In the com­ing years, there will be no short­age of books writ­ten about Octo­ber 7th, but few will be as per­son­al and riv­et­ing as Amir Tibon’s The Gates of Gaza. The rea­son Tibon was able to write such an affect­ing book is because he chose depth over breadth. Rather than try­ing to tell every sto­ry from Octo­ber 7th, he talks about his family’s ordeal on that day. And rather than telling the com­plete his­to­ry that led up to the attack, the book chron­i­cles the sto­ry of Israel through Tibon’s home com­mu­ni­ty, Kib­butz Nahal Oz, and how the kibbutz’s loca­tion, at the bor­der of Gaza, shaped who they were and are.

Tibon is a renowned jour­nal­ist who writes for Haaretz. With jour­nal­is­tic care and detail, he shares an almost minute-by-minute account of wak­ing up to mis­sile sirens, rush­ing into the bomb shel­ter, and hid­ing there as car­nage raged out­side. Tibon paints a pic­ture of a par­ent des­per­ate­ly try­ing to keep his two chil­dren qui­et while hop­ing not to scar them in the process. He also recre­ates the events that led to his sal­va­tion. He talks about his father’s coura­geous quest to make his way to the kib­butz to save his fam­i­ly, as well as the sto­ries of many oth­er heroes. He hon­ors the lega­cy of those who died pro­tect­ing road­ways, and high­lights some of the impos­si­ble deci­sions that lay before Israelis that day — like whether to dri­ve toward the sound of gun­fire in the hopes of sav­ing lives. To piece all the details togeth­er, Tibon con­duct­ed dozens of inter­views with survivors.

Tibon inter­spers­es his per­son­al account with chap­ters that tell the sto­ry of Gaza gen­er­al­ly. He traces the region’s his­to­ry from its time as part of Egypt after the Inde­pen­dence Day War, to when it became Israel’s dis­put­ed ter­ri­to­ry after the Six-Day War, to today — when the strip is under block­ade and con­fla­gra­tions seem to break out every few years. Through­out the book, Tibon charts the many wrong turns made by lead­ers and speaks about the numer­ous times Israel came close to peace but fell short. Because Octo­ber 7th becomes the stakes of these false starts, it makes Israel’s fail­ure to end the con­flict so trag­ic. One walks away from the book feel­ing that, for myr­i­ad rea­sons, things could have worked out differently.

At each turn, Tibon links Gaza’s his­to­ry with the sto­ry of his kib­butz. The book’s title takes its name from a speech deliv­ered by Moshe Dayan after a ter­ror­ist attack in 1956. Reflect­ing on the bur­den that bor­der com­mu­ni­ties like Nahal Oz car­ry, Dayan acknowl­edged that vio­lence would be a fact of life for these fron­tiers­men. Iron­i­cal­ly, the kib­butz move­ment was and remains one the bas­tions of left-wing, dovish, peace-lov­ing activism; yet despite their world­view, the ​“gates of Gaza weighed too heav­i­ly on [their] shoul­ders and over­came [them].” As such, Tibon doesn’t just cat­a­log the wars along the bor­der, but talks about the wed­dings those wars inter­rupt­ed, the trau­ma they caused chil­dren, and the peo­ple who decid­ed, in spite of the vio­lence, to stay and raise their fam­i­lies in Nahal Oz.

The Gates of Gaza is one of the most unique books to exam­ine the his­to­ry, lega­cy, and impact of the Israeli – Pales­tin­ian con­flict. Part mem­oir, part ethnog­ra­phy, and part his­tor­i­cal sur­vey, it is a new and refresh­ing look at a well-trod­den topic.