Most people’s lives are pretty mundane.
That’s not a criticism. I like mundane. There’s a reason that “may you live in interesting times” is considered a curse.
But no matter how boring, every life contains those occasional flashbulb moments that change everything. That divide your story into Before and After, whether for good or for bad.
For me, it was my wedding day, which was definitely for good. My wedding day split my story into Before Raizie and With Raizie. I’m now living in year 15 DUB-R, meaning, with Raizie. I can’t imagine, and wouldn’t want, a different life.
Most of the time, those pivotal moments are private and small. A wedding, a birth, a death, a divorce. Everything in your life has changed, and yet the world continues spinning obliviously on.
But sometimes, those pivotal moments knock the entire globe off its comfortable axis. Sometimes, they change everything.
The assassination of an Austro-Hungarian Archduke. Covid 19. 9/11.
I was 16 when the planes hit the Twin Towers. And as I sat in Dr. Chase’s history class, watching the iconic Manhattan skyline burn on a boxy TV, I learned the truth about being an adult.
In times of upheaval, there are no adults. Not parents, not teachers, not the president of the United States. We were all scrambling to figure out how this happened, what it meant, what should be done about it. When the entire world is upended, we’re all flying blind.
That’s how I felt last October. We’d all heard in synagogue that something was going on in Israel. People were throwing around impossible numbers. 40 dead. 100. 150. 300?! How could this be?
But when we turned on our phones, 24 hours after we first heard rumblings, it was so, so much worse. As the Israeli writer Yair Agmon puts it, quote:
“In one moment in the early morning, we all turned from homeowners to refugees. From Israelis to Jews being pursued. More than 1200 were murdered on this day. 260 people were kidnapped. Many thousands were injured. Millions hid in shelters. All of this happened during one day in October. Such a sad day. In less than 24 hours, the State of Israel changed beyond recognition.”
And now, we’re coming up on a year since that Black Shabbat. Sometimes, I feel like I’ve lived a century since that day. Other times, I’m transported right back to the night of October 8th, staring in shock and horror at my phone, knowing nothing.
Except one undeniable truth. The world we once knew is gone, it’s over, it’s a different world. And with that knowledge comes a terrifying and hopeful corollary. This is our chance to build a new one.
I say terrifying because it’s not easy to build a new world. And it’s even harder to rebuild one on the ruins of the old. There’s a rabbi, his name was Norman Lamm, and he said something incredible:
“The decision to rebuild — that is far more difficult. To approach a rubble and try to make of it a habitable home; patiently to pick up the pieces of the past and paste them together; to take the tattered ruins of a former majesty and somehow restore them; to patch together what time and circumstances have ravaged – for this, the masses have little enthusiasm, less spirit, and no patience.”
Rebuilding is really hard. But there’s another factor that complicates our efforts to rebuild. And that is: making sure we learn from the past. But how do we do that when the past isn’t past? How do we do that when we’re still living through the aftermath of the Black Saturday, the Black Shabbat, when war is still raging, hostages are still underground, and everyone seems to be pushed further and further towards their respective poles?
How do we learn from the past when history is still unfolding all around us? How do we rebuild in the midst of this chaos?
I don’t know the answer. No one does. But I think I see a piece of one. Just the tiniest corner of an answer, the first baby step in a long and impossible journey.
And that is: understanding the past as best we can. Not retreating to our comfortable old narratives. Not barricading ourselves in our echo chambers, that’s so boring. But critically examining ourselves and our history from as many angles as we can.
We won’t do it perfectly. That’s just too hard. As Israeli intellectual Yuval Noah Harari points out, quote:
History isn’t a single narrative, but thousands of alternative narratives. Whenever we choose to tell one, we are also choosing to silence others.
I know that any story we tell, any insights we have, will always be incomplete. Still, in this series, as in this podcast in general, we’ve tried our best to include as many narratives and perspectives as possible. Some contradict others. Some are difficult to hear, that’s what’s important about this. I don’t agree with all of them, and you don’t have to, either.
That doesn’t mean we’ll give air to the many crackpot opinions that have cropped up like toxic mushrooms in the wake of the massacre. We have to resist any narrative that seems too easy or too black-and-white. And that means confronting a lifetime of painful truths.
And that’s what this series is all about.
This week, in Part 1, we’ll examine the factors that led us up to this moment. We’ll explore life in Gaza, pre-1967. We’ll trace the rise of Hamas. We’ll visit the Israeli kibbutzim, plural for kibbutz, on the southern border and explain the bitter divisions of Israeli society. We’ll close on the night of October 6th, the last golden minutes of the Before.
In Part 2, we’ll tell the story of the Black Shabbat in detail. It’s going to be difficult. It’s also entirely necessary, for reasons we’ll explain in the episode itself.
Finally, in Part 3, we’ll cover the aftermath. The war. The protests. The media. The negotiations. The echo chambers so many of us have retreated to. We’ll do our best to make sense of a situation that is still unfolding around us.
All three of these episodes illustrate something crucial about the process of rebuilding. We can’t build a future without knowing our past. But we also can’t remain frozen in the stubborn poses that brought us here.
So. Welcome to the hardest story I’ve ever had to tell. It’s a privilege and an honor and a massive responsibility. I can only hope we do it justice.
Episode 1: Before
Part One: Gaza
“It’s an absolutely lousy feeling being a conquering army.”
I don’t know the full name of the man who said that. All I know is that in 1967, he was 29 when he said it, and entering Gaza as an Israeli soldier. After the war, he’d be decorated for his bravery. But when he speaks about his experience to Israeli journalists, he doesn’t sound heroic. He just sounds kind of exhausted.
