As more details come out about the ordeal that the just-freed hostages had to endure, it’s hard at times to fathom how anyone survived. A few were held captive entirely by themselves the entire time, some in chains. The psychological terror we’re learning about is mind boggling. The starvation. The beatings.
And …. having no idea what was happening in the “real” world (though their world was all too real). A few had literally no exposure to news since they were kidnapped on October 7. And now, they’re home. Were they to sit with one of us and say, “Tell me what happened,” what would we say? We know where we’d start, but how much do we really remember?
That’s soon going to be more than a hypothetical issue, because contemporary men and women have short memories. In a few short years, our children or our grandchildren, too young to ask now, will ask us to tell them the story. How much of these agonizing 738 days are we really going to remember?
Professor Monty Penkower, a highly regarded historian of modern Jewish history, the Holocaust, Jew-hatred and Zionism, has prepared for this moment from the very beginning of the war, and in a series of volumes — which he can thankfully now end — has written a detailed account of the war we have just lived through.
With the Sukkot holiday behind us and the holiday season now completed, we resume our weekly Israel from the Inside podcast, with the full conversation as well as a transcript prepared for our paid subscribers. We renew our conversations today with Professor Penkower about the first volume of the history of this war.
Professor Monty Noam Penkower, is a professor emeritus of Jewish history at the Machon Lander Graduate School of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem, and was one of four recipients of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Asia (ASMEA) 2023 Bernard Lewis book prize for his book “After the Holocaust”.
He is the former Victor J. Selmanowitz Professor of Modern Jewish History at Touro University in New York, and was one of Touro’s earliest full-time faculty members, having taught at the school’s Manhattan and Brooklyn divisions for both men and women since 1974. Upon moving to Israel in July 2002, he taught modern Jewish history at Touro’s Graduate School of Jewish Studies’ Israel branch campus for five years before retiring from academic teaching.
Prof. Penkower has lectured widely on American history and on modern Jewish history, and his numerous publications include “The Jews Were Expendable: Free World Diplomacy and the Holocaust,” (1983), “The Jews Were Expendable” that earned Prof. Penkower the Samuel Belkin Memorial Literary Award from Yeshiva University, together with his 1986 work, “The Emergence of Zionist Thought.” Especially noteworthy is Prof. Penkower’s five-volume study, four of which were published by the Touro University Press, of the rise of the State of Israel in the years 1933-1948, and his 2024 book “The Holocaust and Israel Restored: From Rupture to Revival”.
His latest book, “Awakening to Radical Islamist Evil: The Hamas War against Israel and the Jews”, offers the first daily account of the war forced upon the State of Israel by Hamas’s brutal attack on its southern communities near the Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023. Focusing on the initial six months of that war, Professor Monty Penkower examines in detail its local, regional, and international significance.
The link at the top of this posting will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below you will find a transcript for those who prefer to read, prepared for our paid subscribers.
Given the fact that the war that Israel is currently mired in is not even over, there is an uncanny amount of material that has been written. There have been tens of thousands of articles. Someone told me more than a thousand books written in Israel about it. That struck me as a high number. But even if it’s too high, the number of books written in Hebrew about this war is huge. And we’re beginning to see books written about this war coming from all over the world, from all different kinds of angles, whether it’s about the wave of anti-Semitism that was unleashed or what we’ve learned about Hamas and radical Islam. They’ve been written in English, they’ve been written in Hebrew. They’ve been written in French, they’ve written all over the world. My guest today is someone whom I’ve known for very many years, someone from whom I have a tremendous amount of admiration and regard, Professor Monty Noam Penkower, who is Professor Emeritus of Jewish History at the Makhon Lander Graduate School of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem. Prior to that, he was the Victor Selmanowitz Professor of Modern Jewish History at Touro College in New York.
He also taught at Bard, Rutgers, Stern, and in the graduate history departments of NYU and Yeshiva University. He’s lectured in more places than one can take a stick at. And if you’re going to, I’m going to just read you for a second, a short, partial, very partial list of some of the works that Professor Penkower has written in the past to give you a sense of what a dramatic change a book about the current war is for his focus. And one of the things that we’re going to hear from him is why this focus. He’s at the top of his game in the field that has long been his. And this is a big change. It’s a hugely important contribution to our discourse. But we want to hear from Monty why he chose to do this. But just as a few examples, he wrote what came out in 1983, The Jews were Expendable, Free World Diplomacy and the Holocaust, The Emergence of Zionist Thought, which came out in 1986, The Holocaust and Israel Reborn, From Catastrophe to Sovereignty, which came out in 94, Decision on Palestine Deferred, America, Britain in War Time Diplomacy 1939 to 1945, which came out in 2002. Just a couple of other examples: 20th Century Jews, Forging Identity in the Land of Promise and in the Promise Land, it’s a great title, by the way, 2010. And The Swastika’s Darkening Shadow: Voices Before the Holocaust, 2013. And that hardly completes the list. Then we’ll have his full biography in the notes on today’s conversation. Monty, it’s great to see you. Thank you for coming by this morning to have this important conversation. So let’s just start with that list of books. In my mind, you have always been a scholar of matters related to the Holocaust and the emergence of early Zionism. Not everything that you’ve done has fallen into that barrel, but that is certainly where the weight of your life’s work has been. And you have just published, really, I think, a fascinating new book, which is entirely different from what you’ve done in the past. The name of the book, which is put out by Touro University Press and Academic Studies Press. The name of the book is Awakening to Radical Islamist Evil: The Hamas War Against Israel and the Jews. And as people will hear shortly, you pretty much take us in a very granular way through about the first six months of the war.
A couple of things. First of all, the Hamas war against Israel is a reminder to us that this is also a war that doesn’t have a name. We really don’t know what the history books 10 years from now we’re going to call this war. Haravot Barzel, Swords of Iron, I think is a long shot. The October 7th war is, I think, becoming less and less likely as it spreads over many October 7ths. Some people said the Simchat Tora War, just like there’s a Yom Kippur war. But Simchat Tora, the joy of Torah, and then the war, that doesn’t go. So I think you and I both know that we don’t know what this is going to be called down the road. So you called it the Hamas War Against Israel, but you didn’t call it just then. You called it the Hamas War Against Israel and the Jews. People might say, well, they the Gaza envelope. There were a lot of Jews there, but there were some not Jews there, and a lot of Jews in other places who they didn’t attack. How is this war against the Jews? We’re going to come back to all of that.
Let’s start out with the choice that you made at this stage of your life to write this book. It was a very different project. Why did you choose to do this now? And what were the unique challenges for a historian of the Holocaust and early Zionism to do a book like this at this point in history?
We are meeting today, July 20th, 2025, day 653 of this war. When I cast my eye back at the very beginning, and we all know where we were when this erupted in shock and so forth, I said to myself, in a few days, there’ll be another war to erupt, which I call the war for the narrative. Namely, Israel, initially, as I suspected, was portrayed as David attacked mercilessly in a genocidal jihadist war. I’ll explain about that in a moment. But In a few weeks at most, David became portrayed as Goliath. In almost no time. And I knew that immediately, opponents of Israel, from the right to the left and everybody else, would immediately accuse Israel of genocide, ethnic cleansing, the standard phrases that we have to unpack, which I tried to do. And so unlike everything that I’ve done over the last five decades, which include, which you didn’t put in, but I think that’s my master work, a five-volume study of the rise of Israel from 1933 to 1948, I had a real challenge here. Number one, and most important, no archives. The historian relies on historical fact as portrayed in primary source material. That was a real problem. And I knew those archives will be open maybe five decades hence, exactly as happened with the Yom Kippur War.
Which just opened the archives recently.
Exactly. And this happened 50 years and a day to that terrible tragedy.
And you’re thinking that you’re going to be too old in 50 years to write this book.
If I’m around, highly unlikely. Number one, no archives. Number two, as you begin studying this, you realize it’s a vast topic. It’s not limited as the Yom Kippur War was basically to the region and outside of Israel, basically. Here we’re speaking not only of the area and the region, we’re talking about the international world. And that requires a much broader, as you said, granular study across the board. So I felt compelled to do this, at least to get the record in a chronological sense on tape and then written down. It was extremely challenging for another reason. It’s draining. I’m at it morning, afternoon, evening. Every day. So what happened after six months? After six months, I said, This book is just too long. Like Topsey in gone with the wind, I just rowed. So I basically decide I got to stop. Obviously, the conclusion peppered with question marks. But the war continued. Another six months, volume two.
