Jonathan Spyer

Jerusalem Post, 07/02

An interview with an October 7 survivor, Gaza combat veteran, and advocate for IDF reservists, who is now entering Israeli politics.

“About 100 meters outside of Tsohar, the Ravshatz (community security officer) saw a convoy of 15 motorbikes heading towards them on the road leading to the yishuv,” Shlomi Damri tells me.  “He said to his deputy ‘wow – look how quickly the police have arrived.’  And his deputy said ‘listen, there’s something strange.  They’re not wearing helmets.’  And after a moment they realized.  They opened fire on the Hamas men and a firefight began.”

Shlomi is  describing to me the opening moments of the events of October 7, 2023, as experienced by the small community of Tsohar, seven kilometers from the Gaza border. 

“They managed to kill a few of them.  I was close by.  I heard the whole thing but I didn’t understand exactly what was happening.  Then the Ravshatz called me and said “Listen, there’s terrorists everywhere.  Get everyone in the shelter, inside the house, and lock it.” 

We are sitting at my kitchen table in Abu Tor.  It is early 2026, a Jerusalem winter’s day.  But as Damri, calmly and without emotion, relates the astonishing, dramatic story of his, his family’s and his community’s experiences  that day, we are back , transported to the horror and confusion of that time in early October. 

Shlomi Damri, 34, an electrical engineer by profession, has emerged over the last year as one of the more remarkable of the new breed of reserve soldier activists produced by the events of the last two years.  An infantry squad commander in the IDF reserves, and a wounded veteran of combat in Gaza, Damri today is a leading member of the ‘Miluimnikim’ movement, and a volunteer with organizations assisting veterans suffering from PTSD. 

From the chaos of the border communities on October 7 and the loss of his brother, murdered while leaving the Nova festival,  to 400 days of combat in Gaza, and then on to public activity in an effort to change the country’s priorities and bring a new serving elite to the fore, Damri’s journey is at once remarkable, and yet perhaps representative of those emergent forces now set to come to the fore in Israel. 

October 7

Damri, married with two daughters, lives in Ranana.  He found himself on October 7 in his home community of Tsohar because of the festival of Simchat Torah.  His mother still lives in Tsohar, and a family gathering took place on October 6.  Damri was accompanied by his four year old daughter, Arbel. 

Tsohar is one of a cluster of seven communities, located a few kilometers from the Gaza border.  It was established in 1973. 

Tsohar avoided the fate of the neighboring border communities – namely, to be over-run by the first wave of Hamas terrorists on October 7 – because of a series of coincidences. Damri was woken at 4.30 on the morning of that day by his brother in law, the community’s security officer.  There were reports of Beduin infiltrators in the village. They took their rifles and made a search. They found nothing.  When the sirens started at 6.29, they were still awake and thought it was something routine.  Maybe the IDF had carried out a targeted killing and this was the response.  Or a small scale infiltration had taken place.  Nothing yet had happened to convince them that this was the major attack that residents of the border communities had discussed for years. 

As a result, when the community’s security officer received a call from neighboring Kibbutz Holit that terrorists had entered the area of the kibbutz, he decided with his deputy to drive to the neighboring community and offer assistance.  This was the reason why the two were 100 meters or so down the road from the entrance to Tzohar when they sighted the convoy of terrorists coming towards them, and opened fire. The burst of fire killed four of the Hamas men and scattered the others, giving the residents of Tsohar time to organize their own defense.  The remaining terrorists made for the neighboring Moshav Mivtachim where they succeeded in entering and in slaughtering many of the inhabitants.  Some got as far as Ofakim before they were neutralized.  Others succeeded in returning to Gaza. 

“We started getting pictures on Whatsapp.  From Nir Oz.  From the kibbutzim.  Yarden Bibas was a good friend of mine…I saw the clip of Shiri with the two children and I understood that they’re starting to kidnap people.  We began to understand that something huge was happening.”

Understanding that the ‘major attack’ had come, Damri tried to call his two brothers, Tal and Dan, both of whom were in the vicinity.  Tal was living in Kibbutz Kfar Aza.  Dan was attending the Nova festival.  

“Tal at Kfar Aza answered me in a whisper.  He said ‘there’s terrorists inside the kibbutz’, then hung up. Dan already didn’t answer.” 

“I’d chosen to stay in the vicinity of our home.  My mother’s house is in the area of the entrance to the village.  If they arrive, we’re the first house they’re going to enter. 

The emergency response team of Tsohar was basically the security officer and his deputy.  The army had taken the rifles from the others a year earlier.  People just had their pistols.  Everyone did what he could.”

“I called my battalion commander.  I said the whole area is crawling with terrorists.  He told me ‘they haven’t called us up yet but I’ve already contacted people and told them to get to the base.’

So I’m trying to get forces to come to us, but I’m also trying to figure out what’s happening with my brothers. “

“I knew that Dan was on the way home from the Nova, so I got the car and went out to look for him.  After a few hundred meters, close to where the Ravshatz had fought the terrorists, I passed the bodies of two Hamas men.  Then further down I saw a convoy of shot up cars.  There were two people there – a cop and the Ravshatz of a different community.  And we started opening up the cars, to see if there were survivors. 

In the first was the body of someone I knew, who had gone to save his daughter and was murdered.  And on, and then to the last car and I already recognized it.  I opened it and I saw there Shir, Dan’s girlfriend, shot dead in the driver’s seat, my brother Dan in the seat next to her, also shot dead, and in the back – Dor, Dudi and Chen, three friends of theirs, all murdered, at the intersection, not far from getting home.” 

