them from murdering all four of us if they had the opportunity. So you, you actually for a moment believed that if they saw the baby stroller, they would like pull back and the fact that they hadn't pulled back despite the baby stroller being there…
AT: I wasn't that generous, but it was important for me to write this in the book because I know what Hamas is and what their values, I guess, are, but not everybody does. And I think the fact that the baby stroller is there is significant. And by the way, they had cameras on their helmets. One of those cameras returned to Gaza at the end of the day, and there is a video of them on our front porch firing into the house with the baby stroller behind them. Now…
DS: And you've seen the video
AT: I've seen the video. You cannot ignore the presence of the baby stroller, even if you take it for granted that this is what Hamas would do. In writing this, this is something that has to be mentioned because it's part of the story. That's the fact. They saw the baby stroller and then they kept going.
DS: Right. So then just briefly describe what happens next. Just carry us through the next couple of hours.
AT: So, we're in the safe room. It's a very small room. It's completely dark because the electricity in the kibbutz, at least in our neighborhood, fell down around a quarter to seven. We have no air conditioning and it's getting hot outside. We have no food. We have no light. We have some water. And we have two girls that have just woken up from the gunfire.
DS: And you're worried about your cell phone battery dying.
AT: Yes, we are losing battery on the phone all the time and we need to use it for light. And we have two little girls who are asking, well, can we go outside of the room and play? They don't understand what's going on around. Now, I'm thinking about us versus the terrorists. And here's my mental scorecard. They have a lot of weapons with them. They have, you know, Kalashnikov AK-47. They have hand grenades. I don't know what else they may have, but it's clear that they are armed. We don't have any weapon. And even if I had a handgun, it's probably, you know, I'm not trained enough to fight. You know, I hear five people shouting outside. So, advantage terrorists. They can't see us. We're in this dark room. They're outside the house. The door is locked. The windows are, you know, the blinds are all rolled down. So, they can't see us and we can't see them. So, let's make that a tie. Okay. We can hear them. We can hear their gunfire, and we can hear their shouting, and I understand Arabic from my military service, so I also understand what they're saying. They can't hear us if we're quiet in the room. That's our one advantage. We have to keep it. So we have to be very, very quiet. But we have two girls there, three-and-a-half-year-old, one year and nine month old. They just woke up to a scary sound. They're asking to get out. We are telling them that they can't. There is no light in the room. It's a scary situation. And our number one mission is to keep them calm and quiet. To keep the one advantage we have over the people outside our doorstep who are trying to break in and kill us. How do you do that? So here I give a lot of credit to Miri. Miri is a social worker. She works with children on the autistic spectrum. She's very patient. She knows how to explain things to kids. And she just tells them, you know, girls, we're really, really sorry, but we can't get out of the room right now. And there's no food and no light. There are dangerous noises outside. So we have to be quiet. And here's what you can do. You can stay in bed. You can hug your favorite doll. You can sing a song to yourself very quietly. You can ask for a hug or, you know, to hold our hand. These are the options right now.
DS: What kind of communication are you having at this point electronically with other people in the kibbutz?
AT: So we have our cell phones and cell phone reception inside the safe room is always limited because it's a very thick room and once you shut the window and the door, it's hard for signal to get inside. So we are seeing WhatsApp messages on the group of the neighborhood we live in and then on the larger group of the kibbutz and those are not encouraging. Everybody's writing, I have a terrorist in my house, I have a terrorist in my backyard, they're trying to break into my home, I see them breaking into my neighbor's home. And you understand the magnitude of it. It's not one cell of five terrorists who are just outside our house. You realize we are being conquered. We are now being conquered by the enemy. It's all over the community.
DS: There are people in the kibbutz who are dedicated security officials.
AT: Yes.
DS: And so what are they doing at this point based on what you know now?
AT: Today I can tell that there was a battle right outside our window. We have a local security team in the kibbutz like all the communities along the border. These are people who have jobs and families and hobbies and what everybody in this room has. And at the same time, they volunteer and two of them get paid for doing it, but the others are volunteers, to be in our local security team and they train with the military, and they're supposed to be the first responders, but their training is to respond to security emergencies for the first 10 minutes. Nobody is expecting the local security team of a small kibbutz to repel an enemy invasion with 100-plus fighters, which is what Hamas brought to our kibbutz that morning. That's just not what they're supposed to do. On top of that little team, we, in the kibbutz on that morning, have a team of 10 police fighters from a special unit of the Israeli police who were almost accidentally stationed in Nahal Oz that weekend. I tell in the book their story very briefly. I'll say in the weeks before October 7th, there were demonstrations and riots along the border fence with Gaza. know thousands of people from Gaza would march toward the fence throw Molotov cocktails and stones and stuff like that they would try to rattle the fence, and the border patrol, which is under the Israeli police, sent this special unit, special team of snipers, 10 guys, to be on the border, be on alert in case somebody tries under the guise of these demonstrations to break into Israel. Now, in the first week of October, the demonstrations stopped. Like, completely ended, nothing. Because there was this deal between Israel and Hamas that we would give them more money from Qatar and more work permits, and Sinwar just stopped the demonstrations. But somebody in the police said, this little team in Nahal Oz, let's keep them there a few more days. Maybe the demonstrations will be renewed. They were supposed to leave on Sunday morning. Friday night, they were drinking and singing and playing guitar in their little barracks at the edge of the kibbutz because it was quiet for an entire week. And then Saturday morning when everything started, they joined forces with our local security team. And at 7:15 AM, there are 14 people fighting for this kibbutz, 14 armed men fighting for these kibbutz, a combination of our security team and this police squad, I guess you can call them. By 9:00 AM, we're down to eight. Two of them get killed, one of them literally on my doorstep. Four others get injured to a level that they can no longer fight. And now there are eight guys. It's 9:00 AM. There are still many, many dozens of terrorists in the kibbutz. And everybody's asking one question. Where's the military?
