Hey! I’m Noam Weissman and you’re listening to Unpacking Israeli History, the podcast that takes a deep dive into some of the most intense, historically fascinating, and often misunderstood events and stories linked to Israeli history.
Okay, yalla, let’s do this.
Welcome to the third and final installment of our three-part series on October 7th. If you haven’t checked out episodes one and two, I highly recommend you do that before diving into this one. But first, a content warning – please use your discretion.
Here’s a quick refresher:
Episode one of this series covered the history of Israel’s relationship to Gaza since 1967. We talked about the birth of Hamas and their takeover of Gaza. We discussed how they quote-unquote “fooled” Israel into a sense of complacency. We explored the discord and dysfunction on the Israeli side of the border throughout 2023, including the looming fear of civil war – yeah, civil war – and political violence. And we faced some hard truths about the overconfidence that left the country open to a massive surprise attack.
And then in episode 2, we covered a single day. October 7th, the single worst day in Israeli history. By a long shot. The Black Saturday, Black Shabbat. It was a very, very difficult episode. It was also among the most meaningful and cathartic things our team has ever done. A powerful expression of our collective grief. I know I play the role of historian on this podcast, but sometimes that role is also important.
Today, we’re moving forward, to focus on the aftermath. Which yes, also contains some grief.
We’ll begin on October 7th, US time. As Israelis were still dazed and terrified, as terrorists were still hiding in border communities, as Hezbollah began sending rockets over the border, as international organizations started promoting anti-Israel quote-unquote “solidarity rallies” and yes, all that aftermath started as Israel was still counting bodies. Still figuring out who was alive, who was a hostage, who had been killed. And it continues into now, October 14th, 2024.
Like I said, this is a history podcast, but today’s focus isn’t history. It’s our present, it’s today… and our unknowable future. It’s our tomorrow. What will tomorrow look like? Which means that some of the things I say today might not be true in a week, in a month, in a year. We’re still in the thick of the chaos, while things change from hour to hour.
But for all my talk about narratives and storytelling, I am not a relativist. I do believe there are objective truths. . We don’t get to decide which facts are true and which aren’t. We only get to decide which facts we care about and how we interpret them. And when we tell stories, we choose who gets focused on and who does not.
I’ve said it a million times, every single one of us has biases, narratives we cling to for comfort and reassurance. I have my own biases. I even talk about them. I acknowledge them, try to reflect on them, and then I try my best to tell a transparent story with that bias in mind. But, there’s one bias I’m so fascinated by, I always have been, I always come back to: it’s confirmation bias. We all have a natural tendency to seek out and interpret information in a way that confirms our existing beliefs.
I’ve seen people from all over the political spectrum dismiss multiple news outlets wholesale because they didn’t agree with the content of the reporting. Very few people actually want to be convinced by the other side. Mostly, we’re looking to bolster our own opinions.
Tim Gilovich is a social psychologist who studies why people believe what they believe. He’s broken down the process of how we form beliefs as follows:
When we want something to be true, we ask ourselves, CAN I believe this? So we look for evidence – no matter how flimsy. Once we find it, we stop digging. That tiny shred of evidence has given us permission to believe what we want, a justification for all of our opinions.
But the process goes the other way, too, and I find this so interesting. Plenty of times, we don’t want to believe something. So we ask, DO I HAVE TO believe it? And then we go hunting for evidence that the claim is wrong. Once again, it just takes the tiniest shred of evidence, no matter how tenuous, to convince us. So we stop looking immediately.
None of this is a criticism of any person or belief, by the way. This is how human brains work. It’s how my brain works. And this is how your brain works too.
But natural doesn’t mean good, doesn’t mean right.This tendency to seek out information that confirms our biases isn’t just a feature of human brains. It’s also a bug.
And that’s why we have to compensate for it, or to guide it.
Because if we only see what we want to see, hear what we want to hear, then we’re not seeing the full truth – just our little corner of it. We choke off other facts, other narratives, other people’s pain.
Our echo chambers are comfortable. But if we aren’t careful, they can become a graveyard: for empathy. For curiosity. For imagination. For solutions.
And that cuts both ways, all ways.
If someone is predisposed to believe that Israel is evil, a colonizing interloper, a thief of life and land, they are not likely to be generous or even honest in interpreting the facts of October 7th. So when Hamas live-streamed, live-streamed, the murder of grandchildren and the abduction of babies, some people found a way to make that footage fit their already-decided narrative – no matter how hard they had to reach.
They’d say, “It was a false flag operation by the IDF. Seriously, look up the Hannibal Directive.”
Or: “Show us the rape kits. Where’s the survivors’ testimony? Expose your deepest pain so the world can judge whether it happened. Whether you deserve your grief.” They might even say, it never even happened.
Obviously, this disgusts me. Pains me. And I reject it completely.
And, on the other side. Yes, on the other side.
Since the seventh of October, I’ve also, I’ve also, heard people minimize, ignore, or justify the suffering of Palestinian civilians. I’ve heard people claim that they deserve what they got because they voted Hamas into power. I’ve heard that there are no innocent civilians, they don’t exist in Gaza, they don’t exist. I’ve heard people calling for the IDF to “glass Gaza” – as in, use such strong bombs that the sands of Gaza turn to glass.
And again, I understand the pain, but I reject that rhetoric and the biases that shape it. I reject the way such sentiments contort the facts to fit a comfortable narrative. Confirmation bias.
But then I take a deep breath. I remember that I believe, truly, that most of these opinions – from all sides – come from ignorance and pain, rather than malice.
And that truly, many people are curious and open-minded and willing to learn. Many people aren’t attached to some calcified narrative that will never, ever change. Those are the people I’m trying to understand, I am trying to talk to.
So, you might hear things in this episode that make you profoundly uncomfortable. In advance, I apologize. But this whole series has been an exercise in being profoundly uncomfortable. This whole year.