As you might remember from our miniseries on the Six Day War, in the summer of 1967, Israel was preparing for its own annihilation. Ordinary citizens filled sandbags. Dug graves. Cracked dark jokes.
But you know the story, that’s not what happened. As you know, in under a week, under a week!, Israel routed Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, quadrupling its own territory in the process.
Including Gaza.
Gaza had been in Egyptian hands since 1948, when the British pulled out of the region. Under Egyptian rule, Palestinians lived in squalid refugee camps, stateless citizens of a country that had never existed. Egypt didn’t offer citizenship, or much in the way of prospects.
And then came June of 1967. And Gazans went from being stateless under Egyptian control to stateless under the Israelis.
The Israelis hadn’t expected to be in charge of Gaza for long. They assumed they would exchange the land they had conquered for a peace deal with their neighbors. Instead, the Arab League decreed what we call the “three nos”: no peace with Israel. No negotiation with Israel. And no recognition of Israel.
So as the 60s gave way to the 70s, then the 80s, nothing moved forward. Israelis had no peace. Palestinians had no state. The refugee camps grew into sprawling, increasingly crowded towns, where Palestinians did their best to make a life.
This is Nahed el-Ghoul. In 2018, he worked as a water supplier in Gaza. He told Al-Jazeera:
“The best period of our lives was when we used to work in Israel, 25 or 30 years ago. We were happy, we used to go to Israel or Jordan or Egypt – the roads were open. We lived well, there was money. Today, there’s no money. I used to work – how did I build my home? From working in Israel. I used to get 100-150 shekel a day. Today there’s nothing. We had a good life. The roads were open. Today, everything is closed”.
I don’t blame el-Ghoul for being wistful. At the time he’s talking about, Gaza boasted one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. Hard to imagine that now, right?
And look, I’m not trying to romanticize life under occupation. Not what I’m trying to do. Not the Egyptian occupation of 1948 to 1967, and not the Israeli occupation of 1967 to 2005. I just want to illustrate that even though we’ve never had peace, or a Palestinian state, things were not always as bad as they are now. They were not.
This is “Khalil.” That’s not his real name, of course. It’s a pseudonym to protect him from Hamas. In 2022, he gave an interview to the Center for Peace Communications for their series Whispered in Gaza. And what he told them lives rent-free in my mind.
“Our grandparents used to tell us, ‘When you work with Israelis, and they trust you, you can live the life you’ve always wished for, a very decent life.”
They told me that back in the day, we used to attend their celebrations, and they would come to ours. It was a normal thing.
Imagine that for a minute. Imagine a Jewish Israeli just… going to Gaza on a random Friday because they could. Or a Gazan visiting a friend in Tel Aviv.
That happened. We all need to know that. That happened.
Most of the time, the Jews who came to Gaza would drive back home to Israel at the end of the day. But some Israelis stayed. Land was cheap.
Plus, many Israelis were motivated by religious or political conviction. In their minds, Israel had won Gaza in a defensive war. So it was theirs. Wasn’t it?
“There is no doubt in my mind that one of the reasons that I arrived specifically here was that there was a sense of dispute, there was a battle, to gain control over this geographical area. And despite all of the terrorists activities, the population is growing and growing and growing…”
That’s Sodi Namir, a doctor who lived in one of the Jewish communities in Gaza. He came to the area because he felt that maintaining a Jewish presence in Gaza was important, from both a spiritual and a security standpoint.
From their cramped and squalid camps, Gaza’s Palestinians watched beautiful, manicured Jewish communities spring up, seemingly overnight. And don’t get me wrong, many beautiful places in Gaza. Always have been. But their resentment boiled.
This is Dor Shachar. He has a fascinating story — legit, it’s insane and it’s amazing — but that’s for another time. For our purposes, here’s what you need to know. Dor Shachar’s name wasn’t always Dor. He was born Ayman Abu Soboh in Khan Younis, Gaza. A refugee. A Muslim. From the moment he was old enough to understand stories, he was told about the Jews who had stolen everything from his family.
“When I was three years old, my grandfather sat down and said to me, sit down. So I sat down. He told me a story about Jaffa. He said part of it was his land, and the Jews took it from him. In fact, all of Israel is our land. Every place we used to live, the Jews took. When you grow up, you’ll murder them and return the land, because that’s your inheritance.”
I’m not saying that every Palestinian child was educated to hate, I’m not saying that. Is the education a problem there? Yes, it’s a problem there. And I’m not saying that they were wrong to be angry. I get why they were angry! They had never known real freedom. Not under the Ottomans. Not under the British. Not under the Egyptians. And now, not under Israel.
By 1987, two decades after Israel had won control of the Gaza Strip, tensions were at an all-time high. Like, insanely high. The smallest spark would ignite the whole region, and that’s what happened. That spark was a car accident. An Israeli truck collided with a Palestinian car at an intersection in Gaza, killing four Palestinian laborers.
The Palestinians’ rage boiled over.
Palestinians had been living under a military occupation of another people for decades now. All the while, Israel was thriving right next door, on land that Palestinians saw as theirs, that’s how they saw it.
From their point of view, Israel had stolen their future, that’s how they saw it. So to them, the accident that killed four laborers wasn’t an accident at all – it was just further proof that the Israelis wanted them gone.
So they didn’t merely mourn the sudden and tragic deaths of four Palestinian laborers, that’s not what happened. They started an uprising. What’s this uprising? Yeah, you know what it’s called: the First Intifada had just begun.