DS: Around this time, your father, retired Major General Noam Tibon, who retired soon after you made this decision to move to the Kibbutz in 2014…
AT: Beginning of 2015, he was out of the army.
DS: So you made the decision in 2014. And among the projects he had in wrapping up his tour was working on an investigation to understand what happened in the 2014 Gaza Hamas war. And after he was finished with that work, he said… For those of our listeners who don't know him, he's a nationally known military figure in Israel. Every Israeli war correspondent I know knows retired General Tibon. So he and your mother are at the beach in Tel Aviv.
AT: Yes.
DS: What I would like to do every Shabbos, I might add, but that's a separate subject.
AT: Listen, for them it's a religion, it's not a hobby.
DS: I get it, I get it.
AT: In Tel Aviv, going to the beach on Saturday morning is like going to synagogue.
DS: So they're at the beach. And your father sees something that is like a tell.
AT: Yeah, they go to the beach early and he sees movements of planes in the sky, like military planes, very early and that's very unusual. It's a Saturday. Everything's supposed to be off in terms of the military.
DS: Not just a Saturday. It's also a chag.
AT It’s a holiday, yeah. But they kind of, you know, think, okay, probably, you know, they're on alert or something just in case and they go into the water. 6:30, rockets flying toward Tel Aviv and my parents, of course, what they do, they keep swimming. Hamas is not going to ruin their morning swim. But after another siren and another siren and another one, they get a little worried for us at Nahal Oz and they come out of the water to check up on us. And at first, they get this message, yeah, rockets, we're preparing to leave. And my mom texts us, come over to our place with the girls. And then 7:15, they get the second message from us, which says there are terrorists surrounding the house, they're firing into the living room. At first, my father tries to call people he knows in the military, the chief of staff, the head of the Southern Command, to alert them that there are terrorists inside Kibbutz Nahal Oz, a very unusual situation. This is something that has never happened before. Nahal Oz has been sitting on the border with Gaza for 70 years. There have been mortars and ambushes and land mines and hand grenades at cars. And I write about everything in the book, all these incidents. A terrorist had never stepped foot in the kibbutz. And my parents know that because they were very supportive of our decision to move there, very proud of it. They were regulars at the kibbutz. They would come once a week at first to visit us, then see their granddaughters. And they understand that if the terrorists are inside the kibbutz, something very bad is happening. And that feeling gets stronger because when my father tries to call these people in the army, nobody's picking up the phone. Nobody's answering.
DS: So he does what?
AT: They decide to come down there to drive, you know, from Tel Aviv to Nahal Oz on a Saturday. It's an hour and 10 minutes. And that's one of the crazy things about Israel, right? That Gaza and Tel Aviv, because Nahal Oz is basically Gaza. Tel Aviv and Gaza are so close to one another and yet worlds apart. But it's really, if you get into your car at my parents' neighborhood in North Tel Aviv and you just drive, like right now when we're recording this, it’s what, like 3 in the morning in Israel, an hour and 5 minutes it will take you. And they just start going.
DS: Okay, so they start driving south and they don't really know what they're driving to and then they start hitting checkpoints.
AT: At first my father wanted to go alone. He takes a pistol and he just starts going. And my mom very, very wisely says, you need someone to drive because you need to be with the phone to try to talk to people in the army and you need to be with the pistol when you get there. So she says, I'll drive. And that's how they get out. And pretty much after Ashkelon and after the Yad Mordechai junction, which is kind of like the entry point to the Gaza border area, they're alone on the road. This is, you know, shortly after eight in the morning. This is now an area controlled by Hamas, but they don't know it yet. They are not sitting at home watching television and seeing the white pickup trucks in the streets of Sderot, that harrowing image that I'm sure so many people listening to us now remember. They don't see any of that. They're just driving. And then they see in front of them on the road, at the entrance to Sderot, two police cars blocking the road and gunfire, a gun battle between the policemen and this white SUV, Hamas fighters. And they realized they have to turn around, they have to try to go somewhere else. And then two young people, a young couple jumped toward their car, basically.
