It’s been one year since the devastating October 7th attacks by Hamas into Israel. It’s a truly awful anniversary to observe for numerous reasons. In the past year, there’s been immeasurable horror, violence, destruction and death. It is estimated that at least 40,000 people have died in Gaza and there are still over a hundred hostages. Our guest this week survived the attacks on October 7th and the chaos that ensued. Amir Tibon is an Israeli journalist working for Haaretz Newspaper and is the author of a newly published book titled “The Gates of Gaza: A Story of Betrayal, Survival, and Hope in Israel’s Borderlands.” He joins WITHpod to discuss what has transpired over the last year, internal politics in Gaza now, the U.S. response and what he hopes will happen in the future.
Note: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
Chris Hayes: Hey there, WITHpod listeners. I just want to say before we get into today’s episode, we recorded it on September 25th. So it was a few weeks ago. It’s about what’s going on in Israel and Gaza and the region, but it was before some of the latest exchanges between Hezbollah and Israel and Iran, including the strikes in Beirut and the ballistic missile attack from Iran. So when you hear this conversation, just know this was recorded about two weeks ago.
(MUSIC PLAYING)
Amir Tibon: You know, I really believe that we will come back to live in a house. And in the first weeks after October 7, I thought Gaza would be destroyed and that it would remain like this for years and years and years. And that may still be the case, but I really hope that it won’t, that there can be a way to rebuild it.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host Chris Hayes. We are on the one year anniversary of the October 7th attacks by Hamas into Israel. And it’s a truly awful anniversary to observe for a whole bunch of reasons. One, to revisit the horror of that day. Two, the fact that a year later and there has been nothing but more horror and violence and death, estimates of 40,000 people dead in Gaza after the 1300 Israelis killed. There are still over a hundred hostages, the best that we know trapped in Gaza. Multiple hostages have died.
There are increasing, as I speak, increasing exchanges between the Israeli Defense Forces and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hundreds are dead in Lebanon, (inaudible) set of airstrikes, there’s still about a hundred thousand Israelis who are evacuated from the north and can’t live in their homes there. And I’ve been thinking about how to kind of revisit this anniversary. The best thing to do would be to talk to someone who lived through it, is a survivor of October 7th, was in a bunker with his family on the day of the attack but is also a journalist who’s written about it, reported on the Netanyahu government, about the security failures that led to the attack, about the nature of the Israeli government’s way of dealing with the aftermath of this, its pursuit of the war in Gaza. And he’s a great journalist and an author of a new book.
His name is Amir Tibon. He’s a reporter for “Haaretz” newspaper and he’s author of the book that’s out now called “The Gates of Gaza: A Story of Betrayal, Survival and Hope in Israel’s Borderlands.” Amir, it’s great to have you.
Amir Tibon: Hi, Chris. Thank you so much for inviting me and especially to speak with you on this sad anniversary. You know, it’s very important for me. So, thank you for the opportunity.
Chris Hayes: Well, first let me ask how you’re doing. I mean, you went through something really traumatic. You and your family, you know, your children, you know, hiding in a bomb shelter as above you in the kibbutz in which you live. There were Hamas fighters killing people that you knew and loved, waiting to be rescued by Israeli Defense Forces that weren’t there. Your father ended up driving down in a kind of incredibly cinematic way and sort of fought his way to you. But so first, just how are you now? How do you feel?
Amir Tibon: So like you said in the beginning, Chris, we are marking a sad anniversary because a year later, a year after this horror, after the day on which we lost 15 of our friends and neighbors in the small community that I live in, a small town, a kibbutz, to those who know the term, it’s like an agricultural community of 450 people. So, if we lost 15, that means 3% of the population of our community was murdered on that day. Just try to imagine for a second, you know, your neighborhood or your town and losing 3% of the people in one day in such a terrible, violent way.
Seven people from our community were kidnapped on that day into Gaza. And while five were released in November in that very important deal orchestrated by President Biden. On the day we are recording this conversation, we still have two friends, personal friends of mine in the tunnels of Gaza held there by Hamas. So it’s a sad anniversary. And like you said, the war is still going on. People are dying. The destruction is only getting wider and broader and is now affecting other countries in the region. It’s very hard to find any kind of bright spot. On a personal level, I have to say I’m doing okay. I wrote this book. I’m working. My wife is back to work. Our daughters, you know, they’re four and a half years old, two and a half years old. On most days, they’re just like any other kid living their life happy. But this is like a cloud that’s hovering above us all the time. The fact that we haven’t been able to return to our home. The fact that we still have friends in the hands of the terrorists, remembering all the people we lost, it’s not an easy situation.
Chris Hayes: Well, first tell me about your upbringing. Where in Israel did you grow up? What was your upbringing like?
Amir Tibon: So I grew up in a military family. My father served for 35 years in the Israeli army. And we moved around a lot, just like military families in the U.S. often do. You know, the job takes the family to different places. But a large chunk of my childhood we actually spent in northern Israel, very close to the border with Lebanon, because my father was serving in that area at the time. And those are the places that are currently making international headlines because all the communities in northern Israel that are bombarded, abandoned, and now Israel is attacking across that border into Lebanon, those are the places of my childhood. Those are the places where I formed my first memories.
And growing up in a military family, we had a very strong Zionist ideology at home, a strong commitment to Israel, to the security of the country. But my parents always also educated us with a very humanist perspective. We didn’t grow up with any sense of hatred toward our neighbors on the other side, toward the Palestinians that we have a conflict with. And like a lot of people in Israel who served for many years in the military, I think there’s a point where all this exposure to war can also make you understand the importance of peace, if you can reach it. So that’s the kind of idealism that I grew up with.
Chris Hayes: You were living in the kibbutz in Southern Israel or along the Gaza border. Tell me a little bit about that kibbutz and why your family chose to live there.
Amir Tibon: So Kibbutz Nahal Oz, the place where I spent most of the last decade and where my family was attacked on October 7th, it’s a small community, like I said, 450 people, and it is located basically half a mile from the Israeli border with Gaza. It was founded in 1953 in October, and in fact, on the evening of October 7th, we were supposed to celebrate the 70 year anniversary of this community. There was supposed to be a large party at the communal pool with everybody from the community and then a lot of guests from outside. And instead of a big celebration, we ended up experiencing the worst day of our lives.