“In the beginning, I tried to lift them up, to do something, to move them.  The cop said to me ‘get out of here, theres still terrorists about.’  So I went home, changed my clothes because my trousers were covered in blood.  I took some clothes of Dan’s and his army boots.  We could hear the fighting from Mivtachim, about 300 meters from us.  I understood they’d be on us soon.”

Expecting a major assault from Hamas at any moment, Damri organized his 4 year old daughter’s evacuation from Tsohar.  “I put her in the car, with my sister and her partner, gave them a pistol, explained the way they should go.  They drove through the fields, in the direction of Tze’elim, and then to Be’ersheva. 

Two rifles, a few pistols, and if the Ravshatz hadn’t’ve been on the road, they would have reached us.”

The people of Tsohar then spent the rest of the day in the defense of their community.  Thanks to the early response, Hamas did not succeed in penetrating the area, despite repeated efforts.  They stood guard throughout the day, and throughout the night. 

“Towards the evening, I understood that rumors of Dan’s death were already beginning to spread.  I was worried that my mother would find out that way, through Whatsapp.  So I went back to the house, my mom understood something was not ok.  I sat them on the sofa, and I said ‘We’re a strong family.  We’ll get through this.  But Dan’s been murdered.  And Shir.  And Dudi, and Dor.  I gave then the names of about twenty of our friends, who I knew had been murdered.  My mum just broke apart.  A friend of mine who was at the guardpost at the entrance to Moshav Ohad told me later that he knew Dan had been murdered because he heard my mom’s screams.

From then til the morning I was outside the house.  The terrorists didn’t succeed in getting into the village. The first forces of the Israeli military arrived at 5.30 on the morning of October 8.” 

“Then we went back to the houses. The army organized a convoy out of there of all the cars in the direction of Eilat.  In Tse’elim we stopped the cars.  My family continued in the direction of Eilat, and I turned around.”

“I drove on the 232 Road, by way of the Gaza Division base, the Nova site, Kibbutz Be’eri…I couldn’t just stand there, after everything that had happened, no army, nothing there, everything collapsing, and on October 8 I arrived to miluim.” 

Gaza

Damri’s unit, the 5^th infantry brigade, replaced the Givati Reconaissance company and the Maglan commandos at Kibbutz Nahal Oz.  “In the first days, we killed the last few terrorists who were still hiding.  And we collected the bodies of the dead in Nahal Oz.  The last terrorists we saw was about two weeks after.  In an avocado field.  They were all in, hungry, drinking from the irrigation system.”

“The military command at that time was barely functioning.  The army was being managed by company commanders and those below them.  Then we got the order that we were joining the maneuver into Gaza. “

“The company commander called me in and said ‘listen, we’re going to a sensitive place.  I don’t think you should take part.’  I didn’t understand why.  Then he told me we were going to Khirbet Khuzaia. On October 7, we took from the bodies of the terrorists all the kit they had on them – phones, papers and so on.  And two of the terrorists whose bodies we found, the two who were closest to the body of my brother, those two were from Khirbet Khuzaia.”

“He said, ‘you have a personal involvement in this.  I don’t want you to come. I said ‘if I wont be there, no one has a reason to be there.’  He understood I was serious on the matter and he agreed that I’d go in.”

“We were the first to arrive there.  I’m the commander of the medical section. It was the first time I’d been in combat of such intensity.  Tens of dead.  Artillery.  Air power. 

One day I was standing on a roof with one of the guys.  And we saw Tsohar from there, and the house in which my mom lives. 

Then you meet the war face to face.  We got  a call that a D9 working with us had been hit by a shell.  This was the first critically wounded man we’d seen in the war.  The driver had a wound to the stomach.  He came down himself from the D9.  He went with his stomach open, holding it in.  We treated him. Got him to a helicopter.  He survived.”

“16 days of fighting in Khirbet Khuzaia.  We left there on foot, back to Israel.  We looked behind, and we saw the Hamas men coming out onto the rooves.  All the ones we’d spent two weeks looking for.  They’d just hidden in the tunnels and waited for us to leave.”

“In January, we’d thought we’d finished, but straight away we got called up again.  To Shati, in the north of Gaza.  The brigade took heavy losses in Shati.  Difficult ground. A lot of rain.  Mud up to your knees.  We had people killed in the first days.  One of the tanks was hit by an RPG.  The company commander was killed.  The others trapped in the tank.  We got a D9 to take the turret off.  Incidents like that every day.  We were killing 6 or 7 Hamas men each day.  Face to face.  For 3 weeks.  The most intense of the war. 

And on the last day.  There’s drones in the air.  And we got a message that one of the tanks had been hit and someone was critically wounded.  We ran there,  three or four minutes of running, through mud and rubble.  I got there first.  They’d already brought the wounded man off the tank.  I saw that he’d lost an arm and his stomach was open.  I’m not a medic by profession, I’m just their commander.  I took my hand and pushed it into his shoulder, to try and stop the bleeding.  With my other hand, I’m trying to push his organs back into his stomach.  They got him breathing again.  There was fighting all around.  We were shouting for them to come and get us. 