DS: From the Nova Festival?
AT: This is a couple that ran away from the Nova Festival, Bar and Lior. We've become friends since then. But they ran away from the Nova Festival. They're about our age. They have two young children about the ages of our girls. And after they managed to get out of the Nova Festival with their car, Hamas put up ambushes along the roads. And in one of those ambushes, their car went completely destroyed. I mean, they are lucky to be alive because the car was hit by several bullets and just stopped functioning. They got out of the car, they ran by foot. They don't know the area. They don't live in the Gaza border region. They live near Tel Aviv, but they ran and ran, and they found a place to hide. And at some point, they got out and that's pretty much when they run into my parents who have no idea what this is. They don't know about the Nova Festival. They don't understand what's this battle ahead on the road. But they see these two young people and they realize if they don't take them into their car, they could die there.
DS: And they bring them into the car, and they know that obviously that's going to be its own detour while they know you and Miri and the kids are still dealing with some kind of live fire hell. And so what do they do with this young couple?
AT: They take them to Ashkelon. Basically, they drive back 15, maybe 20 minutes north, away from Nahal Oz to bring them to safety. And along the way, they investigate them. My father tries to gain information from them. What are you doing here? What's going on? And what he hears from them is shocking. They tell him we were at this party. Terrorists started firing at the cars. We ran away. Our car was destroyed. Everybody died. Crazy stuff. They saw bodies along the way on the roads and that makes my parents even more worried for us because the point where they picked up Bar and Lior is further away from the border compared to Nahal Oz. And they're thinking if this is what's happening over here, then there must be a total chaos in the kibbutz. But they bring them to the entrance to Ashkelon, they drop them over there next to a police car, and then they turn around and they head toward Nahal Oz.
DS: And along the way, they’re running to these checkpoints, I'm not talking about the Hamas checkpoints, they also run into Israeli police and military checkpoints, who don't want to let them through.
AT: Yes.
DS: And they literally, I mean, they just defy them.
AT: They do the Israeli thing.
DS: Right, right, right.
AT: They do this Israeli thing of, you know, bypassing the checkpoint.
DS: Yeah, so you write, at the southern edge of Sderot, just north of the junction where 232 and 34, the two main highways of the border region, cross each other, my parents encountered a second checkpoint. This time, they simply drove through it. The police officers aimed their guns at the Jeep, but my mother opened the window and shouted, we're Israeli. Our family is stranded in Nahal Oz. If you want, you can shoot us. The officers put down their weapons and my mother sped past. They were now at another junction where highways 232 and 34 intersected approximately eight miles from Nahal Oz. My mother took a left on 232, the road that Bar and Lior had taken in their attempt to escape the music festival, and then stopped the Jeep in its tracks. She couldn't believe what she saw in front of her. It was a biblical scene, you write. The road was strewn with corpses, not one or two, but dozens of dead bodies, inside cars, outside cars, on the sides of the road, in the middle of it. Bodies of Israeli citizens, men and women, and bodies of armed men, some of them Israeli soldiers and policemen, some of them Hamas fighters. Most of the cars on the road were charred skeletons, some were overturned, several still intact, with their engines running but no one behind the wheel. My father had been a military man for most of his adult life. He began his career in the Special Forces, had fought in Israel's 1982 war in Lebanon, and later took part in secret operations behind enemy lines in multiple countries. He had lost friends, been injured, and watched people die before his eyes. Still, what he saw that morning was different. He later explained, I've never seen so much death in one place before. At that point, he knows what he's going towards because he's never seen so much death in one place. He describes it as biblical, and he still goes.
AT: Well, you know, it's at that point clear that the military has lost control over the border area and we're still there. And along the way, my parents are talking to people in the kibbutz because it's hard to communicate with us. But what they're hearing from our neighbors and friends who have better cell phone reception is that there's no military in the kibbutz and that the chief of security of our community, my next-door neighbor, Ilan Fiorentino, one of the biggest heroes of this book, is not responding. And they realize that something has completely gone wrong in this situation, and they have to keep going. In a way, the worse it gets, the bigger the incentive to keep going because of what it says about our situation.
DS: Okay. And while they're trying to get to you, there's obviously fighting going on in the halos and all over the place. There're so many amazing stories about people you didn't know. There’re the people in your story that you obviously know. And, but then, there's all these people you've learned about. You've done a lot of reporting since then. Among those that I was most moved by were these Bedouin Israelis who were in the thick of the fight. Can you talk a little bit about that one and one guy in particular who fooled the Hamas?