And this community was founded, like I said, in 1953 as part of a national security strategy that Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, believed in that the new young state of Israel, and, right, getting to the mindset of 1953, its five years after the 1948 war, Israel’s establishment, the Palestinian Nakba. Israel at that point does not have peace agreements with any Arab state around it. It’s really surrounded by enemies. And Ben-Gurion says, we need to establish civilian communities along the borders of Israel. First of all, because militaries, can very easily be redeployed from places. Like if you look at the American experience from the last decades, you guys had forces for two decades in places like Afghanistan and Vietnam. And basically within a week, once a decision was made, the military was taken out. And Ben-Gurion wanted to send a message to Israel’s neighbors, all of them at the time were enemies, that we are here to stay.
And so he wanted not just military bases along the borders, but civilian communities, which are much more difficult to uproot, right? Once you have families living there, a kindergarten and a school, a clinic and a factory, tractors working the fields, taking care of the land, it’s a different story. And communities like Nahal Oz were created in the early years of Israel with that intention in mind. And there’s this famous saying in Israel that if you turned off the lights of the entire country and you only left on the lights of the kibbutzim, these small agricultural socialist communities that were founded on this socialist, liberal Zionist ideology, if you only left their lights on, you would see the original borders of Israel, the 1948 post-war borders. And Nahal Oz existed this way on the border with Gaza for many years.
And in my book, I write about the history of the kibbutz, not just the October 7 attack. And I describe the very interesting and, at times, complicated, at times, successful, at times, terrible relationship with the people on the other side of the border in Gaza. Because there were times of war, and of course, nothing like the last year, but there have been times of war in this long history. And there were times when you had people from Gaza come to weddings in our kibbutz. And people from our kibbutz go regularly to Gaza for, you know, restaurants and shopping. And there was this different relationship than what exists in previous years.
I moved to this kibbutz with my wife in 2014. It was a year during which there was a long war between Israel and Hamas. And this kibbutz, Nahal Oz, because of its proximity to the border was constantly bombarded by Hamas. It is so close to Gaza that it’s not covered by Iron Dome. There’s no air defense protection in Nahal Oz.
Chris Hayes: Right, because there’s not enough time —
Amir Tibon: Exactly.
Chris Hayes: — for Iron Dome to do the complicated calculations that it does to shoot them out of the air. Just, whoop, goes right over and —
Amir Tibon: Five seconds —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Amir Tibon: Boom. Yeah. And in that community on that summer of 2014, there was a terrible tragedy. A four-year-old child, Daniel Tragerman was killed by a mortar from Gaza. And this caused a deep crisis in the community. A lot of families left and the kibbutz was eager to have young people come and move there. And me and my wife, Miri, we were living in Tel Aviv at the time. I was working as a journalist. She’s a social worker. She works with children with special needs. We just decided we’re moving there. It was an ideological decision. We wanted to come and support this community after what it had been through, help it stabilize, get back on its feet. And the idea that this community on the border, which I just want to emphasize, it’s not a settlement on occupied or disputed land. It’s within the international borders of Israel.
Chris Hayes: The 1948 border, the original borders of Israel.
Amir Tibon: Exactly, the idea that it would be abandoned after the murder of a child, that’s basically letting the terrorists win. And that’s what brought us there. And the second question that comes often with what brought you there is why did you stay? Because you can go to a place like this, live there for a year, be on a mission, feel like you’re doing something great, and then go back to the comfort of Tel Aviv. And the reason we stayed was because we fell in love with the place. It’s a beautiful kibbutz. When you think about a place so close to Gaza, you can imagine a military fortress, but it’s really not like that. You come into the kibbutz, it’s all green, a lot of trees, a lot of lawns, flowers around every house. It’s surrounded by open fields, sunflowers. It’s just beautiful. And a lot of people have been through this. I write about it in the book. This process of coming there because of a mission and just staying because you fall in love with the place.
Chris Hayes: I want people to read the book. I mean, the stuff about the relationship across the border is fascinating and almost feels like, sometimes you read this medieval writing and they talk about what happened in Rome, where it feels like, how was that in the past, right? Like the notion of some sort of forward progress just completely annihilated, right? The idea that like in the past, there was these friendships and relationships. Not that it was ever uncontested, it was always fraught, it was always tense, obviously, but it was not what is currently.
Amir Tibon: It was different. It was just different than today.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. And I want people to read your firsthand account of what the experience of that day was like. But what I want to ask you is, one of the things you said very early after that, you survived this and sort of had kind of gathered your family, you were safe, and taking stock of the scope of what had happened. You talked to the journalist, Yair Rosenberg, who I have on my show a lot, he writes at “The Atlantic.”
Amir Tibon: Good friend.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, I know you guys are close, and he sort of had this amazing interview with you. And you said, one of the shocking things, aside from the brutality, aside from the fact that there were examples of the attackers throwing grenades into a bunker with children, just the sheer brutality of that, was how the hell did this happen? I mean, we are the most notoriously secure state. It’s not like a place that didn’t know that there was Hamas on the other side. Like how could this possibly happen? And I wonder if you have a better answer a year later to that question and how you think about that question.
Amir Tibon: So that’s one of the things I tried to answer in the book.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Amir Tibon: And the reason that I chose in the book to write about October 7th, but also to describe the history of Kibbutz Nahal Oz from 1953 until October 6 basically, was because I felt that without going back in history, you can’t really answer the question of how did we get here? And how did we get here, it’s two separate questions really. It’s how did we get to a place that Hamas, this very fanatic, very extreme organization, is in a position where they can commit this massacre and why they’re doing it? And the second question is, how did we get to a place that Israel is failing to stop it? And failing not in the first hour only, but for many, many long hours. Civilians are at the mercy of the terrorists. How did that happen? And those are really the two big questions, because for me, October 7, it’s a story of two things that happened on that day.
