The Long Year
They say the days are long but the years are short. Not this year. It’s been one endless year since the tragic attack of October 7; a year that has divided nations, split communities, fragmented college campuses, created schisms inside of warring countries, and even caused rifts across kitchen tables. An era defined by the determination to speak and post with certainty about things we know little or nothing about has rendered us fully dysfunctional when it comes to analyzing the world’s most complex crisis. On October 7, a scab was ripped off the world’s chronic trauma exposing, yet again, the festering wound that has infected the world’s body politic. With my stomach in knots, I’ve been refreshing news feeds from the region every day for a year and some days I’m not even sure I agree with myself. So I’ll mark this day with the simple answers. Does Israel have every right and responsibility to defend itself against Iran-backed terror groups hell-bent on its destruction? Yes. Have there been way too many citizens killed in the name of this defense? Yes. Is this all relentlessly sad and frustrating? Yes. Those views all seem innocuous enough. But don’t kid yourself. In this conflict, those are fighting words. The NYT (Gift Article) on this year of living awfully. The War That Won’t End: How Oct. 7 Sparked a Year of Conflict. “Both sides appear to have decided that they will not go back to how things were before Oct. 7. Hamas’s leaders have said the prewar dynamic of endless Israeli occupation must be disrupted regardless of the human cost. Israel feels far more vulnerable after the deadliest day in its history and has decided it can no longer tolerate groups dedicated to its destruction on its borders. ‘This war won’t end because nobody is willing to blink,’ said Thomas R. Nides, the United States ambassador to Israel until shortly before the Oct. 7 attack. ‘In the meantime, everyone is losing — hostages and their families, innocent Palestinians, Israelis displaced from northern Israel, Lebanese civilians. And it’s truly tragic.'”
+ “Months of US shuttle diplomacy involving Secretary of State Antony Blinken, CIA Director William Burns and other senior officials has yielded only limited progress in freeing hostages in Gaza. And a deal that would forge a ceasefire with Hamas seems more distant than ever. Often, it’s appeared that the US wanted an agreement far more than Netanyahu or Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who embedded Hamas forces in civilian areas, adding to the war’s carnage.” How the October 7 attacks became a turning point for US politics.
+ “Nearly every day, Avital Dekel Chen sends a text message to her husband, Sagui. He was kidnapped by Hamas on Oct. 7 while she and their two young daughters hid in a safe room at their kibbutz in southern Israel. ‘Please come back home. Please hang in there a little longer,’ Dekel Chen wrote in one message. Dekel Chen, 34, finds emotional solace in the daily WhatsApp messages to her husband, though she knows he won’t see the texts unless he is freed.” One year after Hamas attacks, hostage families are living in limbo but trying to find hope. From BBC: Stories of the people taken from Israel. And from Times of Israel: Pain, determination and survivor guilt at Nova massacre site, a year after atrocity.
+ “As an act of spy craft, it is without parallel, one of the most successful and inventive penetrations of an enemy by an intelligence service in recent history. But key details of the operation — including how it was planned and carried out, and the controversy it engendered within Israel’s security establishment and among allies — are only now coming to light.” WaPo (Gift Article): Mossad’s pager operation: Inside Israel’s penetration of Hezbollah.
+ Meanwhile, with the impending Israeli response to Iran’s missile attacks and the increasing threat of a wider war, the beat goes on. Here’s the latest from CNN.
