I am not at all convinced that the war will end with an unequivocal victory for Israel, Czech TV Middle East correspondent David Borek says in an interview for Aktuálně.cz. He came to Prague for the launch of his new book Bloody Year 5784, in which he deals with the attack of the Hamas movement on Israel on October 7 last year and its consequences.
Your book begins curiously. You describe how you woke up on the morning of October 7 last year in Kyiv, where you were working on reports, and immediately began moving to Israel after learning what happened there. I’d say that’s one of the wildest moves in the history of journalism. You must have been experiencing a lot of tension in those days…
I had one advantage. All this time I realized that it was not my problem. I could also be on vacation. I would have problems with guilt. That something happened during my vacation, I missed it and it’s my fault. Fortunately, this was not the case, because I offered my colleagues at Czech Television that I would go to Ukraine as part of our reporter rotation system.
The move was wild. Of course, I subordinated everything to the goal of getting to Israel as soon as possible. When traveling from Kyiv to Prague by car, the biggest unknown is the inscrutable Ukrainian-Polish border. Once we were delayed there for about four hours, luckily this time it was faster.
And then finding a flight to Israel. Hundreds of Israelis, many of them of military age who knew they were going to the army, danced at the airport, and a few journalists, including us, joined in. But as I said, the biggest nightmare of foreign correspondents is that something happens when they are on vacation and somewhere in Mácháč. Fortunately, I was only on another work mission.
In the book, you focus on the story of your neighbor and her boyfriend, who lived next to you in Herzliya, Israel, and three months before the attack, they moved to live with their parents in a village near the Gaza Strip that was attacked by Hamas. The man lost ten family members in the attack. Some died, some are still imprisoned in Gaza. Are you in touch with him and how did he deal with what happened? Did they come back to live in your neighborhood?
Bloody Year 5784: 12 Months of War in Israel Book | Photo: Nakladatelství nastole
She lives elsewhere, with his sister. They found alternative accommodation. The village of Beeri, where they moved then, had about a thousand inhabitants at that time. I visited it three weeks ago and now about fifty people live there. Repaired houses appear here and there, although in some parts of Beeri the houses were not damaged and burned.
Of course, life there is complicated. You live next to unswept rubble and burnt houses.
Such a ghost town…
Yes, and a city that has something terrible behind it. In the Czech Republic, it is difficult to sell houses where a murder took place. When something like that happens there, the house is hard to sell on the real estate market. When a tenth of the population in the village died and others were kidnapped, it is difficult to return there.
I saw that acquaintance three weeks ago. He looks better than he did shortly after October 7th, but he still has four relatives in Gaza, unknown where. His father is dead, so are his uncle and aunt.
In the end, will the desire not to allow the success of Hamas prevail, and all those attacked villages will be repaired and people will come to live in them again?
There will certainly be an attempt and the state is certainly interested in it. The entire Israeli urbanism is based on the fact that Israelis must not be afraid to live near the border. If they were afraid, then it means defeat. That’s why villages were established near the borders since the 1950s, they were such forward patrols. In addition to the trauma, survivors have a problem with the feeling of a kind of incompleteness. Because if some people from these villages are still hostages in Gaza, their neighbors are reluctant to return to their original residence. They cannot pretend to live a normal life when their relatives and neighbors are underground in Gaza, beyond the fence they can see from their homes.
Can the war in Gaza end without the Israelis killing Hamas leader Yahya Sinvar, whom I identify as the mastermind of the October 7 attack?
I dare not say that. Sinvar is a symbol for Israelis and his death could unlock many things, but I cannot predict the fate of one person. I will quote the American left-wing journalist and longtime Middle East reporter Thomas Friedman. He said the Middle East was a region without right angles. Everything is rounded, somehow “noised”, out of focus. Whether it’s a language: Arabic is an ornamental language, people don’t say what they want outright. Whether it’s urbanism: Arab cities don’t have a rectangular checkerboard grid. Whether it’s politics: it’s hard to label someone as a clear friend or foe, often both at the same time. And this also applies to conflicts, they just aren’t square. According to Friedman, Israel was an exception, but in my opinion, it is gradually adjusting to the rhythm of the Middle East.
(On Thursday afternoon, October 17, after this interview was published, the Israeli military said in a statement that it very likely killed Sinvar on Thursday in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.)
I say this because what comes out of the current conflict can also be rounded. A war can end in a rounded, hard-to-define outcome. I don’t think at all that it has to end with a total victory for Israel. Most likely, there will be neither complete peace, nor will there be any long-term solution. Middle Eastern conflicts often end in a stalemate. It may end up with a bit of Israeli occupation of Gaza, a bit of Palestinian autonomy, a bit of international oversight. A little Hamas government, a little someone else’s government.
One of the chapters in your book is about how this could actually happen. How did Hamas manage to make such a breakthrough? Do you have an answer after more than a year?
It is a combination of snobbery, disregard and a defensive mentality that has permeated Israel in the last decade. The Iron Dome air defense system is a defensive technology. The wall on the border with Gaza is defensive technology. All this has led Israelis to feel that it is possible to live with Hamas as a neighbor because defensive technology will protect them.
Last year’s October 7 was a total failure of this concept. Hamas was aware that the Israelis were reluctant to enter Gaza. If he was sure that they wouldn’t break in, he had so-called peace of mind to work. He was building tunnels, an arsenal, and maybe for several years he was thinking about plans to invade Israel.
Even before the war, you restricted private travel to the West Bank. Has it become dangerous to drive there with an Israeli e-bike?
Half a million Israeli settlers live there, and they drive an Israeli express car. But I’ll put it this way. The decade since the second intifada ended in roughly 2005 has been quiet in the West Bank. Nothing much happened there, we went to national parks and wineries. I traveled there with my little son. I have Palestinian friends, I used to go there for dinners, often to one of the breweries. I traveled there even as a tourist, I did not wave the Israeli flag anywhere. I didn’t experience anything problematic there. But this calm disappeared. There is a minor civil war. Palestinian attacks on Jewish settlers, attacks by Jewish settlers on Palestinians.
You describe a funny story in the book. You were with a group of journalists in Jenin, West Bank, and the tour guide said that Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Martyrs’ Brigades had been informed of the group’s presence in the city by al-Aqsa, so you can work in peace. Was that some kind of security guarantee?
Yes. Jenin, in particular, is a highly paranoid city, as Israeli raids regularly occur there. Sometimes the Israelis sneak in there, like in some cheesy spy movie. In this paranoid environment, it’s a bit risky to drive an Israeli espezette. Although the way I see it is that if I were an Israeli agent, I would arrive in a Palestinian car and pretend to be Palestinian.
Until last October 7, it was safe and unproblematic to go to Ramallah, Bethlehem and Hebron, which, on the other hand, was hot in the 1990s. The biggest problems are now in Jenin and Nablus. We already dealt with it before October 7th by having a Palestinian fixer to show us around the city and contact the militant groups with the information that we were really just journalists.
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