Tomorrow marks two years since October 7, 2023. I don’t need to tell you what that date means to Israelis, to Jews around the world, and to anyone who remembers watching in horror as the images and stories unfolded. It was the deadliest day in Jewish history since the Holocaust. A day of unthinkable violence, trauma, and loss. And a day that continues to shape everything in Israeli life and politics, and frankly, in Jewish identity worldwide.
I remember that day and its aftermath vividly. The disbelief. The chaos. The news trickling in slowly, which unbelievably, unimaginably, kept getting worse and worse. Like so many of you, I felt helpless, devastated, and sick to my stomach. Even now, two years later, it is hard to put words to the grief and the rage of that day.
Last year, for the one-year anniversary of October 7, I sat down with my friend and co-host of Wondering Jews, Mijal Bitton, to speak with journalist Amir Tibon. Amir survived the massacre in his kibbutz, Nahal Oz, alongside his family. He later wrote a powerful book about what happened that day: what he saw, what he felt, and how he and his neighbors lived through hell.
That conversation originally aired on the other podcast I host, Wondering Jews, but today, on the two-year anniversary, I wanted to share it here on Unpacking Israeli History. Because 2’s story is not just about one family, one kibbutz, or even one day.
Recently, I’ve been focusing more on the concept of heroes. Young people need heroes to look up to. Not infallible people. And I don’t mean athletes or politicians, though they can be heroes too. But, I mean everyday people, because when young people see that an “everyday person” acted like a hero, it shows them that being a hero is more attainable than imagined.
For me, a hero is someone who takes risks or makes sacrifices for the sake of others, guided by courage and a sense of responsibility beyond themselves. The 7th of October saw tons of tragedy, but it also saw tons of heroism.
In this episode, we talk about one of the heroes of the 7th of October, a man by the name of Noam Tibon, Amir’s father.
So, here it is. My conversation with Mijal Bitton and Amir Tibon.
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Noam: Hey everyone, welcome to Wondering Jews with Mijal and Noam.
Mijal: I’m Mijal.
Noam: And I’m Noam and this podcast is our way of trying to figure out the Jewish world. We don’t have it all figured out, but we’re gonna try to figure out some big items together. That’s what we do on this show.
Noam: Okay, so today we have a very, very special guest. We thought a lot about who to speak to for our episode on the one year anniversary of 10/7, or as it’s called in Israel, 7/10, the 7th of October. And we are so lucky to be speaking to and with Amir Tibon.
Amir: Hi guys, great to be here.
Mijal: Amir, great to be here with you. I’ll just say, Amir, that I follow you on Twitter and I feel like I have been living through October 7th and aftermath, a lot of it reading what you’ve written. Amir Tibon is an award-winning Israeli journalist and the author of a recently published book called The Gates of Gaza. It’s really very freshly recently published. It’s been a few days. And Amir, you’ve emerged as one of the storytellers who are telling the story of what happened in Israel on October 7th, so we look forward to hearing from you.
Amir: Well, my pleasure. Thank you guys so much.
Noam: So now, I want to dive directly in, Amir. There’s so much to talk about over here. Before we get to the 7th of October, before we get to that day, I want you to tell us a little bit about yourself, about your life growing up, how you ended up in Nahal Oz. Just very briefly, just paint us a picture.
Amir: So I grew up in northern Israel, actually. I grew up in a military family. My father served for most of my childhood and teenage years in the Israeli military. And so we were wandering around. Maybe this is something that is connected to the title of your podcast, but we were wandering around like many military families do, from one post to another.
And a lot of it was in the north. My father was in Lebanon. So I grew up right on the Lebanese border in a place not as close to Lebanon as Nahal Oz, my future home, is to Gaza, but also not very far from that standard, like within the line of Hezbollah’s rocket fire. All of my childhood we had incidents like the one I had this evening before talking to you because we’re recording this on a day that Iran fired missiles at Israel and I had to run with my two young daughters to the safe room so I grew up with that kind of thing, actually.
Later, I lived in Tel Aviv. I’m a journalist, I write for Haaretz and I moved to Kibbutz Nahal Oz which is the closest community in Israel to Gaza in 2014, following that year’s Israel-Hamas war. It’s a long story and I write about it in my book, The Gates of Gaza, which was just published by Little Brown and Company in the US. Very briefly, during that summer, Nahal Oz was bombarded heavily by Hamas and suffered a terrible tragedy with the death of a four-year-old child in the community, Daniel Tregerman was his name.