So it’s coming out.
It’s coming out in January of of 2026. But the war continued. Another six months of volume three that hopefully will eventually come out. It’s done. And the war still continues. Right now, July, I’m in volume four. That’s the greatest tragedy as far as I’m concerned. I wish I had stopped with volume one. Alas, the political and military echelon early on had the chutzpa, we’ll get back to that, hubris in the Greek word, to call for total victory.
Which is ludicrous from the beginning.
Absurd. And there’s another angle that one had to handle. Unlike the Yom Kippur war, I’m reminded of Clausewitz, a famous Prussian military strategist who said, War is an extension of politics. So one has to understand the political angles in operation administration in Israel, in America, the Biden administration then, now the Trump administration, and all other angles. And you’re dealing with not merely Hamas. You’re dealing with Iran’s proxies. You’re dealing with Iran itself. You’re dealing with Russia, China, the West, et cetera.
Turkey, a little bit.
A little bit, true, which leads me to my title. Why this title?
Just to remind everyone, Awakening to Radical Islamist Evil: The Hamas War Against Israel and the Jews.
I searched as an historian, not for the name of the war, but how would I characterize it. Everybody threw out the word pogrom. Wrong. As you know, I wrote about the Kishinev Pogrom, the classic illustration of pogrom, which is a sudden attack over within two days because the Tsar insisted that it be stopped, and less than few than 50 Jews were killed, many wounded, et cetera. It wasn’t a pogrom. This was a genocidal, I’ll get back to that, clear jihadist attack. True, there were non-Jews in the envelope. Many Thais were killed or brought in and others, et cetera.
Some Arabs as well.
Correct. But it was clearly directed against the Jews who lived there. As Hebron in 1929, these weren’t Zionists, but they were targeted because they were Jews. And we know this because you only have to look at the Declaration of Principles of Hamas and the Hezbollah. They call for the destruction of the Jews, period. They don’t want us here. And alas, when you start to study the period, you realize some warned of this early on. In an appendix, I added this, which I don’t have in my other books. Number one, Moshe Dayan. I just want to read a little piece.
Is this the eulogy for Ro’i Rothberg?
Correct. Who was killed, obviously, in Nahal Oz, came from Tel Aviv there, all of ‘21. And Dayan says the following. He was then Chief of Staff, went to a side tent. He wrote it, incredible. It’s poetic. We will make our reckoning with ourselves today. We are a generation that settles the land. And without the steel helmet and the cannon’s more, we will not be able to plant a tree and build a home, etc. He understood very early on.
That’s ‘56, by the way.
Now, the problem is, hence the title, Awakening, has a double meaning. Number one, Awakening at 6:29 in the morning, October 7th, to this horror. Premeditated, of course. Number two, Awakening, which was not present in the minds of many in the military and political echelons. We now know, and this was not really fully understood before, that there was a sense for the military, we mowed the lawn, we go in occasionally when there’s trouble, we mowed the lawn, we exit. That was not a strategy. For the long term because it kept continuing.
Oh, it also did nothing about the infrastructures, the tunnels, and all that.
Exactly. We had no clue, because we didn’t follow this, that more than $100 million meant for hospitals, schools, et cetera. We used, as you said, to build this labyrinth of tunnels that the only longer system is in North Korea. It’s bigger than the New York City system in the subways. And secondly, there is certainly in both echelons, especially the political, which begins with Bibi Netanyahu, of course, for years, we can placate Hamas. If we give more jobs to the Palestinians coming in. And besides this, we play against the PA because we don’t want to have a two-state solution. This is the thinking that emerges. Now, the irony is that Nine years before, I have this on tape, Bibi was in a TV station, and the interviewer said to him, So how are you different? He says, I’m Mr. Security. This will never It happened on my watch. Guess what? It did. The regrettable thing, just to finish on that point, is to this day, the Prime Minister has not taken any responsibility for what happened blaming it totally on the military echelon. And I’m convinced that the vast majority of Israelis, even those who want a hostage deal, et cetera, and those who say, no, we’ve got to go until the victory, they need a new leadership. They demand a new leadership. And that’s a remarkable change in my mind.
