Just a few weeks after the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks in Israel, Haaretz journalist Lee Yaron began gathering testimonies from the massacres and learning the personal stories of their victims. Having been thousands of miles away on the day of the attacks, at Columbia University where the Israeli reporter was on a fellowship, Yaron seized the only tool she felt she had to help the victims — to tell their stories thoroughly and faithfully and ensure they are remembered. In her book, 10/7: 100 Human Stories, which was released in September, Yaron digs deep into the experiences and histories of more than 100 civilians — spanning the gamut of Israeli society as well as foreign victims — through interviews with survivors, the bereaved and first responders.  

Interwoven through the personal stories Yaron, 30, provides Jewish and Israeli historical background as well as political analysis. “I wanted the book to be a way to understand — not just to get to know the victims — but understand Israel and the history of the conflict better,” Yaron said in an interview with Jewish Insider during which she also discussed the impact Oct.7 had on Israel’s peace camp, the reaction of the global left to the Hamas attacks and the gender aspect of Israel’s intelligence failure leading up to Oct. 7.   

The following interview is lightly edited for clarity.

Jewish Insider: What made you decide to write this book?

Lee Yaron: I started very early, in the end of October, and I just felt I needed to do something. There’s not much you can do for the dead. So the thing I felt like I could do is to write, and I really wanted to tell the story of Oct. 7 from the bottom-up. I couldn’t hear the politicians anymore. You know, all of these people taking this innocent civilian’s life and just revealing and mistelling their stories. And I wanted to hear it, to learn about them first, to learn about their lives and their beliefs and their communities, and as you saw, I went really deep on the research of their families’ histories two and three generations back, because I tried to understand Israel again and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through these victims to use their stories as a mirror for a bigger story. But it started just from, you know, we’re after Yom Kippur now, and I really felt like I wanted to ask them, “slicha” [sorry], and I wanted to do something for them, at least to make them remembered.

JI: Was there anything that shocked you that you hadn’t already known, that you hadn’t heard already in the stories already out there?

LY: There were a lot of, for example, in the Moshe Ridler story, the story of the Holocaust survivor, I knew a little bit about his story from what was published in Israeli media, but when I was doing the research, I learned about just how crazy is the story of how he survived the Holocaust and was saved by this Ukrainian family. And then afterward, it was amazing the discovery that he was deported from his home in Hertza on the very same day of Simchat Torah, when he was murdered 82 years later. When we began the interviews, the family didn’t know it. And then after two or three interviews, we stayed in touch, and they told me, ‘You wouldn’t believe it, we got a letter from another survivor that is now living in Israel, and she said she knew Moshe from this town, and she wanted us to know that the Nazis deported them on Simchat Torah.’ And they were like, ‘We don’t know if it’s true, you know, it’s like a very old lady, but check it.’ And then I went to the community’s yizkor [remembrance] books, and there are documentations from them, and I discovered it was true.

So a lot of the things were about how this day is not just part of Israeli history, but it’s part of Jewish history, and putting this day in the wider context of you know, understanding the Shahar Zemach story [the peace activist killed defending Kibbutz Beeri], and then understanding his grandmother’s story fleeing the Farhud pogrom in Iraq in Baghdad in ‘41 and this family of generations of fleeing persecution, trying to find a safe place. And how, in that matter, Oct. 7 is not just about our immediate pain and grief. It’s about the shattering of a dream of generations of Israel as a place of safety. And I think that was something that I discovered in so many stories, and a question that is still open now, when we see so many young people now leaving Israel, using the passports of their grandparents to go back to other countries, this feeling of if this place can fulfill its mission, its dream, what we were promised Zionism will be.

JI: I know you split your time between Israel and the U.S. Were you in Israel on Oct. 7?