After that happened, a lot of families left the community. And then other people from other parts of Israel, including my wife and I, decided to move there. We were young at the time. We were living in Tel Aviv. And we just made a decision, a combination of Zionist ideals, adventurism and a search for community and belonging and a mission, to be a part of that, we are moving to Nahal Oz. And we did and we ended up getting married there, raising our two daughters there, becoming part of this amazing kibbutz, a great community. And we were there on October 7th. That’s, you know, if I had to summarize it in a minute and a half, that would be my summary.
Mijal: Amir, before we get to October 7th, you said that you had Zionist values and adventure that drew you to Nahal Oz. So what did it symbolize for you? Why did you and your wife decide to move there after such a tragedy?
Amir: We believe in the founding principles of Zionism, which is that there needs to be a Jewish democratic state of Israel. And we believe that in order for this country to continue existing and thriving, we should not only think about existence. Survival is very important, but we also need to thrive and grow as a country.
And in order for all that to happen, we need to have secure borders. Israel is surrounded by enemies of all sorts that would like our country to disappear. And the communities alongside Israel’s borders, communities like those in the north that have been evacuated since October 8 because of Hezbollah’s attacks, and like those along the border with Gaza that were infiltrated and attacked on October 7, are the front lines of this idea that we need to protect the borders of this country.
It’s not a coincidence that the first governments of the state of Israel, led by David Ben-Gurion, invested a lot of resources in these border communities like Nahal Oz. For example, Nahal Oz was founded in 1953 as a direct order from Moshe Dayan, who was at the time the most influential general in Israel. Based on this idea, that there needs to be civilian communities along the borders, that it’s not enough for Israel to have military presence on its borders because militaries can easily be redeployed and structured back. You need to have communities there that will hold these borders and that will send a message to the people on the other side that Israel is here to stay.
Israel is not some temporary military presence like the American military in Vietnam, for example. Israel is a country where people live and raise their children and have communities and work the land. And once you believe in those ideals, you see the importance of stopping a community like Nahal Oz from falling apart in the aftermath of tragedy, which is something that almost happened in 2014.
And I just want to say that as a citizen of Israel, you know, if I look back for a moment and take kind of like a 10,000 feet view, what really happened on October 7 and its aftermath is that all of these border communities like Nahal Oz and like Kiryat Shmona in the north, all of these places that Israel built for decades and invested in and put a lot of effort to make them grow. And people literally put their blood and sweat and tears and dreams into those places. All of those places were then abandoned and some of them destroyed on October 7. And we will have to rebuild them with the same efforts and resources that were invested in them for dozens of years before.
And this is a major issue that we’ve not even started discussing in a society because we’re so busy with the day-to-day But in the big picture, this is what happened on October 7th.
Mijal: So, could you tell us, I know it’s such a, it’s a long and intense story, but could you tell us a little bit about how you and your family or your two children, you know, October 7th, what it was like for you individually?
Noam: Without reliving it too much because it’s a treacherous story that when I read through it, you were a journalist I’d followed for a long time. And then just hearing that story of what you went through made it so real for me, so human for me.
Mijal: Yeah.
Noam: And not that like 1200 Israelis being murdered and 251 being taken hostage, that was real for me also. But the story was…
Amir: But a story, a story sometimes is easier. Yeah, of course. So I’ll tell you something, Noam and Mijal, I really really agree that a story is stronger than a message and we are always as Israelis busy with messaging and hasbara and do we say the right things but once you’re explaining and hasbara literally is to explain you are already losing you’re on the defensive side and the story always beats a message not that messaging is not important but a story explains the message better than the message itself.
And that’s why by the way, I wrote the book telling the story of my family and my community on that day because I believe in the power of a story more than anything else and that all the explanations in the world cannot compete with one story about one family.
In my case I wrote about many families in the kibbutz. But you know, if you want to kind of really really get it to the most filtered level, you know, the story of my two daughters who woke up that morning when gunfire is being fired into our house. And they were in a small room, know, what we call the safe room, the mamad, this little in-house shelter. And it was dark because there was no electricity, there was no food, we couldn’t turn on any lights. We heard the bullets exploding inside our living room. And then we had to tell these two girls, my oldest was three and a half years old at the time and my youngest wasn’t even two years old, that they have to be quiet. I mean, think about children those ages waking up from a scary sound in the dark and their best and most correct instinct would be to start crying, and then on top of all that being told you cannot cry.
