Updated at 8:50 p.m.
Just two days after Hamas invaded Israel, killed 1,200 people and took 251 hostages into Gaza, Israeli journalist Amir Tibon’s story of survival was already spreading.
The Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg was first to report about the near-death experience for Tibon, his wife and two young daughters. They hid from terrorists in their home’s safe room on Kibbutz Nahal Oz for more than 12 hours on Oct. 7, 2023 — until Tibon’s father and retired military general, Noam Tibon, came to their rescue.
Amir Tibon, a senior columnist for Ha’aretz, wrote his first-person account of those events a year later for the Atlantic and in a book called “The Gates of Gaza: A Story of Betrayal, Survival, and Hope in Israel’s Borderlands.”
Seated before an audience of roughly 200 people on Monday at Stanford University, Tibon discussed his book with Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies who leads its Visiting Fellows in Israel Studies program.
Tibon began the discussion by displaying a photo of his friend and former kibbutz neighbor, Omri Miran, one of the 20 people believed to remain alive out of the 58 hostages still held in Gaza.
The journalist recounted the heart-pounding details of his family’s rescue on Oct. 7 and explained how it shaped his thinking about the current war between Israel and Hamas.
When Tibon’s father was just a few minutes from reaching Nahal Oz, an Israel Defense Forces officer asked him to transport three wounded soldiers to a hospital, including a paratrooper with life-threatening injuries. Tibon’s father did as asked, and they all survived. As the paratrooper recovered, his wife was also in the hospital, giving birth to their child, Tibon said.
The decision that Tibon’s father “basically made was first of all to save those who needed immediate saving, who were on the verge of immediate death and in grave danger, and then to continue the mission to Nahal Oz,” Tibon said.
“When I look today at the dilemma of the State of Israel, whether to continue the war after 20 months or to stop in order to save those who need immediate saving… I don’t see a dilemma.”
Tibon also explained the dual meaning behind the book’s title. “The Gates of Gaza” is a reference to a eulogy delivered by Moshe Dayan, the renowned Israeli military leader and politician, at the cemetery of Nahal Oz in 1956.
“He talked there about the young people who had founded this kibbutz, having to carry the heavy gates of Gaza on their shoulders,” Tibon said.
It is also a reference to the Biblical story of Samson, who during a war with the Philistines, used his strength to tear down the town gates in Gaza and carry them away on his shoulders.
Unlike most Israeli authors, Tibon wrote his book in English and later translated it into Hebrew.
“My intention from the beginning was to tell it to an international audience. That’s why I wrote it in English from the start,” he told J.
Tibon’s visit to Stanford was presented by the Visiting Fellows in Israel Studies program in partnership with the Daniel Pearl Foundation, the Taube Center for Jewish Studies and Hillel at Stanford.
The talk, much like his book, ended on a message of hope that the war will end, the hostages will come home and that a lasting peace can someday be achieved.
“I do believe that we can create a better future. It will take a lot of hard work, and there will be ups and downs along the way,” Tibon said. “But hope is really important because otherwise it’s tough to survive.”