One story is the cruelty and the brutality of Hamas, the people who came in to murder civilians on the other side of the border. And the second story is the failure of the Israeli government and military to protect those civilians. And that’s why I always say that I put all the blame for October 7 on Hamas, on the murderers. But as an Israeli citizen, I seek accountability from my government that failed to protect us on that day. And there are the third story, which is the story of the heroism, of the courage and the determination of all the people who were fighting to save lives on that day. And I write about many of them in the book, civilians —
Chris Hayes: That’s an amazing story.
Amir Tibon: — soldiers, and policemen, really incredible stories of courage. But that story is a direct result of the other two stories. I mean, it was made necessary because of the failures. Usually, where you have heroes is in the places where everything fails. That’s when you need a hero to come and save the day. And so we had many heroes on that day because there were many colossal failures.
Chris Hayes: What were the failures?
Amir Tibon: One of them was an intelligence failure that we did not detect Hamas’s plan to do this. And in fact, we knew they were planning this, but we didn’t detect their intention to do it on that date. And an intelligence warning without a date is important, but also very hard to act upon. Another was a military failure in the sense of the presence of forces. There were not enough forces on the Israeli border with Gaza on that morning. Hamas came in with more than 3,000 fighters and we had only 400 soldiers on the border. The soldiers were in other places. A lot of them were in the West Bank, which at the time had something like 25 battalions. Some were up in the north because we were more worried about Hezbollah attacking from Lebanon than Hamas attacking from Gaza. Some were at home because it was a holiday. It wasn’t just a Saturday, which is already, you know, Israel’s national day of rest, like, you know, our Sunday is Saturday because of the Jewish status law. But it was also a holiday. It was the holiday of Simchat Torah —
Chris Hayes: Simchat Torah. Yeah.
Amir Tibon: — which is like the last holiday in a cycle of holidays marking the new Jewish year.
Chris Hayes: Fall holidays, a lot of Jewish holidays. Yes.
Amir Tibon: Exactly. So, you know, a lot of soldiers were at home. So the military wasn’t there. And on top of that, there is a policy failure, which is a failure of the Netanyahu government. And there is the policy failure of seeing Hamas as a partner, which I write about a lot in the book, how Netanyahu for many years emboldened Hamas, strengthened Hamas, pampered Hamas, treated them as partners and saw this division between Hamas and Gaza, and the Palestinian authority in the West Bank as beneficial to Israel. And even I write about the relationship he had with Sinwar in this, you know, letter that Sinwar sent. Sinwar being Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza.
Chris Hayes: And the person who oversaw, I mean, at the time he was the military commander.
Amir Tibon: The architect.
Chris Hayes: The architect of the attack. He is now, we should say, the full leader of Hamas after the previous political leader was assassinated in Lebanon.
Amir Tibon: Yes.
Chris Hayes: He now runs the whole thing, yeah.
Amir Tibon: And he sent a letter to Netanyahu at some point because there was this exchange of messages between them. So I write a lot about that. And I think there’s another policy failure that needs to be mentioned, which is the Netanyahu government’s focus for the entirety of 2023 on the judicial reform that they were doing in Israel, this attempt to dismantle the powers of the judiciary and ram in this very controversial legislation to give a lot of power to the government, which tore Israel apart. And I’m mentioning it because while we were fighting over that issue and really tearing apart our own country in this very important battle over the very foundations of our democracy, our enemies were watching and preparing for the attack. And this was said many, many times during that year.
Chris Hayes: No, I had people say it to me when I was reporting on it at the time.
Amir Tibon: Yeah, I write about this very dramatic moment in March 2023 when Israel’s defense minister, who’s a member of Netanyahu’s party, not some left-wing activist, basically stands up and says, we have to stop this judicial legislation because it’s tearing us apart and the enemies are preparing to attack us. They see us fighting each other and they’re preparing to use the opportunity. And instead of listening to him and stopping, Netanyahu fired him. And that’s a very dramatic moment during that year. So all of these failures, intelligence, military, political, they are one big story of how we missed it. And my book begins to answer that question. I think more information will come out and we’ll have even more explanations in the coming months and years.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
(ADVERTISEMENT)
Chris Hayes: Can we talk about the Sinwar-Netanyahu letters, which are fascinating, and explain why Netanyahu viewed Hamas as essentially a kind of strategic tool that he could use in pursuit of a larger goal that he had.
Amir Tibon: So I think there were two reasons behind this policy that Netanyahu carried for his entire time as prime minister. One reason was because he saw Gaza, where Hamas has been in power since 2007, as a minor issue compared to Iran. Netanyahu had a very short stint as prime minister in the 1990s. And then he loses power. He comes back in 2009 and he says, I want to focus on Iran. Iran is the biggest threat. Then we’ve got Hezbollah in the North. The Americans are pressuring me to do a two-state solution. He views that as another issue he’s got a problem with. And Gaza is just not a priority for him.
He says, we’ve got Hamas there. We can make deals with them. We can keep that one as like a minor issue, we can work with them. And he pursues that policy for the entirety of his time in office. There were all these wars and skirmishes and exchanges of fighting with Hamas, but at the end of the day, he always viewed Gaza with one word in mind, quiet. And if Hamas can keep it quiet, then they can get money from Qatar and they can, you know, smuggle stuff with the tunnels under Egypt. And it was just never something that he prioritized. He wanted Gaza to stay quiet so he could focus on the other issues. And the second reason he went along with this policy was because he wanted to weaken the Palestinian authority. And he viewed this division —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Amir Tibon: — in Palestinian politics as beneficial to Israel because it makes the two-state solution which you can argue was impossible anyway, but it makes it even more impossible.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Amir Tibon: When Palestinians are divided, they have one government in the West Bank under Israeli control and another government in Gaza, and they don’t really talk to one another. And there were several moments over the years when there was pressure on Netanyahu from the right in Israel and also from the left to end the Hamas rule in Gaza and try to bring back the Palestinian authority. And he always refused to do that because he saw this as something that serves his interest. And when Hamas was at some point in danger of losing its grip and needed money, and Qatar, which is Hamas’ biggest sponsor, it’s this rich country in the Gulf that has a tendency to support the more religious forces in the Islamic world, was volunteering to give them money to help them stabilize, he was all for it, and he was even encouraging them to do it. So that was his strategy. And the way I describe it is, you know, he took a big gamble that Gaza will stay quiet and that gamble failed. And it was a gamble on the lives of our children really.