There’s a lot to say about all of this. Obviously, every sentence you just said could be unpacked for hours. And unfortunately, you will have to do that for another time. But let’s talk a little bit about just the craft of writing a book like this. In other words, if you’re doing something on the emergence of Zionist thought from year X to year Y, so we all know where the obvious archives are. When you go to the library because many of those great books are on the shelves. Actually, the Ben Yehuda Project has put much of that online in here. The historian like you sits down on your touche and you start to read.
You don’t have it here.
What was the process of writing this book? What did you do? Did you go through all the issues of Haaretz and Times of Israel and Ma’ariv, and Yediot? What did you actually do?
That’s just a, as they say, just a piece of it. First of all, unlike the Yom Kippur War and other prior wars, there’s a wealth of material just on the Internet, number one. So you have Internet sources.
Just remember, by the way, the Yom Kippur War was 18 days, and you wrote about the first 171 days. Correct. So it’s almost It’s not 10 times as much.
Exactly. Number one, the Internet. Number two, books. Number three, articles, interviews, et cetera. There was no end to it. And the historian has to then choose what is, what is the crucial element as he or she sees it, and what is tafel, what is less so. And you need the historian’s antenna, developed over many decades, to say, I think this is crucial. But I wanted to do much more than that. In the course of it, I understood there are individual stories that have to be told, however briefly, because there are far better books just devoted to individual stories. But there is that famous song, Superheroes.
We’re a nation of Superheroes.
Exactly. Which focused on the soldiers. But I didn’t only focus on the soldiers. Matan Abergil, who threw his body on the grenade to save camarades, and died. Aner Shapiro, out of uniform to save people in a shelter near the Nova Festival. He threw out seven grenades. Hamas tossed in, the eighth killed him. And he’s saying to his people, Wait, Tzahal is coming. It took two days for That area to be somewhat engrossed because the military wasn’t ready.
You have, in addition to everything else, you have recordings of kids with their parents from that day. Those parents, by the way, tell them, Don’t worry, don’t panic. The army will be there in a second.
Now, what makes this unique, and hence the word genocidal, there’s a zeal to what’s going on. It’s recorded by camcorders by Hamas. They later denied it, but we had these recordings where a guy says, in one case, Daddy, Daddy, I just killed 10 Jews.
Yeah, he called his parents.
And the father says, “Allahu Akbar!”.
And he says, “Tell your mother also”.
Yeah, and she says, “Come home”. You know, that thing. There’s great denial. But what bothered me, and that’s unique, On the one hand, these tremendous heroes, Awad Darawshe, an Arab who stayed with his patience in the Nova Festival. Although speaking Arabic, they killed him. He could have escaped. And there were many such instances. I don’t want to forget the Tatspitaniyot, the surveillance young women. I heard this from a personal account of a woman who survived as a Tatspitanit in another place. She records that in the major military base in the Gaza envelope, the women knew their end was near. They had no weaponry. None of the men around had guns. And they kept broadcasting till the very end. We now know, but hopefully a state commission that still is not in the works, we understand the politics behind it, it’s disgraceful, will indicate exactly what they passed on earlier on, and they were just, Oh, your job is just to record, et cetera. These are some heroes. At the same time, there are innocents on both sides. I wanted to be fair as an historian to have every actor and have his and her say, which indicates that it made it complex because I wanted to cover the Gaza story and account also for IDF errors, which is incredible to me. Here’s one story amongst many. I go on and on for hours. The mother of one of the three Israelis who were killed by accident in Gaza wrote to that group, Don’t worry, I forgive you. You did what you had to do and just continue doing.
She spoke at a Shalem College graduation. We gave her an honorary degree. She’s an unbelievable human being.
Now, that was one thing I wanted to emphasize. What is also remarkable, which you didn’t have in the Yom Kippur War and other things, is world Jewry uniting is in an unbelievable way from all over the world sending materials, including war material, because the IDF wasn’t ready. And what about the 300,000 youngsters who did everything to get on planes to come back from treks into Israel?
Those are Israelis.
