JTA — “To be a liberal Zionist, it’s quite a lonely place,” said Amir Tibon, the Israeli journalist whose book “The Gates of Gaza” is one of the defining memoirs about the October 7, 2023, Hamas invasion of Israel.

“Lonely” is relative, of course. Tibon’s story of how he, his wife Miri and their young daughters hunkered in a safe room as Hamas gunmen overran their kibbutz in southern Israel, and how his parents — Maj. Gen. (ret.) Noam Tibon and Dr. Gali Mir-Tibon — rushed into the war zone on a mission to save them, has made him one of the best-known survivors of the carnage.

In an interview, he described the outpouring of support his family received from fellow Israelis and American Jews, and the letters he gets weekly from people inspired by his book.

But Tibon, the opinion editor for the left-wing Israeli daily Haaretz, was speaking about a political reality. In the 33 months since October 7, Israeli society has moved to the right, while the global left has turned Israel, its government, its people and its supporters into pariahs. That makes Tibon an inconvenient figure in both camps: too left for the Zionists, too Zionist for the left, and an eyewitness to events — acts of butchery on one side, security lapses on the other — that both would rather forget.

Meanwhile, even as he feels like a beleaguered minority, he remains committed to a vision of coexistence. “The one thing that is not changing: In this land, you have about 50% Palestinians or Arabs — some of them civilian citizens of Israel — and 50% Jews,” he said. “What do we do? How do we live together in this land? I think that question is not going anywhere.”

On July 28, at the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem, Tibon will receive the 2026 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature for his memoir, subtitled “A Story of Betrayal, Survival, and Hope in Israel’s Borderlands.” The $100,000 award, established 20 years ago by the family of the late American real estate developer, philanthropist and Holocaust survivor, is presented annually to an emerging author “who demonstrates the potential to make ongoing contributions to Jewish literature.”

In “The Gates of Gaza,” published in the fall of 2024, Tibon weaves his family’s rescue story with a wider history of Kibbutz Nahal Oz and the Gaza border communities and an account of the intelligence and policy failures that left them undefended. The book has also won the National Jewish Book Award, the Wingate Prize and the Bernstein Prize, and has been translated into Hebrew, German, French, Romanian, Italian and Hungarian, with a Spanish edition on the way.

The Rohr prize, Tibon said, arrives at a moment when he feels a duty to keep October 7 in view.

“It means that we are not forgetting October 7,” he said of the prize. “We are not allowing anyone to minimize, deny, justify or otherwise just ignore that day and its place in history. There are very powerful forces that are trying to shift the conversation away from that day for various reasons. And by choosing this book, I think the judging panel is doing the opposite: It’s once again putting a spotlight on that day, and on everything that has changed because of it.”

Since the attack, Tibon and his family have lived as evacuees in Kibbutz Mishmar HaEmek in northern Israel. In........

© The Times of Israel