And though some forms of discomfort are pointless and harrowing, others can be quite productive. They can help us evolve, grow out of our biases, practice empathy, and look at our problems with creativity and compassion.
So let’s talk through the aftermath of October 7th. Let’s talk about the good stuff (because yes, there is some). And we’ll talk about the bad stuff, the sad stuff, the ugly stuff. The hostages. The war. The international response. The rallies, the protests, the huge question mark around tomorrow.
We’ll acknowledge the way history is being constructed in front of our eyes. And as we bring this series down to a close, we’ll also hope for better days – and for the wisdom to seize opportunities for change.
Let’s begin.
Chapter 1: The Good
As I’ve told you before, I’m a silver linings kind of guy. Here’s me, from a few episodes back:
“I’m a pretty positive person, most of the time. I think. I believe in trying to look on the bright side. I think. In silver linings. In glasses half-full. I think. This way of living isn’t forced. It’s entirely sincere. It’s an effort I try to make every single day.”
OK, true, I did then follow up with a list of my pettiest pet peeves, really really not into the word, “yummy,” but hey. Good intentions, right?
After October 7th, I tried hard to look for silver linings. Not because I necessarily thought they were there. But because if I didn’t see them, I’d go crazy. I’d drown in grief.
But Israelis and Jews around the world made it easy to find those silver linings. My friend, Times of Israel’s senior political analyst Haviv Rettig Gur – who you’ll hear in an upcoming episode of Unpacking Israeli History – talks often about how deeply Palestinians misunderstand Israelis. There’s no better proof of that than the October 7th attack.
For five years, Israel’s neighbors watched Israelis tear each other apart. They watched every failed election, the massive, massive protests in the streets, the personal insults, the violence towards protestors. They predicted that a nation on the brink of civil war would be easy to finish off.
They were wrong. Very wrong.
For Yahya Sinwar, the current head of Hamas, that’s gotta be humiliating. It’s humiliating because he studied Hebrew, studied Israel, he thought he knew the Jewish people, inside and out. But he didn’t predict how quickly the Jewish people, and Israel, would come together in the wake of his attack.
In Episode 1 of this series, we talked about the judicial reform protests that had roiled Israel for nine months. Those protests were led, in part, by an organization called Brothers in Arms, which was made up of army reservists. Here is why this is so incredible. By March of 2023, the organization announced that if the Israeli government continued with its controversial judicial reforms, thousands of reservists would no longer show up to reserve duty. That was a big deal. They refused to give their lives to protect a – quote – “undemocratic” Israel that they no longer recognized.
But on October 7th, the organization’s leaders were the first to mobilize – with or without a call-up notice. Some even got the IDF’s permission to enter closed military zones, crawling with Hamas members, to rescue civilians. By October 8th, Brothers in Arms had transformed into Israel’s largest NGO, matching roughly 15,000 volunteers per day with opportunities to help. Some identified the fallen or the missing. Some matched evacuated residents with new accommodations. Some babysat. Others rescued abandoned or orphaned pets. Others cooked, churning out thousands of meals for soldiers and refugees. One Druze woman even kashered her kitchen – meaning, she turned her restaurant 100% kosher, in order to serve the greatest number of Israelis. From the back of a wig store, a group of Haredi women known as the Iron Sisters dedicated themselves to helping fellow Israeli women – no matter their religious affiliation.
“[We focus on] whatever a woman can give another woman. Babysitting, home visits, comforting mourners, cooking meals, referrals to professional services…
When the war started, we were very divided. But it made such an impact. It’s crazy – Haredim have SUCH a strong desire to enlist in the war effort, to be a part of the Israeli people. I feel like this is my mission, to make these connections [between volunteers and people who need help]”
In the meantime, nearly 400,000 soldiers prepared to go to war. Among them were roughly 4,000 rookies: Haredi men who were so devastated by the attack that they decided to enlist. We’re talking grown men going through basic training with a bunch of 18-year-olds.
Historically, haredim have had a very fraught relationship with the Israel Defense Forces, the IDF (link in the show notes for more on that). Four thousand is a very small number, relative to the wider Haredi population. But this wasn’t about numbers. This was a symbol. A sign that, after everything, the Jewish people are in this together. Israelis are in this together.
But as the war dragged on, the unity of those first stunned months began to fray. Which brings us to Chapter Two of this story.
Chapter Two: The Call Is Coming from Inside the House
On Day One of the war, Israelis had two goals.
Smash Hamas. Get the hostages back.
One hostage is a nightmare scenario. 253 is simply… unimaginable. And yet, here we are, a year later at the time of this recording. Over 100 hostages are still stuck in hell. At least a third are dead. As for the other sixty-something, we just don’t know.
Everyone agrees that the situation is untenable. But Israelis don’t agree about how to change it. And now, as much as I hate to say it, the hostages have become more than just people. They’ve become symbols of the bitter divisions within Israeli society.
It might have started with the death of Yotam Haim.
Yotam was a heavy-metal drummer from Kfar Aza – a neighbor of Yuval Solomon, whose story we told in our last episode. That night, he and his band, Persephor, were supposed to perform at the Sychworld Metal Festival in Tel Aviv. He was annoyed when the rockets started. He didn’t want the concert to be canceled. So as Hamas sent thousands of rockets into Israel, Yotam joked around with his mom over Whatsapp while hiding in his safe room. He posted videos of himself drumming to pass the time.
But by ten AM, his tone had changed. His messages got more serious.
they’re in my house
they’re shooting at me
please
everything is burning
His last message read I’m escaping through the window and they’re going to shoot me
After that: silence.
But Yotam wasn’t dead. He had been taken hostage. That, at least, was a strange comfort to his mother Iris. She watched the footage of his abduction, noted his confident stride even as terrorists guided him into their car. Yotam was strong. He would survive.