Young Israelis. And what about even today? I, like thousands, were stranded because of the war recently, and people just clamoring to get home. Can you imagine a war is on, your life is at stake, and you say, I’ve got to get home, because this is, as we say in the prayer, this is our life. This is the Jewish future. And one has to remember, I quote rabbi Sacks in this regard, A Holy War never saved a soul. For them, it’s a Holy War, and that’s the second thing of awakening. They have to understand. Bernard Louis was the first of many to alert us to this years the great Princeton scholar. In radical Islamist thought, the world is divided into Islam and the infidels, and it’s a war to the end.
By the way, so America is in the same boat that we’re in, as is Western Europe.
Correct. Look at 9/11, Al Qaeda, et cetera. And we had far worse 9/11s on that day. Just 1,200 people killed, estimated, and 350 hostages, which reminds me my last point on this. I said it couldn’t be the Holocaust because we have a sovereign army to protect us. By the way, it’s to the IDF I dedicate this book.
I saw that. It was very moving.
But my emphasis there was from the Pasuk, Peace, Shalom Al Israel. We want to just live here in peace. My first hero in the preface, Ofir Libstein, the head of the Gaza troop area, Southern region. And he’d made every effort for a few years to bring Palestinians in, both with an industrial park and to bring, as some others did, to hospitals in Israel. And he was the first casualty. His mother was killed. His nephew was killed throwing himself on his beloved so that she would survive. She did. He did not. And there are so many such cases. But I just wanted, I have to say this one thing I could go on and on in the appendix, of all, I included letters from home to home from soldiers who died.
There’s a whole book of those. If you’re reading this.
It’s correct. I just thought this was absolutely incredible. A poem, okay, by Racheli Moskowitz, to indicate the unity of the Jewish people. I won’t read the poem. It’s too long. But the idea is, and I contacted her, How did you come to write this poem? A coat of many colors recalls Yosef. What’s the story? She was talking to her five-year-old son. It was the parashah where Yosef is sold by his brothers. And the son says, How could brothers do this? And she didn’t tell him. They thought initially to kill him. And then she said, How can I respond? And then she unpacked the oldest son’s bag, heavy knapsack, and says, Oh, look at this. A ceramic vest from Argentina, boots from Poland, et cetera. And she realized maybe this is a Tikun, a repair for what the Joseph brothers did. And that she told her her son. And that unity, of course, one could be a cynic or a realist, and say, Yeah, when the war’s over, we’re going back to the fractious atmosphere of judicial review for the months until the war. I don’t know. I have hope. Why do I have hope? Not only because our anthem is Hatikvah, the hope, but you consider the reservists who came back, the people who were out and came back. Of course, we have a great price to pay. I’m not talking about politically. The widows, the orphans, the traumas.
20,000 people diagnosed with PTSD.
Now, that’s just Israeli side. Gaza, it’s a moonscape. It’s rubble. It’s nothing. And alas, now, and that’s what the book is also trying to do, to be fair, to indicate the Biden administration’s positions, Qatar, on the one hand, playing firemen, helping negotiations, on the other hand, arsonist. They’re the ones who gave the money to Hamas and the Houthis and the Hezbollah, et cetera. Iran makes no secret of its desire to destroy the Jewish state. Notice I say Jewish state. For them, again, back to Louis, that’s why the subtitle is, and the Jews. They simply do not want us here. This is Holy Land.
That’s their view. Now, obviously, we want people to read the book because it’s beautifully written and it’s unbelievably detailed. I think, by the way, it made me think of a very, very different book. It has nothing to do with your book at all. But it made me, when I read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs a number of years ago, Steve Jobs’s life was basically the history of the computer, right? And so even though I read by the time he died, and then the book came out, but I’d forgotten about the very first Mac in the very first, and it was a it brought it back. And I think in a very strange, but much sadder way here, people who take a look at the book because we’ve now forgotten. We’ve forgotten a lot of things that we once knew, and we certainly didn’t know all the granular detail that you go into. I think that people go through this. It’s not an easy read. It’s not a fun read, but it’s a very accessible read. And people can really get a sense of really how this war unfolded. And we’re going to let the book do that.