AT: Yeah. So, one of the things that happened on that day is that a lot of the military commanders that actually made it to the area tragically waited for orders which did not arrive because all of the military bases in the region were basically conquered by Hamas. And there's one battle I write about where the regional command of the Gaza border area, the most important military base, is under attack by Hamas. And the soldiers who save it, there are a group of Bedouin soldiers who are serving there. One of them at some point actually pretends to be a Hamas fighter, using his native Arabic to fool the terrorists and lure them into an ambush. You can write an entire book just about that battle, honestly. I felt it was important to mention it because of the impact it had on the lack of command and control during that day. But it's just one of those crazy, unbelievable stories of that day, how this most important base that Israel holds, there's now a gunfight for it. And on both sides, you have Muslim Arab fighters, one side Muslim Arab citizens of Israel, soldiers of the Israeli military, and on the other side, Muslim Arab Palestinian terrorists who came in from Gaza. And that's a scene that, you know, nobody could write a script like that. Well, maybe my friend Avi Issacharoff from Fauda.
DS: I know, he's working on it. He’s working on it.
AT: But only him, only him.
DS: I do want to ask you, though, about… This community was very hopeful about coexistence with the people who lived on the other side of the border. You have the scene in the book, I think it was summer of 1994, it's after Oslo, it's maybe even after the Jordan peace agreement is signed, and there's like a festival…
AT: A peace festival.
DS: In the kibbutz, right? In the kibbutz and it's a coexistence festival. Palestinians are going to come from Gaza, Israeli Jews from Nahal Oz and they're going to, what was it? It was like the festival for peace.
AT: The Nahal Oz Peace Festival of 1994. By the way, that's an event that I was not aware of when I began to write the book. I mean, that's part of the research that just…
DS: But it's emblematic.
AT: So in order to understand that event and what it signals, I do have to go back a little bit more back in time, to 1956, to the Dayan speech. Because that's the one event before October 7th that was the most affiliated with Nahal Oz. It's this seminal Zionist speech given at the funeral of a young kibbutz member who was killed by Egyptian soldiers. And Dayan, at the time the most famous general in Israel, comes to the funeral and gives this very dark and pessimistic speech. The Nahal Oz speech, you can read it today. It's a…
DS: You have it in the book.
AT: It's as if it was written yesterday, honestly. And he basically says the Arabs in Gaza will always want to kill us because they want to take revenge for what we did to them in 1948. That's basically the crux of his speech. And the young kibbutzniks of Nahal Oz, the young men and women who had founded this kibbutz in 1953, and when Dayan comes to this funeral and gives the speech, they are 23, 24-year-olds, they hated that speech because they were ardent Zionists and they were willing to fight and die for their country, but they also had hope for peace. And he basically comes and tells them, this man that they admire and that was by the way involved in the very decision to build this ski boots on the border, he tells them, you're never going to have peace here. You will always have to be on alert. You will always have to fight because we took their lands in ‘48. They want to take revenge and that's just the way of the world. And then in 1994, these young men and women, by then they are 70 years old, but still young at heart, suddenly in their kibbutz there's this peace festival a year and a half, no actually just a year after Oslo, a month after the peace agreement with Jordan, and you have buses coming from Gaza, organized by the newly founded Palestinian Authority, and families get off the buses, and they're on the main lawn of like the soccer field of the kibbutz, and people are dancing on the stage. There's a Bedouin dance and then there's the choir from a nearby kibbutz. There's art stalls with Israeli and Palestinian art. There are flags, Israeli flag, PLO flag. Kids are playing soccer together. People are drinking coffee. And this is separated from October 7th by three decades.
DS: And there's nonprofit organizations in Gaza, many operated out of the kibbutzim that work and bring–
AT: Sick people to the hospital.
DS: Palestinians from Gaza.
AT: I write about that in the book as well.
DS: So there's this overall sense that coexistence in some way is possible, is in the air, even after Hamas takes over?
AT: No, that's kind of like the breaking point.
DS: Okay.
AT: Coexistence not with Hamas. But there is this, I think ability, you know, to separate the people from Hamas. You can say okay, Hamas is a terror organization, they want to kill us. We've got no business talking to them. But that doesn't mean every person in Gaza is an enemy. Because for many years, people from Gaza would come to work in the kibbutz. People from Nahal Oz would go into Gaza. You go to restaurants, go to the beach, go shopping. I write about a wedding that took place in the kibbutz in the 1980s where there were guests from Gaza who came to celebrate. So there's this history of a relationship that precedes Hamas. And I think most people see Hamas as an enemy that tragically cut these connections. Because once Hamas takes over Gaza in 2007, there is no more connections between the kibbutz and people on the other side, which is something that for 40 years after 1967, after Israel conquered Gaza, existed. You know, there were good times and bad times. And there was the intifadas and the terror attacks, but then there was the peace festival also. And when Hamas takes over in 2007, it's like, you know, I don't want to be too dramatic, but it's like in, you know, the Churchill speech about the Iron Curtain. Gaza is just lost. There's no more connection.
DS: The connection is lost. But do you or do people from the kibbutz communities in the south believe that the Palestinians on the other side of the fence are prisoners of Hamas effectively? You know, we now know that there are over 6,000 people who came over on October 7th, and some of them were trained combatants—
AT: Terrorists.
