While Israel Slept: How Hamas Surprised the Most Powerful Military in the Middle East
By Yaakov Katz and Amir Bohbot
Macmillan, 336 pp.
The Road to October 7: Hamas, the Holocaust and the Eternal War Against the Jews
By Rafael Medoff
Jewish Publication Society, 368 pp.
Hostage
By Eli Sharabi
Harper Influence, 208 pp.
The anniversary of a world-changing event typically sees the publication of books and articles offering us fresh information and insights, and marking two years since October 7 is no different. Last year seemed a bit too soon, but now there is undeniably much to learn and think about—even if the war sparked by the Hamas atrocities on that day rages on.
Books that seek to provide insight into the worst day for Jews since the Holocaust—and the crises Israel has confronted since then—fall into broad categories, and these three new books offer examples of the three most common: a detailed chronological account of what precisely happened on October 7, 2023, from one bloody hour to the next (what journalists call a “ticktock”); a book that opens the lens to consider the attack against a wider canvas of antisemitism; and a memoir of suffering by a hostage sharing the pain and humiliation of the experience.
I will leave the memoir until last, as it is the likely bestseller of the three and is truly a remarkable and well-observed document of the crimes carried out by Israel’s enemies in Gaza.
The hour-by-hour piece of journalism is While Israel Slept: How Hamas Surprised the Most Powerful Military in the Middle East, an admirable work that fulfills what the authors doubtless offered in their book proposal: a readable examination of the many angles of a despicable act of terrorism, including Israeli politics in the background and military tactics in the Gaza war as it unfolded. Yaakov Katz, former chief editor of The Jerusalem Post, teamed up with Amir Bohbot, military correspondent for the Walla news website, and they know how to collect and connect the dots of a shocking failure.
Readers who keep up with Middle East news may not find much that is new in While Israel Slept, but they will find a well-organized account of the clues that were ignored in the weeks before the surprise attack of October 7. Katz and Bohbot remind us of previous mini-wars between Israel and Hamas, and they expose the folly of Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to permit Qatar to send an estimated $1 billion in cash to Gaza’s rulers.
“Hamas put Israel to sleep,” they write, arguing that the terror group led Israel to believe that the extremists leading Gaza were more interested in money than in killing their Jewish neighbors. Israel fell victim to “a mix of hubris and faulty intelligence,” they add, and they have plenty of facts and clear anecdotes to back up their diagnosis and their recommendations for changes that could help Israel win future wars.
The brutal massacres and kidnappings of October 7 are covered in Katz and Bohbot’s book, of course, but the authors focus more on the political, military and security issues where the State of Israel plainly failed in its primary duty: to protect its citizens. They report that Netanyahu was unmoved by letters addressed to him, earlier in 2023, by intelligence analysts who warned that the nation was distracted by the controversy over his push for judicial reforms that would weaken Israel’s courts. They also note, in a concern familiar to observers of American Jewish politics, that Netanyahu has endangered the vital alliance with America by relying almost completely on Republicans. As Katz and Bohbot put it, repelling Democrats “is not merely playing with fire; it is toying with Israel’s very future.”
Sharabi’s memoir in Hebrew has broken all sales records in Israel and will surely succeed in its many translated versions.
A second book timed for the second anniversary, The Road to October 7: Hamas, the Holocaust, and the Eternal War Against the Jews, conveys a wider-ranging sense of worry. The author, Rafael Medoff, is a respected Holocaust scholar, and he connects Hamas’s outrageous bloodthirst with age-old antisemitism.
Medoff’s book is not about the events of one tragic day, but rather the dangers that Jews have always had to confront. He devotes many pages to a subject that we all know from news sites and magazine articles: the uproar on American campuses stirred up by “media-savvy anti-Israel militants.” Medoff even includes a detailed history of U.S. universities cozying up to Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s, which may or may not seem relevant to readers.
He sharply criticizes protesters for failing to condemn “the murders, rapes, and beheadings” of October 7, noting that many “voiced the most extreme positions: Israel is evil, Zionism is racist, American supporters of Israel are war criminals, violence against Israel is justified.” Perhaps most offensive, he writes, is the claim by some protesters that there were no atrocities committed by Hamas on that Saturday of Simchat Torah two years ago.
This Holocaust scholar apparently wants to warn Jews that we are still targeted by a multitude of enemies. But Medoff offers hope by reminding us that the State of Israel exists and is strong.
The third type of book that we want, as highly concerned readers shocked by October 7 and needing to know more, is the firsthand history of that day and its aftermath by those who experienced it. After most wars, we can read the memoirs of generals and presidents. Without waiting for the Gaza war to be over, Eli Sharabi—who was held hostage in disgusting conditions for 491 days—gifts us with an intimate, skin-crawling account of what it was like: to suffer, but to maintain always the belief that he would survive.
Sharabi’s memoir in Hebrew, with the blunt title Hatuf (“Hostage”), has broken all sales records in Israel and will surely succeed in its many translated versions. It will remind people of Night, in which Elie Wiesel helped us feel the physical and spiritual struggles of surviving Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
In Hostage, we learn intimate and terrible details of how Sharabi and other Israeli hostages were treated, but he also reveals what was going on inside his head: yearning for his wife and two daughters, initially believing that the attackers at Kibbutz Be’eri would spare them, and trying to help his fellow hostages—whose personalities he profiles—preserve their sanity by nurturing hope. He says he urged one weeping Israeli to make a choice: “I want to survive. And this is how. This sadness, this crying, this self-pity. It won’t help you.”
Sharabi, a financial manager in normal life and presumably helped by an editor who knows how to organize a memoir for the strongest, almost cinematic impact, has a huge advantage as a witness to atrocities: He is fluent in Arabic, and thus he overheard his captors and had long conversations with some of them. He writes that they were ignorant and simply spouted Hamas propaganda: “All of Palestine is ours…There’s no room for the State of Israel…Go back to where your parents or grandparents came from. There won’t be peace as long as you’re on our land.”
We can draw many insights from Sharabi’s account into what any hostages still alive may be thinking, including a hope that Israeli troops won’t try to stage a raid to rescue them. Sharabi recalls discussing that hope in detail with fellow captives: “We pray they won’t even think about it and try to contact them by telepathy: Don’t come in here. Don’t die. Don’t get us killed.” While doing some squats and push-ups to stay as fit as an undernourished man can be, Sharabi writes, he thought about how the Hamas guards would kill them only if the Israelis approached: “We are bargaining chips. They need bargaining chips. And they need bargaining chips with a pulse.”
There is no pleasure in accompanying Sharabi through his ordeal and his personal losses, but we can get some pleasure from the vivid description of his liberation day, which took place in the context of a partial deal that returned some of the hostages this past February 8. In one telling scene from that day, one of Sharabi’s fellow ex-hostages confronted a Red Cross woman from New Zealand in the van taking them from Gaza to freedom. The Israeli asked why the Red Cross had never helped them: “We didn’t hear from you. You didn’t take care of us. You never visited. Where were you?”
After a long pause, the humanitarian aid worker weakly replied: “They didn’t let us reach you.”
Eli Sharabi saw and experienced terrible things, but he’s an inspiring believer in life and gratitude. Campaigners who have demanded that Hamas free the captives will be glad to read: “We would not have come back from the October 7 tragedy without the mobilization of the entire Jewish people, in Israel and in the Diaspora, in a call that echoed around the world for the return of the hostages.”
Dan Raviv, a former CBS correspondent and host of the podcast The Mossad Files, is a frequent Moment contributor and co-author of Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars.
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