And we were like that for 10 hours almost until the first military force arrived in our neighborhood to start rescuing families. And in the book I tell how my father, who is 62 years old and lives in Tel Aviv, has been retired from the military for almost a decade, joined that military force and also arrived to our house. And then I tell about also the next hours after this happened and we were finally able to leave the safe room, our home became somewhat of refuge for neighbors from other homes around us and they all gathered in our house and that’s when we started to learn what happened to other people in our community. A neighbor in the house in front of us was killed while engaging the terrorists, trying to fight them. And another neighbor in the house behind us was murdered because the terrorists had succeeded to break into our house. Overall in my community in Nahal Oz, 15 people were murdered on that day out of a community of 450 people.
Imagine that in your neighborhood or in your town, within one day, 3% of the population was murdered. Because that’s what happened to us. 15 people out of 450, approximately, we lost in one day, 3 % of our population.
Just try to internalize that for a second. Imagine it in your neighborhood, in your small town, where you grew up, in your school, God forbid. And then on top of that, we had seven friends who were kidnapped into Gaza. Five were released in November, thanks to the deal orchestrated by President Biden, for which we will always be grateful, because that deal brought us back alive. Five women and girls from our kibbutz. The oldest, 84 years old. She arrived basically on the verge of death from the tunnels of Gaza and if the deal had been delayed by 24 hours she would have died but she’s alive today thanks to that deal in November and the youngest an eight-year-old girl who was kidnapped together with her 15 year old sister, Daphne and Ella they became quite famous in the beginning of the war. I was giving a lot of interviews talking about the urgent need to bring them back.
So that’s the story. In a nutshell, there’s many, many more details in the book, but that’s kind of like the big picture.
Mijal: Well, I mean, I’m just sitting, you know, it’s every time you hear, you see the human connection to the stories or statistics, you know, it just lands really differently. And you’re reminding us how important it is to not forget the human dimension of it all. I know you said that stories are stronger than messages, but you know, I’m sure you wrote the book, The Gates of Gaza.
Amir: Indeed.
Mijal: Because you wanted to convey certain messages, both to Israeli society, imagine to Jews around the world. Can you tell us a little bit like why, why you wrote the book? What were the messages that you, you hope to convey?
Amir: Yeah, that’s a really important question. So first of all, I really wanted to tell the story. That was my number one goal. Just, I started writing it at the end of November. I wrote it in English because my intention was to tell it to an international audience. Later, I also translated it myself into Hebrew. But the first mission I took upon myself was to write the story in English.
And I wrote it in a way that is different than other books, some of them excellent books that I recommend, but still different than other books about October 7 in that the book does not only happen on October 7. It basically has two timelines that run in parallel to one another. There’s the October 7 timeline in Kibbutz Nahal Oz, which begins at 6.30 a.m. when a barrage of mortars falls on our neighborhood and we have to run to the safe room.
Then there is the historical timeline of Nahal Oz, which I tell separately, and it begins in 1953 when the kibbutz was founded by a group of 60 young men and women on a mission from Moshe Dayan to build this new border community. And so there’s, you know, October 7th history chapter, October 7th chapter, history chapter, until the two timelines meet toward the end of the book when history arrives at October 6th.
And the way I did it, and this connects to your question about messages, Mijal, because if there was one message I wanted to convey is that all of these places that were attacked on October 7, Nahal Oz, Sderot, Ofakim, Be’eri, were not born on October 7. And I fear that October 7 will become the only thing to be affiliated with them in the historical outlook, that 50 years from today, the only thing that somehow will be affiliated with these communities is October 7 and I didn’t want that because all of these places which I believe will be rebuilt and expanded in the future but even just looking from a point of suppose history stopped on October 7 all of these places had a very rich history a fascinating history that tells us a lot about the history of Israel and of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and so that’s why I added these historical chapters, that they tell the history of the kibbutz, and through it, the history of Israel and Gaza and the relationship between our country and this territory entity enclave right next to us.
And I thought it was important to give that context so that we understand that October 7 is part of a longer history of a relationship that had a lot of ups and downs, by the way. I mean, I tell in the book about previous acts of terrorism that happened as early as the 1950s in my kibbutz. And I also tell about Palestinians from Gaza who attended weddings in Nahal Oz and people from Nahal Oz who went to the beaches of Gaza on Saturday morning on bicycles and things that today sound imaginary but they are also part of this history.