For 42 days, Yotam was held with two other Israelis and one Thai national, who was later released in a hostage exchange. He told Yotam’s family what was happening to their son. The way he tried to keep his spirits up, by drumming with his fingers while another hostage sang. The way he tried to pass the time by learning Thai.
The way he was beaten. The way his captors kept their guns trained on him all the time. The suffocating closeness of the tunnels. The lack of air, and food, and room.
And then, the IDF killed the three Hamas members who had been holding Yotam and the other two captives, leaving the hostages on their own. For five days, they moved around, looking for the IDF. Everywhere they went, they left messages. SOS. HELP ME. HOSTAGES HERE. But the IDF was suspicious – and rightfully so. Hamas uses these tactics all the time to lure Israeli soldiers.
On December 15, the three hostages finally found the IDF. Freedom was so close. It was so close.
But the Golani soldiers who had spent the past two months in Gaza were exhausted and battle-hardened. They saw the three men coming with their hands up. They assumed they were terrorists. After all, they were in a particularly dangerous neighborhood. They’d been ordered to shoot any fighting-age man they saw.
So they did. All three hostages were killed.
When the story came out, Israelis were horrified and enraged. They flooded Tel Aviv in protest. One journalist called it a “war crime.” Human rights organizations issued a statement about the IDF’s tactics.
If anyone had a right to scream and rage and wish for the government’s downfall, it was Iris Haim.
But that’s not what she did. Instead, she recorded a voice note and sent it to the soldiers who had shot her son. And… it’s remarkable. Let me read you the translation. (breath)
“Hello, this is Iris Chaim, Yotam’s mother. I wanted to tell you that we love you, we love you very much, and we’re not angry, and we don’t judge you. And what you did, with all the pain and sorrow, what you did was probably the right thing at that moment, and I ask you, I ask you not to hesitate. When you see a terrorist, you need to kill him, and don’t think that you killed a hostage. And when you can, please come to us, we really want to see you, look you in the eyes, and hug you.”
And since that terrible day, she’s repeated that message over and over and over, urging unity, urging the citizens of Israel to love one another.
“After I understood that the soldiers were affected and psychologically wounded by the shooting, I felt a very very strong need to talk to them, to convey our message. That we don’t blame them, and we understand that what’s happening in Gaza is very complex. IDF soldiers aren’t murderers. They’re people who came to save the State of Israel, so I can’t be angry or accuse them. They came with good intentions. And even though I’m devastated, so devastated that my son is not with me, and it hurts more than anything else in the world. My anger won’t bring Yotam back to life.”
Iris Haim is a hero. I don’t know how she has the strength, the empathy, the love to tell the person who accidentally killed her child, “I love you. I want to meet you, to hug you.”
I can barely comprehend that nobility of spirit. We need more of that incredible, superhuman strength.
Because over a year into this war, the question of the hostages is tearing Israel apart. Once again, protestors have mobbed the streets in the hundreds of thousands, demanding Bibi’s resignation, demanding a deal now. Since November, every hostage negotiation has fallen through. Many Israelis blame Bibi.
This is Hagit, a longtime peace activist, talking to my colleague Yirmiyahu about her utter disgust with the Israeli government.
“[The government] should have freed them the day they were abducted instead of starting a war. They could have used a measure of restraint. It was clear, it was clear, that they wouldn’t return them. I don’t have a drop of faith in the people in charge. All they care about is their own political survival.”
As far as I know, Hagit doesn’t have any loved ones in captivity in her own family. Imagine the anguish and desperation of those who do. I understand the hundreds of thousands of Israelis clamoring for a deal. Every time I see footage of the tunnels where we know hostages were held, I feel sick – breathless and dizzy, like I’ll never be able to get enough air. Every time I think of Kfir and Ariel Bibas, experiencing their first and fifth birthdays in the dungeons of Gaza, I want to break down and cry and scream. And when my mind turns to Na’ama, Daniella, Liri, Karina, and Agam – the five tatzpetaniyot of Nahal Oz – it immediately shies away again. I don’t want to open that door. There is nothing good behind it.
So I get the protests for a hostage. I really, really do.
And, I also get the other side. The side that says, no deal. That the only way forward is the total dismantling of Hamas’ infrastructure. That side argues that as long as Hamas has any power, they will continue to attack Israel. To snatch hostages from their beds and their military bases, giving the Jewish state a repeat performance of October 7th.
We explored both sides of this no-win equation just a few months before 10/7, in an unknowingly prescient episode about the fraught calculus of hostage negotiations. Link, as always, in the show notes.
It hurts, it hurts, when both sides are completely right. It hurts to see 101 precious souls become a political football, tossed between two bitterly opposing camps. It hurts to see both sides turn against each other.
And it hurts to see a small but vocal minority of extremists berate the hostage families.
In late September, Liri Albag’s father demonstrated outside a Likud event – Likud being Netanyahu’s party. Liri, if you remember, is one of the five tatzpetaniyot abducted from Nahal Oz. Her family has been through hell.
There is no evidence that Liri is dead. But there is also no evidence that she is alive. That’s precisely why her family is so anguished. They’re completely in the dark.
And this is what devastates me. While the families of Liri and the other missing hostages live in this daily pain, increasingly, they are being harassed by a fringe minority of deeply twisted fellow Israelis. Yes, fellow Israelis.
In late September, Liri Albag’s father, Eli, stood outside Netanyahu’s Likud event with a megaphone, begging, begging the government to do something to release his daughter. In response, someone egged him. As in, threw raw eggs at the anguished father of a teenage hostage.
But that’s nothing compared to the hecklers. One person shouted “you are a cancer.” Another accused the families of being funded by Sinwar himself. Heartbreakingly, Albag told reporters that this is business as usual. That he is frequently the target of threats, harassment, even physical violence by people who believe a hostage deal is a mistake.
