‘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. 

A Pivotal Moment for Climate Policy

In early May, Israel faced its second major wildfire in a month, as flames tore through the woodlands around Jerusalem, forcing the shutdown of the central region and the cancellation of Independence Day celebrations. Conference Chair, Professor Alon Tal, Visiting Fellow in Israel Studies and a leading environmental advocate, explained that once a rare occurrence, such fires have become far more frequent, reflecting a broader international pattern.

“In the past, fires of this magnitude maybe happened once a decade,” Tal noted. “But like California, Israel’s fire service now reports a tripling of high-risk fire days — ultra-dry conditions paired with high winds. This is an international phenomenon. This past year, Canadian fires destroyed 45 million acres of woodlands — seven times the annual average. Israel has received a wake-up call about the impacts of the climate crisis.”

Across two days of programming, the conference will bring together 25 Israeli experts to discuss potential solutions alongside colleagues from Los Angeles and California. “This is not just a policy conversation. This is about how we prepare our communities for an uncertain future,” Tal said. “Both Los Angeles and Tel Aviv are confronting real environmental risks, but they also have the innovation ecosystems and civic infrastructure needed to respond creatively. We have a lot to learn from studying them side by side.”

Comparing Los Angeles and Tel Aviv offers scholars and policymakers unique insights, Tal believes. “These are two of the most creative cities in the world. They both have thriving tech sectors and liberal city governments with resources and professional expertise. At the same time, they face comparable challenges: they are both dryland cities on rising coastlines, where heat waves are becoming more treacherous. Bringing their top experts together at Stanford has tremendous merit.”

Rethinking Climate Governance at the City Level

Tal emphasized that local governments are increasingly bearing the burden of climate adaptation, especially in societies marked by inequality and demographic complexity. “The changing climate brings new challenges that cities need to be ready for. And they aren’t,” he said. “Most people live in cities — they need the tools (and the budget) to reduce new risks. The LA fires have left enormous human suffering in their wake, just like the climate-driven floods in New Orleans, Houston, and New York City did. So, the question is: what steps should cities take proactively to avert disasters and maintain stability?”

While Tal emphasized the immediate environmental threats, Larry Diamond, Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and director of the Visiting Fellows in Israel Studies program, framed the discussion within a broader governance context. “It is often said that ‘all politics is local,’ and there is a policy corollary to that. While we need national policies and international coordination to reduce fossil fuel emissions and accelerate the transition to renewable energy, the challenges of climate adaptation and resilience are also deeply local and must be met at that level. This is a great opportunity for all of us to learn from two cities on the front lines of the challenge in our respective countries — Tel Aviv and Los Angeles.”
 

A Vision for Collaborative Learning

The event also reflects the broader goals of Stanford’s Visiting Fellows in Israel Studies program, launched in 2023 to foster cross-disciplinary analysis of Israel and its unique position as a regional influence and geopolitical actor. The program appoints an Israel-based scholar to serve as a visiting fellow at FSI for a recurring three-year term. The fellow will teach courses related to some aspect of Israel’s politics, society, economy, modern history, technological development, and/or regional or international relations, as well as advise students and collaborate with faculty interested in Israel and the Middle East.

Diamond emphasized the significance of the conference in fulfilling the program’s mission. “One of our key goals in the Israel Studies Program is to engage scholars, policymakers, and civil society leaders in Israel, not only individually but collectively based on their expertise. And we seek to promote functional and scholarly interaction and mutual learning. This conference is a historic opportunity to advance this mission in the realm of climate resilience.”

Tal also highlighted the significance of hosting the conference at Stanford. “Stanford has become the world’s leading academic center for researching critical ecological problems like biodiversity and climate change. The Doerr School of Sustainability and the involvement of Nobel laureate Steven Chu as a keynote speaker make this an unparalleled opportunity for collaboration.”

Building a Lasting Impact

Tal hopes the conference will catalyze new approaches to addressing climate impacts. “It’s clear that new environmental conditions require new strategies and technologies. Seeing practical solutions firsthand is crucial, but they don’t matter without policies that enable cities to step up their climate mitigation game. Success stories need to be shared.”

The conference outcomes will be documented in a special issue of the academic journal Sustainability, ensuring that insights resonate beyond the event itself. “By focusing on urban policies and highlighting both successes and failures, we aim to chart pathways for cities to live with global warming while mitigating emissions to address the root causes,” Tal said.

Diamond further expressed his hopes for the conference’s impact. “We hope participants will not only take away specific ideas and strategies from the two cities and countries but also connections that can be of mutual practical value going forward. We want to underscore that Israel and California, with their similar climates and start-up cultures, have a particularly rich set of possibilities for collaboration and mutual learning.”

Community members and members of the public are invited to participate in this pivotal conversation. To view the full agenda and register, visit the conference website.