Chris Hayes: What were the nature of this, the Sinwar letter? Just talk a little bit about that because it’s an arresting moment in the book.
Amir Tibon: So at some point, Sinwar, after he takes over Gaza, you know, he becomes the most important guy for Hamas in Gaza, he offers Netanyahu to go beyond this arrangement of just bringing Qatari money into Gaza to keep it quiet. And he offers some kind of a bigger deal in which Israel will relieve almost all of the pressure that it is pushing on Gaza economically and restraining the economic activity there.
Chris Hayes: And the borders and people coming through.
Amir Tibon: Yeah, everything, movement and goods and everything.
Chris Hayes: Because people have to understand that there are still folks working across the border who can get permits and come over.
Amir Tibon: Yeah, but very limited.
Chris Hayes: Very limited, yeah.
Amir Tibon: It’s not true to say that Israel controls everything in Gaza back, let’s say, five years ago, but it has a lot of influence. And so at some point, Sinwar says, let’s take this model that you allow Qatar to bring suitcases full of cash into Gaza and I don’t fire rockets at your citizens, and let’s take it one step higher. I’ll commit to a long-term ceasefire and you relieve all the economic pressure and we’ll flood it with money here. And he sends Netanyahu a letter in Hebrew, because Sinwar sat for many years in Israeli jail for his involvement, by the way, in the murder of Palestinians. His earliest actions in Hamas were to murder Palestinians —
Chris Hayes: Informants.
Amir Tibon: — who were suspected —
Chris Hayes: Suspected.
Amir Tibon: — of cooperation with Israeli intelligence. And that’s what he sat in jail for in Israel. And so he sends Netanyahu this note in Hebrew with two words, sikun mechushev, calculated risk. Basically tells Netanyahu, you take a calculated risk here. You remove the economic pressure. I give you a long-term ceasefire. You see that I have a word. And Netanyahu continued to make deals with him until the very end, really. I mean, in late September, and I write about this in the book, there was this phenomenon that Hamas was organizing protests along the border fence between Israel and Gaza, bringing thousands of people there to throw stones and Molotov cocktails at the border. And everybody was on alert that this could lead to another round of fighting because the IDF was pushing these people away. They were coming back and if one or two people die, everything gets ignited. And then suddenly it all stopped at the end of September, basically a week before October 7th, it all stopped. Because once again, the Israeli government made some kind of a deal with the Sinwar through Qatari mediation. And the deal was you stop the demonstrations and we will allow Qatar to increase the amount of money that it pumps into Gaza.
And after that agreement, I don’t want to say signed because I don’t think there was official paper, but after that agreement was reached for one week, we had complete quiet along the Gaza border. It was crazy. I mean, I write in the book about this scene during that week, the first week of October last year, where my wife and I and a couple of friends who have kids our age, we all go out to this cotton field, which is right between our kibbutz and the border fence. So this is like, you know, as close as you can get to the border with Gaza. I mean, like, you know, less than half a mile basically. And we’re there, we’re completely exposed to the other side, there’s a Hamas guard tower overseeing us. And we’re there with a bunch of young children playing, you know, picking up the cotton and we felt it was so safe because this agreement had been reached. The demonstrations stopped. And today we know that Sinwar fooled everyone. While he did this, he was already planning the attack. And he said, now the Israelis are letting their guard down. They’re going to remove military forces from here because we just made a deal. And on October 7, he struck and surprised.
Chris Hayes: I think it’s fair to say that, well, I think by any objective measures, you could say that the Israeli public en masse has moved to the right over the last 15 to 20 years.
Amir Tibon: For sure.
Chris Hayes: The Labour Party, it has had right-wing governments. The current government, again, I think it’s sort of an objective statement, the most right-wing government Israel has ever had.
Amir Tibon: Ever, 100%. Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. And I think there’s a bunch of complicated reasons for that. My personal feeling is that political violence brings out the worst in populaces of all kinds.
Amir Tibon: Usually. When you’re attacked, you have this natural instinct, basically.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. And not even attack, when you’re doing the attacking too.
Amir Tibon: Yeah, well, that’s two sides of it. Let’s just put it that way. War usually will —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Amir Tibon: — turn people more aggressive in general.
Chris Hayes: Particularly, but not even just war in the sort of organized sense, but in the kind of shot through with terror and expecting —
Amir Tibon: Yeah, 100%.
Chris Hayes: — and political violence, I think.
Amir Tibon: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And I saw this happen in the U.S., you know, when I was 22-years-old in the aftermath of 9/11. When I was one of those people in the polling, should we invade Afghanistan? I was in the 10% of people who was like, no, I don’t think that’s going to solve anything.
Amir Tibon: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: So the reason I set all this up is just, how do you characterize how Israeli politics has metabolized this past —
Amir Tibon: October 7th.
Chris Hayes: — October 7th, the aftermath and the year of war, basically.
Amir Tibon: What we’re seeing right now in Israel is a very interesting political phenomenon, which is like you said, Chris, the country, in terms of the public opinion on the conflict with the Palestinians, has shifted even more to the right, which is almost a natural reaction after something like October 7. You have, in one day, more than 1,200 people killed and murdered and women raped and people kidnapped. So obviously there’s a shift to the right in views of the conflict. And if you ask people, do you believe there can be peace? Do you believe there can be a two-state solution? There’s a shift to the right on all those parameters. And at the same time, the current right-wing government in all the polls is losing support. In the beginning of the war, they just collapsed. I mean, they were like just annihilated. And now they’re making a small comeback, but still far from enough to win an election. And that’s a bit of an anomaly, right? Because if the public has shifted to the right, why are the government’s right-wing parties losing support and why would they lose, according to all the polls, if we had an election tomorrow?