DS: Terrorists. And many of them were not.
AT: Came to loot and steal.
DS: Right, and Ronen Bergman has pointed out to me that on the night of October 6th, overnight, because Hamas was so diligent about not using electronic communications, they brought all the Palestinians that were going to participate on October 7th out, like they went door to door to say, okay, it's on, we're doing it. So there were thousands of Palestinians who had to tell their families, I'm going to… So he and I just once did this like math experiment to think, okay, so how many, if you just do the math, 6,000, you just start seeing many of these homes, it's eight or 10 people live in the home, some subset of them know about it. So you're talking about tens of thousands of people. You start to say, is that representative of a radicalized society?
AT: I think that what it shows you is that Hamas, and that's not new to anyone, but it's still significant to point out, Hamas has a lot of support in Gaza. And Hamas won the last election that was held in Gaza. Now, does that mean every person in Gaza is a Hamas supporter? No. You see pretty clearly that even in the election they won, there was a very significant vote against them. It was almost split. They won a lot of seats in the parliament because, that's my previous book, Abu Mazen ran a disastrous campaign with lot of splintering and basically wasted votes. But let's say they have the support of half the population and support to the level not just of voting for them, but of cheering on this kind of thing and even participating in it. Okay. And rooting for it. That still means there's half of the population that's not with them. And this is part of the equation. And when you live so close to Gaza and you have this history of relationship with people, you can see the complexity of that. You can understand that a huge chunk of the 2.2 million in Gaza really support Hamas and are devoted to this antisemitic charter that Hamas has published. And at the same time that there's many, many people there who don't support that and would like to have a different relationship with Israel and would like to go back to the days pre-Hamas where they could work in Israel and Israelis could come into Gaza and there was business cooperation. And if we look at it and say, oh Hamas is just holding all these people as prisoners, that's, you know, we're making our lives too easy. And if we tell ourselves all the Palestinians are Hamas supporters, we're also making our lives too easy.
DS: When I asked you about your decision to move to the kibbutz, you write about it in the book, it was a personal decision, and it was an ideological decision. How has October 7th changed you both personally and also ideologically?
AT: That's such an important question and you know, Dan, I like to say that anybody who experienced this and something in them did not change, I really think should seek some help because this is a life shattering experience. On the personal level, you look at priorities in life a bit differently. You ask yourself what really matters at the end of the day. I have my family. I have my community. My friends. Everything else is secondary. A lot of things are important, but you just stop for a minute and you say, you know, I was close to losing everything on that day. And some of my best friends lost everything on that day. And that gives you pause, and it makes you think. On the political, ideological level, I think I'll answer a broad answer. And I think it maybe will also reflect on me personally, but it's also a larger trend. We're seeing something really interesting in Israel right now politically. We're seeing that there is a shift to the right of public opinion about the conflict. More people are coming to the conclusion that the two-state solution right now is off the table, that we don't see a path to peace in the near future, are adopting more hawkish views on national security, which can be seen as a natural reaction to this kind of event. We're not the first society to shift to the right after being attacked by an enemy. But at the same time in public opinion polling, the right-wing parties that constitute the current government are losing support. They've managed to bounce back from a complete disaster, which is where they were after October 7th to a smaller disaster, but they're still losing badly in all the polls. And that's a weird development because if the public is shifting to the right, why aren't the right-wing parties currently in power gaining? But you know, the opposite is happening. They're losing.
DS: But they could be replaced by other right-wing parties.
AT: And I think that's the issue. I think the issue is that a lot of Israelis are telling themselves, I want someone who's tough and willing to go to war and take tough decisions and be combative and, you know, aggressive. But I also want someone that I can trust, someone responsible, someone who does more and talks less, someone who is not wasting time on all kind of political shticks and internal fights and is more focused on the people really trying to come after us. Someone who is, you know, this is a Hebrew word that’s very hard to translate it to English, but mamlachti, you know, sees the good of the state above their own political interest. And someone who's not extreme, messianic in their worldview, but kind of like, you know, center-right security focused and I've been talking now about a general trend in public opinion, but I think also on a personal level, if you told me tomorrow morning you get Naftali Bennett back and it's a center-right government, there's a left-wing element within it, but it's not with Ben Gvir and Smotrich and all the crazy guys. And there's less speeches and less drama and pathos and big promises and just more work being done quietly. I'm like, all right, where do I sign then? Where do I get this?
DS: Okay. But with Naftali Bennett, let's use him as a proxy here for this conversation.
AT: It doesn't have to be him personally.
DS: I know, but what he represents, because you may trust him and you may say he has high integrity, but I know you and I know your views and we've been in conversation over the years and your views are not Neftali Bennett’s.
AT: True.
DS: So I guess that's my question, is, you know, many Israelis I've spoken to since October 7th, including one I interviewed earlier today for my podcast, said, we've tried everything. You know, we tried Oslo, we tried land for peace, we tried to, you know, have some kind of diplomatic accommodation. That didn't work. We tried disengagement. We just got out of Gaza and said, it's yours.
