WORLD
ACROSS 75 YEARS, ISRAEL HAS BUILT itself around a military so formidable in battle that the country qualifies as a warrior state. But for the 2,000 years before that, the story of the Jews was one of perseverance through persecution, flight, and the kind of intimate, house-to-house slaughter Israelis awoke to on the morning of Oct. 7. What Hamas recorded on smartphones and uploaded to social media was a 21st century pogrom. The massacre of more than 1,400 people renewed and validated the dread that resides in every Jewish Israeli as a kind of inheritance—the embedded collective memory of trauma that has kept a society’s sense of confidence eggshell-thin even behind the most powerful fighting force in the Middle East.
What that military is directing onto the Gaza Strip—6,000 bombs in the first six days—had by Oct. 17 killed more than 3,000 people. For Palestinians, the Israel-Hamas War is likely the worst trauma since the Nakba, or “catastrophe”—as they refer to the 1948 victory of the Jewish army that, in establishing a Jewish homeland, exiled more than 700,000 Arabs who claimed the same land. Their descendants’ defiant presence in blockaded Gaza (where 2.2 million people are ruled by Hamas) and on the West Bank (where 3 million chafe under Israeli military occupation) has posed a persistent challenge not only for Israel’s security, but also for the moral code cultivated during the millennia that Jews had not a state, but a tradition. Revenge hangs in the air over Gaza along with cordite. And just as no gentile can apprehend the horror of the Oct. 7 sabbath, nothing can communicate the experience of bombardment.
Imagine enduring both. The roughly 200 hostages Hamas carried away at gunpoint were awakened at dawn by the terror of a missile onslaught and faced the darkness of Gaza beneath the thunder of Israeli munitions. They form a kind of human bridge between two realms. “I can only hope that she is being held in Gaza,” says the son of 74-year-old Vivian Silver, a peace activist missing from her kibbutz. “What a terrible hope that is.”
With power cut off by Israel, accounts of the profound suffering in Gaza are largely being told from a distance. And in a conflict that has always been about competing narratives, Hamas ensured that attention would be on the hostages and their loved ones. The families speak wrenchingly about what they know and the torment of what they don�
