Before and after Oct. 7: ToI writers share their stories that mattered most in 2023
With the war against Hamas looming large, we are also reminded of a prescient January interview and how the judicial overhaul crisis continues to reverberate
For all of us here in Israel, chronology was split in two this year: There is before October 7, and after.
The murderous Hamas invasion of Israel on the Jewish holiday of Simhat Torah saw 1,200 people killed — largely civilians — and 240 taken to Gaza as hostages. There are over 100,000 internally displaced Israelis who were compelled to evacuate their homes along the Gaza and Lebanon borders.
Immediately, up to 360,000 reservists were called up, many of whom are still serving in Israel’s north and south. A ground offensive in Gaza was launched on October 27.
It is believed that 129 of the hostages abducted by Hamas on October 7 remain in Gaza — not all of them alive.
Since October 8, Hezbollah-led forces have attacked Israeli communities and military posts along the Lebanon border on a near-daily basis, with the group saying it is doing so to support Gaza amid the war there. So far, the skirmishes on the border have resulted in four civilian deaths on the Israeli side, as well as the deaths of nine IDF soldiers.
Before October 7, we believed we faced an existential crisis as judicial overhaul legislation was rolled out shortly after the Netanyahu-led “hard right” government took office.
This tear in the fabric of Israeli society — patched up by citizens’ shared purpose during this war against Hamas — may soon be tested again.
As calendar year 2023 came to a close, we asked our reporters to share which of their articles matters the most to them.
A wounded, weakened Israel is a fiercer one
Haviv Rettig Gur
One of the great challenges of October 7 for journalists was to understand the seismic shifts underway in the public consciousness of Israelis in the wake of the massacre. People are complicated. The response wasn’t one-dimensional — trauma or fear or resolve. It was all of these at once, all intermingled and filtered through the lens of how they understood Hamas and the larger conflict.
This article was my attempt to put down to paper some of that complexity, the paradoxes of a society’s response to trauma in such a fraught context.
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Inside a Gaza bedroom, soldiers searching for tunnels find how low Hamas can go
Emanuel Fabian
It is no surprise that my main focus this year, as a military correspondent, is the war in the Gaza Strip. Over the last two months during the IDF’s ground offensive, I have been inside the Gaza Strip six times, although the first visit is still the most memorable for me.
On November 7, I was embedded with the Combat Engineering Corps’ 614th Battalion deep in the northern Gaza Strip, close to Gaza City, as troops searched for Hamas infrastructure. During my visit, the soldiers found and destroyed a Hamas tunnel, one of many in the area.
The entrance to this tunnel was not in a Hamas military site, but rather hidden underneath a child’s bed in a large beachfront home. Officers at the scene said the find exposes the cynical use Hamas makes of the civilians of the Strip.
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Weeks after the onslaught, a quietly inspiring visit to a bloodied Gaza-border kibbutz
David Horovitz, founding editor
This was an article that wrote itself.
I was down south for a briefing with military officials and thought I’d drive the relatively short distance to visit a kibbutz, very near Gaza, where I’d last been decades ago. I knew someone there who I hoped would be able to walk me through what had happened there on the darkest day in modern Israel’s history.
I spent maybe an hour with Stevie Marcus, taking notes as he walked me around Kibbutz Alumim, and left inspired and encouraged by his resilience amid the bloody evidence of the horrors. I wrote up the piece simply by setting out exactly what he had told me, in the order that he told me, quoting almost everything he said.
And then, a few short weeks after it was published, I had to add a devastating update. And this little article now stands as a tribute to an utterly fine, beloved and deeply missed man.
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What Matters Now to Micah Goodman: Vowing to stand with Israel when it fires back
Amanda Borschel-Dan
As the calendar year began, Israelis were torn asunder by the looming judicial overhaul after the government’s plan was proposed in January. Observing the incipient societal schism and the need to gain perspective by hearing from those who were making the news, The Times of Israel launched our weekly What Matters Now podcast series.