AT: And Lebanon.
DS: And withdrew from Lebanon. And that's not even a territorial dispute. And we've got Hezbollah now, you know, waging war against us. It's like there's just a sense that…
AT: It’s hopeless.
DS: Yeah. I mean, you know, I was thinking, and you reference this in your book when Sadat was negotiating the Camp David Accords with Menachem Begin. I mean, it's sort of an interesting thing that no one focused on at time, but he didn't fight for Gaza. He's like, hey, we want the Sinai back. Gaza, it's all yours.
AT: He told his team, if Begin wants Gaza so badly, let him have it.
DS: Yeah, yeah, knock yourself out.
AT: This is a separate conversation. I think we need to talk first of all about how we fix Israel, how we get our country back on track, how we reestablish trust between the people and the state and how we have a functioning government because we need to talk about the two-state solution. Is it still viable? What are the alternatives? I don't want us to get to the zero-state solution. I want to save Israel, first of all. And then we have the conversation. After we've stabilized our country and we rise from this disaster and we reestablish trust and we focus back on what matters, then we can also have the conversation. What do we do with millions of Palestinians living around us, within us? Maybe we reach the conclusion that right now there is no solution that we can do. Maybe that's where the conversation ends. It's a really important conversation, but I feel first of all, we are heading in a bad direction that did not start on October 7th but accelerated since October 7th. And we, first of all, have to focus on basically strengthening ourselves.
DS: But there are many actors around the world, including officials in the US government, who are saying, that's very nice, you work on strengthening Israel, but we need to talk about a two-state solution. The Saudis are saying, very nice, you work on strengthening Israel, but we need to talk about a two-state solution. So you don't, I mean, it's not clear that Israel gets to choose the timing and the sequencing of these conversations.
AT: You cannot implement a two-state solution without Israel actively being part of it. You can apply crazy pressure on Israel, and I think that this will not actually lead to that kind of outcome. It may lead to something else. It may lead to Israel, you know, kind of like becoming, you know, like this porcupine. The two-state solution, if we decide that this is the solution that needs to be, is something that I think will take years to build after the trauma of October 7th. And by the way, also on the Palestinian side, I mean, the trauma in Gaza is immense after this war. When I go to visit Nahal Oz, I go about every two weeks, and I see the destruction on the other side of the border, I'm not happy about it. I know some people in Israel are like, yeah, you know, great week. Honestly, I mean, even if on a logical level, I understand that, you know, this was the military retaliation. It's a war and it's terrible to see. It's heartbreaking to see. And so, we are right now two people in trauma and there's a lot of desire for revenge and there's a lot of pain. I don't think we're at a place right now when you can just take, you know, diplomats from both sides…
DS: And start carving up.
AT: Yeah, I think, you know, but I do think that if we have, let's say a more functioning government, we can make some steps to reestablish some kind of trust. Okay. And to lessen the tension, like let’s take one example, okay, which I know the United States has been very concerned about in other countries, this issue of violence against Palestinians by extremist settlers, far-right, in parts of the West Bank. This issue does not require a two-state solution. It just requires Israel to function as a state and to have a police that is willing to take care of this and put an end to it because in a normal country people, should not have the ability to go and harass and attack other people just because they're Jewish or just because they're Palestinian. And this is something that is...
DS: Sure, I agree, but that's not a substitute for...
AT: No, but we're facing a lot of pressure over that.
DS: No, I understand.
AT: And this is not an issue of, okay, let's sit down with…
DS: It’s not like if you just do that, I mean, there are many who are committed to the eradication of Israel. Absent those incidents.
AT: That's true, that's true. But we are now facing pressure from our friends, not from Iran, from our friends, from the UK, the US, Germany, France, on this issue. And we're not solving it, and it's not helping, and it's causing a lot of tension on the ground, you know, the security services are warning that this could ignite. And I mean, it costs us nothing to solve this.
DS: One last issue I want to talk about, which your thinking has evolved on over time, which is the issue of the hostages.
AT: The issue. So on October 7th in our community, seven people were kidnapped into Gaza. The oldest was an 84-year-old woman, Alma Avraham. The youngest, an 8-year-old girl, Ella Elyakim. She was kidnapped together with her sister, Daphna, 15-year-old. Daphna used to babysit my daughters. Of our seven hostages, we received five alive. In November, in that deal orchestrated by President Biden, and that was very important for our community. Honestly, that was the one day since October 7th that we were happy, when we got five of our hostages back alive. Now we still have two friends in the hands of Hamas, Omri Miran and Tsachi Idan. Both of them are in their 40s, fathers of young children. You know that thing when Google Pics shows you the pictures from last year? So recently I had, you know, one year ago, the party that ended the year in my daughter's kindergarten and I'm sitting next to Omri and we're like laughing together and now I'm here and he's in the tunnels of Gaza. We have tried, kind of like what you said about the two-state solution Dan, you know, we tried this, we tried that, it didn't work. You know, there was this line that said, we just need to apply more military pressure and that will get them out. And we have to get to Shifa Hospital. We got there. We have to get to Khan Yunis. We got there. We have to take over the entire Khan Yunis. You know, it's a big city. We did it. We have to get to Rafah. Took us a little time, but we did it. We need to control the Philadelphi…
DS: It took a little time because Israel was pressured not to go into Rafah.