Noam: I love that. One of the things, first of all, Amir, I love your father’s name. He’s got a great name. I think he’s got a great first name, I really do.
Amir: Well, I tend to agree, definitely. And you know, my most beloved cousin is Mijal, so you guys are cool. You guys are cool.
Noam: There it is. We’re in good company. That makes me happy. Amir, one of the things that I’ve really enjoyed to do, this is what I like to do as a educator, podcaster. I like to complicate narratives for people. Really, I really like to do that. So when I started following you and then reading what you spoke about, the message that I think that you share is actually complicating the narrative a little bit, meaning you’re not, it doesn’t seem to me to be the case that you present a hasbara one side or the other. It doesn’t seem to me to be the case that the way you talk about Israel is every American Jew, every Australian Jew, every British Jew or non-Jew, we want you to stand with all of Israeli policies. And on the other hand, you’re very clear against the problems of terrorism, coming out of Israel. Maybe that’s something to do with the title of your book with Moshe Dayan’s speech about Roi Rothberg, but what is your message to the English speaking Jewish world about, and maybe beyond the Jewish world, about Israel?
Because there is, for many of us, there is a very strong defensive posture that we feel right now to defend every single thing, every single move, every single moment. Because if we don’t, I’ll tell you what happens. What happens is it feels like everyone else is attacking Israel. So we go into, go into, have to explain, I have to explain, I have to explain. And we do go into Hasbara mode. what, why, it doesn’t seem like that’s what you do. Why?
Amir: So yeah, don’t believe personally in this concept of, let’s say, know, hasbara. I think, again, telling a story from my perspective is the more important thing. And I do have to say that I also don’t share the outlook that everybody is against Israel because at least in the United States, Israel is a very popular country.
And listen, I mean, we’ve been in this war for a year now and Israel has been getting from the United States, basically almost a free hand. There is nothing that Israel wanted to do that it did not eventually do. There was a moment around April, May, when there was an argument about going into Rafah and that was resolved with Israel going into Rafah, taking over Philadelphi and it’s still controlling it right now. So that’s kind of like the framework.
Now I understand there’s antisemitism. I don’t deny it. I’ve experienced it myself. Israel has big problems with younger populations all over the world and also in the United States. The long-term trajectory of American support for Israel is far from guaranteed. And I don’t, you know, underestimate the risks that we are facing. But at the same time, I also think it’s important to remember the good things.
Okay, we were all expecting around the DNC in Chicago a few months ago, total, you know, shutdown of the conference with tens of thousands of antisemitic and anti-Israeli and pro-Hamas demonstrators. And instead, the most memorable moment of that Democratic convention was the speech by the two people I admire most in the entire country right now, Jon and Rachel Goldberg-Polin, who spoke about the need to make a deal to bring back the hostages and received a standing ovation that maybe, maybe Michelle Obama got more applause than they did. Maybe. Okay?
Now in terms of my criticism of the Israeli government, this specific government, I believe that this government failed the most principal commitment of any government to its citizens, which is to protect the people. And on top of that, it then failed to take responsibility for what happened. Our community has been evacuated to the small kibbutz outside Haifa, it’s called Mishmar HaEmek. We’ve been here since October 8th, when the first buses brought our community over here from Nahal Oz. And we emerged like ghosts, you know, after everything we’ve been through. During this entire year, not a single minister from the Netanyahu government bothered to come here and visit us. Some of them inquired if they could come and meet only a small group of selected residents so that they don’t have to face up to the anger and the pain.
And of course we refuse that because if you’re a minister in the government, you want to come here and then put up a photo on your Facebook and your Instagram, I met with the heroes of Nahal Oz, you should be able to stand and hear my neighbor Gali, whose daughter, 18 year old Maayan, was murdered on that day. And then her husband, Tzachi, was kidnapped into Gaza, and he’s still there in the tunnels of Gaza. And if you want to come here, you need to meet my neighbor, who is now actually in reserve service in the north of Israel, Avishai, who has four young children and for the entire year, 2023, was demonstrating against the judicial reform of the government and warning that they are leading us to disaster. And then his family was almost murdered and since October 8th, he’s been in reserve service, Miluim.