Early on, we heard from judicial overhaul protest movement leader Dr. Shikma Bressler and from MK Simcha Rothman, who is leading the legislative charge. As weeks passed, we began covering other crises, including violence in the Arab Israeli sector, the rising costs of living and Iran’s role in the Mideast. Around the Jewish holidays, we discussed the Book of Ruth and whether King David was a nomad.
Since October 7, like most of our coverage, the weekly podcast has necessarily turned to amplifying voices affected by the ongoing war with Hamas.
As we witness the international blowback against the war with Hamas, one conversation with Israeli philosopher Micah Goodman — conducted mere days after the Hamas massacre on a morning in which we both received tragic news — is all the more relevant today.
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Those we have lost
Amy Spiro
Before October 7, I wrote about all sorts of things — drama in the Israeli media industry, historical looks back at terror attacks and hijackings, and even a women’s soccer team shaking things up.
But when the whole country was turned upside down less than three months ago, so was my work as we began the project that soon consumed most of my waking hours. Early on in the war, The Times of Israel launched its “Those We Have Lost” series, telling the stories of the lives cut brutally short by the Hamas massacre and the ensuing war, and before long I ended up spearheading our effort.
We published our first post on October 11, when the scale of the Hamas massacre was still unknown and unimaginable. To date we have published close to 320 posts, memorializing close to 400 people who will be missed by their loved ones for eternity.
From a Sri Lankan caregiver slain alongside his patient, to a couple murdered protecting their children, a beloved high school principal who fell in battle, a colorful grandpa who lived on the edge, a Bedouin grandmother and her beloved granddaughter killed by a rocket, and a social worker gunned down at a festival just days after purchasing her wedding dress, every story has stuck with me long after writing it.
But most of all I think about how many there are still left to write.
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Rachel Goldberg talks about her son, Hersh, and the turning points of the last 13 days
Jessica Steinberg
For me and for most of us, the war has overshadowed the previous nine months of the year.
I wrote an article that accompanied a Times of Israel podcast I recorded with Rachel Goldberg, mother of Hamas hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin.
Rachel is a dear friend of many years, and at first I hesitated in writing about this impossible, brutally painful situation in which Rachel and her family have found themselves, specifically because of our personal relationship. But that emotional connection ended up heightening our interview and all the other articles about Hersh I’ve written since then.
Leaning into what I know about Hersh and his family allowed us to skip certain details, to navigate the article differently and for me to simply listen to Rachel and hear what she had to say, talking about her beloved son with dignity and grace, strength and resolve.
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Foreign media given unprecedented access to forensic institute to witness atrocities
Renee Ghert-Zand
Nine days after Hamas butchered at least 1,200 people in southern Israel, the government made the unprecedented decision to invite foreign journalists into the National Institute of Forensic Medicine, also known as Abu Kabir. It is rare for any journalist to be allowed in the areas of the building where staff members do their work, including autopsy rooms.
However, October 7 changed things. The Health Ministry realized it had to respond to the fact that almost immediately after news of the massacre broke, many around the world denied that it had happened. Claiming it was all fake news, antisemites and Israel-haters refused to believe that the terrorists had tortured Israelis before murdering them in their homes, sometimes burning them alive.
So, on October 16, the foreign media was called to Abu Kabir to bear witness to Hamas’s atrocities so the world would have no excuse to look away. As an English-language publication, The Times of Israel was included.
When I began working as the ToI health reporter, I never imagined I would ever face so much death in one place and at one time. The level of pure evil I was exposed to was traumatizing. It has taken time for me to process and recover from the experience, but I don’t regret having covered the story. It needed to be shared.
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The world’s foremost rabbinic authority on declaring death grapples with Oct. 7 horrors
Mati Wagner
Writing this piece helped me to appreciate how the Jewish tradition can provide a framework and a sense of continuity — and therefore connection, belonging and meaning — even in the most trying of times. Jews have been the target of hatred and violence for as long as they have existed. Not only have the Jews overcome every adversary, sometimes at a great price, but they have recorded for posterity in the form of teachings and laws strategies for coping with the worst, all the while holding in the collective Jewish mind a broader view of history and a faith in perseverance and a hope for the best.