I’ve tried, I’ve really tried, to see the perspective of someone so enraged at the hostage family that they could do something like this. Maybe they had a relative murdered by a terrorist released in another hostage deal. Maybe they simply – and very reasonably – want their country to be safe.
I can understand that perspective, I can. But I simply cannot understand their actions. I can’t understand the small minded, narrow-spirited audacity required to throw eggs at a grieving father. I refuse to understand that kind of ugliness. It hurts to watch. It hurts.
After the destruction of the Holy Temples, ordinary Jews tried to find a reason for the calamity. Why? Why would God allow a foreign empire to raze a holy site, the holy site, to pluck Jews from their land and return them to slavery, to so thoroughly crush the spark of rebellion?
The Talmud’s answers are not meant to be historical, but they are tough to read, because they feel so immediate, so raw, so current. It boils down to something pedagogical, “baseless hatred.” In Hebrew, Sinat Chinam. The Temple was as good as gone the moment that Jew turned against Jew.
So yes, I’m afraid of the threat from outside. I see relatives and friends and colleagues get called to the front lines all the time, and all I can do is pray. I refresh the news constantly, my heart jackhammering with every update. And on the eves of two major Jewish holidays – Passover and Rosh Hashanah – I watched Iran fire missiles at Israel with my heart in my mouth.
But I trust in the IDF. I trust in the Iron Dome – and in the iron will of the Jewish people, who have outlived every empire that tried to hurt us and that oppressed us.
But the eggs that targeted Eli Albag? Those scare me far, far more.
The call is coming from inside the house. And if we want the house to keep standing, we have to make a choice. Baseless hatred? Or its only antidote, what Abraham Isaac Kook, the first ever Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of British Mandatory Palestine, called baseless love, ahavat chinam?
To me, it’s never been more obvious. The Jewish people have to love each other – not out of some woo-woo idealistic shtick, but because it’s an imperative. Especially now, the Jewish people should all be looking to Iris Haim as an example of how to love one another even from the depths of our most unimaginable pain.
Which brings me to the next chapter in the story of the aftermath – the opposite of love.
Chapter Three: Globalize the Intifada
In the immediate aftermath of the attack, I found myself grasping to signs of solidarity like a drowning man clings to a raft. Because it became very clear, very quickly that a loud minority of people believed that Israel deserved it. That they deserved it!
That the correct response to the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust was… celebration. Or victim-blaming. Or atrocity denial. Or a toxic cocktail of all of the above.
I’ll never forget the statement from the Democratic Socialists of America, sent out as Hamas was still slaughtering civilians, which read: “Today’s events are a direct result of Israel’s apartheid regime.”
Or BLM Chicago tweeting their solidarity with Hamas, with an image of a man on a paraglider, in case we had doubts as to whose side they were on.
Or an editor at Teen Vogue tweeting “what did you think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.”
I won’t forget the heinous comparisons to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Or the statements of student groups at Harvard and NYU that blamed Israelis for their own murders. I won’t forget the Yale professor who responded to Noa Argamani’s heart wrenching abduction video with the (totally false and deeply troubling) claim that she was an Israeli soldier and thus fair game.
And look. It’s easy to say that all of these people are marginal voices, just sound and fury signifying nothing.
To some extent, that’s true. That’s true. A year into this horrible war, most Americans still support Israel’s right to defend itself. (I’m focusing on America here not just because I’m an American, but because it is home to the world’s second-largest or the largest Jewish community in the world (depending on who’s counting, I don’t know, but it’s large.)
But the fringe is loud, very loud. and the fringe is shameless, very shameless.
Across the world, some of the extreme progressives tore down hostage posters. At Harvard, someone scribbled “Israel did 9/11” on the faces of kidnapped grandparents and babies. In London, someone drew Hitler mustaches on the posters of 3-year-old twins who had been abducted by Hamas. Some people skipped the subtlety and went straight to smearing actual, literal feces on photos of kidnapped kids.
Stickers began to decorate lamp posts and mailboxes, especially around synagogues, with messages like “resist colonial power by any means necessary.” Swastikas started popping up at anti-Israel rallies and college campuses and the Kingston Street Station in Brooklyn, right across the street from the world headquarters of the Chabad Lubavitch movement. All over the world, anti-Jewish hate crimes ticked up, up.
In Tunisia and Armenia and Germany, rioters set fire to historic synagogues. Masked vandals repeatedly firebombed and shot at Jewish schools in Montreal. A mob stormed the airport in a remote province of Russiacalled Dagestan, you’ve never heard of Dagestan before, don’t lie, looking for Jews after a plane touched down from Tel Aviv. As my friend texted right after, “Let’s add Dagestan as a place to never visit.” (If you want to understand Jewish people, just think of that text message.)
In Paris and Berlin, spray-painted Stars of David began to appear on the doors of Jewish residences – a sinister echo of the stars that had marked Jewish businesses during the Third Reich.
And then there were the physical assaults. The attack on a young yeshiva student in Brooklyn, whose assailant yelled Free Palestine before stabbing him with a knife. The Jewish students at the University of Pittsburgh, physically attacked twice by people shouting antisemitic insults. The Yale student stabbed in the eye with a Palestinian flag. The 69-year-old Jewish protestor killed during a pro-Israel demonstration.
And then, of course, there was the so-called tent-ifada. See what they did there? Maybe you remember the two or so months in which the news seemed to focus exclusively on American college campuses. On the quads of America’s finest universities, students set up tent cities “in solidarity with Gaza.” Demonstrators called for “global intifada,” for a free Palestine “from the river to the sea.” At Columbia, those protestors taunted and harassed Jewish students, calling “go back to Poland” and “you have no history.”
As in, go back to the mass grave that swallowed your families, your people. Got it.