Finally we got him on a stretcher, and into a Hummer.  I took my hand out of his shoulder and put the hand of one of the guys in the Hummer in.  They got him to a helicopter.  The rest of the crew were unharmed.  He was a company commander.  He’d only been in the job two weeks because the previous company commander had been killed.  His name was Netzer. 

That night, we were pulled out.  We walked four hours or so, back to Israel.  And as soon as I got back, in those first moments back in Israel, someone came up to me and said that Netzer the company commander was dead, that he hadn’t made it. 

Activism

And 24 hours later, the same hands that had been treating the critically wounded are there with my two daughters.  And that’s life.  But also I saw while in Gaza we’d all fought together – leftists, rightists and so on.  But I got back and people had gone back to October 6^th.  All the hatred, and the mutual accusations.  It just broke me. 

So on the one hand, I’m angry with what’s going on.  On the other, I’m only now starting to really absorb what happened.  I see my family and the girls.  I’m trying to re-build everything. 

I see that in the day, I’m just fine.  But in the night after the girls are asleep, I can’t get to sleep and I sit outside.  With the pistol in my hand.  And my feeling is, another minute and the terrorists will be here. I can feel that something’s not right.

I feel all the time that I want to go back to reserve duty.  That there my behavior is normal.  You know the military atmosphere? Something fun in it, and something moving too, but also that you don’t have to deal with reality itself.

So I realized I needed to be active.  And I started looking for places in civilian life to volunteer.  I got in touch with Yoaz Hendel, I saw that he’d created a movement, not political at that time – volunteers in kibbutzim, helping miluimnikim and people with combat shock, and I started to volunteer.” 

Damri was called up for a third three month period of reserve duty in mid 2024, in the Netzarim area. 

On his return, he increased the pace and scope of his activism. 

“All the tjme I’m thinking, and its burning in me – why don’t people understand that the divisions, and the irresponsibility, are what brought us to this – beyond the specific military errors.  We too are responsible.  So when I returned, I went to Yoaz again, to begin activities to really address this. 

I have a very clear compass which says that the murder of my brother took place because of these reasons: apart from the murderous Nazi ideology of Hamas which wants to kill all Jews – they had the chance to carry this out because we were busy with the wrong things.  With shrinking the army, internal divisions, little political matters. 

And that’s when I went in and really began my struggle – to make the army bigger, recruitment for all, also Haredim, also Arabs. 

We became a party at that time.  But one of the things that continued to most concern me was the treatment of PTSD sufferers.  I see my own situation, I know what’s with me.  I know I have serious PTSD.  And I know there’s many others like me and I’m not prepared that they should be ignored.  People are taking their own lives.  One of the people from my own unit committed suicide.  Someone who’d been with me since my regular service. 

So I’ve been the face of that struggle, for PTSD sufferers, for the wounded and around the Chok hagiyus (recruitment law – ie the effort to ensure conscription of Ultra-Orthodox Israelis). 

But we’re working on something deeper, which is the cornerstone – to end the whole business of left and right.  Whoever is a Zionist, whoever believes that the State of Israel should be based on Zionist forces, and not on people who escape from responsibility, and from the army, people like that should be in politics.  So I’m working so all those forces should be united.  Whoever sits with me in the tank, can sit with me in the government.  That’s my slogan.”

During reserve duty in the Muwassi area in mid-2025, Damri suffered damage to his hearing, as a result of prolonged exposure to very loud noise.  “There was a shooting incident.  And in the middle of it I lost my hearing completely.  In the days ahead, the hearing returned in one ear.  But in the other one not.”  He remains deaf in one ear. 

“I was in a three month recovery process, so I wasn’t working and I focused on the activism.  With the central message that if we don’t get it together, they’ll come against us again.  I’m fighting for us not to return to the same mistakes as before.  The recruitment law is the thing that gets headlines, but we’re fighting for other things too, for the wounded and PTSD sufferers, and also for an aggressive security policy. 

The Yellow Line, from our point of view, is the border.  Its out of the question that we allow Hamas to remain in the Gaza Strip, and this can be achieved only by force.  There’s nothing now preventing us from using force, and now is the time for military pressure.  And instead, the government’s going back to 2006 and trying to sell all manner of clever tricks.”

“From my point of view, the whole 120 of them should go home. The first responsibility for what happened is that of the IDF and the Shin Bet, no doubt, but the higher responsibility is of the prime minister and the government.  It’s their policy, which they stuck to for years, of strengthening Hamas, giving money to Hamas and so on. At 6.29 on October 7^th, the army should have stopped Hamas.  But until that point, it’s the government’s responsibility. 

So we need as much new blood in politics as possible.  So yeah, I think they should all go home.  But I have to put my personal views aside, for the good of Israel. 

We’re losing a lot of people. Some killed, some wounded, some with trauma, some whose lives are collapsing after 400 days in the reserves.  Every time they call me, I’ll go.  I’ll fight to go.  It’s a critical moment for the nation of Israel, no doubt. 

But things have to change.  The people who contribute the most, I want them at the front.  Not only in the army, but also in civilian life.  So we want to put the reserve soldiers to the fore.”

Shlomi Damri is heading for another round of reserve duty.  Into Syria, this time, in the Quneitra area.  Afterwards, there are elections looming, of course, but also the daily work for PTSD sufferers and the wounded. And, presumably, his own route back from everything which has taken place over the last two years. 