I won’t go into detail about it, because we already did an episode on it that’s linked for you in the show notes. So check it out. I also won’t go into detail about the so-called resistance group that sprung up in the chaos of that bad time, really bad time, of that horrific time. We’ve already talked at length about Hamas, and there are links in the show notes if you want to know more about them. For our purposes, the most important thing for you to know about Hamas is this: Israel misjudged them. Like, totally.
Hamas’ founder and spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, was a half-blind quadriplegic man who had spent years building up Gaza’s social fabric, establishing welfare programs, health clinics, and mosques.
So while the IDF kept an eye on him, they didn’t consider him a threat. Not compared to the secular nationalists led by Yasser Arafat. But most of the Israeli intelligence establishment didn’t realize that behind the scenes, he wasn’t just building soup kitchens. He was building a movement, recruiting thousands of Palestinians to a life of armed struggle, as they saw it.
But Hamas’ aims became clear soon enough. Even as Israel held peace talks with Palestinian leaders through the 1990s, Hamas kept up its campaign of terror. Their greatest weapon seemed to be their willingness to die.
Article 8 of their original charter, here it is, reading it to you straight, here it is:
Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.
Got it. In other words, Hamas established a new paradigm that Israelis had to learn to confront. Palestinian life was great. But it was nowhere near as great as Palestinian death.
This Is Ghazi Hamad, a leader of Hamas’ political bureau. In late October of 2023, he told a Lebanese journalist, quote:
“Will we have to pay a price? Yes, and we are ready to pay it. We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.”
I should mention that Hamad left Gaza for Lebanon shortly before October 7th. I guess he wasn’t willing to pay that price himself. That was for other people.
Ordinary Israelis have never had trouble taking Hamas at their word. And yet, a terrifying percentage of the West seems to have forgotten something really important Maya Angelou said, and here was her advice:
“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
Hamas has been showing the world, through words and actions, exactly who they are since 1987. They did their best to destroy any hint of peace, launching a string of attacks as Israel was negotiating with the PA. The final nail in the coffin of the peace process was the Second Intifada, much, much more heinous than the First Intifada. Much different.
Over the course of five years, Palestinian terrorists murdered over 1,000 Israelis. Meanwhile, the Israeli army cracked down. The numbers vary, but by 2005, between three and five thousand Palestinians were killed in the fighting. At least a thousand were civilians, according to B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights NGO.
But Israel simply doesn’t have enough people to sustain an active war for very long. So the Jewish state turned to preventive measures: curfews. Checkpoints. High-tech security barriers around the West Bank and Gaza.
“Security barrier,” by the way, is what I call the fence slash wall that separates Israel from the Palestinian Territories. Many people call it a “separation wall,” that’s another way to describe that. Some like the evocative “apartheid wall.”
I recognize that it is, technically, a separation barrier between two populations. But its primary purpose was security. Israel didn’t build the wall because they hate Palestinians, that’s not why they did it. They built it to stop the unending flow of suicide bombers into their territory. They built it because they were tired of burying grandmas and babies and tourists and teenagers who had just wanted to go to a club and dance.
No matter what you think of it, the wall worked. This is a Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Ramadan Shalah, speaking to Lebanese TV in 2006.
“The martyrdom-seeking suicide operations as a strategic option, invented by the Palestinians, is an option that exists. We haven’t abandoned it. However, the timing of operations and the ability to execute those operations are issues for the field commanders. For example, in the West Bank, there’s a separation wall, which is an obstacle to the resistance. If it did not exist, the situation would be completely different.”
After the wall went up, attacks fell by over 90%. Israelis were safer. But Palestinians were more miserable. The wall was another stranglehold, choking off their access to holy sites, relatives, jobs, school, opportunities… and land that had been legally theirs for centuries.
That ugly concrete barrier snaking across the land was just another reminder that they weren’t free.
I don’t know the name of the man whose voice you’re about to hear. I do know he’s a Palestinian from the West Bank, describing what it was like to earn a degree at Tel Aviv University. Here he is in a recent interview with Bari Weiss, on her podcast, Honestly:
“So in terms of time, how long does it take from my house to, to Tel Aviv university, takes at least five hours….So both ways take at least about eight hours or more, especially at night. ’cause there is no transportation. So it takes way much more than five hours. And you know, like you have to go through a checkpoint checkpoint, they will like take your bags, like take everything and they would search you and they would check your permit and everything’s good. You pass the checkpoint and from the checkpoint you’ll take another transportation to another city in Israel….my friends came to visit me like during Covid period and they drove from Tel Aviv to my village where I live. It took them about one hour, like 10 minutes, something like this to drive from Tel Aviv and get to the place where I live. And for me it takes a like about five hours. So this is like explains or like describe how challenging it is.”
The wall and the checkpoints were there for a reason. In Israel, security threats are devastatingly real. And, as we saw on October 7th, even the people you trust can turn around and stab you in the back – literally. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have a deep and profound sympathy for all the ordinary folks who have to live like this. When you believe, as I do, that most people are good, hearing a story like this just…. sucks.
Meanwhile, as the bombs of the Second Intifada exploded in Tel Aviv clubs and Jerusalem cafes, remember that nearly 10 thousand Israelis continued to live comfortably in Gaza. Some commuted to Israel for work, returning at the end of the day to lush communities circled by fences and protected by the Israeli army.
We’ve already released an episode about Gaza’s Jewish communities, known collectively as Gush Katif. For an in-depth refresher on why thousands of Jews chose to make their homes there, check out the links in the show notes.