I want to ask you a couple of 30,000 foot questions. And you obviously have spoken all over the United States and more hundreds of times than you can begin to imagine. And you mentioned before you were very fair and you’re very, and I know you, so you’re a decent, deeply caring human being. And you acknowledge that Gaza is a moonscape, and there have been plenty of innocent people on the Gaza side killed, too. And we’re now almost two years into this pursuing some, absolute victory, which is absurd, in my view. If you were on a campus, you went to CUNY now, or you went to, I don’t know, City College, whatever, or you went to NYU or whatever, and you gave a talk about your book, the standard book tour that every author does. And a student got up to you and said, You know, but here’s what you’re not exactly saying, but you even admitted in your book. There has been genocide on both sides. You say the Hamas people, that was a genocidal attack. But also there’s been tens and tens of thousands of Gazans, of whom clearly many are innocent. Many were not, but many were innocent. And they might say to you, So why don’t you just come out and say what you know to be true? This was genocide on both sides. What does Monty Noam Penkower say in response to that question?
It’s a false assertion because, and here I quote, Non-Jews. A fellow who runs the War Studies Department at West Point, pointed out directly that Israel has done more than any other army to try and avoid deaths of innocence. Alas, it’s happened a lot because Hamas often uses them as human shields. We have this proof over and over, and this is a charge by a non-Jew against this charge. Secondly, the British colonel who led the British forces in Afghanistan, Kemp, points out, Richard Kemp. According to the UN, a standard war has a ratio of civilians to military people killed nine to one. In this war, he estimates it’s 1. 5 to one. We have to understand that Israel, even warns people, get out of these buildings. We’re setting up humanitarian corridors because we’re in, no other army does that. I’m not denying that war is horrible. Victims on both sides but let’s not call it genocide. Let’s be honest and admit, and the IDF has admitted, when mistakes were taken and what has to be done, there are people who were brought into jail, IDF soldiers who committed mistakes. They tell them, don’t steal anything. Leave the houses the way you are. I’m not denying, as I said, it was Sherman, Civil War, war as hell. But nevertheless, don’t say genocide. What is genocide? Genocide is, as I said, the Hamas and Hezbollah declarations. But for campuses to have students totally ignorant to say something like, from the river to the sea, they can’t say which river or which sea. But we do know that in effect, to globalize the intifada means it’s going to be worldwide in Sydney. When the Opera House had an Israeli flag put up, Demonstrators came out and say, Gas the Jews. We’re going back to that reality.
That’s what’s happening in Melbourne, and that’s what’s happening in Toronto, and New York is about to elect a Mayor.
That’s why, exactly. And that’s why When I look at the campuses, it’s not the Columbia, of which I was proud to receive a degree, the PhD in 1970. But the fact is, the ignorance has to be changed changed, hopefully by reading such a book, by seeing the zeal of people who want to murder Jews simply because it’s a jihadist war. And that would be my response to these campus people. Ethnic Cleansing. Since 1967, the number of Palestinians has grown from 1 million to 5 million under Israeli control. Oh, that’s genocide? Certainly not. We have to be as historians, as students of history, and just intelligent people, understand the facts. My late mentor at Columbia, William Lichtenberg, told me a long time ago, Don’t editorialize. Let the facts speak for themselves. I’m hoping that my book contributes to that serious conversation. Let’s get the facts down.
Okay. I actually hope that your book will do that as well. And the second volume and the third volume eventually will also become part of a really, I think, a critical account of what this word was all about, because there’s going to be a lot of noise. And so we need something that’s much more signal than noise. But let’s assume that you’re on this campus and you give that response to the student who asks you, well, isn’t there really genocide on both sides? And this is the very rare American student who has actually opened up a newspaper in the last five years. And the student says, yeah, well, okay, I hear you. But you know, there’s an Israeli guy who used to work for the army itself named Omar Bartow, who just wrote a piece in the New York Times that was called, I know genocide when I see it. I’m a student of genocide, and I know it when I see it, or something along those lines. And he says, he says the student, that this is very likely genocide. And this is an Israeli, an Israeli used work for the IDF. What’s your response to that, student?
My response is, I don’t think it’s based on fact. I think that I and many other historians and non-Jews who are specialists in war, as I said, know genocide when they see it. And there were Arab born surgeons who came from England to help out the Zaka volunteers who did this incredible, incredible Chesed good deeds of trying to identify remains of bodies and so forth. And she said, looking at this, this is genocide. One didn’t simply kill, one beheaded, one slaughtered, raped, bounded children to parents. Israel never did anything like that in Gaza. Many are killed. I’m not denying it, but that’s not genocide. We have to understand. Genocide is Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish refugee who made it to the US and coined the term in a book in 1944, said straight away, genocide is a targeted effort to wipe out whole elements. Israel isn’t doing that.