The attacks of October 7, like earlier Arab and Islamist offensives against the Jews in Israel from north and south, were predicated, the available evidence suggests, on a notion of Israel’s fragility.  Just one final push, the theory went, and the whole infuriating edifice of non-Muslim rule west of the Jordan river would collapse.  This appears to be a perennial illusion in the minds of a considerable population in the region. As a result, a cohort emerges with the intention of testing the matter, every two or three decades.    From this point of view, and whatever the very justified criticisms of the performance of various state entities in the course of the last two years, Israeli society seems to have passed the test.  This is in no small measure and perhaps most centrally the result of the efforts of people like Shlomi Damri and the many other comparable young men and women in his generation.  The impact they will make on Israeli public life in the period ahead remains to be seen. 

Australian, 18/10

At the Gama Junction, a few kilometers from the Gaza border,  I met Gadi Mozes.  Among the crowd of people waiting to greet the convoy bearing the last 13 of the living Israeli hostages from Gaza.  Gadi, who is 80 years old, is a member of Kibbutz Nir Oz.  He was standing amid a group of residents of the kibbutz.  They had a banner bearing the name of their community and a Hebrew message saying “We aren’t tired – we are the pavers of the path.” 

Tiny Nir Oz was the community perhaps hardest hit of all in the massacres of October 7.  47 of its 400 residents were killed on that day, and another 76 taken hostage.  Gadi’s long term partner, Efrat Katz, was among those murdered.  Gadi was held as a hostage for 482 days, most of it in solitary confinement, by Palestinian Islamic Jihad.  He met my gaze steadily when I approached him after recognizing him, and politely declined to be interviewed.  “You can photograph me, though,” he said, so I did.  I was lucky because Gadi’s son made a joke just before I pressed the shutter, so he’s smiling warmly in the photograph.  That isn’t what he looks like most of the time. Mostly, there was that unreachable gravity about him that people who have suffered the unimaginable often have. 

A few minutes later, the convoy bringing the 13 hostages came down the road.  The shouting was unexpectedly loud.  I stood at the front to get a clear line for photographing, so I couldn’t see people for a moment, and it was like a great wave of sound behind me. A sort of wall of cheering and applause.  “Youre heroes,” someone called out.  It was over quickly and the convoy moved on, on its way to Tel Aviv.  It occurred to me that we had just witnessed the last act of the two year war between Israel and Hamas. 

It affected me more than I had expected.  Perhaps it was the ride down from Jerusalem, and the point at which we entered what I think of, like Paul Simon says in ‘Graceland’ as the cradle of the war.  The names, once just nondescript Hebrew locations, have now become signifiers of something monumental and somber, that is already solidifying into history.  One after another.  Kibbutz Beeri, the scene of one of the most terrible massacres.  And then Alumim, which the Hamas men failed to enter.  A desperate attack by a few self-mobilized men from the air force commandos held them up, and bought time.  One of the commandos, who was killed in that fight, was Ido Rosenthal, a relative of some  good friends of mine from Jerusalem.  I remembered him from when we were younger.  A preternaturally calm man, with the unmistakable look of an elite fighter, and no interest whatsoever  in making a thing out of it.  Except when it mattered. 

And then, further south, the site of the Nova festival.  This has already become a kind of shrine.  There are portraits and little messages about many of the people killed there, all arranged in what was the main dancing area of the festival, where much of the slaughter took place.  Mainly you’re struck by how impossibly young they all were.  Some of the messages have a kind of sweetly exhortary tone which for those who know the country well is immediately identifiable as quintessentially Israeli.  Not the Israeliness that gets talked about and that people think they know, but another element.  The memorial for Dor Hanan Shafir, for example, exhorts the reader to “do good deeds, which were characteristic of Dor, in his memory:  1. Check in on a friend, especially if they are going through a tough time. 2. Complete tasks fully.  3. Honor your parents.”  Shafir, who was 30, and his fiancée Savyon were both murdered at the Nova site. 

The arrival of the last 13 living hostages to Israel effectively brings the curtain down on the war that the massacres of October 7 initiated. 

The conflict has been of monumental dimensions.  Western coverage has concentrated on Gaza, and on the plight of its civilian population.  At its height, however, in the 15 month period between April 2024 and July 2025, this was a region-wide, state to state conflict.  Gaza was the spark that ignited it.  The narrow coastal strip then formed a single front within the larger picture, before returning to be the sole arena of combat in the final months.   The region wide conflict came about because of the alliance system of which Hamas was and is a part, namely the group of states and movements aligned with and supported by the Islamic Republic of Iran.  The most immediately striking outcome of the war is the very significant weakening of this alliance, though not yet its destruction. 

Evidence which has emerged since October 7 suggests that the attacks were not part of a coordinated effort by Iran and its allies.  Rather, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar chose to act alone.  So from Hamas’s point of view, October 7 was something of a leap in the dark.  A handwritten document authored by Sinwar and recovered by the IDF during the fighting in Gaza indicates that the Hamas leader expected, without knowing for sure, that bold action by his movement would launch a much wider regional conflagration.  It also appears that he expected that the attacks would trigger a wider uprising west of the Jordan River, bringing in both West Bank Palestinians and Arab citizens of Israel. 

A passage from the document reads “There may be indications of enemy collapse already at the outset, and the movements of our people “inside” in Jerusalem and the West Bank, as well as Hezbollah’s attack, may encourage this. Therefore, we must be prepared to expand the attack to the maximum.”  Elsewhere, Sinwar writes of the need for images “which will trigger a surge of euphoria, frenzy, and momentum among our people, especially among the residents of the West Bank, the “internal” [Israeli Arabs], Jerusalem, and our entire Islamic nation.”

