How we Americans feel about Gazans living under Israeli bombs does matter, since we’re the ones financing it.
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At the end of 2015, I worked with Israeli journalist Amir Tibon on a long story about the devolving relationshipbetween President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. My role was to help report out the U.S. side of that fracturing relationship, relying on my sourcing inside the Democratic Party and the White House. I still remember what a privilege it felt like to work with Tibon, whose own sourcing on the Israeli side gave us a window into the strategic thinking of Bibi and his inner circle that one simply never sees here in the U.S. Instead, all we get is a flattened gloss on Netanyahu as a tough guy and a political survivor.
I did a double take when I woke up on Saturday, October 7, and learned that Amir had only narrowly escaped being murdered with his wife and two young girls by Hamas. In a story that has since become famous, he and his wife woke first to the sound of mortars — not uncommon in their kibbutz near Gaza — quickly followed by the sound of automatic gunfire, quite uncommon.
They rushed to their safe room — effectively a concrete bunker that can withstand a mortar blast, and where children often sleep — as the sound of gunfire drew closer. Group texts with neighbors soon let them know Hamas had overrun the kibbutz, and a text with a source of his told him the militants had overrun all of southern Israel.
The family was hours from being rescued, and he was sure they would die. He texted his father in Tel Aviv before he lost reception, then spent the next many hours huddled with his family in the dark, gunfire ricocheting through their home.
His 62-year-old father, meanwhile, grabbed a pistol and headed south, picking up another 70-year-old veteran and a handful of lost soldiers along the way. As Amir told The Atlantic:
We were just hearing the gunfire getting closer and closer. The girls had fallen asleep, but now they woke up. I think it’s 2 p.m. They haven’t had anything to eat since last night. There’s no light, and we don’t have cellphones anymore, so we can’t even show them our faces, and there’s one sentence that is keeping them from falling apart and starting to cry—I’m telling them: “Grandfather is coming.”
I tell them, “If we stay quiet, your grandfather will come and get us out of here.” And at 4 p.m., after 10 hours like this, we hear a large bang on the window, and we hear the voice of my father. Galia, my oldest daughter, says, “Saba higea”—“Grandfather is here.” And that’s when we all just start crying. And that’s when we knew that we were safe.
The story of Amir and his family hits me hard (I’m sure it hits all of us hard) for what it tells us about love, faith, and resilience in a time of terror — and because behind it are hundreds of stories that did not end with grandfather making it. In a must-read essay, Palestinian American journalist Sarah Aziza reflects on one of the horrifying details that Amir and other survivors relayed — that children tend to sleep in bunkers in the communities near Gaza.
CONTINUE READING ON THE INTERCEPT
He has been a staff reporter for Politico and the Washington City Paper and is a co-host of the show Counter Points. He is the author of the books “We’ve Got People” (2019) and “This Is Your Country on Drugs” (2009). His third book, published in December 2023, is “The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution.”