And I think the reason behind that is that there is this shift to the right in views of the conflict, but there’s also this huge disappointment and disillusionment with this far right, most right-wing government ever that under its watch Israel has been the most humiliated and at its weakest point ever. And this is a very populist government. And just like in the U.S. you have different versions of right-wing politics. And there was an internal battle within the Israeli right-wing between the populist, extremist, very loud, very theatrical right-wing, and the more kind of conservative, level-headed right-wing. And in Israel, what’s happening right now is that people are saying, okay, we want someone who’s tough on security. We want someone who’s a hawk in terms of how they would run the policy. But we don’t want any of this stuff, not the extremism, not the big promises that turn out to nothing, not this hatred. And we have also like a subsection of it, which is this ultra-religious politics that brings a lot of religious decrees into public life. All of that is not what people want. People are searching for something different. And I don’t think that it means that in the next election, you will have a left-wing government in Israel. That’s not happening.
Chris Hayes: No.
Amir Tibon: But you could have a very different government than this one that could also have some centrist and left-wing elements within it, right? Because our politics is so different than yours in your politics. In your politics, basically there’s only two parties and a candidate needs to build a coalition before election day, right? The coalition is the people who go out to vote.
Chris Hayes: Exactly.
Amir Tibon: Whereas in our politics, it’s a multi-party system. People go out to vote and then the different parties need to form a governing coalition.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Amir Tibon: It’s never just one party in power. So the next coalition, if we had an election in the coming month in Israel, would very likely be led by some moderate right-wing party. And then you would have around it centrists and even fragments of the left, which is a bit like the government we had there for a brief moment in 2021, 2022. The government of Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, which was the center-right government, but also had two parties from the left and even one party representing the Arab minority in Israel, which was historical because we’d never had something like this before, that a party representing the Arab citizens of Israel was part of the government. I believe this is the kind of government we could get if we will have an election in the coming month and that the group that is now leading the country, Netanyahu and the ultra-religious far-right extremists would lose power because they failed. And the failure cannot be masqueraded and denied. It’s the biggest failure in the history of the country.
They left their own citizens to be slaughtered, and under their watch, Israel has shrunk. We have lost the northern border with Lebanon, where I grew up. We have lost the Gaza border, where I was living with my family. And this has never happened before that Israel shrunk like that. And it’s not a coincidence that it is happening under this far-right populist government, because usually far-right populists don’t know how to run things and bring disasters.
Chris Hayes: You know, I’m someone who is neither Jewish, nor Israeli, nor Palestinian. I’ve been to Israel once and I’ve been to the West Bank as well and to Jerusalem, both sides. I have an intense interest in the conflict.
Amir Tibon: I know. I’ve been following it over the years.
Chris Hayes: Yes, an intense interest in particularly in both the Middle East in Jewish history, which I’m intensely interested in have read a lot about and feel, you know, connected to and invested in. And I’m saying all this because one of the things I really try to do is I have my own views about the conflict and I do judge people in certain ways. But the one thing I don’t do is I don’t judge people who are living it for how they feel. You know, there are people whose poor Palestinian, whose social media things crop up and say things. And I’m like, I wouldn’t say that, but you know, you have a family member who just died or Israelis who are posting certain things. And the reason I put all that out is to say that like, acknowledge that you have, A, suffered a trauma, B, lived through this horrible thing, C, lost people that you know and love and are still not back in your home. But I also do want to ask about how you think about the toll of this war on the other side.
Amir Tibon: Of course.
Chris Hayes: You know, and I’ll say again for myself, I was utterly horrified by October 7th. I think 90% of Americans were. I think because of the allyship between the two countries, because of the large Jewish diaspora in the U.S., and because of our own experience of 9/11, I think there’s all these ways in which it was relatable.
Amir Tibon: Yes.
Chris Hayes: You know, missiles falling from above, blowing up buildings is not really relatable to Americans. It’s like that’s just a thing that happens in other parts of the world. But it’s really freaking a little crazy making —
Amir Tibon: It’s terrible.
Chris Hayes: — to watch day after day after day, children dying. And it’s like, I just wonder how you process all that.
Amir Tibon: So I also write about it in the book.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Amir Tibon: Let’s say, you know, on a logical level, on a reasonable level, I really understand why Israel had to go to war after October 7, and I supported it. I’m not going to now pretend that I was standing there and waving a peace flag and saying, don’t go into Gaza, because that’s not where I was. I was completely, you know, logically convinced that we had to strike back after what Hamas had done, and that it was necessary in order to, first of all, create some kind of a mechanism of pressure to release the hostages. And also because we have to remove this threat. For all these years, we had allowed it to grow and grow and grow and we even fed the monster. And now the monster came and devoured us and we just had to fight back. So that’s on the logical and reasonable level and I don’t regret that. I still do believe that it was justified and necessary.
If you’re asking me at the emotional level, you know, if I look at what happened, you know, I go back to my kibbutz every once in two weeks, you know, we’re not living there yet, but I’m visiting and I’ve led groups there and I’ve shown people what happened. And I see what’s going on the other side of the border. You can see Gaza there from my kibbutz. You know, I’m not happy about it. Even in the slightest, you know, like even 1% of me is like, oh, they deserve it. It’s terrible. It is terrible. It is horrifying. It is very difficult to see. And I want on the other side, you know, to have good life for people and to have opportunities and to have success and prosperity. And I don’t think it serves us if Gaza is left as this Somalia. Who wants to live next to Somalia?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Amir Tibon: We also need to rebuild the damages over there and to help the population over there. You know, after this horrendous war, get back on their feet and try to rebuild their future. Because otherwise, what you’re going to have in Gaza right next to our home is two million people whose lives have been devastated —
Chris Hayes: Right, yeah.
Amir Tibon: — and are just, you know, eager for revenge. And that’s not going to help anyone.
