LEILA FADEL, BYLINE: How has the past year changed a survivor of the October 7 attack on Israel? Amir Tibon is a correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. He lived in an agricultural community of about 400, a kibbutz, right on the border with Gaza. He and his wife awoke that morning to the whistling of mortars. They ran to their safe room, a room with concrete walls, where their two daughters slept.
AMIR TIBON: We shut the heavy metal door. We covered the window with a metal plate that's installed on the wall. And we heard the bombardment of our community, of our neighborhood.
FADEL: Tibon tells the story of his kibbutz, from its founding to the attack to the aftermath, in a book called "The Gates Of Gaza." Though he and his family survived that day, many did not.
TIBON: We lost 15 people on that day. Seven of our friends and neighbors were kidnapped into Gaza, including two young girls kidnapped by Hamas after their father and brother had been murdered. We got five of our hostages back in November in the hostage deal orchestrated at the time by President Biden, including the two young girls - Dafna and Ela, the two sisters. But we still have two friends who are in Gaza, and we are fighting to get them back alive.
FADEL: What is stopping this deal to bring home the hostages?
TIBON: A lot of people most affected by this don't feel that the government is doing everything it can right now, because Netanyahu is in a coalition government that relies on the support of two extreme far-right parties that are against any kind of deal. As of late, it seems that he's placing his political survival as a higher priority than getting a deal. And he has, sadly, a partner in this obstruction - Yahya Sinwar, the murderer leader of Hamas. Between Sinwar's fanaticism and Netanyahu's cynical calculations and politics, the negotiations are stuck. But I do want to encourage President Biden to keep trying. Don't give up on our people.
FADEL: The title of your book comes from a speech from a military general who had first given the order for soldiers to settle Kibbutz Nahal Oz. And later, the kibbutz's head of security was killed while patrolling the border, and this general, Moshe Dayan, comes and speaks at his funeral.
TIBON: That speech is one of the most important speeches in the history of the state of Israel and really in the history of Zionism. And Dayan stands there. He is the chief of staff of the military, the most admired man in Israel. And he opens, and he says something very controversial. He says, we should not blame the Palestinians in Gaza for this murder that was committed the other day because it's been eight years since the war of 1948, when they lost their homes, they lost their territories. And they've been watching from the refugee camps of Gaza how we - the Israelis are building homes there, building communities. And it is natural and obvious that they want to take revenge. And that is a radical message that shows some deep understanding of the tragedy that the Palestinians went through.
And you could almost feel for a second that it may be a speech that is a call for peace. But then it turns around, and Dayan says, we should point the blame at ourselves for believing for even one second that they will not want to kill us. And he basically says, because of what happened to them, if we lay down our sword for even one second, we will be killed. And so it becomes a very dark and pessimistic speech.
FADEL: Do you agree with that?
TIBON: The young people who founded Kibbutz Nahal Oz - today they're still young, but they're 89, 90 years old, and some of them are still with us. They did not like that speech because they always wanted to believe that, one day, maybe in the distant future, there will be peace with the people on the other side. They did not want to come and live there for the sake of eternal war, but this is what Dayan had promised them.
Now, was he right or wrong? Well, I can give you two arguments. Twenty years after this speech, Dayan was involved in the signing of the Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement. So a man who said there could never be peace was involved in the creation of Israel's first peace agreement with one of its neighboring Arab countries. So maybe he was wrong, and the young, hopeful kibbutz members were right. But then you see October 7. You say, maybe Dayan was right. Maybe we let down our guard. And I don't want to say who is right and who is wrong. I don't even know if I can say, but I can tell you that it's still the conversation we need to have almost 70 years after he gave that speech.
FADEL: In your book, you talk about how you felt about the war when it began. And you supported the war, you said. It's been almost a year. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed, many, many children your daughters' age. Hostages have turned up killed. I just wonder what you think about it now, almost a year away from that day when your community was invaded.
TIBON: On the logical level, I still understand that Israel had no choice but to go to war after this attack on October 7. That does not mean I don't feel terrible on a human level, on an emotional level, for all the destruction and the pain that the war has brought and all the people that have died. It also doesn't mean that I think the war should go on indefinitely. I do believe, right now, our interest is to reach an agreement that would free the hostages, that would bring about a cease-fire and that would allow us to begin the healing process and the rebuilding process on both sides of the border.
FADEL: The empathy gap - I hear that a lot from people about how Israelis feel and understand the pain that they're living through, and Palestinians feel and understand the pain that they're living through, but that pain is not acknowledged or seen for the other. Is that true?
TIBON: People on both sides are facing immense pain over the last year. I can share the Israeli perspective. And you could very well have now a Palestinian interviewee who would share their perspective of the pain of the last year - of what they have lost in their family, in their home, in their future. And I think, under these circumstances, for most people, it is very difficult to see the other side.
FADEL: Yeah.
TIBON: And I think there will come a moment when both societies will also have to acknowledge the pain of the other side. I don't feel like most people are ready for it right now.
FADEL: Amir Tibon is the author of "The Gates Of Gaza: A Story of Betrayal, Survival And Hope in Israel's Borderlands." Thank you so much for your time.
TIBON: Thank you for having me.
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