We had other people come and visit us here. Naftali Bennett, previous prime minister, he was here on October 15, a week after we arrived. He came here, no fanfare, no cameras, he came to the Shiva of one of my neighbors who was murdered. And he said, even though he hasn’t been in office for a year and half on October 7, he said, I want to apologize on behalf of the state of Israel, which was very powerful. And he said, everything will have to be investigated, all the failures, including things that happened under my watch as prime minister. To me, that’s leadership and it’s lacking right now in this country.
And I say it, and I believe the last thing I want to say: Israel is the insurance policy of every Jew in the world. Today, there are places in the world which are not safe for Jews, and there are places where there is a risk that in the future they will not be safe for Jews. Israel is the insurance policy of every Jew in America and in France and in the UK. And that’s why Jews in the diaspora need to make sure that Israel remains a strong, prosperous and democratic society. One that can actually be a shelter and a plan B for their children and grandchildren.
If Israel becomes poor, weak, undemocratic, extreme, illiberal, you will lose your insurance plan. And that’s why everybody has to really care about what’s happening here in Israel and not just say I support the IDF and I don’t involve myself in the internal questions of the country. So that’s kind of like my spiel in a few words.
Mijal: Well, Amir, I hear in your words an invitation to become more fully stakeholders.
Amir: Yes, I am.
Mijal: And to not sit in the sidelines and to really give everything we have to the project that you and so many others have helped build and defend. You, you spoke before about both thinking about the tragedy that happened in the past and also you spoke about the kibbutz being rebuilt. I’m just curious as we wind down our conversation, American Jews, you know, we are the experience of being a Jew in the world is uneven right now. We are experiencing different challenges and different things in different places. And many of us are trying to figure out how to walk into this day, how to mourn, how to honor, how to also have hope at the same time. And I’m just wondering if you have any words about what you and other Israelis, how from where you’re sitting, what do you hope guides us as American Jews are commemorating October 7th?
Amir: First of all, the American Jewish community has been there for us big time since October 7 and also other diaspora communities. But we have received so much help from North America. It’s astounding, really. I, I mentioned first earlier with the government ministers not showing up. I cannot count how many delegations from North America have shown up, have come to visit us, have come to hear our stories and see with their eyes what happened.
The American Jewish community can be our best messenger in telling the story, not in spreading messages in Hasbara, not in writing viral tweets, all of those things, know, whatever, if you’re into that, have fun. Tell the story. And our brothers and sisters in America, they can be our best allies in doing that. Telling the story, not allowing all the people who deny, minimize, justify or whitewash what happened on October 7 to erase the story, keep telling it as it is.
Mijal: Beautiful. Thank you.
Noam: Well, that’s something that we’re very much so committed to, to telling the story. And Amir, thank you so much for joining us.
Amir: Yeah, I hope that by the time this is live we’ll have a little more quiet here and that we’ll have a Shana Tova and the start of this Shana Tova is a deal to bring back our hostages alive.
Mijal: Amen, may they all come home soon. Thank you, Amir.
Amir: Todah Rabah. Thank you so much guys. Bye bye.
Noam: Thanks, Amir.
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Noam: That was, that was a lot, that was a lot.
Mijal: Yeah, yeah, I’m sitting with it. It’s a lot.
Noam: One of the things that he said that, I mean, I wrote down as he said it, he said, a story is stronger than a message.
Mijal: Yeah. I wrote it down also. Yeah.
Noam: You wrote it down? Okay. I just think it’s… It’s so true.
Mijal: Yeah. You know, you know, no, I mean, you what I’m sitting with? You can hear in a mirror so many different voices that actually I think represent the kibbutzim that were hit so hard on October 7th. These were kibbutzim filled with like old style, like Zionist ideology, center left of, that old kind of like kibbutz image that many of us have. And I heard with him so many different voices and stories, just the horror of what happened, the feeling of being not only attacked by external enemies, but betrayed, right, by your government. And also the determination to say we’re not giving up. We are fighting in multiple fronts, both in terms of telling the stories, in terms of defending, right? He spoke a lot about the importance to have communities around the border.
And also for him, part of the story of October 7th that I just want to acknowledge that sometimes in the States, it’s hard for us to understand this in the way that Israelis think about this. But for him, part of the story of October 7th is about leadership and who’s at the helm of Israel and who he and so many others wish, you know, the kind of leadership they wish they had. So that’s a lot of what I was hearing in his words.