But their life in Gaza was drawing to a close.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had a reputation as a hardliner. Some called him “the father of the settlement movement.” So it came as a shock, like a real shock, when Sharon announced in December of 2003, I was in Israel at the time, that Israel would be “withdrawing” from certain territories. (That’s what he called it.)
The country went into a panic. What territories? Why?! What was Sharon thinking?! What was he thinking?? Soon after that initial announcement, Sharon unveiled his plan. Israel would withdraw entirely from the entire Gaza Strip, uprooting the nearly 10,000 Jewish citizens from their homes. He’d also clear out four small communities in the West Bank.
And now, for the million dollar question: why? Why would he do that? Why would this guy do that??
Shortly after the disengagement, Sharon fell into a coma and never woke up, it’s actually crazy. We can’t ask him about his motivations, I’d love to, and we’ll never know how he would react to everything that happened next.
But analysts have had decades to speculate about his motivations. Some believe that Sharon withdrew from Gaza because he wanted to get the international community off his back – on his terms, not theirs.
By 2005, the Second Intifada had ended, and the world was starting to make noises about renewing the peace talks, resuscitating the idea of an independent Palestinian state. But Sharon wasn’t interested in those talks and roadmaps and plans, all crafted by outsiders who didn’t actually have to live in Israel. He was convinced that there was no negotiating with the Palestinians. A unilateral withdrawal would get the rest of the world off his back without offering any other concessions to the Palestinians.
Other scholars point out that defending the Israeli enclaves in Gaza was expensive, in every sense of the word. Each year, Israel spent tens of millions of dollars protecting these tiny communities. They paid in blood, too. During the Second Intifada, Israel lost more than 200 soldiers in Gaza alone. It was a high price to pay for a territory Sharon didn’t care much about.
So Sharon decided that occupying Gaza was no longer sustainable, not happening. But his disengagement plan threatened to rip Israel apart. All through that summer, Israelis were bitterly divided, demonstrating, and arguing, and protesting. But, thank God, the dire predictions of civil war and Jew-on-Jew violence never came to pass. The disengagement was difficult and painful and traumatic. It was also, thankfully, bloodless.
In Gaza, the streets teemed with celebrations. Over 70% of Gazans had approved of Sharon’s withdrawal plan, hoping it would bring them independence and prosperity. Maybe this was even the first step in the long journey towards a sovereign Palestinian state.
But that’s not what happened. Like, not at all. Like, not at all at all.
Gaza’s economy depended heavily on Israel. Now that Israel had withdrawn, it had less interest in Gazan exports or labor. So instead of growing, Gaza’s economic prospects plummeted.
And then Hamas came to power, and everything got a whole lot worse.
To Israelis, Hamas was nothing more than a fundamentalist terror group made up of violent thugs. But for Palestinians, Hamas was much more complicated.
Sure, they’d started as a so-called resistance movement. Hence their very subtle name: The Islamic Resistance Movement. But they’d always offered Palestinians more than just a chance to become a suicide bomber.
Remember, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin had started out building social and cultural institutions all over Gaza. Mosques, medical clinics, orphanages, youth groups… you name it, Hamas was involved. Sure, they recruited heavily from these youth groups and summer camps. But they also provided Palestinians with cultural, social, charitable, educational, and religious programs.
Along the way, they developed a political wing. Sure, their military arm focused mainly on how to kill Israeli civilians. But their political arm represented Palestinian political interests, offering an alternative to the Palestinian Authority.
The PA had been created during the Oslo Accords – a first step in the direction of peace and self-determination. But Palestinians were growing deeply disillusioned with the PA’s corruption and inefficiency. More and more, they turned towards Hamas to represent their social, cultural, and political interests.
Hamas had rejected the Oslo Accords and everything they stood for. Which meant that for them, the PA had absolutely 0 legitimacy. Like, zero, zilch, zero. But by 2005, Hamas realized that if they wanted to get anything done, they’d have to participate in the political process – even if it meant legitimizing the PA. So for the first time ever, they participated in the Palestinian municipal elections of early 2005.
And to their surprise, they did really well. Really, really well.
So when parliamentary elections rolled around a year later, Hamas ran under the name “The Change and Reform Bloc.” And once again, they were shocked by their own success. They hadn’t expected to win 56% of the seats in the Palestinian Parliament. But here they were, quote: “a resistance organization, a religious movement, and a governing party all at the same time,” in the words of the Wilson Center.
Did they know how to balance all three of those priorities? Not really, no. It’s one thing to run a soup kitchen, very good thing, by the way. It’s another to actually govern. But the Palestinian people were ready to give them a chance to figure it out.
And here’s what most people don’t understand. To Israelis, to Jews, Hamas is nothing more than a terror group that wants to kill every man, woman, and child in Israel and then establish an Islamist caliphate. And that’s true, they really are antisemitic.
But that wasn’t their platform at all. Sure, they were a resistance movement. Sure, they hadn’t made a secret of their tactics. But their platform focused not on how to fight the Israelis, but how to strengthen the Palestinians. They promised to build more infrastructure, to invest in housing and healthcare and schools. They reminded Palestinians of all the charities they’d established, all the clinics and mosques and schools.
And Palestinians rewarded them for it by voting for “Change and Reform.”
Palestinians didn’t vote for Hamas because they’re all lunatic hardliners who want to wipe Israel off the map, and it’s very hard for Jewish people to understand that. In fact, according to exit polls, sixty percent of Hamas voters favored a two-state solution.
Lemme repeat that, because it’s actually mind-boggling. The majority of Palestinians who voted for Hamas in 2006 believed in a two-state solution.
