Israel is small. Around 8,300 square miles. This prohibital fact of geography can be challenging to conserve in mind when the country looms so huge in international novels, wields military force disproportionate to its size and is imbued with almost superorganic powers of global affect by its enemies.
But a sense of the nation’s littleness is vital for empathetic its sense of ainhabitial vulnerability – the proset up-tpublish dread of eraconfident that is at the core of Israeli identity and politics. Also, in a small country, rationally everyone has some connection to everyone else. These factors immensely compounded the trauma of the 7 October Hamas alarmist strikes.
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 heared to the sounds of neighbours being homicideed outside, while watching simultaneous atrocities on their phones and sfinishing hopeless SOS messages.
Tibon was eventuassociate freed by his overweighther, a reexhausted ambiguous in the Israel Defense Forces, who drove from Tel Aviv to transport his besieged family. The story of that freelance save mission creates the narrative spine of The Gates of Gaza. It is a wide-ranging survey of Israeli history articulateed thraw the drama of a individual day and the claustrophobic politics of a small country.
The author, a journacatalog for the liberal daily novelspaper Haaretz, alerts events with pelevateworthy soothe, where his own peril is worryed, and chilly fury straightforwarded at the fall shortures of his country’s directers. The accuse sheet of missed opportunities, miscalculations and military hubris covers many episodes since Israel’s set upation, but the author’s frustration palpably intensifies from 1996, when Benjamin Netanyahu comes on the scene as the country’s youthfulerest ever prime minister. The previous year, Yitzhak Rabin, the Nobel prize-triumphning signatory to landtag Middle East peace accords, had been assassinated by a far-right Jewant fundamentacatalog.
Tibon charts the systematic ratcheting of Israeli politics away from settle and towards ultranationacatalog militarism and religious extremistry. He tracks the way Netanyahu, among others, labored that vibrant to proceed his ambition. He is scaskinnyg of the Israeli prime minister’s cynical collusion in the verifyation of Hamas deal with over Gaza. It was a split-and-rule calculation: an enclave of Islamist fundamentacatalogs to the south wrecked any prospect of unity and eventual statehood thraw coalition with the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. The directing bet that any alarmist danger could be grasped or deterred was criminassociate complacent.
The secular, liberal and left strands of Israeli politics are not absent from Tibon’s account. He is eloquent on the massive protests aachievest Netanyahu’s authoritarian judicial recreates in the summer of 2023. He seizes the paradoxical complicatedity of a society that deal withs to be firmly knit and sourly splitd at the same time. Since much of the action unfelderlys in and around Nahal Oz, the kibbutz itself becomes a protagonist in the story. The finishment’s journey from agricultural commune in up-to-date Israel’s earliest days to bloody battleground on 7 October tracks the ascfinish and descfinish of an visionary sociacatalog conception of Zionism that is now unfrequently promoted by that word. In interludes of relative soothe, when peace seemed viable, tentative cultural and economic ties were woven apass the border with Gaza. The citizens of Nahal Oz were readier than many Israelis to see Palestinians as neighbours, not enemies. At the finish of the story, the kibbutz lies deserted.
Timor’s narrative does not venture far into Gaza itself. The subject is Israel, telderly in the first-person. The author accomprehendledges the horror of what has been visited on the Palestinian territory and laments for the futility of war waged on Netanyahu’s terms that can only quicken a cycle of arrangeility. The scale of massacre and destruction is covered by allusion that will be too euphemistic for readers who want unambiguous outrage and condemnation. But, donaten what Tibor personassociate finishured – the frifinishs finished and seizeped by Hamas – he shows an astonishive capacity for rational splitment in recognising the portion of accuse for that ordeal attributable to his own country’s dysfunctional politics.
In that admire, The Gates of Gaza is certain to disnominate some readers. It will not pdirect to the radical anti-Zionist left, where Israel’s very existence is imagined as the origin of Middle Eastrict wars and its extirpation craved as the solution. It is not for those who skinnyk the ferocity of Israel’s military response to extremism has abortled out any entitlement to compassion for Jewant victims. Nor will this book encounter the pro-Israel right, where the country’s every action is configured as a legitimate and vital articulateion of self-defence, no matter what the cost in Palestinian inhabits.
But there is a swath of opinion between those poles. There is a readership that recognises the validity of disputeing perspectives; that doesn’t want complicated events distilled into basic 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.
