Amir Tibon went back to Nahal Oz. Now he fears the next October 7

Three years ago this week, Amir Tibon spent ten hours in a safe room in Kibbutz Nahal Oz with his wife and two small daughters while Hamas gunmen moved from house to house. His father, a retired general, drove down from Tel Aviv with a pistol and joined the battle to take the kibbutz back. Tibon, a Haaretz journalist and the author of The Gates of Gaza, has now moved the family home.

In the week of the third anniversary, and three weeks before Israel votes, Jonathan Freedland talked to him for Unholy Conversations about the nights less than a kilometre from Gaza, why the first two anniversaries were overshadowed by the hostages, and how he reads the election on 27 October. Jonathan interviews alone on this episode; Yonit Levi does not appear.

One disclosure, made on air and repeated here: Tibon's father, Noam Tibon, is a candidate for Yesh Atid in that election.

Trying, not returning

Tibon's family does not describe moving back to Nahal Oz as a return. They say they are trying. The decision was theoretical while the kibbutz was a closed military zone. It became real when neighbours came home and his daughter Galia, three and a half on 7 October 2023, had to start first grade. They enrolled her in the kibbutz school.

"I think there's also an emotional component here of hope and a desire to see if we can overcome what had happened. And I don't know what the answer is, but right now we're trying to find out."

The picture, he says, is mixed. The house, the school and the kindergarten are good. At night the explosions and gunfire from Gaza make it hard to sleep. The war, in his telling, is not over.

Why the third anniversary lands harder

Tibon's argument is that Israel has not yet absorbed what happened on 7 October, and that the calendar explains why. The first anniversary was consumed by more than a hundred hostages still held in Gaza. The second came days before the deal that returned 20 of them alive, among them his neighbour Omri Miran. Grief and dread sat on top of each other, and the scale of the day itself never had the room.

With the hostage crisis over, he says, the count lands.

"I think we're finally coming to terms with the sheer magnitude of the tragedy. Twelve hundred lives lost in a single day."

The figures are Tibon's, as he gave them on the episode: 1,200 killed in one day, almost fifty hostages returned in caskets, among them Tsachi Idan of Nahal Oz. Then the soldiers killed since, the north, Iran. The reckoning with what happened in Gaza, he says, is a separate conversation, and one he is not sure Israel is ready for. He does not say more than that, and neither do we.

A referendum on the next October 7

Jonathan put it to Tibon that the 27 October election is a referendum on the failure of 7 October. Tibon turned it round.

"I think it's more of a referendum on how to avoid another October seven in the future. I think this is what most people have in mind when they're going to vote on October 27."

His own answer is that he does not trust the people who were in charge the first time. On Netanyahu's campaign, Tibon's reading is that it rests on a promise of total victory that only survives while some form of fighting does. End the war on every front, he argues, and the promise can no longer be made. Most Netanyahu voters, in his view, do not believe total victory has been achieved, which is one reason the race is still close.

That is the guest's analysis, offered on the episode, and the disclosure about his father's candidacy applies to all of it.

The morning the army did not come

The conversation opens where the story does. Tibon's parents, a retired IDF general and a historian, got into their car in Tel Aviv on 7 October 2023 after realising the army was not coming. They were armed with a pistol. They stopped on the way to help others. His father joined a small group of soldiers in the fight to retake Nahal Oz, and the family was taken out by bus around 10 PM.

Three years later Tibon is back in the house, listening to Gaza at night and losing sleep over an election. He told Jonathan he does not know yet whether trying will work. The full conversation is on YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify.