At 6:20 a.m. on October 7, my Canaan dog Lucy began barking. I was sleeping over at my sister and brother-in-law’s for Simchat Torah on a kibbutz in southern Israel. In a few minutes, we were all awakened by a steady rocket barrage from Gaza and the sound of the Iron Dome near the kibbutz shooting down the rockets.

I tuned in to Kan News and heard a reporter trying his best to be calm, explaining that 50 years after the Yom Kippur War, Israel had again been the target of a multi-pronged surprise assault – this time, by the Iranian-backed Hamas terrorist group that has controlled the Gaza Strip since 2006, a year after Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the territory it had captured in the Six Day War.

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