That’s obvious that it’s not doing that. That’s a different story. I want to ask you something else that you said before, because again, the day to day, what happened in October, November, December, January, that’s what this book is. And we want people to go get the book and read it. You said at the beginning, though, that at the beginning of this war, there were two things that you knew. One was that within days or weeks, David was going to turn from David to Goliath, which, of course, is exactly what happened, maybe even more quickly than you imagined it would because it was pretty much on a dime. Within a week or 10 days after the war started, we were already being accused of all kinds of things. And of course, women who claimed to have been raped were not believed, and that was unlike it would be with any other population. You also said something, though, about how this was really an extraordinary coming together of diaspora Jews and Israelis. And I remember the number of times that I went down there to the south to pick avocados or God only knows what, to lay pipes once, my wife and I did.
There were all these people who are not Israeli, who there, and it really did seem like we would enter a new period of diaspora Israeli cooperation. Is your sense that that sense of partnership has survived the almost two years of war, or have we backslid on that? And is this relationship much more fraught than people like you and me might have hoped it was becoming in, let’s say, November, December, January, ‘23, ‘24?
I’m reminded of a book by none other than Daniel Gordis, who studied the differences emerging between American Jewry and Israelis. I think it brought us together. We’re historians, my circle. We’re not social scientists looking ahead. We’re not sociologists. We cannot predict the future.
Yeah, but you’re seeing in terms of what has happened already.
Right. What has happened already, I see in young people a slide back somewhat. Obviously, there’s a difference between those of the ‘48, ‘67, even ‘73 time, and those of the intifadas. It’s a different attitude. But what is remarkable is that so far, I still see a unity. I’m more concerned about the youth in the future. When the war is over, we need to do much more in terms of education, not only here, to bring the center. After World War I, it was Yates, the center cannot hold. I sure hope it can, because it was, as we learned, if I may just go segue to the last biblical parashah, Pinchas. Zealotry is not the Jewish norm. The Jewish norm is neither to the right nor to the left. It’s hopefully to the center. I’m hoping that in intelligent young people from Israel and young people from America can somehow come together in some forum, forums, plural. And you and your circle can do a great deal in bringing this together to achieve some an intellectual dialog that is honest and fair.
People who read your book are going to learn a tremendous amount of fact day by day, week by week, month by month. There’ll be some things that they’ve already heard, and they’ll see it from a slightly different view. And there’ll be things that they read that they had no idea happened because there’s individual stories and individual battles and whatever. But if they zoom up to 20,000 or 30,000 feet and they close the book at the end with the Moshe Dayan eulogy for Ro’i Rothberg and other things, when they step back from the book, what do you think their understanding about what we’re going through is going to be, how is it going to be different from how it was before they began the first pages of the book? What’s the larger change in picture that it’s going to leave them with?
I purposely ended, as I told you, the conclusion with no definitive conclusions.
Well, it’s also leading up to volume two and three of your own.
Not only that, even without looking that far ahead. I raised all sorts of questions. And to be honest, I indicated, which impressed me, and I didn’t see it in previous wars, people who knew no one, lone soldiers or people from place X, and they’re going to their final resting place on Har Hertzl or elsewhere. And Israelis come out who don’t know them at all and raise flags out of respect. It’s unbelievably moving. Or people coming out of hospitals without legs their arms and everything, and they’re being cheered. It brings tears to one’s eyes. So what I end up, and I think every reader has to end up, I put it in bold face even. Go ahead, read. The final narrative has yet to be told. I don’t know how this is going to end or when, but I felt at least 50 years down the road, when, as I said, the archives finally do open, people can go back, at least to get the chronological record of who said what and when and what happened, et cetera. And the archive should flush out the story. But the final narrative, we have to wait.
Monty, when did you make Aliyah? What year?
It was July 1, 2002.
