‘Keep the girls calm and quiet’

For almost 10 hours on October 7, Tibon and his wife and daughters listened to the sounds of gunfire and rockets outside, while monitoring Hamas atrocities on their phones and sending desperate SOS messages from their darkened safe room. 

Tibon said, “We had only one advantage, which is that we could hear them, we could hear their bullets, we could hear their shouting, and if we managed to keep the girls calm and quiet, they wouldn't hear us. And so that was our mission, to keep the girls calm and quiet.” 

They did, waiting until about 4:00 pm when the family was eventually freed by Tibon’s father, who drove with his mother from Tel Aviv to rescue the besieged family. Along the way, his parents made key decisions to rescue wounded Israelis by taking them to the hospital.

Learning later on about his parents’ dangerous foray into a war zone — and the aid they offered along the way — Tibon gained a deeper insight about saving those in grave peril. This informs his moral stance on prioritizing the rescue of the remaining 58 hostages — alive and dead — still held by Hamas in Gaza, over the competing priority of dismantling Hamas as a military and governing organization:

“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. You save those who need immediate saving, and then you continue the mission,” said Tibon, focusing on the fates of the approximately 20 living Israeli hostages still held in Gaza.

When Diamond asked him about the word “betrayal” in the book’s subtitle, Tibon said the dual meaning of the term is a conscious one. The word “betrayal” reflects two concepts — the failure of the Israeli government, military, and intelligence services to heed early danger warnings about a Hamas attack, and the disappointment about their neighbors in Gaza, with whom they had for years worked with on peace and reconciliation issues. 

He recalled kibbutz members who volunteered to take cancer patients from Gaza in their cars to Israeli hospitals so they could receive optimal medical treatments.

“This was a peace-seeking community that, for many years, advocated for peace and reconciliation,” he said.

As for accountability, Tibon emphasized the need for Israel to launch an independent and professional investigation into the October 7 catastrophe through a State Commission of Inquiry. Such an inquiry would examine the causes of the strategic, intelligence, defensive, and operational breakdowns experienced by Israel before, during, and after the attack, and would establish who was responsible for the multiple failures. 

“This is the strongest tool in the Israeli system for investigating failures of the state. It's a commission established by the government, headed by a former judge, that has all the powers of a seated court to invite witnesses and investigate,” he added, noting that the current government has not yet approved such an endeavor, despite about 70-85 percent of Israelis supporting such a commission.

Tibon said, “The government is refusing to do it because they are afraid of what will come out.”

‘Shifted public opinion’

The October 7 Hamas terrorist attack marked a major, and rather peculiar, shift in domestic Israeli politics, Tibon said.

“It shifted public opinion on the conflict to the right because there is a lack of belief in the peace process after this kind of thing. And at the same time, it significantly weakened the current right-wing government, which in all the public opinion polls is losing a lot of support,” he said.

He explained that this trend reveals that Israelis currently do not believe in a peace process and that they perceive an existential need to defend their families and homeland. 

At the same time, Israelis want a serious and competent government, and the existing right-leaning government is not viewed as such.

“We have to be led and managed by competent, serious people, and this government is not considered competent or serious by most of the Israeli public for obvious reasons,” he said.
 

In his book, Tibon expresses deep empathy for the people who are suffering in Gaza, and he reflects on another subtitle, “hope.”

Hope can begin, he said, with saving the Israeli hostages and then ending the war. “Forever wars may be good for religious preachers, but they're not good for border communities. Border communities need to reach an end and go back and rebuild,” said Tibon.

He cited a Polish poet, who once wrote that after every war, somebody has to clean up. “We are the ones who are going to have to clean up and fix our own houses,” he said.

Tibon is an award-winning diplomatic correspondent for Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper. His story and book, The Gates of Gaza, was featured on 60 Minutes.

He, his wife, and daughters are currently living in temporary housing in north-central Israel.  

Diamond said, “This is a story of remarkable courage and tenacity from many quarters in the face of unspeakable terror and potentially paralyzing fear. It is quintessentially an Israeli story.”

A full recording of the conversation can be viewed here.

The 2025 Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture 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. 

Argument & Key Findings

Hesham Sallam draws our attention to a surprising pattern: Egyptian Islamists and leftists have, for several generations, criticized each other on remarkably similar grounds. Their arguments have sometimes focused on Islam and left-wing political goals. But just as — if not more — frequently, they have focused on how each other’s agendas are inauthentic to Egyptian society and promoted to benefit foreign actors. It is true that the contents of their critiques have differed: Islamists denounce the left as betraying Egypt’s pure, Islamic nation while acting on behalf of “Zionists” or “western imperialists.” Meanwhile, leftists see Islamists as inauthentic to Egypt’s secular, pluralistic history, as well as advancing foreign interests. These differences notwithstanding, a common structure of political argument has been preserved across decades. 

The article introduces the history of Islamist-leftist debate in Egypt since the 1970s. Central to this history was the process of reappropriation: Islamists criticized the left, and the left responded by criticizing Islamists using more or less the same script. The study draws upon an array of Arabic sources likely unknown to readers outside of Egypt, including editorials, monographs, and public debates.

The Islamist Critique

The article first presents the intricacies of Egyptian Islamists’ critique of the left. There is a long history of Egyptian political elites denouncing left-wing politics as inauthentic and foreign. For example, Gamal Abdel-Nasser accused Egyptian communists of conspiring with Zionists and Soviets, while Anwar al-Sadat accused them of atheism and thus betraying Egypt’s Islamic essence. As leftists were repeatedly accused of disloyalty, nationalist ideas became even more dominant within leftist circles — this despite the historical suspicions of left-wing thinkers of nationalism as a distraction from class politics. The Egyptian case thus mirrors the trajectory of Europe’s internationalist labor movements during World War II, when leftist political goals were abandoned for state nationalism. In any case, the Islamist critique, which was led principally by the Muslim Brotherhood, regularly accused the left of foreign loyalties and a betrayal of Egyptian values. Over time, this critique was extended to secular Egyptians and deployed increasingly virulent language; for example, an academic critic of Islamism was denied promotion, ostensibly for his writings that were described by an Islamist detractor as “spreading cultural AIDS.” They also drew on prominent social science frameworks like Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations”: Egypt’s authentic Islamic nation was seen as pitted in an irresolvable clash against the atheistic West, which, they alleged, was simultaneously funding the Egyptian left. These are just a few of the examples Sallam uses to show how Islamists portrayed the left as inauthentic and disloyal, undermining its legitimacy in Egyptian politics.
 

The Leftist Critique

Sallam next shows us how the left struck back at their Islamist foes. A key process in this history concerns the Hosni Mubarak regime’s co-optation of influential leftists into the state’s cultural institutions. This occurred as a response to the Muslim Brotherhood’s electoral successes in the 1980s. Coincident with these institutional changes, leftists began appropriating the authenticity critique. They claimed that Islamists were engaged not in building a pure Islamic state and society, but in a narrow project meant to advance their own political standing. Rejecting the Islamist critique of them as atheists, leftists accused their opponents of weaponizing Islam and betraying its true essence. They rejected the distinction between so-called violent and nonviolent Islamism, on the grounds that nonviolent Islamists still were willing to justify violence. Islamists were said to be working on behalf of foreign interests like Sudanese president Omar Al-Bashir, whose designs on Egyptian territory went unnoticed by Islamists. The Brotherhood was deemed a cult-like vehicle for indoctrinating and promoting foreign goals, especially those of the Gulf. Far from authentic to Egyptian society, Islamists were seen as holding Egyptian Muslims in contempt for their alleged heresies. And in one of the most surprising appropriations, leftists claimed that Islamists were in fact quite similar to both Zionists and imperialists: all three sought to dominate the Middle East through sectarian politics. The Brotherhood’s Egyptian constitution was denigrated for being indistinguishable from versions published in Europe and Pakistan. Especially inauthentic to Egyptian society was the Brotherhood’s view of religious minorities as second-class citizens; this was deemed a fundamental betrayal of Egypt’s national essence, namely secular pluralism. These counter-critiques helped the left frame itself as the true guardian of the Egyptian nation.
 

Beyond Speech

Importantly, the Islamist-leftist debates were not mere rhetoric, but served as a basis for political action, especially when it came to questions of cooperation. For example, after the Islamist critic Farag Foda was assassinated, the so-called ‘moderate’ Islamist Mohamed Al-Ghazali defended his assassins; some leftists used these events to justify their refusal to cooperate with Islamists. More generally, they argued that Islamists’ quest for a religious state would only lead to political violence and exclusion, further grounds to reject compromise. Yet claims about authenticity and nationalism were also used to justify cooperation, as when leftists argued that both they and the Brotherhood were natural allies in the fight against foreign imperialism and Zionism. It is not clear whether a less confrontational approach would have helped Islamists and leftists cooperate against Egypt’s successive dictators, but their divisive rhetoric almost certainly did not help matters.
 

Contributions

The article will help readers understand why Egyptian politics has become increasingly marked by groups’ ‘affective’ hatreds for one another, as opposed to normal political disagreements. By weaving the themes of treason and inauthenticity through decades of history, Sallam shows us why this new status quo is not surprising. Affective polarization has led many Egyptians to view their opponents as unworthy of political inclusion, consistent with the rise of a global populism that emphasizes “us vs. them” distinctions. Sallam fleshes this out by relaying the different responses among leftists and Islamists to Egypt’s 2013 military coup, which ousted the Brotherhood leader Morsi. Leftists called the coup a necessary evil to counter foreign influences seeking to establish an Islamic state, while Islamists accused the left of being sponsored by the West. 

Readers will see the conflict between Islamists and leftists as not just fleeting moments of political disagreement, but a generations-long battle for domination in the realm of ideas.

*Research-in-Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.