Protestors at UCLA set up checkpoints around campus, blocking anyone who identified as a Zionist. (I’ll take this opportunity to remind the you, the listener, that roughly 95% of the Jewish world either lives in Israel or views Israel as central to their identity.) Students at America’s elite universities, which are supposed to be the front lines of intellectual exploration and critical inquiry, blocking access to campus based on personal beliefs and quote-unquote wrongthink.
Meanwhile, Israeli and Jewish academics have found their articles rejected and their work boycotted, while major academic societies vote to condemn Israel. Anonymous social media accounts point out “Zionists” in the arts, so that consumers can make an “informed decision” about whether to listen to their music or see their films or read their books. I want to quickly read to you, by the way, what Zionism is from Yuval Noah Harari, you know the famous atheistic author of Sapiens and Homo Deus.
Let me read to you what Zionism is: Zionism basically says three things that should be uncontroversial. it says that the jews are a nation, not just isolated individuals. There is a jewish people. the second thing zionism says is that, like all other peoples, the jewish people also have a right to self-determination. like the palestinians, like the turks, like the poles. and the third thing it says is that the jews have a deep historical cultural spiritual connection to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, which is a fact. that’s what Zionism is.
A “Zionist,” by the way, doesn’t even have to say anything supporting Israel. Sometimes – as in the case of Gabrielle Zevin, author of the bestselling novel Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow – they just have to be Jews.
I could go on. But honestly, I’m starting to bore myself. It’s boring! Because I’m not interested in the many ugly faces of antisemitism, let other people deal with that. I’m interested in why otherwise reasonable-seeming people fall prey to the toxic sludge of lies, half-truths, misinformation, and conspiracy theories. What makes an anonymous 24-year-old so afraid to come across “Zionist ideas” that she feels compelled to compile a public list of writers to avoid?
What makes someone callous enough to tear down a hostage poster, or claim that the IDF did 10/7?
It’s just so absurd. And so, I don’t blame anyone who looks at this and says they hate us. This is just antisemitism, pure and simple. Plenty of serious people have watched the rise in antisemitism with alarm. The Atlantic lamented that the “golden age of American Jews is ending.” The Free Press ran an article titled “the holiday from history is over.”
But when I sit down to think about it, like really think about it, I think I disagree.
Sure, the Jewish people will always have haters. There have always been far-right slimebags with shaved heads and swastika tattoos. And don’t worry, there have always been far-left loonies. The Palestinian terrorists who murdered 26 Israelis in a Ma’alot high school were committed Marxists. So were the Japanese gunmen who massacred 26 people, most of them Christian tourists, at Israel’s single international airport in 1972.
You’re never going to convince the committed antisemites that – I don’t even know what we should be trying to convince them of. That Jews are human? That’s just not going to happen. That we don’t drink blood, or have space lasers, or control the weather? That there’s no sinister Jewish plot to overthrow the world order?
The hardened antisemites, they’re lost. They’re sad. They’re pathetic.
But most people aren’t hardened antisemites. Most people are just… uninformed. Which makes them a very, very easy target for propagandists.
And since more and more young people are getting their news from social media, rather than actual news sources, they’re particularly susceptible to misinformation.
We’ve talked about this before, in the immediate aftermath of the attack. Here’s what I said on November 7th, 2023. Nearly a year later, and I still believe it, every word.
“Despite their seeming support for Hamas, most young people are very anti-Nazi, right? So we’ll use WWII as an example. Imagine it’s 1945. For forty eight hours straight, U.S. and British air forces pound the German city of Dresden with 4,000 tons of high-explosive bombs. In two days, they kill 25,000 civilians and destroy acres of historically and culturally priceless art and architecture.
Now, imagine the whole thing is uploaded to TikTok. You’re 20 years old, and glued to your phone. You see the crying babies. The maimed civilians. The newly homeless, sifting through the rubble for a sign of life. Share after share after share, the outrage goes viral. How could the Americans do this?! How could they kill so many people in cold blood?! As the 30-second clips make the rounds, no one bothers to ask if they actually show Dresden, or if they’re showing Tokyo, or Yemen, or Syria. (OK, I’m getting a little anachronistic here, but you see my point.)
Okay, yes, sure, some of these videos are mislabeled, from years ago or from hundreds of miles away. But some are real. And you, you’re watching these gut-wrenching images of dead kids, of destroyed houses, of men in tanks with machine guns. And you’re a good person. You’re on the side of the little guy. Of humanity, of kids not dying. And maybe you also don’t know soooo much about this conflict. And I say this without making fun, or being derogatory, but you may have an under-developed, reductive understanding of this entire conflict to begin with. The Israelis are white. The Palestinians are brown. There’s oil in Gaza.
These are outright falsehoods peddled as truth, all manufactured to fit a very simple narrative in line with a specific worldview. And college kids are falling for it hook, line, and sinker. Listen, if you’re at Columbia, or York, or University of Sydney, you’re probably familiar with what your government did to indigenous Americans, or Canadians, or Australians. You know all about the history of slavery and race relations in your home country. You’re ashamed of this profound moral stain on your history, as you should be.
But here’s the fatal flaw. Here’s the thing that makes you extra-susceptible to misinformation. You view every country through that same narrow lens. You have no understanding of the fact that most conflicts can’t be shoehorned into your established narrative”.
So I don’t blame the young people for falling for misinformation. It’s human. It’s normal. And when people are suffering so horribly, it’s a sign of empathy.
You don’t like what Israel is doing?
Hear it from me, the Unpacking Israeli History guy, by all means: protest. That’s your right. It’s your right to call for a ceasefire and the safe return of the hostages. It’s your right to advocate for a peaceful solution that respects everyone’s rights. To chant from the river to the sea, we’ll live side by side in dignity. Those are great.
I just encourage everyone to remember that empathy is not a zero-sum game. Showing empathy for Israelis, trying to learn their narrative, their story, their pain, doesn’t somehow detract from your empathy for Palestinians.