Sinwar got his images, all right, but they didn’t produce the results he expected, or hoped for.  In the event,  there was no joining of the fray by Arab Israelis or Arab Jerusalemites, or West Bank Palestinians.  The Hamas leader’s hope wasn’t absurd.  In the events of May, 2021, there had been some stirrings in these areas in sympathy with Gaza and the supposed defence of Al Aqsa Mosque.  But not this time. 

The regional response, Sinwar’s ‘Hizballah attack’ did come, but it came late, and piecemeal.  This appears to have been the product of the Hamas leaders’ decision to go it alone, without seeking the prior assent or approval of their allies. This left the allies in the position of either being seen to desert Gaza in its hour of need, or risking entry into a major war with Israel before they were completely ready (ie mainly before Iran had gone nuclear, but also before their various assets and forces had reached the needed levels of capacity and power). 

The result: Iran and its allies tried to split the difference, entering the war, but not, they hoped, to a level that would bring down major Israeli retribution.  They also seem to have failed to coordinate their response.  The result was that Israel was able to focus on each of the component parts in turn, rather than being forced to deal with all of them simultaneously. 

Hizballah in Lebanon entered the war as early as October 8.  Israel responded defensively for a year, even as 70,000 Israelis were forced to leave their homes in the north.  A major operation began against the organization in September, 2024 and by the end of the year Hizballah was pulverized, its leadership dead, with the IDF deployed in five outposts north of the border. 

The Yemeni Ansar Allah (Houthis) organisation began its attacks on Israel on October 19, 2023.  The Houthis achieved their main successes, however, against international shipping on the Gulf of Aden-Red Sea route.  They hardly penetrated Israeli airspace.  Israel, in response, destroyed large swathes of infrastructure in the Houthi controlled part of Yemen, killing also the Houthis’ prime minister and a large part of his Cabinet. 

Iran itself chose to enter the war in April, 2025, with a ballistic missile and drone attack on Israel, repeated in October of that year.  Israel’s major response came in June, 2025, in coordination with the US, causing massive damage to Iran’s nuclear sites, destroying its air defenses and killing a number of senior officials, before Teheran accepted a ceasefire. 

In a historically significant by-product of the weakening of the Iran-led axis, the weakened Assad regime in Syria was finally over-run in December 2024 by the Islamist insurgency under way against it since 2012. 

Finally, with the war once more reduced to a single front, Hamas in October 2025 agreed to a ceasefire which would include the release of  all Israeli hostages, while leaving Israel in control of part of Gaza. 

From this quick tour, it’s plain that the main result of Sinwar’s decision to launch the October 7 attacks has been the decimation of the area he controlled, and the profound weakening of the alliance of which he was part.   

In the specific context of Gaza, however, Israel has not achieved a complete victory.  Hamas is already re-emerging in the 47% of the Strip from which the IDF has withdrawn.  The organisation still musters somewhere around 20,000 fighters.  The clan based Palestinian militias operating in cooperation with Israel will seek to stand against them.  This means that the reassertion of de facto control in part of Gaza by Hamas, or renewed strife as other elements seek to prevent this looks likely.  The ‘International Stabilisation Force’ envisaged by President Donald Trump’s plan does not yet exist.  In the meantime, other forces will fight in the vacuum.  Hamas has not surrendered or disarmed, and will not do so of its own free will. This matter remains to be settled.

So the outcome of the war on the ground, across the region, is very favourable for Israel. The country, its defence forces and its civil society recovered quickly from the shock of October 7, re-sealed the border, and went on to deliver crushing, tho not yet terminal blows against a regional axis arrayed against them.  That’s the way it looks from the Middle East, where hard power and its uses are understood by both friend and foe. 

On the diplomatic and international stage, the picture is different.  Western media coverage concentrated on Gaza throughout the war. The framing of the coverage often, somewhat surreally, depicted events as a kind of senseless assault by Israel on a civilian population.  This picture bears no resemblance to the truth. Israel’s Gaza operations in many of their details and in their results resembled the global coalition’s war against the Islamic State.  I say that not as a passive observer, but as a correspondent who covered both those wars on many occasions from the front lines.

But the extent to which this false depiction has penetrated large swathes of public consciousness in the west gives reason for pause.  The crowds of thousands in western capitals calling for the destruction of Israel, and the strong support afforded those crowds by powerful political forces up to and including governments in the west, and up to and including rewarding Hamas with recognition of a Palestinian state, all form troubling elements of the picture of the last two years. 

There is a point at which this shades into the area of the intangible.  Why does a disproportionate, furious anger against the Jews seem to re-surface, in altered form, generation after generation?  But there is also something deeply tangible here.  It is the growth of Islamist political power, as a result of ideological currents and demographic changes, in a series of western countries.  This phenomenon, and its alliance with a part of the political left, lies behind these developments in the west.  Israel needs, and has lacked, a diplomatic and political strategy for addressing these matters.  Perhaps, now there is time, such a strategy may be assembled. 