AT: But we did it. We did it. Took us little time. We got there. We took over Philadelphi. We took over this. We took over that. We have to start killing their senior leadership. Sinwar is basically the only one still alive. And during this time, we got seven hostages out alive in military operations. Well, how many did we lose during this period? We're talking about 30, maybe more. People who were kidnapped alive. And they're now dead.
DS: But what you've told me, separate from this conversation, is that you believe that Israel has achieved a security situation in Gaza right now, where the risk is just simply, the risk of some deal is not the risk it was, as far as you were concerned, three months ago, six months ago.
AT: Six months ago, yeah. It was a different picture. I think that we have achieved a lot in this war against Hamas militarily. I'm not sure that there is another way right now to get them out except doing a deal that will include at this point the end of the war. We should not fool ourselves. This idea of like a stage, know, multi-stage deal that after it will resume the fighting. We may have been close to that at some point. We're not there today. The deal that's on the table is a deal that ends the war and brings back the hostages alive. Those that are alive and are still there because we're talking about 100 overall, but the prime minister said this week, we think half of them are still alive. And I don't see the alternative. This idea of the military pressure, even the people who said that, don't believe it anymore because we're now moving military resources from Gaza to Lebanon. That's the truth and we see it. We're moving soldiers and other resources to the northern border. And if we don't make this deal, we could lose all of them. And that's not just a humanitarian issue. It's a major humanitarian issue, but I also see it as a national security issue because what we saw in the previous year that led up to October 7th is how divisions within Israel are used by our enemies and are seen by our enemies as opportunities. There is not going to be an issue that will divide Israeli society more than if we get all those 50 people back in caskets. This is my biggest nightmare. The impact it will have on our society is terrible. It's one of the reasons that Sinwar is not very eager to make a deal because he sees some advantages, but he also needs some things. He wants some things. We know that. And a deal will, it will have a price. This is not going to be an easy deal to stomach for anyone. But I do believe the price of allowing the current situation to continue and basically all these people dying in terrible suffering in the hands of the enemy is a bigger risk to Israel. Risk. I'm not just talking about moral and Jewish values. I'm putting all that aside. It's a national security issue because it will tear apart our society.
DS: You mentioned Lebanon. We asked for people to submit questions, but actually most of the questions that I just scanned deal with what's going on in Lebanon and what's going on in the North. What do you hope the world would understand about what Israel's dealing with in this war of escalation, this escalatory war in the North, that the world does not understand?
AT: That Hezbollah, unlike Hamas, cannot even make the argument that this is related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the occupation and the settlements because...
DS: Or land.
AT: We are not occupying any part of Lebanon, and Hezbollah attacked us unprovoked on October 8th. Now, the fact that we are occupying the West Bank and we have settlements and there's suffering in the West Bank, it doesn't justify anything that was done on October 7th. But you can at least somehow, you know, see some kind of connection that there's a conflict between Israel and the Palestinians and Hamas is a Palestinian organization and we've been fighting. But Hezbollah, I mean, what do want from us? We're not occupying any Lebanese land. We did not attack you on October 7th. We have this business with Hamas. And they decide to throw themselves into the ring and start attacking us. Now I may have reservations about the idea of going now into a full-scale war and intensifying this because of the previous issue we discussed, the hostages. My fear is that we get dragged into half a year of fighting in Lebanon and we don't get a deal and they all die. That's a separate conversation. But in terms of the justification, I mean, listen, they have been attacking us for 11 months with no real reason, with no real reason.
DS: Where do you think this war with Lebanon or on that front, it’s obviously a part of a much larger regional war in the making it feels, but where do you think at least the war on that front is heading?
AT: I think the last week was Israel's most successful week militarily in this conflict with Hezbollah. Militarily, the IDF has just been hammering them. It's, you know, one achievement after the other. They take a lot of the long-range missiles. They kill a lot of the leadership. They blow up the beepers. Well, that wasn't Israel. That's Liechtenstein, I heard. You know, so, but a lot of these things are happening. And that leads to a point that I know people are now asking themselves, can we achieve more or is this the point from which we are beginning to, you know, have a separate problem? Which is they keep firing missiles and rockets, even after everything we've done. And that could lead us to a ground invasion. And a ground invasion is a completely different story. Because Hezbollah, in a way, that's what they're hoping for. To lure Israel into southern Lebanon and have this guerrilla war against us over there. Keep launching rockets from other parts of Lebanon and kill Israeli soldiers. And they will lose many of their own men at the same time, but this is what they were created for, to fight this war. And we could get bogged down there for a very long time, which is what happened to us every previous time we went into Lebanon. And that's a major risk. And again, when I think of it, I keep one eye on Gaza and one eye on the hostages and I'm thinking to myself, is this the best decision to make right now? Or maybe we have an opportunity here to use the momentum and to use Hezbollah's losses to give one more try to the diplomatic route because they may feel a little more urgency right now to do it.