And they deserve our empathy. They do. Because let’s not forget that October 7th wasn’t just the worst day in Israeli history. It also opened a new chapter of misery for Palestinians, something that Hamas leaders were somehow okay with.
Which brings me to Chapter 4 in this story of the aftermath.
Chapter 4: Iron Swords
In the first chapter of the Biblical book of Amos, God threatens to destroy Gaza. He promises the prophet: I will send fire upon the wall of Gaza and it shall devour its fortresses.
It’s as fitting a description as any I’ve seen in the newspaper.
A year after October 7, 2023, Gaza is nearly uninhabitable. The airstrikes have leveled most buildings. Entire streets have caved in on themselves, sinking back into the earth – which is what happens when there’s a massive tunnel buried deep beneath a building’s foundation. Many neighborhoods are now rubble and ash.
Sharif Abu Shanab once lived in a four-story building in Gaza, in the same neighborhood where the three Israeli hostages were accidentally killed by the IDF. When the bombing started, he and his family fled, sleeping on the streets. In July 2024, they returned to see what had become of their home.
It was gone.
Sharif and his family are now homeless, and he doesn’t see a way out of his predicament. “There’s only one solution,” he told an AP journalist. “Hit us with a nuclear bomb and relieve us of this life.”
It’s hard to say that. It’s also deeply, deeply necessary. I don’t have an accurate death toll for Gaza. The so-called Ministry of Health is… Hamas. They don’t differentiate between civilians and combatants, or between fact and fiction. But let’s face it. There is no “good” number for civilian deaths. One is too many. Every person is a universe. In Gaza, thousands of universes are now gone.
Here’s Rachel Goldberg-Polin, from an interview we held over the summer of 2024. Her son, Hersh, was killed by Hamas a month or two after we spoke. But I’m entirely confident that even now, from the depths of her grief, she would still feel the same.
“I don’t think we’ve had one day in 282 days where we don’t say and, and not or. That we are worried about innocent civilians in Gaza, and we’re worried about innocent civilians in Gaza who were dragged there on October 7th. But you can hold two truths. You can be worried. And I think part of being human is being able to be worried about people regardless of what their background is, what brand they are, what texture they are, what color they are. And we are constantly talking about, worrying about, the innocent civilians in Gaza. And, saying, this isn’t a team sport. It shouldn’t be that you’re for this side or this side and you can only root for one side”.
It’s an and. Not an or. Here’s my take. if you’re hardened, if you can’t have the empathy for the Palestinians in Gaza, just think of what Rachel was able to do. Rachel, whose son was taken as a hostage, whose son was murdered in Gaza, by Hamas. It’s an and, not an or.
Empathy is not a zero-sum game. If Rachel can make room to feel the pain of Gazan civilians, the truth is, so can the rest of us. Yes, Gazan civilians streamed into Israel that day. Yes, they cheered and whooped and spat on the tortured bodies of women who had been dragged to Gaza by Hamas. And yes, they held hostages in their apartments.
But that isn’t everyone.
And even if it were, there are rules in this world. Moral ones. Legal ones. Hamas shattered those rules on October 7th, and darn it, they make it really hard to fight back morally. But in the days since, so have some IDF soldiers, most not, but some, particularly when it comes to treatment of Palestinian prisoners.
Deep in the desert, on the border with Gaza, is a detention camp called Sde Teiman. Legally, prisoners can be held in such camps for up to 45 days before they must be transferred to the Israeli prison service. Most citizens have no idea what happens in detention facilities. They might not even know such facilities exist. But in the days after Hamas’ assault, the IDF needed a place to hold and interrogate Palestinians they caught within Israel. Anyone captured inside Israel after the 7th of October was considered “highly dangerous” and kept blindfolded and restrained for days on end.
Reports began to trickle out of horrific abuse of these prisoners, including sexual abuse. Beatings, torture, sleep deprivation, degradation… after 10/7, it seemed nothing was off-limits.
When the news of these abuses broke in Israel, human rights groups petitioned the High Court of Justice to shut down Sde Teiman and other facilities like it. But the High Court declined.
In the meantime, authorities arrested nine reservists on suspicion of abusing prisoners. That same day, far-right groups – including politicians – stormed two of these facilities in protest. The IDF had to be called in to quell the riot.
If you can think of an uglier illustration of the split between Israelis, well, I kind of don’t want to know what it is.
Yes, Hamas’ attack was depraved and inhumane. No, Israel should not respond in kind. Hamas is not Israel’s model for how to respect fellow human beings.
No matter what inhumane things people have done, everyone deserves to be treated with basic human dignity. Everyone.
So sure, put these Hamas guys on trial. Sentence them. Imprison them. Let it be for life. But you gain nothing, NOTHING, by abusing them. That’s not victory. That’s a betrayal of the values and ethics that govern the army and the state.
Now, I promised empathy. So now, I’ll also try to see it from the perspective of the people who stormed these military bases. These are the folks who say that unless Hamas is destroyed, there will be more terror. There will be more kidnappings. And that now is not the time for second guessing the government or the military. That the only way forward is quote-unquote “complete victory.”
Look, “complete victory” has a nice ring to it. And there’s a pleasant simplicity to an “all or nothing” approach. But that simplicity ignores the very real messiness of war – including the possibility that the longer the war rages on, the more likely it is that hostages will die or be killed before they can be released.
I would like to believe that Hamas’ grip on power has weakened to the point that they won’t come back. I’d like to believe that even if Gazans hate Israel, they hate Hamas just as much, if not more. That they understand that eternal war does not serve their cause.
Palestinians and Israelis have no reason, right now, to trust or like each other, of course not. But according to Dr. Khalil Shikaki, founder of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, “a majority of Israeli Jews and a majority of Palestinians” would rather have peace than war. It sounds so basic. Like, duh. Who WOULDN’T rather have peace than war?
Well… Hamas. And Hezbollah. And Iran.
But those groups do not represent the will of the people.
