“The heroism here is not triumphant. It is torn from the absurd.”
Amir Tibon takes a different approach. In The gates of Gaza: a story of betrayallit tells a story that is both broader and more finely detailed. A journalist and editor of Haaretzhe powerfully tells the gripping story of a family on a kibbutz — his own — interweaving it with the broader story that brought them to that October morning.
This kibbutz, Nahal Oz, on the border with Gaza, was founded in the early days of the Israeli state. It has become, over time, a strange Israeli Eden: a tight-knit community with echoes of democratic socialism, set in a beautiful setting with a rich cultural life, regularly under fire from mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. These became a daily reality after Israel’s clumsy withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, facilitated by American errors of judgment and the ineffectiveness of the Palestinian Authority, which ultimately led to Hamas’ takeover two years later. late.
A crucial point of Tibon’s account, and one often lost in standard press accounts, is the extent to which the communities bordering Gaza were populated by left-wing Israelis, who, in seeking affordable housing, chose to live in the distant but indisputably sovereign periphery of the country — rather than in the occupied West Bank. They saw themselves as, and often actually were, descendants of the left-labor ideals of Ben-Gurion’s era. Many settled near Gaza precisely to foster Israeli-Palestinian coexistence and help local Palestinians as best they could, while being committed Zionists fulfilling their democratic principles.
Tibon very well exemplifies this ethos of left-Zionist solidarity, which he learned from his father, a retired major general. Like so many others, Father Tibon grabbed his pistol on October 7 and literally fought south, standing alongside soldiers decades younger than him. Unlike many others, he succeeded in his mission, saving his son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren from their dark, suffocating shelter.
The betrayal of Tibon’s title is that of the Israeli government, and in particular Benjamin Netanyahu, and Tibon’s criticism of Netanyahu runs as deep as the commitment to the Jewish and democratic ethos on which he based his life. Netanyahu has built his career on a mix of uncompromising nationalism expressed in eloquent cadences and brilliant, if infuriating, tactical maneuvers. Both aim for the same goal: guaranteeing Israel’s immediate physical and economic security while postponing strategic decisions indefinitely. One such maneuver was to facilitate the abundant flow of Qatari money to Hamas, so that it would never need to cede control of Gaza to its internationally recognized rivals in the Palestinian Authority.
Of course, Netanyahu was not alone here. Many Israelis became convinced that Gaza could be contained. As we see now, the price of confrontation was simply too terrible to contemplate.
And, in fact, even if the Hamas attacks had never happened, 2023 would still have made Israeli history for the huge anti-Netanyahu protests that shook the country last year in response to his agenda a look back at Israeli justice. These rallies galvanized Israeli civil society in a way not seen in decades. And it was, in part, these same protest movements that pivoted and turned toward each other in those horrible post-October 7 days.
The week before the attack, we held dialogue sessions across the country, making an effort to cross Israel’s bitter political divide. One thing that clearly emerged from these conversations was enormous solidarity at the grassroots, thinning as we moved further away from concrete issues, and the closer we approached the wide ideological divides that divide society. No wonder the philosopher Hanoch Ben-Pazi claimed that there now exists a “truly incomprehensible” gap between Israelis and their leaders.
As the war drags on, much of the intense solidarity of its early days has decreased. A very real point of tension is whether the ultimate goal of war is to crush terrorists or to bring captive hostages and displaced communities home. Another, perhaps inevitable, is what you think of Netanyahu. Much of the Israeli public wants him gone. Yet his intransigent coalition partners know they have nowhere else to go, and his partisan supporters verbally and sometimes physically attack his critics. The miracle of Israeli solidarity, then, is put to the test again.
Well, not even One Day in The Gates do not speak of solidarity as such, the idea permeates the pages of both. What, then, makes it happen and keeps it alive? The basic structures of daily life are surely important here: public schools; state-funded daycare centers and other family-friendly policies; national health and social insurance; and, of course, compulsory military service with reserve duty thereafter. Although Israel is a much more privatized society than before, in short, much of the strong collectivist ethos of its early decades endures.
Yet, more than socio-economic, Israel is a state with strong networks of culture, attachment to place and family, and the Hebrew language, whose revival as a living and spoken language is in itself a kind of miracle.
Judaism, of course, is not the only faith here. Nor is Judaism the only ethnicity. Yet a striking feature of the civil response to October 7 was the engagement of Israel’s Arab citizens, Christian and Muslim. Their own entanglements with Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank further complicate their lives. As Rima Farah, a scholar of Israeli Christian history, has pointed out, these particular dilemmas offer the sharpest test of whether Israeliness, as opposed to Judaism, can truly be a national identity.
Here as elsewhere, and despite its uniqueness, Israel is also a testing ground for key issues of democracy. Israel is not the apartheid state of the caricature — yet fear that occupation of the West Bank will make it one is largely what motivates Tibon and other liberal activists. Resolution of this occupation now seems more distant than ever, and lazy talk of “two states” is just wishful thinking. Yet a meaningful path away from the endless crushing of military oppression and settler expropriation is essential for a decent future. And as October 7 suggested, if only for a moment, that future rests in part on solidarity, on people rushing to help their fellow human beings without stopping to think about which party they voted for. or what language they speak at home. More than that, it allows us to honestly question ourselves and each other: Where have we gone wrong?
Once religion ceases to be political, it can become a means of grounding our moral bonds and responsibilities to the past, the future, and to each other. Fortunately, for many Israelis, their faith is not simply a matter of spiritual dispensation — but rather a means of anchoring one’s own particular identity in something greater, something that endures after we are gone. In this way, it is reminiscent of the caressing solidarity of the family. At the same time, and as Levinas and Buber clearly understood, religion hangs an eternal question mark over all our certainties and all our worldly ambitions, warning us against excessive pride and undermining the foundations of our cruelty. . It makes us both deeply particular and deeply universal, totally enclosed in our particular circumstances and yet intertwined with all human beings everywhere, sharing as we do this distinctly human blend of resounding power and utter vulnerability. It makes possible a kind of solidarity in which we can offer help to others beyond ourselves, without losing ourselves in the process.
That balance is still there, but it fades and contorts without a welcoming echo. Solidarity is not all gentleness and light. There are solidarities of hatred, enmity, fanaticism and violence, as the last year has terribly shown. But this careful knowledge can also protect us from ourselves, guiding us away from the seductive lies of “leadership” and toward the tangible, life-giving work of responsibility.
