A new book about October 7 aims to capture the humanity behind the horror

Lee Yaron was in New York on a fellowship at Columbia University on October 7 when news broke of an unimaginable attack on southern Israel by Hamas. Like many Israelis living abroad, she felt helpless and frustrated. Unlike most Israelis, she is a journalist, a longtime contributor to the Israeli daily Haaretz, and she had an outlet for her fear and anger.

Within days, she was on a plane to Israel, where she spent the next four months interviewing survivors, aid workers, and eyewitnesses to the attacks. The result is:10/7: 100 human storiesa book that documents perhaps the most traumatic day in Israeli history through intimate profiles of some of the 1,200 people killed and hundreds taken hostage.

“I was still very overwhelmed by my own grief and sense of shock and just this deep feeling that I had to do something,” Yaron, 30, said in an interview this week. “On the one hand, it was very traumatic, and I feel it now, even more than when I wrote the book. At the same time, I had a mission, I knew what I had to do and I was focused on that. The book helped me deal with my grief and my sense of hopelessness.”

The remnants of the destruction caused by Hamas terrorists at Kibbutz Be’eri, near the Israel-Gaza border, as seen on January 4, 2024. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)

“10/7: 100 Human Stories” joins a number of works of near “real-time” reporting and documentation of the attack on Israel, including the documentary film “Supernova-The Music Festival Massacre”; an upcoming documentary on Paramount+, “We will dance again“; a play, “October 7: In Their Own Wordsbased on first-hand accounts; and a museum-style exhibition, “The Nova Exhibitionwhich has been performed in Israel, New York and now Los Angeles.

On Thursday, Yaron will appear on a virtual panel sponsored by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and the National Library of Israelof Amir Tibon, the Haaretz journalist whose new book, “The Gates of Gaza,” describes how he was rescued from Kibbutz Nahal Oz by his own father on October 7.

“10/7,” however, is the most comprehensive account of the day to date, capturing the diversity of the victims and survivors and, by extension, of Israel as a whole. There are stories of Jewish refugees fleeing war in Ukraine, and Mizrahi Jews who fled their country to come to Israel in the 1950s. Hamas did not discriminate between left-wing kibbutzniks, happy club kids or right-wing supporters of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Nor did it spare Bedouins, Thai and Nepalese migrant workers, or the Christian and Muslim Arabs who, she writes, “had the audacity to live among Jews as fellow citizens.”

During her research, one story often led to another: a series of family members, friends and neighbours killed by terrorists, or who survived because they huddled in safe rooms or simply took shelter in places the attackers had overlooked.

Yaron, who divides her time between New York and Israel, has been a journalist at Haaretz for nearly a decade, focusing on what she calls people on the margins of Israeli society: asylum seekers, the LGBT community, victims of sexual violence, and the poor. In all of these stories, she said, she tries to describe a situation from the bottom up.

“We are inundated with information about Israel and Palestine, but we hear it from politicians, from the Israeli government, from Hamas – from the people who created the conflict, not from the people affected by it,” she said.

In an afterword to “10/7,” Yaron’s husband, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Joshua Cohen, compares the book to the Yizker-bikher, or memorial bookswritten by Holocaust survivors to document the history of Jewish communities destroyed by the Nazis — an effort, Cohen writes, “aimed at freeing the dead, at least some of them, from numerical anonymity and political exploitation.”

Yaron accepts the comparison, but with a caveat. Survivors created memorial books so that “people wouldn’t deny these crimes and the stories would be documented,” she said. “But the biggest difference here is that Hamas documented everything. They didn’t try to deny it.”

She also intends the book as a corrective to those who would exploit the tragedy, regardless of their political views. The book is dedicated to Gal Eisenkot, the son of Israeli minister Gadi Eisenkot, who was assassinated in northern Gaza in December during an operation to recover the bodies of two hostages.