LY: The day it happened I was doing a fellowship in Columbia University. So it started far from me. But my family lives in Ofakim. It’s one of these border towns. So from the first moments, we understood that there were 20 terrorists near their home shooting and 49 of their friends and neighbors were murdered in Ofakim. My family was luckily saved because they stayed home. It’s so important for me to share the story of Ofakim, because I feel like people outside of Israel do not always understand who were the communities that were harmed by [Oct. 7], and it’s many times very poor communities. In Ofakim, they’ve been suffering from rockets from Gaza for more than 20 years now, since 2001, and people just don’t have shelters in their homes because they can’t afford it. We in Tel Aviv, most of us have [bomb shelters] in our building, at least, but they’re so close, and so many people don’t have it. So when the sirens start [in Ofakim], people are usually running to the street and go to the public shelter for safety. And that morning, of course, they didn’t know terrorists were there, but it just made them easy targets. 

JI: You mentioned you were at Columbia University. A lot has been said about the rise in antisemitism since Oct. 7 and the war in Gaza. Has that impacted you as an Israeli reporter and in your capacity there as a fellow?

LY: I think, like a lot of people on the Israeli left, I was feeling betrayed by the global left movement. … [I was] the first climate correspondent for Haaretz. I was fighting for climate justice for years, for LGBTQ rights, Black Lives Matter. I was revealing so much policies of discrimination against asylum seekers. Everything I believed was aligned with the goals of the global left. … On Oct. 7, I discovered that our lives as Jews and as Israelis are not as worthy to this movement as I thought, and as a woman as well. I understand these people wish for justice for Palestinians, and I share this will that we’ll find a way to live here altogether. But I feel like so many people are looking now for this perfect justice and wishing to change the past. And as a person who lived all my life and grew up in Israel, for me, intifada is [one of] my first memories, it’s not a chant for me, and I know that justice will always be a compromise. No one is going anywhere. Palestinians are not going anywhere. The Jews are not going anywhere. There are 2 million Palestinian Israelis that show us that we can do it and can live together. And I really, I wish this energy that we see in the campuses would go to fight together, people with people against these governments that are, I think we’re all victims, you know, of these governments that don’t care about any of us, Israelis and Palestinians, and to really seek together for a two-state solution, to demand our leaders to work for it. And, you know, so many of the victims of Oct. 7 were part of this peace community, or the people that did more than anyone for a two-state solution, donating money to families in Gaza, driving sick Palestinian kids to hospitals. 

JI: What do you think Oct. 7 has done to the peace community? How do you think it looks today?

LY: I’m speaking with so many families from this community and so many of them say they feel like not only they lost their loved ones, but everything they believed in was destroyed because they chose to live near the Gaza border, because they believed in peace, and they feel foolish, many of them. We see it in the numbers. I mean, a decade ago, 60% of Israelis believed in a two-state solution. A month before the attack, it was about 50% and when you see the numbers a few weeks ago, it’s about 25 to 35% of Israelis. So we look at it now when we’re still in the midst of war, when we’re still all waiting for the hostages and in grief, people lost their faith in peace, and we need to remember that for you know, [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s 17 years in power, he is trying to weaken the peace community, saying we can’t solve this conflict, we can only manage it. 

I come from the younger generation of Israelis that is 50% of the Israeli society, that we are 30 years old or younger, and that means that we were born with the murder of Yitzhak Rabin and the murder of the Oslo Accords. So we’ve never lived in a time of real hope for peace. It’s so important for people to understand that Israel is so young in that way, and of Palestine as well, more than half of the people are 18 years old in Gaza or younger. So we’re all people who were born to this violence. I hope that my generation will be the generation to end what the shot of [Rabin assassin] Yigal Amir finished when we were born. Rabin has his famous words in Oslo when he says, ‘I come to you as a soldier today, I came from war. I know the price of war. I come from the country where parents buried their children. And as a soldier, I say to you, enough. Enough with the tears, enough with the blood.’ Now it feels like the peace community in Israel is destroyed. It feels like Hamas helped to destroy what remained of the peace community. But as a young woman, as a person whose grandparents came to Israel after the Holocaust, after they were deported from so many places, and that’s my only home, I have to be optimistic, and I do believe that hope is action, and that my generation has the responsibility to act, especially after going through this.