My head is exploding. My heart, too, thinking about what that could have meant for both peoples, if Hamas had just stayed true to its campaign promises.
60% is a majority, but it’s not everyone. What about the other 40%?
Well, some of them voted for Hamas because they thought Hamas’ tactics worked. The PA’s whole shtick – negotiating with Israel – had done nothing to advance a Palestinian state.
But then came the Second Intifada, and Hamas’ relentless string of terror attacks. Immediately afterwards, Israel withdrew from Gaza. Was this a sign that Hamas was right? Was “armed resistance” the best path towards a state?
In 2024, I think that answer is pretty clear to most Gazans. A recent poll from the Palestinian Center for Survey and Policy Research indicates that nearly 60% of Gazans believe Hamas’ October 7th offensive was a mistake. How can they not? Gaza is in ruins. In ruins! Thousands of people, among them children, are dead. Tens of thousands.
But – as we keep saying! – hindsight is 2020.
Back in 2006, Hamas really did represent “change and reform” to so many Gazans. So they voted Hamas, hoping to usher in a better world. Imagine what would have happened if Hamas had actually worked towards that goal. If they’d invested in their people and made good on all their promises.
They tried at first, establishing a unity government with Fatah, the main political party of the Palestinian Authority. But that government didn’t last. Neither party cared much for the other. Fatah didn’t want to share power, and Hamas had no respect for people who negotiated with Israel and intention of softening its stance, no matter what the international community said. So the unity government collapsed.
In its place, Hamas established its own government in Gaza, led by Ismail Haniyeh. Well, Fatah didn’t like that, and the two parties started sniping at each other. Literally. I’m talking about gun battles in the street. And though they did reach a truce eventually, even that shaky peace didn’t last.
Hamas was convinced that Fatah was plotting a coup. And they were right. The US had armed and trained Fatah fighters specifically, specifically, to take down Hamas – including their arch-enemy, Fatah strongman Mohammad Dahlan. But Hamas had no intention of being caught wrong-footed. So they launched a counter-coup in July 2007.
The so-called Battle of Gaza was brief and brutal.
“An office used by Hamas ministers is stormed, vandalized, and set on fire by Fatah activists. It’s the second day in a row that the power struggle between the rival factions spilled over from Gaza into the West Bank.”
“At least 14 killed and 80 wounded in the battle. Fatah is saying Hamas is executing its fighters, killing them in front of their wives and children.”
Both sides did awful things to each other. But in the end, Hamas won. And the international community was horrified. Horrified.
Gaza’s two neighbors – Israel and Egypt – did not appreciate living next to a terrorist group. Both countries set up a strict blockade, inspecting everything that went in and out of the Strip – including people.
Palestinians could still cross into Israel for work or medical care, but Israel limited the number of work permits it handed out. The unemployment rate soared. Gaza’s economy flatlined. Iran, Qatar, the EU, the US, and the UN pumped billions into the Gazan economy, hoping to alleviate the Strip’s crushing poverty.
But most of that cash went straight to Hamas. And instead of using that money to build infrastructure or create jobs, they stockpiled weapons, trained terrorists, and built a vast underground tunnel network under the Strip using child labor.
Gaza was extremely poor, and the tunnels were an economic lifeline. Everything came in through the tunnels, from cigarettes to construction supplies to luxury cars for Gaza’s wealthy elites.
But the tunnels had another purpose, you know it: smuggling weapons and sheltering Hamas fighters. This is Mousa Abu Marzouk, who serves in the Hamas Political Bureau. He’s very clear about why Hamas built the tunnels. Again, when someone tells you who they are, believe them.
“We have built the tunnels because we have no other way of protecting ourselves from being targeted and killed. These tunnels are meant to protect us from the airplanes. We are fighting from inside the tunnels.”
Hamas may have started as a social welfare organization. But by the time they took over, they poured most of their energy into the opposite of social welfare. Forget all the rockets they shot into Israel, which of course called down retaliatory airstrikes. I’m talking about Hamas leadership, which siphoned billions of dollars from ordinary citizens.
And I haven’t heard enough people talk about it. In 2019, young Palestinians took to the streets to protest their government. They wanted jobs, better opportunities, less corruption, freedom of speech. They wanted Hamas out. Hamas, predictably, crushed them.
Meanwhile, Hamas’s leaders used their stolen money to build mansions on the Gazan coast. To book permanent suites at five-star hotels in Turkey and Qatar. To throw lavish parties and send their kids to private schools and drive luxury cars that had been smuggled in through the tunnels.
Make no mistake about it: Many Palestinians in Gaza blame Hamas – not Israel, or not only Israel – for their misery. They hate the so-called leaders who brought them here. That hatred may be one of the few things that still unites Gazans and Israelis.
Ahmed Fouad al-Khatib grew up in Gaza, though he’s been living in the US since 2005. This is what he wants the world to know.
Because, of course, while Hamas ruined the lives of everyday Gazans, they also found time to punish every Israeli on Israel’s southern border. And that brings us to Part Two in our story of the Before.
Part Two: Israel
The border between Israel and Gaza is 37 miles long. Running along that border, on the Israeli side, is a region 4.5 miles wide known as Otef Aza, aka the Gaza Envelope.
It seems like an arbitrary division, right? Who decides these things? Who gets on a podium and announces This area 37 miles long and 4.5 miles wide will henceforth be known as… the Gaza Envelope?