Noam: Yeah, absolutely. Same with me. I think for me, it was this throwback early Zionist of the 1950s that I was imagining. Like an early secular Zionist that maybe I don’t spend enough time with people like that. And I think I should. I’d like to. I’d like to because a lot of people make the argument that Zionism is moving away from that old liberal national liberal perspective. But Amir really speaks to that.
I want to do something. The Gates of Gaza is named for another early throwback secular Zionist from a eulogy that was delivered by Moshe Dayan, who is in the annals of Israeli history, a significant leader, significant military leader. Fascinating parts of his history, some salty parts of his history. But he delivers a really beautiful eulogy. And I did something funny. It was very funny, I think. I asked ChatGPT what you think the message of this is. Okay, I’m going to say it in English. Here it is. So it’s a eulogy that was delivered for Roi, Roi Rotberg, in 1956.
Mijal: And this was like a young man who was part of the security forces.
Noam: Yeah, a young guy, 21 years old. And this is his eulogy. It’s short:
Yesterday with daybreak, Roi was murdered. The quiet of a spring morning blinded him and he did not see the stalkers of his soul on the furrow. Let us not hurl blame at the murderers. Why should we complain of their hatred for us? Eight years have they sat in the refugee camps of Gaza and seen with their own eyes how we have made a homeland of the soil and the villages where they and their forebears once dwelt.
Not from the Arabs of Gaza must we demand the blood of Roi, but from ourselves, how our eyes are closed to the reality of our fate, unwilling to see the destiny of our generation in its full cruelty. Have we forgotten that the small band of youth settled in Nahal Oz carries on its shoulders the heavy gates of Gaza, beyond which hundreds of thousands of eyes and arms huddled together and pray for the onset of our weakness, so that they may tear us to pieces. Has this been forgotten?
For we know that if the hope of our destruction is to perish, we must be morning and evening, armed and ready. A generation of settlement are we, and without the steel helmet and the maw of the cannon, we shall not plant a tree nor build a house. Our children shall not have lives to live if we do not dig shelters, and without the barbed wire fence and the machine gun, we shall not pave a path nor drill for water.
The millions of Jews annihilated without a land peer out at us from the ashes of Israeli history and command us to settle and rebuild the land for our people. But beyond the furrow that marks the border lies a surging sea of hatred and vengeance, yearning for the day that the tranquility blunts our alertness for the day that we heed the ambassadors of conspiring hypocrisy who call for us to lay down our arms. It is to us that the blood of Roi calls. from his shredded body.
Although we have vowed a thousand vows that our blood will never again be shed in vain, yesterday we were once again seduced, brought to listen, to believe. Our reckoning with ourselves we shall make today. We mustn’t flinch from the hatred that accompanies and fills the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who live around us and are waiting for the moment when their hands may claim our blood. We mustn’t avert our eyes, lest our hands be weakened.
That is the decree of our generation. That is the choice of our lives. To be willing and armed, strong and unyielding, lest the sword be knocked from our fists and our lives severed. Roi Rotberg, the thin-blond lad who left Tel Aviv in order to build his home alongside the gates of Gaza, to serve as our wall. Roi, the light in his heart, blinded his eyes and he saw not the flash of the blade. The longing for peace deafened his ears and he heard not the sound of the coiled murderers.
The gates of Gaza were too heavy for his shoulders and they crushed him.
Mijal: That’s really intense, Noam.
Noam: Mijal, before going to ChatGPT, what’s your take? What’s the message?
Mijal: Well, I think Dayan is giving this almost like collectivist existential message to Jews. And don’t forget this is like soon after the Shoah, right after the establishment of the state of Israel. And I think he’s basically saying like, yes, they’re going to hate us. And there’s reasons for that. And it’s almost like we shouldn’t even focus on blaming those enemies for those reasons. But we should just above everything else, watch out against complacency. And don’t we dare lay down our arms and don’t we dare become defenseless again. It’s almost like he’s saying we finally have power and agency. So the danger that we have now is this like naivete or disillusion that we should lay down our guns and our swords.
And there’s something I think very haunting because it’s describing a certain, you know, our friend, Haviv Retig Gur, often says, you know, it’s what it means to be a Jew. You got to fight, right? It’s like what it means to be an Israeli. You gotta fight. There’s no alternative. And if you fool yourself into thinking there is one, then you will suffer and you will have to blame yourself. A lot of that, by the way, is in the words that Amir was sharing. I hear that. What are your thoughts?