JI: You picked 100 stories for your book. How did you choose them?

I had these three principles that I followed. One was to represent the diversity in Israeli society. The book is following 12 chapters of very different communities. There’s a chapter about the refugees from Ukraine, an overlooked community of people who fled the rockets of Putin on Feb. 22 only to flee, again, Hamas rockets and stories in this community; stories of the Bedouin community, part of the Arab Israeli community that’s 22% of the Israeli society. A Holocaust survivor, the kibbutzim, the poor cities on the border — very diverse because the victims were as diverse as Israeli society. 

The second principle was to represent the underprivileged, or people that we didn’t hear their stories a lot, like the story of Sujud, this young woman whose baby was the youngest victim of the attack — a 10-hour-old baby girl, a Bedouin Muslim baby girl that was shot in her mother’s womb [and died 10 hours after she was born]. It’s like this unbelievable, painful story that wasn’t really told. Or the story of the bus of the elderly immigrants from the former Soviet Union, people that we don’t see every day in the news. They come from very mostly from very weak or families that are struggling to make a living. Same thing about the Ukrainians. So I tried to go deep and give respect to people we didn’t hear about. 

And the third and maybe most important one was that I understood that I don’t want to tell individual stories, but to tell stories that are connected to one another. So I chose in the beginning, when I started a few stories in each community that seemed interesting to me, and I started reaching out to the families. I had very little time to write the book. … So I had a few amazing research assistants that helped me to reach the families and ask them if they want to be interviewed, to take the basic information from them for the first interviews. And then we started to, you know, some families didn’t want to speak. It was too painful for them. And the families I could go deep into interviews with were the ones that felt like that was what they could do for their children or for their family members, to at least remember them and to be the ones telling their stories. So after I had a few families in each community, I always asked them about the relationships their loved ones had with other victims or survivors. And then this way one story led me to another. And this web of connections is really the backbone of the book. I built a book around these relationships, and I think it’s important, because I feel like it represents Israel better, because we’re such a small country, these communities were very close-knit communities. And it’s not the tragedy of individuals, of a family mourning one person, it’s communities that are mourning their family, their friends, their neighbors, losing their homes. Kibbutz Beeri lost 10% of the population that was murdered or taken hostage. 

JI: Your book is in some way an answer to the denialism and fake news out there surrounding Oct. 7. How did you go about verifying accounts?

LY: I spoke on every story with multiple people that were connected to one another, with governmental and the IDF and the police and getting the information they had, speaking with families and friends and going to archives, pictures, messages, so I always made sure I had enough sources to verify every piece of information. 

And I think a lot of the beauty… I tried to write a book that is not only about death, but it’s about life, and it’s about really seeing these people not merely as victims but also as the people they were. So some chapters started in the ‘50s, in the ‘40s, and just you know this, getting to know their families and what they’ve been through from these family archives with, I always try to go deep on the personal story and then also research the bigger political and historical picture. And these two lines are woven together because I wanted the book to be a way to understand, not just to get to know the victims, but understand Israel and the history of the conflict better. 