Seen in this light, each new challenge, no matter how traumatic, is just another in a long line of trials and tribulations that, ultimately, the Jews will overcome, October 7 included.
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‘We’re in this together.’ To Hamas, all citizens are targets, say Arab Israelis
Gianluca Pacchiani
I wrote this piece one week after the October 7 assault by Hamas on Israel, at a time when the whole country was still in deep shock and the magnitude of the atrocities committed on that fateful day was only beginning to emerge.
Many in Israel were worried about a repeat of the May 2021 riots when, during an Israeli operation in Gaza, clashes broke out between Jewish and Arab citizens in various parts of the country, and members of both communities were assaulted and lynched. In mid-October of 2023, Israel was in the grip of uncertainty and fear, and old feelings of suspicion and hostility were creeping up.
I reached out to several Arab Israeli activists, politicians and influential figures throughout the country, and they all agreed on one thing: Arab and Jewish Israelis are in this together. The events of October 7 struck and shocked both communities and claimed the lives of Israelis of all faiths. In those harrowing early days of the conflict, everyone felt the need to come together and preserve the social fabric of Israeli society.
Many things have happened since then: Israel launched its ground operation in Gaza, some of the hostages were released — while too many are still in Hamas captivity — and a new battlefront opened on the northern border with Lebanon, hundreds of thousands of Israelis were evacuated from their homes, rockets started flying in from Yemen, and there is no end in sight to the conflict and no real plan for the day after.
But the domestic front hasn’t yet opened, and our social fabric appears to remain intact, rekindling hopes that coexistence may one day be possible with all our neighbors, those who live next door to us and those throughout the region.
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In stunning response, 15,000 volunteers fill leadership vacuum to help victims of Hamas
Sue Surkes
In the searing aftermath of October 7, the one thing that kept me sane was the incredible and inspiring way in which so many parts of society stepped in to help.
While the government was paralyzed, Jews, Arabs, Druze and even asylum seekers from Africa dropped everything to collect, sort, pack and distribute food, clothing, toys, hygiene items and more for the tens of thousands of people evacuated from the border with Gaza, and later on, the one with Lebanon as well.
During the early days of the war, this caring, altruistic spirit was on massive show at the Expo Center in Tel Aviv. The big civil society organizations that had protested the government’s attempted changes to the judiciary before October 7 adapted their networks and logistical infrastructure overnight to manage a huge support effort.
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For displaced families, Eilat’s charms are a painful reminder of a life pierced by war
Canaan Lidor
The juxtaposition of grieving survivors returning as evacuees to Eilat, a holiday destination they remember as a happy place from when their families were still complete, was jarring in its own right.
It also captures an aspect of a broader story, that of a nation whose plans and dreams had been abruptly superseded by harsh realities.
Mostly, though, I find it significant because it allowed me to help someone: A woman who desperately wanted to tell the world about her beloved late husband, who was murdered while protecting his family in Ofakim.
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Amid Israel-Hamas war, students say antisemitism is ‘new normal’ at Columbia University
Cathryn J. Prince
US campus antisemitism — something I’ve covered since 2015 — has always been here, though sometimes writing about it felt like an exercise in solitude. Now I think people outside the schools really see it. The year 2023, particularly the months after the October 7 massacre, featured lawsuits, congressional investigations, and threats to cut federal funding from elite universities. It was the year that campus antisemitism, long bubbling under the radar, finally got its reckoning.
As one student at Columbia told me, “When October 7 happened and a war broke out in Israel, a second war broke out here in the US. It’s a war of antisemitism and public opinion, and Columbia is ground zero.” Jewish and Israeli students across the United States in universities and secondary schools are subject to harassment and violent threats — from peers and sometimes from faculty.
