Dr. Michael Krampner, a retired American trial lawyer, who also earned a Ph.D. In Jewish history, lives in Jerusalem where he is improving his Hebrew, learning traditional Jewish texts, reading widely on historical and political subjects and is engaged with family.
One of the dangers of writing a history of a very recent event, particularly a painful event, is that the event may be so close and the reader too emotionally involved to absorb what the author says. Writing such a history also risks focusing on politicians, leaders and speech-makers and casting blame for a catastrophe.
In The October 7 War: Israel’s Battle for Security in Gaza (Wicked Son Books, 2024), Israeli journalist Seth J. Frantzman avoids these traps by focusing on the processes that the rapists, kidnappers and murderers of Gaza/Hamas used to accomplish the October 7 massacre, the processes that Israel deployed to respond to the Gaza/Hamas massacre to achieve the "pacification" of the militarized mini-state of Gaza, and the resilience and heroism of the ordinary Israelis who still bear the burden of fighting for security on their southern (in addition to their northern and eastern) border.
The lead-up to October 7 is important for Frantzman in two ways. First, Gaza/Hamas, which has sworn to kill Jews wherever it finds them, had prepared carefully, planning almost every detail of the invasion, massacre and hostage-taking of that day. The preparation included not only years of tunnel building, arming and indoctrination of youth, but also obtaining detailed maps of the Israeli communities near the Gaza border, training for the invasion and scheduling the invasion on an important holiday that also fell on Shabbat.
Gaza/Hamas had lured Israel into believing that with enough bribes and payoffs from Qatar it would stay at home and leave Israel alone, at least for a while. Regarding preparation, it is also important that Israel was completely unprepared for this attack: that Israel put too much faith in the high-tech monitors and sensors used to monitor the border, mostly by unarmed female soldiers watching computer screens (to whose warnings its top brass did not listen anyway) and did not have many combat troops in the south. The Gaza/Hamas low-tech tactics overwhelmed the Israeli technologically intensive detection and prevention measures that day making clear that in some situations a fighting force on the ground is needed.
To Frantzman’s credit, he is interested in telling the reader what happened and why and not in blaming anyone for the immense failures of that day.
Without dwelling on the horrors and butchery of October 7, those are described. The description of that day and the following days is chaotic because the immediate Israeli response was chaotic. Caught completely unprepared, the soldiers in the south, including the mostly unarmed female soldiers, were hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned. Attack helicopters were stationed in the north, the few combat capable soldiers in the south were spread thin and outnumbered by the waves of terrorists. The local civilian security squads in the towns, moshavim and kibbutzim were mostly outgunned. outnumbered and unprepared, except in two instances in which the security squads did fight off Gaza/Hamas.
It was a terrible, bloody, painful mess. Many Israeli reservists and soldiers in other parts of the country, upon hearing what was happening, threw their weapons in their personal vehicles and headed south or reported to their units immediately. Gaza/Hamas celebrated their maiming, murder and kidnapping of civilians with jubilation, which they happily photographed, and vowed to do the same thing over and over again until Israel was destroyed and the Jews all murdered or driven out of the Middle East.
As the Gaza/Hamas leadership said this it still had approximately 10,000 rockets it could fire at Israel and approximately 30,000 operatives/terrorists/soldiers willing to fight against Israel.
Then began Israel’s existential war in Gaza. Over the almost 20 years that Hamas had been the government of Gaza Israel had striven for peace and had tried to ‘shrink the conflict’ or ‘manage the conflict’ and had tried to avoid ground invasion into Gaza, knowing that it would be costly to fight an urban war against a guerilla/terrorist army that hid among a supportive population.
Gaza/Hamas had the greatest home field advantage any army had ever had in history because of its underground warren of tunnels and the supportive population. Moreover, Israel knew that Gaza/Hamas routinely placed its military assets in, under or near schools, hospitals, mosques and UNRWA facilities because Hamas counted on Israel’s reluctance to hit those facilities and Gaza/Hamas and its allies could whine and feign victimhood when Israel did hit Hamas operatives in those facilities.
It was not as if Israel wanted to conquer or annex Gaza but only to recover the more than 250 hostages that the Arabs of Gaza/Hamas had taken and to prevent further Gaza/Hamas attacks on Israel by missiles and ground invasion.. Israel wanted security on its border with Gaza, something that it had not had since Hamas came to power there in 2006.
As Frantzman points out, all of Gaza was an armed camp:
“Many homes in Gaza had weapons stored in them. There were factories in Gaza for manufacturing new munitions and rockets. In addition Hamas could also exploit the presence of Gazan civilians to provide itself with human shields. In addition, Hamas could rely on international organizations to provide it with the usual cover. Hamas supporters worked for UNRWA and many NGO’s could be counted on to demand a ceasefire and portray Gaza’s suffering as requiring international intervention to stop an Israeli assault….
"Hamas had already brought hostages to Al-Shifa Hospital and Indonesian Hospital. Sensitive sites, such as hospitals and schools, were seen by Hamas as nodes of control of Gaza; burrow beneath them and near them and Israel would find it harder to uproot Hamas.”
In the past Israel’s wars with Hamas had been short and Israel had avoided ground incursion into Gaza as much as possible. This time Israel needed new tactics to reach the goal of uprooting Hamas in Gaza.
Even before Israel went into Gaza in late October, a massive, fake “cease-fire,” anti-Israel campaign began abroad. The pro-terrorist falsehood machine was completely revved up to support the rapists, kidnappers and murderers of Gaza/Hamas and to oppose the little Jewish state. But what the Gazan Arabs had done was so awful, so grotesque and so filthy, that nothing protesters could say anywhere else, and especially not in the Israel-hating U.N. could deter Israel from taking action.
Using new methods and new technologies including artificial intelligence for co-ordinating infantry, artillery, armor, drones the navy and the air force, the IDF advanced into Gaza. Frantzman spends an appropriate amount of time and detail on the methods and processes that Israel used to fight in Gaza up until June of 2024, telling the stories not only of the deployment of technological innovations but also of the soldiers and reservists who fought there.
The closing section of The October 7 War is Frantzman’s analysis of the military situation as of June, 2024 when he finished writing the book. Although the invasion of Lebanon, the pager explosions, Nasrallah's elimination and the rebels' takeover of Syria occurred after that date, his analysis remains totally relevant:
-He rightly thinks that Israel will need to re-examine its doctrine about managing or shrinking conflicts and should re-consider priorities to focus on Iran.
-He also is in favor of strengthening the border communities’ ability to defend themselves.
-He questions treating Qatar as an intermediary in hostage negotiations since Qatar is a Hamas sponsor and an enemy of Israel.
-He favors developing stronger internal defense manufacturing so that Israel is not subject to the political whims of other countries for armaments,
-He decries the entanglement of NGOs, the U.N. and Hamas, something that became even more painfully obvious as the war progressed.
Most of all, says Frantzman, “The War in Gaza revealed that too much reliance on precision weaponry and special forces, as well as the air force, has hampered Israel’s preparations for large conventional wars.” Frantzman clearly believes that both high-tech specialized weaponry and old-fashioned conventional forces, including infantry and artillery, are necessary to Israel’s defense. He also believes that the war was a significant setback for the Abraham Accords, although they held, and that many of the countries in the Middle East and North Africa are attracted to “a drive for a new world order by the enemies of the West. They want a multi-polar world and they were willing to exploit October 7 to achieve their goals.”
The October 7 War is certainly worth the reader’s time, especially for the reader who is interested in the processes of the war, the interplay of technology and tactics and the patriotic fighting spirit of the ordinary Israeli.