The Gates of Gaza: A Story of Betrayal, Survival, and Hope in Israel’s Borderlands by Amir Tibon; New York: Little, Brown and Company © 2024; ISBN 9780316-580960; 280 pages plus acknowledgments, notes, and index; $30; Publication Date: September 24, 2024.
SAN DIEGO – Nahal Oz is an Israeli kibbutz situated alongside the Gaza border. It is part of the Sha’ar Hanegev municipality, which is San Diego’s sister city. Amir Tibon is a Ha’aretz journalist who lived in Nahal Oz with his wife and two daughters on October 7, 2023.
When Hamas terrorists attacked Nahal Oz at 6:30 a.m. that fateful Shabbat morning, Tibon’s two little girls were asleep in their home’s concrete lined “safe room.” Tibon and his wife Miri joined the girls there for what would be ten hours of terror. They didn’t emerge until 4 p.m., when Amir’s father, Noam Tibon, a retired general with the IDF, after having fought his way from Tel Aviv to the kibbutz, knocked on the metal plate that shielded the safe room’s window and urged them to come out.
Daughters Galia, 3 ½, and Carmel, 1 ¾, began stirring in their beds at 7:10 a.m. Keeping the normally active little girls quiet became a life-or-death concern as terrorists rampaged through the neighborhood. At first, Miri persuaded the girls to sleep a little bit longer, an instruction with which they complied. But inevitably the girls reawakened, and there was no breakfast, no bathroom, and no television for them. The girls wanted to pursue their regular activities, but Miri reiterated to them that it was dangerous outside and everyone, including mommy and daddy, needed to stay very quiet. Both little girls seemed to understand the situation and kept still.
While the family stayed imprisoned in the small, dark room, they all too briefly had cellphone service until the device’s battery ran down and there was no electrical outlet in the room for recharging. The most important call Amir made was to his father in Tel Aviv, who loaded his sidearm, and with his wife, Gali, driving, they proceeded to Nahal Oz. But along the route, near the Western Negev city of Sderot, they found a traumatized couple who had escaped from the Nova music festival at which Hamas slaughtered several hundred partygoers. Noam and Gali picked them up, turned their car around and drove them to safety in the Israeli city of Ashkelon.
Noam subsequently dropped Gali off, and started to make his way toward Nahal Oz, but the way was littered with bodies and fraught with danger. In peace time, the father could have reached his son and family in a quarter of the time, but in wartime nearly ten harrowing hours passed from the time of the initial attack.
The drama is all recounted in Amir’s memoir – the very fact that he wrote the book reassuring a reader that his family survived. What made his account even more valuable – especially for San Diegans eager to learn more about a community within our sister city – was between chapters he recited the history of Nahal Oz from its founding in 1953 to the massacre of 2023.
He detailed how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in an effort to buy off Hamas, had permitted the tiny Arab nation of Qatar to deliver many millions of dollars to Hamas, with which the terrorist group purchased weapons and tunneling equipment rather than humanitarian aid for Gaza’s civilian population.
Tibon reported that Yahiya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, had assured Netanyahu through a network of intermediaries that so long as Qatari money kept being delivered to Hamas, quiet would prevail along the border.
As Britain’s Neville Chamberlain learned at the outset of World War II, appeasement of Hitler didn’t bring about “peace in our time.” Neither did Netanyahu’s attempted appeasement of Hamas. So over-confident was Netanyahu that the Gaza border has been made secure that most of Israel’s military units were stationed in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria), leaving Nahal Oz and the other kibbutzim along the Gaza border relatively unprotected. On October 7, the day Hamas struck, was the Jewish holiday of Simcha Torah!
Today, the Gaza war continues with great loss of life and limb on both sides. Thus far, Netanyahu has not had to face up politically to the disastrous consequences of his pre-October 7th policies.
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Donald H. Harrison is publisher and editor of San Diego Jewish World.