Israel is small. Around 8,300 square miles. This banal fact of geography can be hard to keep in mind when the country looms so large in international news, wields military force disproportionate to its size and is imbued with almost supernatural powers of global influence by its enemies.
But a sense of the nation’s littleness is vital for understanding its sense of existential vulnerability – the deep-tissue dread of erasure that is at the core of Israeli identity and politics. Also, in a small country, practically everyone has some connection to everyone else. These factors vastly compounded the trauma of the 7 October Hamas terrorist attacks.
Amir Tibon spent most of that day with his wife and two infant daughters locked in the “safe room” of their home on the kibbutz of Nahal Oz on the border with Gaza. For hours they listened to the sounds of neighbours being murdered outside, while monitoring simultaneous atrocities on their phones and sending desperate SOS messages.
Tibon was eventually freed by his father, a retired general in the Israel Defense Forces, who drove from Tel Aviv to fetch his besieged family. The story of that freelance rescue mission forms the narrative spine of The Gates of Gaza. It is a wide-ranging survey of Israeli history expressed through the drama of a single day and the claustrophobic politics of a small country.
The author, a journalist for the liberal daily newspaper Haaretz, reports events with admirable calm, where his own peril is concerned, and cool fury directed at the failures of his country’s leaders. The charge sheet of missed opportunities, miscalculations and military hubris covers many episodes since Israel’s foundation, but the author’s frustration palpably intensifies from 1996, when Benjamin Netanyahu comes on the scene as the country’s youngest ever prime minister. The previous year, Yitzhak Rabin, the Nobel prize-winning signatory to landmark Middle East peace accords, had been assassinated by a far-right Jewish fundamentalist.
Tibon charts the systematic ratcheting of Israeli politics away from compromise and towards ultranationalist militarism and religious zealotry. He tracks the way Netanyahu, among others, worked that dynamic to advance his ambition. He is scathing of the Israeli prime minister’s cynical collusion in the consolidation of Hamas control over Gaza. It was a divide-and-rule calculation: an enclave of Islamist fundamentalists to the south wrecked any prospect of unity and eventual statehood through alliance with the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. The accompanying bet that any terrorist threat could be contained or deterred was criminally complacent.
The secular, liberal and left strands of Israeli politics are not absent from Tibon’s account. He is eloquent on the massive protests against Netanyahu’s authoritarian judicial reforms in the summer of 2023. He captures the paradoxical complexity of a society that manages to be tightly knit and bitterly divided at the same time. Since much of the action unfolds in and around Nahal Oz, the kibbutz itself becomes a protagonist in the story. The settlement’s journey from agricultural commune in modern Israel’s earliest days to bloody battleground on 7 October tracks the rise and fall of an idealistic socialist conception of Zionism that is now rarely evoked by that word. In interludes of relative calm, when peace seemed viable, tentative cultural and economic ties were woven across the border with Gaza. The citizens of Nahal Oz were readier than many Israelis to see Palestinians as neighbours, not enemies. At the end of the story, the kibbutz lies abandoned.
Timor’s narrative does not venture far into Gaza itself. The subject is Israel, told in the first-person. The author acknowledges the horror of what has been visited on the Palestinian territory and grieves for the futility of war waged on Netanyahu’s terms that can only accelerate a cycle of violence. The scale of slaughter and destruction is covered by allusion that will be too euphemistic for readers who want unambiguous outrage and condemnation. But, given what Tibor personally endured – the friends killed and kidnapped by Hamas – he shows an impressive capacity for analytical detachment in recognising the portion of blame for that ordeal attributable to his own country’s dysfunctional politics.
In that respect, The Gates of Gaza is certain to disappoint some readers. It will not appeal to the radical anti-Zionist left, where Israel’s very existence is conceived as the origin of Middle Eastern wars and its extirpation craved as the solution. It is not for those who think the ferocity of Israel’s military response to terrorism has cancelled out any entitlement to compassion for Jewish victims. Nor will this book please the pro-Israel right, where the country’s every action is configured as a legitimate and necessary expression of self-defence, no matter what the cost in Palestinian lives.
But there is a swath of opinion between those poles. There is a readership that recognises the validity of conflicting perspectives; that doesn’t want complex events distilled into easy parables of moral righteousness. That audience, despairing of the way so much Middle East coverage is drained of historical context and nuance, will find some solace in The Gates of Gaza.