Chris Hayes: That to me speaks to the larger thing here, which again, it’s so hard when you talk about the conflict to not fall into the same ruts. Every debate, if you go back and you read, even if you read debates in 1890 —
Amir Tibon: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — you know, they’re fighting about the same stuff like —
Amir Tibon: There’s two people here, okay. Two peoples here.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Amir Tibon: Nobody is going anywhere.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Amir Tibon: At least not in quantities that would solve the conflicts. You know, even if you had tomorrow morning, 150,000 people leave Gaza, everyone who can —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Amir Tibon: And even if you had tomorrow morning, 400,000 people, you know, leave Israel all the, you know, the talented, smart, worldly people who want a better future for their children. That would not be —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Amir Tibon: — enough in order to, you know, change the fact that you’re going to have millions of Jews and millions of Palestinians on this land, and they’re going to have to share it somehow. That’s just the reality.
Chris Hayes: Yes. And that exactly, that I think is both the practical and moral reality. And I think that what I’m sort of coming around to is I remember I had, you know, again, I do a fair amount of reporting on this. I talked to different people. I had a Likud, a former member of the Knesset from the Likud party who’d actually been an, I think, education minister and one of the Netanyahu governments. Pretty right-wing. And you heard this from a lot of Israelis, you know, across the political spectrum where they analogize it to the Nazis, which again, makes a certain amount of sense given the creation of the state of Israel and the, you know, the genocide that came out of it.
Amir Tibon: The history, basically.
Chris Hayes: The history, right.
Amir Tibon: We talk through our own history a lot of times.
Chris Hayes: Of course.
Amir Tibon: That’s the references we have. That’s the examples that are in our soul.
Chris Hayes: And Americans do it too all the time. World War II —
Amir Tibon: A 100%.
Chris Hayes: It was always a touchstone in the Nazis.
Amir Tibon: Civil war, yeah.
Chris Hayes: Yes, of course. And the reason that it struck out to me though was, her view is that, in some ways, this sort of hippie dippy view of like, there’s not a military solution and people say, well, there was a military solution to Nazism. I mean, basically they had to just be utterly destroyed. And at some level that’s true, but —
Amir Tibon: Well, but if we talk about World War II, sorry to interject —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Amir Tibon: — there was also the Marshall Plan.
Chris Hayes: Of course. Yes, exactly.
Amir Tibon: And you know, if you’re saying, all right, we’re going to destroy everything Hamas built in Gaza and along the way, tens of thousands of people are going to die, you know, many of them civilians, all right, but what’s the plan for after that? Let’s say that, you know, as difficult as that is, I can say, you know what, no choice, okay? What’s the plan for the day after that thing? What are we doing to stop this from becoming just the feeding ground for the next war? And just like, you know, you see through history, and by the way, World War II is a good example because of the precedent of World War I, actually.
Chris Hayes: Exactly, I was about to say, right, Versailles.
Amir Tibon: You know, if you want to go through that. So, you know, we got to ask ourselves that question, right? What’s the plan for tomorrow? And I do want to say, Chris, and I’ll be very honest with you and the viewers, even things they don’t like to hear. I don’t see a two-state solution happening in the coming years after this. I don’t see it, you know, after October 7.
Chris Hayes: No, yeah.
Amir Tibon: It’s something that’s viable right now, but there are a lot of things that can be done to improve the reality with the two-state solution as some kind of a, you know, vision or a goal that we’re looking into because, you know, the facts on the ground are what they are. And I’ll just give you one example. There’s this issue of settler violence in the West Bank, where you have these attacks on Palestinians from very extreme groups within the settlement movement. That’s something that Israel has to stop, regardless of whether or not we’re talking about negotiations in a two-state solution. This is something that’s making people’s lives miserable, that is violent, that is illegal according to the laws of our country, and just should not be happening.
And this is the kind of thing that you have to take care of, not because it’s part of some diplomatic process and we’re talking about reaching peace, but because you can’t have violent people attacking other people and not paying any price for it. I mean, it’s that basic. Or if we’re talking about Gaza, you know, the day after the war. So, okay, maybe we cannot reach a two-state solution in the next year or two because, you know, after what happened on October 7, you are not going to find a lot of support for that on the Israeli side. And after what happened in Gaza, you’re not going to find a lot of support down the Palestinian side either.
Chris Hayes: Exactly. Yeah, right. Yeah.
Amir Tibon: But let’s start the economic process of rebuilding the place. Let’s offer some kind of a future for the people. Let’s install some kind of a process to replace Hamas, to have a different Palestinian government and finally create conditions where we can actually work with a Palestinian partner to improve the living realities there. All of these things, there needs to be a strategy. That’s what I’m trying to say here. If you want to give the World War II Nazi example, all right, whatever, I’ll go with it. But where’s the Marshall Plan? Where’s the alternative government?
Chris Hayes: Yes. I mean, it seems to me sometimes like, I feel this way watching the Lebanon situation, which again, it’s like, if you zoom in, yes, Hezbollah is a threat to Israel. And have they been firing rockets? Absolutely. It’s not like, oh, you know, retaliating against Hezbollah is some like insane thing. Like it has a certain logic to it, but it all feels like if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Like, you know, is the future of Israel, and this is part of what, you know, the Abraham Accords and the talks with the Saudis of like some sort of normalization and some sort of unified front against the sort of Persian menace of Iran —
Amir Tibon: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — along with the Arabs and the Israelis getting together. But like, again, it’s like some vision of what would be a final end state? Even if you’re just writing it on a chalkboard, that just seems like so absent now.
Amir Tibon: It’s non-existent right now.
Chris Hayes: It’s non-existent.
Amir Tibon: Part of it was that through the Abraham Accords and the talks with the Saudis, we were trying to pretend that the Palestinian issue doesn’t exist.
Chris Hayes: Correct, yes.