DS: Okay. I want to close with two very short questions. The first is you've told me of the things you've done since October 7th is visiting the families of soldiers who've been killed, were killed on October 7th. And you described to me the loneliness that they feel. The reason I ask that is I think there's a lot of people here who have traveled… Raise your hand if you've traveled to Israel since October 7th. Okay, so there's a lot of people who've been traveling to Israel.
AT: Wow, that’s really heartwarming…
DS: Put your hands up again.
AT: That's really heartwarming to see, I have to say.
DS: I, well, so I was at Kibbutz Nir Oz and you know, Nir Metzger, he was showing me around. His father was killed and his mother was released. I visited him twice and we met a woman who was a hostage. She came out in the same November deal and she had those two little girls, two-year-olds, and when she was taken hostage, they took, they separated the twins, they separated them. They put one girl with a Hamas family and then she was left with one of her girls, and then they were ultimately reunited. They’re released. Her husband is still there. And I said to her when we met her, how can we, like, what can we do now? She’s out obviously and she's now trying to just…
AT: Bring the others out.
DS: And she said, come here. Come here. Of all the things that she said, we were worried that people are going to just move on, that they're just going to forget. And we need people here. Which is why this is so extraordinary. But you talk about the loneliness of the families, which I was shocked because what I hear from family members who go to visit shivas is that these shivas are mob scenes, but you say that's actually not...
AT: It depends which and when and where, but after October 7th, when I started doing this, and I've visited so far more than 30 families of soldiers who died in the battles in and around our kibbutz on October 7th, and then of soldiers who helped save our kibbutz and later died in the fighting in Gaza. In the beginning, it was very lonely because every person who died on October 7th is one of 1,200 people who died on that day. That's something Israel has never dealt with before. And I would go sometimes to these shiva, you know, mourning situations, and you get into a house, there's 10, 15 people there. But I've also had later situations where I came into a house where there were 60 people, 100, but one thing remains the same. You come into the house of a family that, you know, their son or their daughter died around the Nahal Oz area on October 7th or their son was in Nahal Oz and saved lives on October 7th and then died in Gaza. And you say the words, I'm from Kibbutz Nahal Oz. And then there's this silence and the family tells all the other guests, alright thank you, but we need to step aside now with this person because they're from Nahal Oz and we need to talk to them. And it means a lot to the families that somebody from this kibbutz that they helped save or, that they died trying to protect comes to acknowledge and say thank you. It's some of the most powerful moments and most difficult moments I've had since October 7th. But I keep doing it because I know how important it is to these families.
DS: This book, Amir, what I was struck by, I was expecting a lot about the day of October 7th. What I didn't expect was how much history you have in there and how much research and original reporting you have about the history of that part of the country, which I didn't know, I mean, the history of these kibbutzim and…
AT: Can I say one sentence about that?
DS: Yeah.
AT: My editor, Alex Littlefield, in the beginning of the process told me a very important sentence about those chapters in the book about the history. Because I told him how I want to build the structure that for every October 7th chapter is a history chapter. And he said, the history chapters shouldn't feel like you have to eat your vegetables. They have to be so interesting on their own.
DS: And they are.
AT: And that guided me as I wrote them.
DS: I actually knew a lot of your story from that day. But on your story, can you just… we left people with a little bit of a cliffhanger with your father.
AT: We can leave it that way. Better for sales.
DS: All right. Fine. All right. So buy the book. But there's one cliffhanger that I feel like you do need to address, which is what are you going to do next? Not professionally, but you're out of this community. Given its proximity to Gaza, you can't be there now. At some point, God willing, there will be some quiet and security in the South. So what does the Tibon family do?
AT: So right now we're in Kibbutz Mishmar Emek, to which we were evacuated as a community on October 8th and most of the community is still there. We have about 20 people living in Nahal Oz right now and I'm very happy that they're there, but most of the families with the children are not ready yet to go back because the war is still ongoing. And because we don't have the hostages back. And because we started another school year somewhere else and there's a lot of factors going on here. But the plan is to go back. This is our home.
DS: Well, I do try to end these conversations on a hopeful note and I think there's probably no more of a hopeful note than that decision because as you said, at a basic level, we are Zionists.
AT: We want to go back home, and we want our friends with us. That's what we want. Omri and Tsachi, and all the hostages back with us and we are back home. That's the future I want to envision.
DS: Amir Tibon. Please join me in thanking him, and I encourage everyone to read The Gates of Gaza.
AT: Thank you.