A year in, 61% of Palestinians in Gaza think October 7th was a mistake. And it’s this group who will need to speak up when this war finally ends. Speak up! Who will need to say Enough. I’m not saying that Israelis and Palestinians are ready to broker a lasting peace. That could be years from now, or even decades from now. But I think they’re ready to choose something else. A chance at normalcy. Whatever that looks like.
And that brings us to our final chapter in this long and complex tale.
Chapter 5: Tomorrow
I spent about a week in Israel this past August. It was intense, exhausting, exhilarating, hopeful, depressing, overwhelming, and I’m still processing it. You’re still processing it with me as you listen to me.
I say all the time that I’m an educator, first and foremost. But this was, really, a reporting trip. I spoke with Jews, Arabs, people from all over the political spectrum, religious spectrum, and any other spectrum you could think of.
And every Palestinian I spoke to was open and candid with me, in ways that sometimes hurt to hear. They spoke about not having citizenship or equal rights. About not having any say in their own fate, in their own destiny. About being dependent on Israel for basic necessities like water and electricity. About the humiliation of being treated like a criminal by a teenage soldier at a checkpoint. The lack of options among occupied people.
This is Noor, a West Bank Palestinian who works with Roots, Shorashim, an organization of Israelis and Palestinians who are committed to fostering understanding and achieving peace. And this is what he had to say:
“Like if you come to the checkpoint and let’s say one soldier was rude to you, what would you do? Like a guy my age, if a soldier slapped me, I have two options. Either to just give up on my dignity and just like pretend this didn’t happen, accept it as it is, whatever, and just like go on, or try to do something and I will be shot and I will be called a terrorist and I be called, you know, I wanted to attack or something like this”.
It’s painful to hear. And remember, Noor is an anti-violence, peace activist. It’s also necessary.
I had the privilege to speak with another Palestinian leader, his name is Khaled Abu Awad, this summer when I was in Israel. Khaled is also a Palestinian man from the West Bank, and he is the co-founder of Roots.
As you can imagine, Khaled believes strongly in the cause. If anyone needs to be optimistic about peace, it’s the founder of a peace organization, right? Which is the reason that what he told me shook me. Like, truly shook me.
He told me that October 7th was worse for Palestinians than 1948, than what they call the Nakba. Worse than 1967, what they call the Naksa. Why? Because it killed peace.
Now, you know me. I don’t want to believe that he’s right. Especially because right now, for me, peace feels more important, more necessary than ever. Peace is everything.
But there’s no denying, he has a point.
Because here’s the great and terrible irony: The Israelis killed on October 7ths were Israel’s peacemakers. Some had even moved to these communities specifically to be close to Gaza. They had regular contact with the Palestinian Gazans who came into Israel for work or medical treatment. Many of the residents of the destroyed kibbutzim volunteered with Road to Recovery, an Israeli organization that shuttles Gazans to and from Israeli hospitals.
Canadian-born Vivian Silver was one of those volunteer drivers. Before that, she spent years as Director of the Arab Jewish Center for Empowerment, Equality and Cooperation, and the founder of Women Wage Peace. I don’t need to tell you what those organizations stood for – the names speak for themselves.
Vivian was burned alive in her home in Be’eri on October 7th. Just like Devorah and Shlomo Matias, who helped found the Hagar school in Be’er Sheva, a multilingual school that taught Jews, Christians and Muslims. We told their tragic story in a previous episode. Links in the show notes for more.
These were the people who actually knew Palestinians. Who formed real relationships based on trust. They believed, truly, that most Palestinians just wanted peace and dignity.
For many of them, those beliefs went up in smoke on October 7th.
Some of the released hostages have spoken out about the treatment they endured at the hands of civilians. Mia Schem, who was snatched from the Nova festival, told an Israeli reporter:
“There are no innocent civilians there. Families live under Hamas. From the moment those children are born, they’re brainwashed that Israel is Palestine and they have to hate Jews”.
I don’t know what to say to that. Really, I don’t. What am I going to do, tell a released hostage that despite what she saw and experienced and heard directly – what she lived through – there are still Gazans willing to give peace a chance? I don’t know that. No one does. But I have hope. I do, I have hope. Because people are people, no matter where they are or how they look or what god they pray to. And I know there are still people who are standing up for peace, despite everything.
And standing up for peace means asking yourself hard questions.
Doing hard work.
Here’s Ittay Flescher, a Jewish Israeli educator who works with Seeds for Peace:
“One day this war is going to end in Gaza. And when this war ends, there’s going to be left between the river and the sea, seven million Jews and seven million Arabs. That’s the demographics of this country. So whenever that war ends, and please God may it be soon, we’re going to have to sit and talk about, how do we share this country?”
Ittay, my buddy, my dear friend, that’s not going to be easy. But some Israelis and Palestinians think they may have found a way forward. Here’s Noor again:
“The compromise will – people will start to accept the compromise after they also change their mindset by accepting that the other side is legitimate, the other side is not going away, they are not going to disappear. They are here, they are real, they have a real connection to the land. And I think then we should have a solution that understands and respects both sides’ identities”.
There it is. The power of narrative. If we don’t accept that each side’s narrative is valid, that each side’s identity was shaped by trauma and pain, we’re never going to have peace.
My new friend Samir Sinijwali grew up in Jerusalem. For the first 14 years of his life, he didn’t realize he lived in a country at war.
“Everything I saw in my city was normal. I mean, Haradim going to the Kotel on Shabbat and Christians going to their church on Sunday. We go to pray on Friday. This is our city and it’s normal and everybody, you know, is, is, is, is part of the scene”.
And then the first Intifada broke out, and Samir found himself out in the streets, throwing stones… until Israeli authorities scooped him up. For five years, he sat in prison. A kid, spending his high school years learning Hebrew from prison guards.