2002. So you have been here for 23 years. Three years, right. Obviously, a student of Israel and Zionism for decades before that. Goes without saying. But you’ve lived in the thick of it in this neighborhood that we call Baca for almost a quarter of a century. I want to ask you a non-historian question by way of wrapping up, just a Jewish Israeli question. There’s been a terrible three years for Israel. We had a judicial reform issue, which regardless of where one stood on the issue, and there was legitimacy, I think, on many different sides, to watch the country get ready to rip itself to shreds and to vote, by the way, on the first plank that did pass just a couple of days before Tisha Be’Av. It was on Shisha Be’Av, I still remember, because that was the shirts that all came out. The sixth of Av, three days before the ninth of Av. I mean, it was just heartbreaking. And then before that, actually, of course, had Corona, which was its own social tragedy. And then we go from the judicial stuff right into October 7th. We’ve now been at war for almost two years.
It’s not been pretty, as you pointed out. The government has yet to take any responsibility. We’ve not had the National Commission of Inquiry. We’re pursuing an absolute victory, which I think both of us agree is not attainable in the way that the government’s describing it, whatever. At the same time, you say there’s been unbelievable demonstrations of loyalty, of togetherness, of mutual support, relative to October 6th, 2023, or when you got here, 2002 to now, are you more bullish or less bullish on the Israel that will be here for your grandchildren? Are you more confident that this country is heading towards a place of security, confidence, stability, or are you more worried?
Let me go back to 1955. This is the personal history. I was the first American to celebrate celebrate his bar mitzvah in the State of Israel. I met the President, Ben Zvi. I met the two chief rabbis. I got a special brachah from Rabbi Herzog Zatzal, in Yeshurun.
The grandfather of the current President.
Exactly. So my ties were very close. Many years in Masad, the Hebrew-speaking camp, a vatik Masad, all that. It was just a question of when and where. When I came with my late beloved wife, Yael, on January 2th. And she, a seventh-generation saber, she’s coming home. And I said to her straight away: we’ve come home. That’s it. I’ve never regretted, whenever I’m abroad, even before the war. And it’s certainly during the war, when I was stuck abroad, I say, I’m coming home. I don’t want to be there. This is the Jewish future. So I don’t know about bullish or not, but we’re a people of hope. I think that Israel, like the Jewish people over millennia, what are we doing here, after all, despite all these wars, from the beginning of our Balfour Declaration and on and on, facing enemies that are not ready to compromise. There are hopes. Abraham Accords, maybe who knows what. I’m not counting on that too much. The bottom line is, as they said in the American Revolution, Keep your powder dry. We have to be ready for any possibility. But I look at this young generation, dismissed earlier as TikTok generation. Is the phrase, They’re at least as strong and committed to this country in unbelievable ways. The great Murray, the British columnist who says, I look at this generation as opposed to the West. It’s an astonishing generation.
It’s our equivalent of the greatest generation, what Americans talk about.
Exactly right, of World War II. And as a student of World War II, I make the comparisons. So I’m hopeful. You mentioned grandchildren. I have now great grandchildren in Israel. More on the way. And bezrat Hashem, I hope it’s not only Hashem. It’s obviously in some, we have to rely on the army as well. And thank God, they’ve come through. Young people, you go to and you see these terrible young men and women lying there at the last, and they gave everything for this country. We should hope that their lives were not given in vain.
Their lives were not given in vain. And in order to honor their lives and their memories, we need to know the story of which they were apart. And we need to really understand in a serious, thoughtful, factual, chronological, very, very substantive way, what the story of this terrible war has been. And so Monty’s first volume is already out. It came out a few months, I think in February or something like that. Awaken to Radical Islamist evil, the Hamas war against the Israel and the Jews. The next volume will be out, you said in January. January, 2026. What’s the title of that one?
Same. Part two.
Part two, okay. And then there’s going to be down the road, a part three. And I hope you’re going to run out of parts. I hope so. Anyway, but Monty Noam Penkower, really, one of the world’s truly great historians of these last decades of Jewish history, has turned his pen and his eye to a very different side of the world from which he normally writes about. The book is out. We’re going to, of course, link to it in the notes for today, put out by Toura University Press and Academic Studies Press, Awakening to Radical Islamist Evil: The Hamas War Against Israel and the Jews. Anyone who wants now the, basically, the official official of history of this terrible, terrible war and wants to remember and learn in very significant chronological, well-researched fashion, what’s happened here and abroad. This is the book. This is the author. Monty, thank you very much for taking the time to have this conversation.
Thank you.