Whether something will be done remains to be seen.
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Israeli tech execs seek UK funds to help create a startup for every Oct. 7 victim
Sharon Wrobel
The tech headlines from Israel this year started out about tech leaders and entrepreneurs becoming protest leaders against the contentious judicial overhaul. Then they turned into how the tech community united and stepped up its game during the ongoing Hamas war: spearheading innovative ideas, helping in the plight of those who went missing, and putting its expertise and vast network to work.
As local tech firms and their founders found themselves turning into advocates for Israel, they are also scrambling to attract funding from foreign investors.
Izhar Shay, whose son was killed on October 7 during fierce clashes with Hamas terrorists, is one of a group of senior tech executives and investors leading a project to make sure that the innocent civilians and soldiers who lost their lives that catastrophic day did not do so in vain.
Shay’s initiative pledges to create 1,200 new Israeli startups, one in memory of each fallen soldier and murdered civilian of the October 7 massacre. The project seeks to help revive the tech sector and create thousands of jobs in the aftermath of the war.
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At an IDF base in the Golan, off-duty reserve soldiers cut loose with BBQ and music
Gavriel Fiske
This piece, a behind-the-scenes glimpse into IDF reserve duty during wartime, was published just over two weeks after October 7. The war was in its early stages. At an army base in the Golan, reservists’ lives had been suddenly upended for an indeterminate amount of time, but they were ready to do their duty.
Now, as the Israel-Hamas conflict drags on, not many reservists have been released to return to their normal lives. Musicians and entertainers, while wondering how they will pay their bills, still run around performing for free or half-wages at small events for evacuees, soldiers and the wounded.
Morale was good then and is still good now, but is the whole effort sustainable for the months or years some officials have said this all might take? It has to be.
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Defiant in defeat: Protesters vow to fight on against government’s judicial overhaul
Jeremy Sharon
Israel in 2023, up until October 7, was all about the judicial overhaul, the governing coalition’s radical plan to rein in the power of the judiciary and the titanic struggle opponents of that agenda waged against the government.
The demonstration outside the Knesset under the fierce summer sun of late July against a principal piece of the judicial overhaul — the “reasonableness” law which was set to pass that day — was eye-opening.
The protesters, young and old, elderly war veterans and ideological students, knew that there was little hope of stopping the legislation from passing. The protest movement had achieved a massive victory back in March when an extreme package of measures was frozen in the face of serious civil unrest, but as a result of that the government was utterly determined to ram through the reasonableness law and did not back down.
Nevertheless, tens of thousands of people showed up, if the face of water cannons and rough police tactics, to make clear to the government exactly how they felt, despite the scant chance of success.
Reporting on the protesters’ determination and fervor that day was for me a crucial aspect of chronicling the broader story of the societal upheaval engendered by the fight over the judiciary.
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US envoy: Netanyahu has big plans. They won’t happen if his ‘backyard is on fire’
Jacob Magid
I kept coming back to this interview with then-US ambassador to Israel Tom Nides from the beginning of the year because his message has continued to resonate.
Nides discussed the strides that the Biden administration was eager to make in its ties with Israel and in expanding the Abraham Accords. “The prime minister has told us he wants to do big things. And we want to do big things, too. But if we want to achieve those things, we can’t wake up and have one’s backyard on fire. So he’s going to have to manage the things we care about… effectively,” the ambassador said at the time.
But even before Hamas’s terror onslaught, the overwhelming feeling in Washington was that due to his judicial overhaul and approach to the Palestinian issue, Netanyahu failed to keep things calm enough for the US to successfully advance many mutual interests.
The approval of a record number of settlement homes and the expansion of Israel’s footprint in the West Bank saw the US summon Jerusalem’s ambassador in Washington for the first time in over a decade; incendiary comments by far-right ministers nearly saw one cabinet member denied a visa to the US; and rampant settler violence sparked the first-of-their kind sanctions against Israeli extremists.
