The essential guide to October 7: Answers to big questions - excerpt

Hezbollah, a Lebanese terrorist army and political party, started firing rockets from southern Lebanon to help Hamas. Within days, over 150,000 Israelis were displaced from their homes, in the North and South. On October 17, exploiting the chaos, Iran unleashed its proxies, especially Yemen-based Houthis, targeting international shipping lanes and the bases the US established against Islamists in Iraq, eastern Syria, and northern Jordan. Responding in self-defense, Israel launched a full-scale war against Hamas in Gaza, while skirmishing with Hezbollah.

Pressured by the international community, Israeli leaders started acting on the assumption that Hamas was turning pragmatic, and preferred governing Gaza to destroying Israel. Yet Article 25 of Hamas’s charter endorses “armed resistance” with “all means and methods.” That concept lulled Israelis into a false sense of security, which collapsed on October 7.

International law justifies fighting back when a hostile neighbor invades. The war began on Israel’s side as a counterattack, repelling the invaders. In the first three days, during the initial attack and counterattack, 382 Israeli soldiers were killed, along with 59 police officers, 13 medics, and dozens of civilians who also mobilized instantly. Israel then vowed to degrade Hamas’s military capabilities and defeat it politically, to avoid a recurrence.

Hamas had spent years hiding its weapons and headquarters in hospitals, kindergartens, mosques, apartment buildings, and hundreds of miles of tunnels, some seven stories deep. In this small, fortified territory, with Hamas fighters hiding behind civilians, many Gazans were caught in the crossfire. Israel’s unprecedented efforts to protect civilians kept the ratio of Gazan civilians killed to each terrorist killed far lower than America’s ratios of 4 to 1 or more, in Iraq and Afghanistan – even with many tragic misfires.

Every life is sacred. Many Israelis regretted the hard choices their soldiers were making and the high cost the Hamas invasion imposed on both sides.

October 7 was a cataclysmic event. Israel suffered the highest per capita loss of any country ever from a terrorist attack. The scale of the murders; the viciousness of the rapes and maimings; and the assaults on the elderly, pregnant women, little girls, and baby boys commanded attention worldwide. Many Palestinian terrorists recorded their crimes, broadcasting footage on social media.

Such a well-publicized, catastrophic Islamist assault anywhere would have commanded attention. But Israel is often in the news. Jews – and citizens in most Western democracies – care about the Jewish state. Simultaneously, a well-funded network of pro-Palestinian activists targets Israel obsessively. Even before Israel counterattacked, these protesters blamed Israel for being attacked, unleashing waves of antisemitic assaults that continue.

As of this writing, Israel’s just war to degrade Hamas’s military power in Gaza slogs on. The threats from Hezbollah to Israel’s North, and from the Houthis to the international shipping community, are intensifying. Hezbollah rockets have destroyed more than 500 Israeli homes. Iran’s nefarious influence on these events becomes clearer every day. And globally, the assault on Israel, Zionism, and Jews keeps disrupting campuses, legislatures, and public squares.

If October 7 represents Hamas’s massacre, October 7.2 represents Israel’s counterattack. That story is not about Jewish powerlessness echoing pogroms or the Holocaust. These heroic tales returned Israel to its Zionist trajectory. October 7 and 7.2 added more chapters to Zionism’s rollercoaster tale about Jews redeeming their homeland, despite cruel neighbors, and how Israelis learned to fight when necessary – but to live, build, and rejoice always.

Kibbutz Nir Am’s security coordinator, 25-year-old Inbal Lieberman, instantly realized that the scale of the attack on October 7 differed from the others the people in this beleaguered region had long endured. She organized 11 fellow kibbutz members; she prevented the electricity from being restored so the kibbutz’s electric gates wouldn’t open. She and her neighbors then fought against the infiltrators for three hours until the IDF arrived. No one on her kibbutz was killed that day. “I’m not a hero; I wasn’t there by myself,” she told reporters.

When the sirens wailed in Beersheba, two brothers, Noam and Yishay Slotki, also sensed a cataclysm. Despite usually respecting Judaism’s religious restrictions against driving on the Sabbath and Jewish holidays, and despite each having been discharged from the army, they drove toward the Gaza border. Both were killed fighting outside Kibbutz Alumim.

Each brother left a wife and baby behind. Noam was 31 and Yishay, 24. “They understood that there was a need to help Israel immediately, that the army was not able to arrive at that time to save the towns near Gaza – and they took on the task themselves,” their father, Rabbi Shmuel Slotki, said. “Like many others, they enlisted for this task on their own and without being called… it’s really an incredible thing – the spirit of heroism, the spirit of responsibility, of dedication to the people of Israel.”

Many police officers fought fiercely. Yisrael Zinger used Google Maps to find a back road exit when terrorists blocked the main roads of the Supernova music festival. His convoy led 500 concertgoers to safety. He then joined with other officers and soldiers in the firefight of their lives. Part of the answer to “Where was the army?” is that soldiers were involved in many intense gun battles as early as 7 a.m. When interviewed on TV from his hospital bed, where he was recovering from his wounds, Zinger said his only regret was that “We didn’t save more people.”

Others who saved concertgoers included Oz Davidian, 53, a local farmer, who saved 120 people; and Youssef Ziadna, 47, a Bedouin taxi driver, who saved 30 more. Each used his knowledge of the area to dodge the terrorists.

In Ofakim, police officer Itamar Alus, 39, a husband and father, describes himself to TikTok fans of his cooking videos as a “simple guy who likes preparing appetizers for our holy Sabbath.” His neighbors call him a hero.

Alus battled for hours, armed only with his pistol and a fighter’s instinct he had never tapped before. “The terrorists shot ‘rat-tat-tat-tat-tat’” with Kalashnikov assault rifles, he recalls.

“We were just ‘pop-pause-pop-pause-pop’…. But they never anticipated our citizens’ resistance.”

Describing a father-and-son team and two brothers, who rushed toward the bullets, each sharing one gun between them, Alus marvels: “What love of country! What love of the other!” All four were killed.

The same social networks that spread anti-Israel propaganda – and that day publicized repulsive rape videos trying to demoralize Israelis – mobilized the first wave of defenders: the Home Front Commandos. Many Israeli military corps have alumni WhatsApp groups that trade gossip, updates, and occasional job offers. That day, they improvised their own command and control systems.

The Duvdevan counterterrorist commandos’ WhatsApp shared pin locations and deployed groups of two, three, four veterans who lived nearby as the enlisted soldiers and reservists reached the overrun communities within an hour or two and fought to reconquer them. Other soldiers hit particular intersections and created WhatsApp groups to share information with improvised units while fighting.

The anti-judicial reform protesters leapt into action as well. Throughout nine months of political struggle, the group Ahim LaNeshek – Brothers and Sisters in Arms – developed a large network of elite combat reservists. When Hamas attacked, an effective network of battle-hardened veterans existed, thanks to Israel’s political chaos.

Politically, many Duvdevan veterans lean Right. This network is all Left. But partisanship vanished as patriotism – and extraordinary military training – triumphed.

So much for the threats not to serve.

When the politicians failed and the IDF faltered, the people stepped in. A consensus coalesced that day. For Israelis, victory does not just include breaking Hamas and restoring deterrence but also rebuilding the pastoral South, which was safe and blooming, in undisputed territory behind pre-1967 borders, until Israel disengaged from Gaza in 2005.

Omri Bonim, one of many kibbutz Rambos who saved his community, Re’im, says, “When we all return, we will rebuild it all, and we will show the world how beautiful our community is.”■