It turns out that in this particular case, Hamas decided. The envelope’s size isn’t arbitrary. Today, Hamas has rockets that can penetrate central Israel. But their very first rocket, the Qassam 1, had a range of up to 4.5 miles. So it was the communities within 4.5 miles of the border who bore the brunt of Hamas’ early rocket and mortar attacks. Who found themselves struggling to get to shelter before impact.
The 70,000 Israelis who live in the Gaza Envelope have gone through a lot since Hamas took power next door. The Tzeva Adom sirens, telling them a rocket was coming. The mad dash to the bomb shelters, usually at the most inconvenient times. The town of Sderot had even accepted, grudgingly, its nickname of “the Bomb Shelter Capital of the world.”
If you’ve been to this southern Israeli town, then you’ve seen them: bomb shelters every few blocks, painted with colorful murals. In the playground, these concrete shelters are shaped like animals. Kids climb on them, as though they’re just one more jungle gym instead of a reminder that a rocket can come whistling through the air at any moment.
When the siren inevitably goes off, Israelis in the Gaza envelope have 15 to 30 seconds to get to the shelters. They huddle there, through the boom of impact, waiting for any secondary collisions. They’ve gotten good at estimating the distance from the sound of impact. That was ten meters away. That was right here. And then they leave the shelters, and the kids go right back to playing. The adults continue on their way to work, or to coffee with friends. Life goes on. Because it has to. To an outsider, this is insane. It’s nuts. But to a resident of the Israeli south, this is just life. A constant limbo between war and peace. Or, as Doron Salomon of Kfar Aza put it:
“Among ourselves, we say this place is 95% paradise, 5% hell. What can you do?”
Hell looks like rockets and mortars and red alerts. Hell looks like hearing a siren in the middle of your shower. Hell looks like the internal debate of: do I risk my life to finish my shower? Or do I risk my dignity by running to the communal shelter wearing nothing more than a bath towel and soap suds? That’s not a debate you have once or twice. It’s a well-practiced internal monologue, repeated over and over and over.
But the ultimate nightmare scenario isn’t a rocket or a mortar or an awkward moment in the bomb shelter. It’s the horror that Israelis lived from 2006 to 2011. The horror we’ve been living through since October 2023. The horror of an abduction.
In the summer of 2006, Hamas terrorists snatched a 19 year old IDF soldier named Gilad Shalit from the Gaza border. They held him for five years, tormenting the entire country. And when Gilad came home at last, after five years underground, Jews around the world rejoiced. 79% of Israelis supported the deal that brought him home, despite its price.
And its price was unthinkably high. Over a thousand Palestinian prisoners for one pale, emaciated 24-year-old. People who had planned terror attacks. People with blood on their hands. But for 79% of Israelis, Gilad was their son.
And no price was too high to bring a child back home.
Even if it meant releasing a man serving four life sentences for murder. A man named Yahya Sinwar.
Today, every Israeli knows his name. He is the architect of the October 7th attack, Israel’s Public Enemy number one. And he is the key to understanding the events of the past year.
Yahya Sinwar was born in a cramped, squalid refugee camp in Gaza. Later, he would describe the indignity of life in the camp. The long lines to use the bathroom. The dirt. The hunger. The humiliation. He would say that it was his impoverished childhood that led him to Hamas. But the Israeli authorities had their eye on Sinwar before Hamas even existed. By the age of 20, he’d already served time in an Israeli prison for, quote, “activities that challenged Israel’s security.”
By 23, he’d created the Majd, a force dedicated to rooting out and punishing Palestinian collaborators. Two years later, the Majd would become Hamas’ internal police, and Sinwar would earn the nickname, ready for this?, The Butcher of Khan Yunis for the brutal punishments he meted out to suspected collaborators.
By 27, he’d been sentenced to four life sentences in an Israeli prison for the brutal murders of two Israelis and four Palestinians. But that didn’t stop him. In prison, he continued punishing suspected Palestinian collaborators. Israeli guards pretended not to see when Hamas operatives would toss the severed body parts of so-called “collaborators” out of their cells. From their perspective, Sinwar was keeping order among the prisoners.
But if the guards ignored Sinwar, he was studying them.
When he wasn’t ordering the torture of collaborators, he was soaking up every detail he could about Israel. He studied their military and their counter-terrorism tactics. (There wasn’t Unpacking Israeli History then, but it would have helped him.) He learned Israeli history and became fluent in Hebrew. He translated autobiographies of Shin Bet leaders and distributed them among the prisoners so they would get to know their enemy. He even wrote a novel about the Palestinian struggle – a copy of which still exists in the New York Public Library system. (I haven’t read it. It doesn’t sound great. Frankly, not that interested.)
Every move sent a message: I may be in here now. But I’m going to get out someday. And when I do, I’m going to get you, gonna fight you.
As it turns out, he almost didn’t get out. He developed a brain tumor while in prison and would have died if not for an Israeli dentist named Yuval Bitton. Dr. Bitton helped diagnose the tumor, saving Sinwar’s life. What a bitter irony.
So Sinwar was still alive in 2011, as the negotiations for Shalit were winding down. Despite the two men’s uneasy rapport, Dr. Bitton recommended that Sinwar stay in prison, and not be included in the swap.
Here’s Dr. Bitton, speaking about Sinwar to journalist Christiane Amanpour in June of 2024.
“I learned from him and I learned from the other leaders, it was clear to me that Sinwar reflects the Hamas Gaza worldview. Sinwar told me clearly in 2004 that they would be ready to sign a hudna, a truce, for 20 years because the State of Israel is currently a strong state. But he also told me that in 20 years, he estimates that we will be weakened because of internal struggles between us within Israeli society. And as soon as they recognize that we are weak, they will attack us.”