Amir Tibon: That we can make peace with these countries that we never had a war with. I mean, how many Israelis died in the Battle of Bahrain?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Amir Tibon: How many people did we lose in the famous battle against the UAE? Exactly zero, because we never fought with them. So the Abraham Accords are great. I mean, I applauded them and it was interesting. They were signed during an election by President Trump and President Biden running against him, put out a statement congratulating him for it. And that was like a month before the election. That’s a very rare thing. And I really think it was a great achievement and it’s very important and I’m happy that it was signed, but it should not be a substitute for the Palestinian problem, which is a real issue. We are living next to and within and controlling over millions of people. And that’s not going to be solved by making peace with a country very far away. That’s going to be solved by dealing with that issue. And maybe it will take time and maybe the solution will be different than what we are envisioning today, but you can’t just ignore it and say, oh, you know, we don’t need that issue anymore. That, I think, is one of the important lessons of October 7, actually.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
(ADVERTISEMENT)
Chris Hayes: The last place I want to sort of end up is on your view of the U.S.-Israeli relationship a year into this. You know, obviously there’s a wide spectrum of opinion in the U.S.
Amir Tibon: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: It’s a huge country. It’s a complicated country.
Amir Tibon: You’ve got your own problems. That’s for a different podcast.
Chris Hayes: Well, yes. I mean, that’s what I spend most of my time on actually. Well, I would say that it’s a very weird situation. There’s no ostensible policy from Donald Trump on all this other than to say it never would have happened.
Amir Tibon: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: That’s his policy, never would happen, which is like, okay.
Amir Tibon: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And yet at the same time, people know which elements of American politics around Israel would be most empowered with him, which tend to be the most right-wing.
Amir Tibon: Yes.
Chris Hayes: There’s a lot of frustration in the Democratic coalition with Biden.
Amir Tibon: Yes.
Chris Hayes: There’s huge mobilization against the war. Not just college campuses, other places. So it’s a very complicated thing, but there’s also the sense of, as we approach, you know, we’re hitting this one year anniversary of this kind of like waiting for Godot, eternal recurrence of like, Biden’s constantly saying some peace deals around the corner and Netanyahu is like, absolutely not dude, like it’s not going to happen.
Amir Tibon: But I want to say something about President Biden and the war, okay? President Biden is dealing with an impossible situation here. If it wasn’t for him, we would not have had the first hostage deal in November that brought us back 100 women and children alive. And no matter what other things you can say about him, good or bad, I will forever be grateful to him for pushing for that deal in November that brought us back five women and girls from my kibbutz on their feet. So that’s one thing I want to get out of the way.
Chris Hayes: No, that’s important.
Amir Tibon: Now, the rest of the war, I think a lot of books will be written about this, maybe I’ll be writing one, about the bad decisions that his team made, about the miscalculations, about the wrong turns. And there’s a lot that they deserve criticism for. But when we talk about the current ceasefire negotiations that have been stuck for so many months, it’s important to understand who they are dealing with here. Because this is an agreement that needs to be signed between two men. Yahya Sinwar and Benjamin Netanyahu.
Chris Hayes: Yes, exactly.
Amir Tibon: Now, one of them, Yahya Sinwar, is an ultra-religious fanatic with messianic visions of grandeur, who is waiting in some bunker in Gaza for the entire Middle East to go on fire. And then God will come and give him the victory. That’s his vision, okay? He’s sitting there. Gaza has been destroyed because of what he did on October 7th. And he’s waiting for Iran and Hezbollah and, you know, militias in Iraq and Syria, and maybe a revolution in Jordan and the Houthis in Yemen and God knows what to ignite the whole region on fire. And that there will be tens of thousands of deaths and entire countries destroyed, and then some kind of a miracle will happen and Israel will be erased off the map. That’s what he’s waiting for. And he tells himself, I can always make a deal for these hostages and the end of the suffering of the people in Gaza, but if I wait one more week, maybe my vision comes true. So that’s one partner in this negotiation, this ultra, you know, fanatic, messianic, delusional person.
On the other side, you have Netanyahu. And Netanyahu is a very cynical politician who wants Donald Trump to win the American election —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Amir Tibon: — because he thinks Donald Trump will not intervene when his government returns to its judicial power grab, which they have never given up on. It’s been waiting during the war, but they are not giving up on it. And they’re actually promoting it during the war, just in smaller pieces. And he knows that if Kamala Harris wins the election, he will face the same obstacles he faced with Biden, U.S. opposition. And this will give encouragement to the protesters in Israel and the American-Jewish community will be speaking up against it and all of this will cause trouble. Whereas if Trump wins, Trump’s not going to care if Netanyahu basically cancels the judiciary in Israel, turns the police into his own security organization.
Chris Hayes: No, he would applaud it, I think.
Amir Tibon: And basically ends our democracy. So he wants Trump to win the election and he sees the continuation of the war as something that helps him in that regard because of this fracture in the democratic coalition. I mean, you know, I’m going to get people upset by saying this, but whatever. The left-wing anti-Biden, anti-Harris movement in this country are basically useful idiots for Netanyahu because, you know, this fracture is going to help Trump and that’s what he’s counting on. And at the same time, he also knows that if he makes a deal for the hostages, it could bring down his government because the far-right elements that he’s counting on will take down the government.
Chris Hayes: They’ve already said that. I mean, they explicitly say if there is a deal, we will walk.
Amir Tibon: Exactly.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Amir Tibon: It’s out in the open. So between these two guys —
Chris Hayes: Yes, right. Yes.
Amir Tibon: — one of them, Sinwar, this fanatic, you know, messianic, you know, borderline insane, the other, Netanyahu, this, you know, very cynical, ruthless politician, it’s very hard to make a deal. Now I do think they could have done some things differently along the way that would have increased the pressure on both of them to reach a deal. But I also recognize how difficult it is.
Chris Hayes: Yes, and the U.S. obviously doesn’t have a lot of leverage on Sinwar. There’s diplomatic ways to try to bring some pressure, the Qataris.
Amir Tibon: They have leverage on Sinwar’s supporters.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Amir Tibon: And they do have on Israel. And I think, honestly, on both, you know, Hamas and Israel, they did not use their cards properly.
Chris Hayes: One thing I’ll say about Sinwar, and I think it’s sort of a fair characterization of Hamas’s theory of the case, if you can call it that here, and I think they do, you know, obviously as a strategic thinker, like he planned this —
Amir Tibon: Yeah. Oh, for sure.
Chris Hayes: — for people that, you know.