The rise of anti Israel and anti Jewish sentiment in the west, the emergence of Hamas as a force, and the Iran-led alliance are ultimately products of the same source.  This source is the revolutionary political Islam which has erupted to prominence over the last half century.  When seen from this point of view, it is clear that the root cause that led to the October 7 massacres has not yet been vanquished, even if some of its manifestations have been severely weakened.  So there are undoubtedly many chapters to come.  But this is a chapter now concluded, with considerable success and achievement, from the Israeli point of view. 

The day the last hostages came home was the festival of Simchat Torah.  Two years exactly in the Jewish calendar from the day of the massacres in 2023.  The first day of the war, and its last.  I came home from reporting on the Gaza border to my neighborhood in Jerusalem.  At the local corner store, Max, the owner, a veteran immigrant from Kharkov in Ukraine was giving out free drinks of some powerful smelling spirit, poured in plastic cups, to his customers.  “My father’s moonshine,” he answered, when I asked what it was.  “He makes it out of sugar, with aniseed, and a bit of ginger.”  I drank a shot of it and departed.  Further down the road, at one of the neighborhood synagogues, I watched through the window for a while as the young, black bearded Rabbi and some of his congregants danced with the Torah scrolls, in the brightly lit room, as is customary on this festival. 

I remembered a time, a few days after October 7, 2023, when this rabbi and I had taken part in a hurried meeting at an apartment in the neighborhood.  The meeting was about efforts to form an emergency response unit, in case the late Yahya Sinwar’s vision of inter-communal war began to look like coming true in our seam-line neighborhood of Jerusalem. They were looking for people with the right military background, to register a local unit of this kind.  After the meeting, the rabbi and I and four or five others had walked around the neighborhood, mapping out places where such a unit might deploy in the event that an October 7 type attack erupted here.  I remember the urgency and the strangeness of it all. Two years later, almost to the day, the rabbi is dancing with his Torah scroll, and  I’m drinking Max’s father’s homemade vodka.  There will be further chapters to be written in this, no doubt.  Good that this one’s over, anyway. 

I remember the light in the Valley of Ela on the day of Shani Louk’s funeral.  It was late springtime, clear light, of the kind that you get in Jerusalem.  I didn’t get enough time to travel round the villages and the moshavim close to the city at that time, and so I wasn’t used to seeing this light reflected on greenery, rather than on stone.  There was a great silence.  Of a kind you don’t really expect in Israel, and especially not in large crowds.  And especially not at gatherings of mainly very young people, as this perforce was.  Shani had been 22 at the time of her murder by Hamas, and many or most of the people at the funeral were her close friends.  There were people from the trance scene in Israel, of which she had been part, and of which the Nova festival where she was killed had been connected.  There were young men in military uniform also.  Some in that new style combat dress that came in during the war in Gaza,  that at first looked slightly foreign and incongruous to our older veteran’s eyes.  Some bearded and with stronger tans, I suppose, from the harsher sunlight in the Gaza Strip. 

Moshav Srigim is located south of Beit Shemesh, and south west of Jerusalem,  less than half an hour’s drive from the city. The Valley of Ela, famously, is where the battle between David and Goliath is held to have taken place.  Shani Louk was born in nearby Moshav Aderet and then raised at Srigim. 

Before the funeral, I saw the house of the Louk family in the moshav.  A journalist friend of mine by chance lived almost opposite and knew the family well.  Nissim Louk, Shani’s father, was the son of Amram Louk, who had been a prominent local politician for the Labor Party in the area.  Her mother, Ricarda, was a German Catholic who converted to Judaism. 

I was aware of a kind of generational gathering, of something pivotal in the air.  Shani Louk had become a symbol for those lost at the Nova festival, in the massacre carried out by the Islamist gunmen on October 7, 2023.  There had been rumors that she might be alive in Gaza, in the first months following that day.  Then it had become clear that this was not so, after a fragment of her skull was found near the Mefalsim Intersection. And then she had straightforwardly come to symbolize for many people the tragedy of the loss of so many very young people.

 Symbols aside, tho, Shani’s family, though, were grieving like other families do, and the funeral ceremony had the usual awkward aspects.  There was that incongruity that is common at funerals where the chief mourners try to put on smiles, while the peripheral visitors do a performance of profound sadness.  Speaking to the mourners at the funeral, Nissim Louk said that “’“The blood of the murdered ones, and Shani among them, was not abandoned and cried out from the ground.”  This phrase is a biblical one, and is both poignant and disturbing.  In Hebrew it sounds less elevated than it does in English. More literal.  It comes from the story of Cain and Abel.  “Your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground,”, and the second, less well known part:  “like a voice calling for revenge.”  In the case of Shani Louk, it also had a more direct meaning. 

The murdered ones.  Shani Louk was killed execution style as she sought with her friend Orion Hernandez Radoux to escape the site of the Nova festival, where a massacre of Israeli Jews and their friends was taking place on the morning of October 7, 2023.  They were killed at the Mefalsim Intersection, as they tried to head north east, away from Gaza.  Shani was shot in the head and died instantly. Orion Radoux was taken captive.  Shani’s body was then taken to Gaza in the back of a van, paraded through the streets, and spat on and abused by the people there.  Her remains were found, under the ground, in a fetid tunnel beneath a house in the Jebalya refugee camp in northern Gaza, six months later.  The bodies of three other Israelis, Amit Buskila, Ron Binyamin and Yitzhak Gelernter, were laid beside her.  Orion Radoux’s body was found in a different location a few days later. And their blood cried out from the ground. 