AMANPOUR: “Yuval, you said that on the morning of October 7th, you knew immediately who had planned this massacre. How come?”
Bitton: “Because I know the person who planned and conceived and initiated this criminal attack. I have known him since 1996, and not only him, but the entire Hamas leadership in Gaza. And it was clear to me that this is what they were planning while they were still in prison, and this is the plan of Hamas. It was very clear to me. “
Again, when someone tells you who they are, believe them. Sinwar wasn’t shy about his plans. On the day of his release, he urged Hamas to kidnap more Israelis. And here he is, in 2018, outlining the evils of normalization:
“To those who normalize relations with Israel, I say…From us here in Gaza, they will never get anything but guns, fire, martyrdom, death, and killing.”
But by 2021, something seemed to shift. Hamas began to lay low. They appeared to focus their resources and energy on tending to social needs within Gaza, rather than attacking Israel.
Hamas leadership convinced Israel that they were more interested in obtaining work permits than firing rockets. When Palestinian Islamic Jihad fired rockets into Israel in 2022, Hamas didn’t get involved. They gave every impression that they were turning a corner toward – if not peace, then at least stability.
Now, the Israelis aren’t dumb. They didn’t think that Hamas was suddenly all roses and sunshine and peaches. So what happened? How did Hamas manage to deliver such a nasty surprise on the 7th of October?
Part Three: The Last Five Years
Israel, 2019 – 2023
Here’s the sad and ugly truth about statecraft: sometimes, all you have are bad choices.
Bibi Netanyahu had never been a fan of the two state solution, we know that. Throughout his long career, he’d done everything possible to thwart a Palestinian state – well documented. Check the links in our show notes for more on that. The only party able or willing to negotiate the terms of Palestinian statehood was the Palestinian Authority. If Bibi didn’t want a Palestinian state, he’d have to weaken them.
So he bolstered Hamas, who also wanted the PA to fail.
Now, let’s get something straight. “Bolstering Hamas” doesn’t mean supporting their aims or being aligned with their strategy. Some bad actors like to say that. It just meant that Bibi gave Hamas every opportunity to actually rule Gaza.
He granted work permits to Gazans by the thousands. He allowed Qatar to pour billions of dollars into Gaza, hoping that Hamas would use them to, you know, govern. In short, he let Hamas continue to exist.
Bibi’s not a dummy. Stop it, he’s not. He knew Hamas was a terror group. But if the price of the status quo was a skirmish every couple of years and rocket barrages every few months, well – that was a price he was willing to pay. Israelis had bomb shelters and an Iron Dome to keep them safe. Plus, they were used to the sporadic violence. Sad, but true. When the lawn gets out of control, you mow it, and then you move on with your life.
Plus, the Prime Minister had bigger fish to fry than some poorly-aimed rockets – a quarter of which misfired and landed within Gaza, anyway, so pathetic. Politically, things weren’t looking good for him. From 2019 to 2022, Israel held five separate elections. Three failed to produce a lasting government. And with every trip to the polls, Israelis grew more and more disillusioned with their whole political system.
The fifth election was the charm. Bibi managed to put together a coalition in 2022. But it was a controversial one, full of highly divisive figures.
The most famous of these far-right figures is probably Itamar Ben Gvir, who the New Yorker nicknamed “Israel’s minister of chaos.” Coming in second is Bezalel Smotrich, who’s made headlines for his controversial views on, well, pretty much everything. (His Wikipedia page is a wild ride. Check it out.)
One day soon, we’ll do an episode on Israel’s quote-unquote far-right, because they’re fascinating. But for now, what you need to know is that Bibi’s legitimization of them tore Israelis apart.
Especially once Netanyahu proposed a series of judicial reforms that would significantly curb the power of Israel’s Supreme Court. Oh, and just as a little cherry on top of this flaming pile of chaos: as all this was going down, Bibi was under investigation for alleged corruption.
Sinwar had prophesied that if he waited a while, Israel would be weak, brought low by the massive chasms between its citizens. He must have been so, so satisfied to watch the country erupt.
For nine months, hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets to demonstrate against their government. Reservists threatened not to show up for military duty. Journalists predicted the end of Israeli democracy. Some citizens began to talk about leaving the country.
The defense minister warned that Israel’s enemies were paying close attention. That the internal chaos would have far-reaching implications for Israel’s security.
He was right.
The day the judicial overhaul passed in the Knesset, the leader of Hezbollah remarked, quote “Today, in particular, is the worst day in the history of the entity, as some of its people say. This is what puts it on the path of collapse, fragmentation and disappearance, God willing.”
Israel’s enemies had been watching carefully. They’d predicted that sooner or later, the country’s widening divisions would rip it apart at the seams. Iran even has a countdown clock to 2040 – the year they claim Israel will cease to exist. (God, Iran, why are you so obsessed with Israel?!)
But as ridiculous as that clock is, and it’s ridiculous, Israel’s enemies were on to something. The proposed judicial overhaul was deeply unpopular. Depending on who was asking – and how they asked – only 20-30% of Israelis supported the reforms, in total. The Jerusalem Post reported in February 2023 that over a third of Israelis believed the reforms would lead to civil war. Nearly two thirds predicted they would result in some kind of violence.
The streets of Israel were soaked in anger moments after one of the most contested laws in the country’s history was passed. Anti-government protesters were being blasted with water cannon and the rage towards Mr Netanyahu or Bibi was boiling.
“This is my country and Bibi kidnapped our citizens and it’s not supposed to be. We need to be here. I served in the army. I have three little boys, and I want to continue to stay in my country!”