Amir Tibon: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: You know, there were several interviews with Hamas spokespeople after October 7th, and I remember one of them, I forget who it was, but he was saying basically, it was on Arab language interview. And basically what he said was, look, you know, these things, essentially ejecting a colonial power, right, or which is how they view it.
Amir Tibon: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: These are long and bloody operations. And he ticks through the death tolls of various fights.
Amir Tibon: Algeria —
Chris Hayes: Algeria, this is the one. Yes, exactly. List them up, he says.
Amir Tibon: Yeah, of course.
Chris Hayes: And in Algeria, I remember him saying, you know, it was a hundred years and a million, I forget what the number was.
Amir Tibon: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: It was brutal. And it was actually very clarifying to me. The theory here, which is like, our end goal requires —
Amir Tibon: Death.
Chris Hayes: — death in enormous numbers.
Amir Tibon: Okay, but I want to respond to that because I —
Chris Hayes: Well, I’m not saying that’s true or good.
Amir Tibon: Yeah. No, I also think it’s ingenuine and I’ll say why. Because I don’t think this is really comparable to Algeria in the sense that —
Chris Hayes: No, I agree.
Amir Tibon: — in Algeria, you really have —
Chris Hayes: The French could leave.
Amir Tibon: Yeah, the French could leave. Exactly.
Chris Hayes: That’s right, yes.
Amir Tibon: The French had a country to return to.
Chris Hayes: That’s right.
Amir Tibon: And when people, you know, like —
Chris Hayes: No, that’s the difference. That is the difference. I agree. I don’t —
Amir Tibon: Listen, Chris, we tried this thing of living in Europe —
Chris Hayes: Right, yeah.
Amir Tibon: — and it didn’t really work that well.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Amir Tibon: Okay? So we don’t really —
Chris Hayes: No. I think the comparison to Algeria and all that is I agree.
Amir Tibon: And by the way, forget Hamas because Hamas, they’re very religious, but let’s say if the Palestinian struggle at large was focused 99% on the occupied West Bank, okay, and targeting the Israeli military, et cetera, you know, there would be a different conversation around it globally. But, you know, how does coming into this kibbutz on the Israeli border and murdering families actually serve this purpose of a Palestinian state in the West bank? I mean, it doesn’t.
Chris Hayes: No.
Amir Tibon: It does the opposite.
Chris Hayes: No, I mean, and I will say, I’ve watched this radicalization happening in American discourse. I mean, again, I returned to the thing you said before, which is my sort of key thing is that there’s millions of people, both Palestinian Muslim-Christian and Jewish Israelis —
Amir Tibon: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — from the diaspora and from Israel who are in that land are not going anywhere, right? That’s the fundamental fact everything has to deal with.
Amir Tibon: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And yet the maximalist view of one or the other is actually quite popular. And one of the things that really shocked me when I went to the region, because I was a little bit of a naive lib, was like, oh, there’s some hidden majority for peace.
Amir Tibon: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And then you talk to everyone and it’s like, no, they shouldn’t be here. Like across the divide, it’s like, oh, I sort of get it now.
Amir Tibon: It’s very true. But at the same time, I also think that it’s a reflection of the political leadership —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Amir Tibon: — because, you know, if you have political leadership that is actually, you know, leading the population in a different direction.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Amir Tibon: Public opinion can change and there are examples of this in the United States. I think one of my favorites, like when Obama came out for gay marriage, suddenly you saw like a rise in support for it publicly. Sometimes a leader can actually convince the public about something.
Chris Hayes: Well, and also the same way that you can get into vicious cycles, you can get into virtuous cycles —
Amir Tibon: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — and people that are in intractable conflicts. It was very funny, I saw someone’s Instagram story that someone I’m friends with, right, now on vacation and their Instagram story is their trip to Sarajevo. And I thought to myself, no, it was actually a sort of a beautiful and profound moment at some level, right?
Amir Tibon: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Because I thought to myself, Sarajevo —
Amir Tibon: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — is occupied for people, I think of our age.
Amir Tibon: Yeah, for a certain age, that’s like the symbol of war and destruction.
Chris Hayes: Exactly. Well, the way Beirut was for an earlier generation, right?
Amir Tibon: Probably Gaza for the future.
Chris Hayes: A bombed out city, right?
Amir Tibon: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: A place that’s reduced to rubble.
Amir Tibon: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And here it was, you know, and which is not to say that like —
Amir Tibon: Vacation land, basically.
Chris Hayes: Yes, exactly. Which is not to say like everything’s going hunky dory there, but it is saying that like the processes that create recrimination, violence, bloodshed and cruelty and this sort of negative polarization, they can be unwound.
Amir Tibon: You need the right leadership. And that’s something, you know, I really believe that we will come back to live in a house. And in the first weeks after October 7, I thought Gaza would be destroyed and that it would remain like this for years and years and years. And that may still be the case, but I really hope that it won’t, that there can be a way to rebuild it.
Chris Hayes: Amir Tibon is an Israeli journalist. He reports for “Haaretz” newspaper, which is, I really recommend to anyone across the political spectrum and across the spectrum of views on the conflict to read because it is incredibly vital resource. His new book, which really is excellent and sort of weaves together his personal story and really fascinating history is called “The Gates of Gaza: A Story of Betrayal, Survival, and Hope in Israel’s Borderlands.” Amir, it’s a great pleasure to have you on.
Amir Tibon: Thank you. Really, I enjoyed it and thanks for giving me the time.
Chris Hayes: Once again, great thanks to Amir Tibon. His book is really fascinating and one of the more revelatory things I’ve read about this past brutal, horrifying year. It’s called “The Gates of Gaza: A Story of Betrayal, Survival, and Hope in Israel’s Borderlands.” We’d love to hear your feedback, particularly on this topic, which tends to inspire a lot of it. Send it our way. Email us, withpod@gmail.com. Get in touch with us using the hashtag #WITHpod. You can follow us on TikTok by searching for WITHpod. You can also follow me on Threads, what used to be called Twitter and Bluesky, all @chrislhayes. Be sure to hear new episodes every Tuesday.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News. It’s produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia. This episode was engineered by Cedric Wilson and features music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mention here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.