“He was a very dear friend of mine since we were kids,” said Yaron, who was born in Tel Aviv. “One of the hardest things after we got the news that Gal had passed away was seeing how his death was politicized and used by so many different politicians with different agendas, turning him into some kind of symbol and obscuring who he was as a person, his humanity, his personality, the unique things that made Gal Gal.

“I think that’s the difference between the reporting I do and most of the reporting we read, in that I try to keep people alive on paper, to keep the sense of humanity of who they were,” she continued.

She extends that sense of humanity to Israelis across the religious and political spectrum, and finds disappointment on all sides. She speaks to October 7 survivors who are shocked and angry, and in many cases radicalized by what Hamas did and what it stands for, but who also feel betrayed by a military and a government that failed to protect them.

“When this fence was broken on October 7, I think for many Israelis, our sense of security was broken as well,” Yaron said. For her parents and grandparents — Romanian on her father’s side, Portuguese and Turkish on her mother’s side — Israel meant security. Yaron is now saddened to see that some 40,000 Israelis have left the country since October 7. and have no immediate plans to return. “They all say, ‘We don’t trust Israel to protect our children anymore. We don’t want to live with this fear that the army is not there to protect us, while we pay incredibly high taxes.'”

Personal items left behind at the Nova trance music festival, where hundreds of people were murdered by Hamas on October 7, are being collected in a real-life lost-and-found exhibition about the massacre. (Eliyahu Freedman)

Does Yaron worry that books and films that focus on the horrors of October 7 will contribute to this sense of disillusionment, or that readers and viewers will actually become more desensitized to the suffering of the Palestinians and the possibilities for peace?

“I write about the terrible situation in Gaza in the introduction to the book. It is devastating that so many innocent people who had nothing to do with Hamas’s crimes paid the heaviest price: the deaths, the hunger, the disease. Most of Gaza has been destroyed,” she said. “But I focus primarily on the Israeli stories out of respect and recognition that the Palestinian stories, especially now, are not my stories to tell, and I will wait for my Palestinian colleagues to do this important work and tell the Palestinian stories.”

And Yaron has not given up her own hope that Israel and its neighbors will one day live in peace. In the book, she tells the story of Maoz Inon, originally from the Netiv HaAsara moshav on the Gaza border, who runs a catering business that promotes Jewish-Arab coexistence. On October 6, his parents, Yakovi and Bilha, were returning to the moshav after a Friday night dinner with their five children and 11 grandchildren in Tel Aviv. They died the next day after Hamas fired a rocket-propelled grenade into their home.

Maoz, who started a demonstration in front of the Knesset after the attack that turned into a protest camp, tells Yaron that his parents wanted him to “forgive, not take revenge.”

“It is time for Israelis and Palestinians to understand each other’s stories and pain, unite in opposition to their politicians and advocate for peace,” he says.

Yaron is aware that many Jewish authors have been excluded by pro-Palestinian activists who see no distinction between aggressive nationalists and liberal Israelis who support coexistence with the Palestinians. As she begins to promote her book, she is wary of extremists on both sides, including Palestinians and Jews who seek a one-state solution that excludes one side or the other.

“The places where I encountered people chanting ‘from the river to the sea’ were in the West Bank by Jewish extremists and at Columbia University by people from the global left,” she said.

“For me, justice is a compromise. As much as I would like to change some of the mistakes that early Zionism made, we cannot change the past. We can only think about the future and fight for the future. And I wish that these (pro-Palestinian activists) on the side of the Israeli left would fight with the people who are trying to promote a solution and a peaceful life for all sides.”

As a liberal Zionist, Yaron said, “I am alone in Israel, and I am alone here. I really hope that these people I know who want justice will learn to distinguish between people and their governments and understand that people are never to blame. I really hope that this book will be translated into Arabic as well, and I really hope that it will be a first step in recognizing humanity.”

JTA and the National Library of Israel present an online conversation with the authors of three new books on the events of Oct. 7 and the future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Amir Tibon, Ilan Troen and Lee Yaron. Thursday, Sept. 12, 6 p.m. ET. Register here.