A couple of days after Shani’s funeral, I was invited along with some other journalists to travel to the place where the bodies were found, and to interview members of the units that had made the discovery.  Jebalya in the spring of 2024 was a place of destruction, rubble and collapsed buildings.  Battalion 202 of the IDF’s Paratroopers’ Brigade was the unit operating in the area where the bodies of Shani and the others were located.  Captain Roi Beit Yakov, aged 22, from Eli in the northern West Bank was the one on the ground responsible for finding the bodies of the four murdered people. Roi Beit Yaakov was a squad commander in the 202^nd.  His squad were operating there and they entered the house where the bodies were located.  It’s not clear if they had prior intelligence about the area and what might be found in it.  It must have been pitch dark, humid and full of dust in the house.  The entrance to the tunnel where the bodies were located was underneath a rug, in a side room.  Beit Yaakov moved the rug and identified the entrance to the tunnel.  He reported his find to his company commander, Major Gal Shabbat, aged 24,  from Tel Aviv. 

The paratroopers then called in assistance from a specialized unit of the Combat Engineers to further investigate.  This unit, called ‘Yahalom’, (Diamond) in Hebrew, has particular expertise in dealing with tunnels.  Its abilities were in high demand in Gaza, where Hamas spent the 16 years between 2007 and 2023 building one of the largest tunnel networks to have been constructed anywhere.  The Yahalom team uncovered the tunnel lid and descended.  About 10 metres down, they entered the tunnel.  A short way into it, they discovered the bodies of the four. 

The story of all this was told to us that day by Almog, commander of the 202^nd battalion, and by an un-named officer of the Engineers’ commando team, who wore a balaklava when he spoke to us.  It wasn’t possible to speak to any of the principle characters involved in the discovery of the tunnel.  A few days after the bodies of Shani and the others were located and returned, Roi Beit Yaakov was killed while operating in Jabalya.  He wasn’t killed by Hamas, or at least not directly so.  Roi Beit Yaakov along with five others from the 202^nd battalion died in a friendly fire incident.  Then, later on the same day, Gal Shabbat was killed by a Hamas sniper while operating in the area. 

So the circle was closed on the three principal characters in one of the myriad of tragedies that was the war.  The young woman killed and her body subjected to abuse and outrages.  The commander who, in the words of Shani’s father, heard her blood crying out from the ground.  And the officer who, alerted, began the process whereby her body was redeemed and returned to her family for burial with decency and respect.  Not one of them over the age of 25. 

Shani Louk and Roi Beit Yaakov came in many ways from opposite corners of Israeli society.  Shani was, according to relatives interviewed after her death, of ‘pacifist’ outlook. She had obtained a deferment from military service.  She had been living in Tel Aviv at the time of her murder, working as a tattoo artist.  Roi Beit Yaakov was from Eli, in northern Samaria, a stronghold of religious Zionism and of the settlement movement. 

I don’t know what they would have had to say to each other if they had met in a different way.  Perhaps that particular freemasonry that exists among very young people in general and among young Israelis in particular might have enabled them to have found a means of communication.  Now they are like those figures from the volcanic eruption in Pompeii. Frozen forever in particular attitudes.  Joined.   

The Islamist assault on Israel, launched on October 7 was a disaster foretold.  It was a culmination of dynamics that had been building up over the preceding two decades.  The preparations for the October 7 attack were secret, of course, and Israeli intelligence failed to locate them in time.  But the larger forces that led to the attack were all plainly visible.  This was the culminating moment for two related forces which had been growing in plain sight across the Middle East in the preceding years.  The first was Sunni political Islam among the Palestinians.  The war came at a moment when Sunni Islamism appeared defeated, and many analysts of the region had written it off. All the projects which Sunni political Islam had raised up in the region in the preceding decade had gone down to apparent defeat.  The series of uprisings and insurgencies collectively mis-named the ‘Arab Spring’ by the western media had, one by one, been thwarted.  In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, finally reaching the apex of power after 80 years of trying, lasted only a year in government before being replaced by the return of military power.  In Tunisia, after early electoral successes, the Nahda party was eclipsed by the return of authoritarianism in the person of President Qais Saed.  In Syria, the Sunni Arab uprising, dominated from the outset by Islamists, appeared to have been crushed by the Bashar Assad regime.  In Iraq, the Islamic State organization, which emerged from the al-Qaeda branch in that country, had triumphed briefly, before being destroyed by a US led coalition. 

Even Hamas itself, which had won the only free elections ever conducted in the Palestinian territories, in 2007, found itself boxed in, in its Gaza fiefdom.  Analysts had begun to consider that it was co-opted, corrupted, a secondary player. 

These conclusions, as it turned out, were premature.  Political Islam remained the choice, overwhelmingly, at the popular level in the Sunni Arab world.  It was never likely that the Arab Sunnis would quietly accept their newly found irrelevance on the political and strategic stage of the Middle East.  These facts combined meant that there was always likely to be an eruption from somewhere, at some stage. 

Israel, paradoxically, did not fail to guard against Hamas because of naivete, or because of a belief that the time of conflicts in the region was over.  Rather, the Jewish state thought that Hamas had been pacified by financial inducement.  Israel was anyway focused on a different, if related threat.  Namely, that of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its bid for regional domination.  The Iranian nuclear ambition was first and foremost among challenges in the minds of Israeli strategists and senior officials.  Indeed, it was the bon ton among some in those circles to assert that attention paid on anything else was a distraction and a waste of time and resources.  A certain shift had occurred in the course of 2023, in that it had become increasingly apparent that the array of Islamist proxy organizations that Iran commanded across the Arabic speaking world could not be ignored.  But even here, the focus was on the more powerful Lebanese Hizballah. Hamas in Gaza was regarded as a backwater, a sideshow, its leaders bought off and interested in maintaining quiet. 