The opposition leader, Yair Lapid, even gave a press conference claiming:
“There is no prime minister in Israel. Netanyahu has become a puppet on the strings of Messianic extremists.”
Yikes.
When the first reform passed, the opposition parties walked out of the Knesset yelling “shame!” (They say that a lot in the Knesset.) The President of Israel called the situation “a nightmare.”
The country was teetering. And no one was sure where it would land.
All the while, the IDF had its eyes trained on Hezbollah in the north, and on the increasingly-violent West Bank. We can and will probably do an entire episode on that situation, but for now, just know that Israel’s military had its hands full. The Gaza border was simply not a priority.
So. We’ve got a strong Hamas that is projecting peaceful vibes and luring Israel into a false sense of security. A divided government that threatened national cohesion and security. A dissatisfied populace. A distracted military.
And still, the tragedy of 10/7 could have been avoided.
In a story rife with tragic mistakes, this is the one that gets me the most. This is the hardest truth. Because it’s not like Hamas hid their intentions completely. And it’s not like Israel forgot they had an enemy in Gaza. There were still IDF soldiers closely observing the border. They noticed that Hamas was running unusual drills. They suspected that something big was coming.
IDF Observers, known in Hebrew as Tatzpetaniot, are highly skilled, unarmed young women, who take note of everything that happens along their section of the border. They are the army’s human eyes – a supplement to the billion-dollar technological infrastructure that runs along the border. It should be considered one of the most important jobs in the army.
But it isn’t. It’s an entry-level position, often occupied by female rookies in their first few months as soldiers. And that means it gets very little respect.
For years, tatzpetaniot have reported being dismissed, brushed off, laughed at. For years, they’ve spoken out about the sexism baked into the IDF. And for years, they’ve been ignored.
Months before 10/7, tatzpetaniot all along the southern border began reporting unusual activity in Gaza. Meetings between high-level Hamas officials. Men studying the border wall, noting the camera positions. Drones hovering over the Israeli communities just minutes from Gaza. Hamas’ elite nukhba fighters rehearsing attacks on model tanks and kibbutzim.
But when the tatzpetaniot alerted their commanders, they were waved away.
This is Maya Desiatnik, who was the only observer at her post to survive October 7th. For months, she’d been warning her superiors that something unusual was happening on the border. And for months, she got responses like… this.
“If I see something [suspicious], I pass it up the chain. Then my commanding officer passes it up the chain, but what happens to that information after that? I don’t know.”
Maya and her colleagues saw a lot of disturbing things on the border in the months leading up to October 7th. They saw Palestinian guerrillas training with explosives. They saw them rehearsing attacks on replicas of Israeli tanks, and placing explosives in holes along the border. And in typical Israeli fashion, they’d joke about it, placing macabre bets on when the situation would erupt.
They never, ever imagined that they’d be the ones to be surprised. They were certain the IDF would see what Hamas was doing and would put an end to it.
But the top brass didn’t seem convinced by the tatzpetaniot’s observations.
“There were times when high-up officers would show up, and they’d be new to the sector, and they’d argue with us over the radio: I know what’s going on, I’m in the field. You’re not in the field. But on the other hand, we’re looking right at it. We see an aerial view of everything, we see it perfectly.“
It’s hard not to see parallels between October 7th and the Yom Kippur War. Fifty years before, to the day, Israeli top brass shrugged off the threat that stared them in the face. Over 2,000 soldiers paid for that dismissal with their lives.
And I know, I know. Hindsight is 2020. It’s easy for me to sit here and point out parallels when I know what happens next. Because I know, in clear and wrenching detail, exactly what happens next. I know the names of the tatzpetaniot taken hostage. I’ve memorized their pictures. Watched the videos of their abductions until I can recite what happens, frame by frame.
Na’ama, with her bloody sweatpants and swollen eye, dragged into the back of a jeep by her long brown hair. Liri, with her gold-rimmed glasses and swollen jaw. Daniela. Karina. Agam. The five tatzpetaniot of Nahal Oz, none of whom is older than twenty. They haunt my dreams.
In my mind, I return over and over to the night of October 6th. The last time that anything seemed to make sense. I imagine Na’ama and Liri and Daniela and Karina and Agam, sharing a home-cooked meal with the other soldiers, staying up late.
I imagine the thousands of Israelis feasting and drinking and dancing with the Torah in the streets. It was Simchat Torah, the joy of the Torah, the holiday. I imagine the young people making their way to the Supernova Sukkot festival – a huge open-air music festival near Kibbutz Re’im. And I think about Yuval Salomon, who was celebrating his 29th birthday by flooding a local pub with 300 guests. He had no way of knowing that in less than 12 hours, he’d be dead, murdered in his home by Hamas.
There are pictures from that last night. Yuval, surrounded by loved ones, smiling at the camera, toasting with another drink.
It hurts to look at them. So we won’t, yet.
Instead, we’ll end this episode by lingering for just one more moment in the joy of October 6th.
We’ll watch the tatzpetaniot FaceTime with their families before they have their own Shabbat dinner on base.
We’ll imagine the thousands of happy ravers in their elaborate outfits, awash in the colorful lights and throbbing beats of a really good music festival.
We will wish Yuval Salomon a happy 29th birthday. We will tease him, as his father did, about how he would top this party when he finally turned 30. We’ll pretend we don’t know that Yuval will never turn 30. That was his last party. His last night on earth.
We’ll hold on, for just another moment, to the before. And we’ll see you back here next week for part two, when we’ll explore, in detail, what happened on the Black Shabbat.