So, for example, there’s this story of Chaim Ben Ariyeh and a chapter about victims of grief. It’s a story that is also mostly overlooked in the international media, of people who just couldn’t bear the grief and ended their lives. There are so many cases like this in Israel today that is hard to speak about because the authorities don’t want to encourage more people to do so, and they feel like when you publish this data, it’s encouraging more people, but it’s true that so many people chose to end their lives, and one of the stories is the story of Chaim Ben Ariyeh, a man who was a settler in the Gaza Jewish settlements and was evacuated with the rest of these 21 settlements and the thousands of people who live there in 2005 in the engagement plan. And it’s a good example … the way that we get to know Chaim and the way he met his wife. You read that they are from the right wing so they’re meeting in a protest against the Oslo peace process with a bus that is taking them to their home in Gush Katif. And then we see their struggle to fight this decision in a year that looks a lot like 2023 what happened in Israel before the war, we had 39 weeks of Israelis protesting against Netanyahu, against the judicial overhaul, was very, very similar from the other side of the map, and then understanding that Chaim was post-traumatic from recognizing the bodies of his neighbors in one of the most horrible terror attacks that happened, and the Kissufim road in Gush Katif. And then we follow one of his last rides, when on Oct. 7, he is sent to save the kids of Beeri, the ones who survived and taken to the hotels in Yam Hamelach (the Dead Sea). And he is just so traumatized by the fact of what he saw and the fact that he couldn’t help them, that after two weeks, he committed suicide. So this is a story, for example, that is a lot about speaking with with his family, but also just going to the archives and finding the articles from 2004, 2005, where he’s giving interviews about how he felt after he found the Hatuel family, or going deep into the these years of the disengagement. And I’m writing in the book about people from the left wing, from the right wing, settlers, people who didn’t care about politics at all, all the Israeli spectrum. It was important for me to represent also these people and to show what the disengagement was for them, as such a critical moment to understand the present.

JI: Was your perspective at all impacted through the conversations you’ve had with the wide range of people that you interviewed?

LY: I tried to leave my perspective, out of the book as much as possible, and to. I felt like my mission was to tell the stories of the victims of this war from their perspectives … in the introductions that are a bit more political and historical where I give a bit more of how I see things.

For me personally this war and writing this book made my commitment to peace and to a two-state solution stronger. I lost a very dear friend of mine, Gal Eisenkot, who was the son of Gadi Eisenkot, who was the chief of the IDF and a minister. And the book is dedicated to Gal. His death was extremely painful, still is. We were good friends since childhood, he was a good friend of mine and my whole family. And he died on Dec. 7, two months after, exactly two months after it started. And I got the call in the middle of an interview with a mother who lost her son and daughter-in-law, and just this feeling of anger, of losing him and feeling that, you know, he died in a mission to save hostages. He was a student. He was a reserve soldier. He didn’t choose a military way like his father. He wanted to be a doctor. He treated Syrian refugees. He wanted to save people and he had so many dreams and hopes, and he was so talented and so kind. And I feel like, when you experience it personally, I feel like, you know, every family in Israel has their own Gal. We’re all and this endless shiva, one-year shiva, still mourning. And just losing him, I feel like you know nothing, nothing is worth it. I mean, of course, Israel needed to respond, of course, what happened to us was horrible, but I would do anything to bring Gal back. We lost so many young lives, and I believe that, we always say in Israel that we need to be worthy. I think being worthy is really working for the next generations not needing to experience what we’ve experienced.

JI: Is there anything else you want to mention that we haven’t discussed?
LY:  I am really upset about the fact that people are ignoring the gender aspect of this war, the fact that women were the first and almost only ones to warn us that that was coming. The tatzpitaniyot [observers] sitting there on the border, reporting to their commanders that they’re seeing a suspected activity and being ignored and dismissed. And then thinking about the peace community that was led by Vivian Silver that just won, that her movement, Women Wage Peace just won this award this week. They led a huge peace march on Oct. 4, with their sister Palestinian movement, Women of the Sun, 2000 women, Israel and Palestinian marching together, speaking about their Mother’s Call. It’s a file they signed together about having more that unites us as mothers than separates us, and their call for their leadership of both sides to go back to the negotiation table. Then three days later, Vivian was murdered with three other members of Women Wage Peace and just thinking that it’s so crucial that we’ll speak about the gender aspect of this war, and that whatever leadership comes next in Israel and in Gaza, we have to have women’s voices in the decision-making process. We need to speak about it — that it’s only men making the decisions of the war and the hostages.