In reality, the two phenomena  – the continued vitality of Sunni Political Islam, and the potent threat of the Iran-led regional alliance – were linked.  Linked in their origins, because the founders and originators of the Shia political Islam which came to power in Iran in 1979 were influenced by and had learned from their Sunni counterparts.  And of course linked organizationally, because Hamas was one of the relatively few non-Shia clients of Teheran, its military capacities largely the product of this link.  So the two challenges were branches of the same tree. 

But, and this is the crucial point, the Israeli system wasn’t looking.  There is a built in hostility to ideas and to conceptual thinking in the Israeli security structure.  That’s not how you’d imagine a defense structure created and manned by Jews would be.  But that’s how it is.  The disaster of the opening stages of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, for example, is attributed to something called the ‘conceptzia.’  The conceptzia, or concept in question, was the notion that the Egyptians would not seek to attack Israel for as long as total victory was clearly beyond them, or more specifically until they had integrated the means to carry out deep penetration bombing of Israel.  This concept was indeed flawed.  But the response in Israeli thinking is to find conceptual thinking of any kind to be a kind of taboo.  So after October 7, the new ‘conceptzia’, according to which Hamas had been deterred, was held up for general vilification. 

In contrast to these failed conceptions, plain, empirical thinking is held up as the ideal.  But of course, a species of supposedly non-ideological thinking had in fact given birth to both the pre-1973, and the pre-2023 conception.  In both cases, the mistake was precisely to ignore or misinterpret the conceptual thinking taking place on the other side.  In the 2023 instance, this derived from a lack of curiosity or failure to adequately grapple with Islamist ideas, and their nature, strength and depth.  In place of an ordered exploration of these ideas, and the political behavior they were likely to produce, a supposedly pragmatic outlook concluded that the Gaza Islamists were as susceptible as anyone else to material inducements and physical deterrence, and therefore a judicious and measured mix of the two could induce quiescence on their part.  This was the basic thought mistake, from which flawed policy followed.  It ended in the presence of just under 700 IDF soldiers stationed along the border on the morning when over 3000 jihadi gunmen began their assault from Gaza.  The remedy to it would have been a proper assessment as to the nature of Hamas as an ideological movement.  But this, in a system given to amused cynicism regarding the enemy and his motivations, never took  place. 

The Hamas assault, when it came, rapidly turned into a clash between societies, rather than simply between armed forces.  Because of the particular positioning of Hamas as both a Sunni Islamist group and an ally of Iran, the Iran led regional bloc mobilized, albeit in a partial and piecemeal fashion, in support of its ally.  Despite this, the October 7 massacres were a Sunni Islamist event par excellence, resembling in their details similar rampages by related forces elsewhere in the region, specifically in Iraq and Syria.  Again, the distinction is artificial.  Political Islam is one phenomenon, not two, though its manifestations may differ in the details. 

It was the younger generation in Israel who bore the brunt of the casualties, the sacrifice and the defense of Israel in the days that followed.  The Hungarian Jewish writer Arthur Koestler, in a strange phrasing, says in his autobiography ‘The Invisible Writing’ that ‘ the gods save their worst torments for the ones they love most: the innocents.’  This phrase comes to mind when one thinks of the young people who faced the worst of the October 7 massacres, and who led the way and paid the price in  dreadful fighting in the built up areas of Gaza which followed.  Both Shani Louk and Roi Beit Yaakov, in their different ways, were innocents, I think. Each of types familiar to anyone who  knows the sociological landscape of Israel.  The Tel Aviv tattoo artist and the airborne infantry officer from northern Samaria.  One should speak in sorrow for their loss, but also relate how others like them who remained went on to deliver telling blows to those who killed them.  It is my contention that the details both of the nature of the phenomenon which attacked Israel in 2023, and of how it was turned back (tho not yet destroyed) are of relevance far beyond Israel itself.  This enemy, after all, threatens not only Israel but the Middle East region and Europe also, and is part of a larger global challenge. 

To understand the dynamics and likely direction of events, one must study ideas, and the societies that adhere to those ideas, and not only military systems.  This was Israel’s mistake before, and it was its mistake in 2023, too.  But the Jewish state was hardly alone in this error.  In the west, where supporters and apologists of political Islam have been permitted to burrow deep into the key systems of political power and of the formulation and dissemination of ideas, the problem is yet more acute.  Israel may have been gravely in error and allowed itself to be attacked.  But the society that could produce people like Roi Beit Yaacov, and Gal Shabbat, and Shani Louk too possessed the vitality and cohesion to mobilise effectively in its own defense.  In the case of the west, partly as a result of the years of neglect, it is not at all clear that the same can be said.  In any case, capacities like those displayed by the 202^nd battalion of the paratroopers brigade in Jebalya, with the heavy price incurred, are of the type which only need to be deployed when something has gone terribly wrong.  The failure to take an interest in the enemy and his mode of thinking was what began the road to October 7.  The west should learn from this as well as Israel, and with no less urgency.   The old slogan of the Polish patriots was ‘For your freedom and ours.’