Noam: it’s radical. It’s radical in two ways. It’s radical because it’s saying Jews defend yourselves. You have to defend yourselves. That’s what it means to be a Zionist. That’s what it means to be a Jew is it’s you who has to defend yourself. You have to do this.
Second sentence. The Palestinians, the Arabs have a reason to hate us. And let’s acknowledge that. And that both things are true simultaneously. That is something that leads a lot of cognitive dissonance for a lot of us. Like it’s just tough. Because what we do is, well, if I’m here to defend myself, then they shouldn’t want to hurt us. They shouldn’t want to.
And what Dayan seems to be saying is stop focusing on what they should or shouldn’t want. Actually, if you’re them and you see what we’re doing, what we’re building up, would you not also have that in you a little bit? A little bit? But that doesn’t mean that you don’t have to defend yourself. He doesn’t give that easy way out either. You still have to defend yourself. You still have to sacrifice. That’s the radical part of this.
Mijal: Yeah, I know you’re saying it’s radical, but it’s almost like it’s better to look at this in the eye and confront this and then fight than to fool yourself into complacency.
Alright, so let’s finish with the machines. So what did ChatGPT say?
Noam: ChatGPT, back to our friend. So this is what my best friend told me. She said, they said, he said,
Mijal: Ouch. She… Okay.
Noam: there will continue to be bloodshed. He calls for a stoic acceptance of the reality that Israel must continue to defend itself. His eulogy is both a tribute to Roi Rotberg’s sacrifice and a somber reminder that the survival of Israel is inextricably linked with violence and sacrifice. In essence, the speech highlights the dual themes of mourning and a resolve to continue building the nation despite the cost of it.
Mijal: Hmm, that’s pretty good. Stoic inevitability. That’s very good.
Noam: That’s, there you go, artificial intelligence for you.
Mijal: You know, I was listening to a different podcast interview. I do listen to other podcasts occasionally with a good friend, Yossi Klein Halevi, and he was reflecting on seeing bumper stickers around Jerusalem saying, Sipur shelanu yesh sof tov. Our story will have a happy ending, a sort of commitment to that. But maybe, Noam, without pretending to answer the question, I want to read one poem that actually came to mind as Amir was speaking, because I found a lot of hope when Amir was describing being enveloped by love and support from Jews around the world. And that to me has been that and the heroism of so many Israelis to me has been the silver lining of this time and my source of hope and resilience.
So I’m going to read this poem called Ketonet Pasim, by Racheli Moskovitz. Ketonet Pasim in English means a coat of many colors, which is in reference to the multicolored garment that Joseph in Genesis wore, and I’ll read it in Hebrew and English.
My son returned from battle, his duffel bursting
With things that I had not packed for him.
Socks donated by the Jews in Argentina.
A quilted blanket smelling like someone else’s home
A blue towel from a family from the Moshav,
Tzitzit from Jerusalem.
A fleece jacket, gifted by a high-tech company,
A scarf knitted by an elderly lady,
Undershirts purchased by online shoppers,
A sheet that was given to him by a friend,
Gloves bought by teenage girls,
A jacket from the closet of someone who
Came and requested to give.
I spread out all those garments
And weave together a new coat of many colors.
See, Yosef, your brothers were there for you.
So this poem, Noam, is a reference to the story of Joseph when his brothers actually sold him to others, and here it’s the opposite. It’s a mother looking at her son, who himself is risking his life for other Jews, and saying, look, you are surrounded by all of these donations from people and Jews all around the world. And in many ways, it’s a repair, a tikkun of that ancient Joseph story in which not only did we not betray, but we actually did the opposite of that and were there in extraordinary ways.
So hearing that from Amir and just thinking about this day and all of its heaviness and the anguish and the pain, to me, it’s both about mourning, but also about having a renewed commitment to be there for each other, and to continue asking ourselves, do we just show up and give our people the ability to write more of these kinds of poems?
Noam: Beautiful. Stunning.
Mijal: We have listeners from around the world. And it’s always meaningful to me to think that there is this this like invisible network of people who are, you know, in conversation with us and we are in conversations with Jews around the world with Amir story with with Racheli Moskovitz, we’re in conversation with all the people that she describes donating to her son. And I just hope that we take our pain and all of us continue to just build stronger connections.
Noam: Thank you.