He was released into a changed world. He’d entered prison at the height of the First Intifada. He re-entered society as Arafat and Rabin were signing peace agreements.
Samir took a job with Fatah, working with youth. He met with Israelis and Palestinians from across the political spectrum. He jokes that he knows Israelis better than they do, since he actually talks to all of them – regardless of their political camps.
It’s that commitment to dialogue that he believes will save the region.
“If we look at the narrative, there are two fighting narratives, mainly over the land. But if we do a small modification on the narrative, they can become one unifying narrative.
I will say I recognize the historical rights of Jews in this land, the whole land. You have lived here, no doubts in this. And I have no right to ignore or deny your historical rights to this land. But I would like to remind the Jews, the Israelis, that yes, you have historical rights to the land, all the land, including Hebron, Beth-El, wherever you feel connected, you have been here. But you have never been alone. There was always others. And these others are us. I continue to be here. You continue to be here. What changed? Are we fighting on the colors of a flag? On what are we exactly fighting?
This is ours and this is yours. It has been always like this. It will continue always to be like this. Even with these terrible days, the war one day will end. And then the Palestinians and Israelis will find themselves again, 50 -50 percent in the same land. And we need to find a way to coexist.”
Obviously, it’s not going to be easy. Change never is. It requires us to look deep inside ourselves, sternly, firmly, not letting ourselves off the hook, and asking: “what can we do to change things?
October 7th changed everything for Israelis and Palestinians and Jews across the world. It upended the balance of power in the Middle East. It destroyed our illusions. It broke our hearts.
But sometimes, sometimes, the old world has to burn before the new one can emerge. Sometimes, destruction can be fertile soil for opportunity. I want so, so badly for that to be true.
A wise man once said if you will it, it is no dream. That’s Herzl, by the way. We’ve survived the tough moments of our history where we thought we’d disappear. The centuries in which we were nothing more than unwelcome guests in other people’s lands, occasionally tolerated but always Other, with a capital O, always suspect, always outside. Instead of giving up, we dreamed. We wrote poems about our return to Zion. We predicted that one day, our mouths would fill with laughter, our tongues with song.
And we were right. We were right. So who am I to laugh in the face of history? Who am I to say there is no hope?
There is hope. Don’t laugh at me, there is hope. We just have to reach out and grasp it.
So that’s the end of our LONG, INTENSE three-part series on the 7th of October, and here are your five fast facts, I know you’ve been waiting for them.
- October 7th was the worst day in Israeli history, shattering illusions about safety, security, and peace. By its end, 1200 people were murdered and another 253 taken hostage. As of this recording, 101 of those hostages are still in Gaza, though many are no longer alive.
- For two years, Hamas deceived Israel into believing it just wanted better economic conditions. Israelis were dealing with significant social upheaval and were all too happy to accept this fiction.
- The 6000 or so Palestinians who streamed into Israel on the 7th of October were diverse. Some committed atrocities that I can’t repeat here without a trigger warning, and so I won’t. Others came merely to loot and celebrate what they saw as Israel’s downfall.
- In the aftermath of that horrible day, Israelis came together. But the initial unity has worn off as the war drags on, exposing significant rifts in Israeli society.
- For the past year, Israel has been at war. Tens of thousands of people, including civilians and children, have been killed. Antisemitism has spiked worldwide. And yet, and yet, hope remains.
Those are your five fast facts. Well, relatively fast. But here’s one enduring lesson as I see it. We should get a shirt that says “One enduring lesson.”
I’ve quoted before from Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, obm, so the following quote, from his book To Heal A Fractured World might be familiar to you.
“Optimism and hope are not the same. Optimism is the belief that the world is changing for the better; hope is the belief that, together, we can make the world better. Optimism is a passive virtue, hope an active one. It needs no courage to be an optimist, but it takes a great deal of courage to hope. The Hebrew Bible is not an optimistic book. It is, however, one of the great literatures of hope.”
It is no wonder, then, that the anthem of the Jewish State is Hatikvah, The Hope. It won over the Revisionist Zionist anthem of Shir Beitar, with its focus on battle and war. It defeated Shir Ha’emunah, the song of faith, which the religious Zionists had lobbied for.
Why? Why did a nine-stanza poem by Naftali Hertz Imber win out over songs of battle and faith? Well, to start, it was dramatically shortened, so people could remember it more easily. That helps. But it was also deeply, deeply rooted in a Jewish tradition of hoping – where to hope is a synonym, a synonym for to do. To act. To change the world. As they say, hope is a verb.
You don’t need to be a person of religious faith to have hope. You don’t need to be a person who wants to fight with a sword and a shield. You just need to be a person who looks back at Jewish tradition, at the Jewish story, even if you’re not Jewish, at the long arc of Jewish history, and understands why we are still here.
And we are still here. Yes, we’re living in chaos.
In a world that feels new and uncertain.
But it isn’t new. We just don’t have our blinders on anymore.
We see the challenges clearly.
And we know, we know, what we have to do to meet them.
We have to empower our young people to HOPE. And that means we have to give them the education they need and deserve. That means we tell stories. Real ones, true ones, that include the good-the bad-and-the ugly. Young people don’t need us to explain our message or talk down to them, to advocate, to indoctrinate, to give talking points. Enough of that! Enough.
They need to hear narratives. They need to hear stories.
And there is such power in the Jewish story. There is power in surviving for four thousand years. In being too darn stubborn to go away. In being too in love with life to stop clinging – even when it’s the easiest thing in the world.
But to access that power, we need to know our story. We need to tell it – to ourselves, to our children, to our community, to whomever needs to hear it, in whatever language meets the current moment.
The ancient Jewish sages tell us, It is not on you to finish the task – but it is also not for you to walk away from it. This is our task, this rebuilding of our shattered world through empathy, through stories, through narratives that tell the truth, the complicated truth.
This is our moment to decide: will we walk away? Or will we meet this challenge head-on?