Despite the circumstances, the US still sought to broker an Israel-Saudi normalization agreement, and US President Joe Biden has claimed that his administration was on the verge of a deal before October 7.
The ensuing Israel-Hamas war has placed that effort on the back burner, but the US insists it will be back on the agenda once the fighting winds down. Then too, though, Nides’s message to Netanyahu will remain relevant.
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Avi Loeb’s claims of finding possible alien technology are polarizing scientists
Rich Tenorio
Israeli-born Avi Loeb, a Harvard theoretical physicist and former astronomy department chair, traveled far afield from Cambridge this past summer. He and a research team headed to Papua New Guinea in search of traces of a meteor that burst above the Pacific nearly a decade ago, in 2014. Loeb claimed the meteor came from interstellar space and was the first known such object. After almost a week of trying, his efforts hit pay dirt — more precisely, spherules or diminutive particles he claims are from this meteor and might represent extraterrestrial technology.
Since then, it wasn’t quite smooth sailing for Loeb. A number of officials in Papua New Guinea questioned whether he had the proper clearance to do the expedition and remove samples. Some scientific colleagues asked whether the meteor was actually interstellar in origin, or if there was another explanation for the spherules — maybe they were man-made?
Despite such challenges, Loeb’s claims have continued to attract interest. (A previous story about him was my contribution to 2022.) He’s working to take his story off-Broadway in a one-man show about his life and work.
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Caught between Hitler and Stalin, one family’s miraculous tale of survival
Robert Philpot
Daniel Finkelstein’s beautifully written book, “Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad: A Family Memoir of Miraculous Survival,” is a harrowing tale of roundups and arrests, gulags and concentration camps, hunger and fear. It describes how both Nazism and Stalinism wrought near-unimaginable suffering on the families of his parents, Mirjam and Ludwik. However, it is also a story of courage, survival, fortitude — and of two remarkable women, his grandmothers Grete and Lusia.
When I interviewed him, Finkelstein, a journalist and member of the House of Lords for Britain’s governing Conservative party, spoke about how he believes the story has contemporary relevance. It is one that highlights both the dangers posed by the populist assault on liberal values over the past decade and the consequences, seen graphically today in Ukraine, of Russia’s failure to reckon with Stalin’s legacy.
In the wake of the October 7 atrocities, my mind turned once again to this book and its lessons: of the unspeakable acts of cruelty and inhumanity men are capable of inflicting and how the suffering of women in conflicts is so often ignored or dismissed. But it is also a reminder of the resilience and strength of the human spirit and the hope that good can triumph over evil.
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How Nazi-sympathizing scholars prepared the ideological groundwork for genocide
Matt Lebovic
This topic proved to be more urgent in the fall, although the article, about top German universities “aligning” themselves with Nazi policies voluntarily both before and after 1933, was published in the spring.
It showed how Germany’s top professors altered their research to give credibility to what became Nazi racial policies regarding Jews, the disabled, and other victim groups.
Since October 7, American campuses have been roiled by antisemitism. We’re seeing how the leaders of colleges react and respond to this wave of Jew-hating on campus, including in congressional testimony. This atmosphere is reminiscent of German universities during the years before 1933, when professors and institutions in Germany still had freedom of speech.
After 1933, there were US colleges that refused to cultivate relations with Nazi Germany and legitimize Hitler, such as Williams College. Other colleges, such as Harvard, sought to legitimize Nazism and strengthen ties to Germany through activities, including delegation visits and hosting Nazis on campus. Only since 2004 have historians started to piece together the extent of these relations and how leaders of Harvard blocked Jewish scholars who could have fled Germany to teach at Harvard.
In retrospect, it’s a clear-cut question of right and wrong. But so was Harvard’s president Claudine Gay being asked by Congress if calls for the genocide of Jewish students were permissible on campus as a form of free speech — a question she equivocated on. That’s the link between 1933 and 2023 — the institution making its own choices regarding what constitutes antisemitism and if antisemitism is admirable or not.
