Substacks
THE MYSTERIES OF OCTOBER 7 Seymour Hersh
A decade ago, while on a trip to the Middle East, my wife and I were sharing a pizza dinner in a Jerusalem hotel with an American journalist and a photographer who had just returned from a reporting visit to Gaza City. An anchorman for one of America’s television networks and his wife joined us. The journalist and photographer chatted at some point in Arabic with our waiter and that chatter prompted a middle-aged gentleman in a suit and tie who was dining alone to approach our table and ask if he could join. He explained that he was a US Army intelligence officer, a colonel, assigned to the American consulate in Jerusalem and his mission was to report on Gaza. The only problem, he said, was that he was not allowed to actually travel to Gaza and so when he overheard the journalists talking about their visit there, he wanted to know more.
We invited him to join, and the colonel got what was in effect a briefing on the deprivation and despair that the reporters had found.
Gaza and Hamas—the Islamist group that has led the territory since 2007—remain murky, confounding subjects today. Why did Hamas stage an early morning raid on October 7 in what turned out to be a series of unguarded kibbutzim in Israel south? Why were only a few Israelis Israeli soldiers on duty that morning?
In 2019 a curator from the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., and an elderly scholar from Jerusalem were at work on an odd manuscript: a pocket-sized Hebrew book of uncertain age and origin.
Over the years, the manuscript had been variously identified as a fragment of the Talmud, a seventeenth-century book of Psalms, a relic from Babylon, a ninth-century prayer book, and a remnant of a famous medieval repository of texts from a synagogue in Cairo. It was rare enough to draw the attention of scholars, if not the public. Some of the pages contained a previously unknown poem for the Jewish festival of Sukkot. On one page, an untrained scribe, perhaps a child practicing lessons, wrote out the Hebrew alphabet. Other pages had a version of the Haggadah, the text read by Jewish families at the festive Passover meal.
The Jerusalem scholar, Malachi Beit-Arié, had a hunch that the book’s story was other, and older, than it seemed.
Beit-Arié, 82 at the time, was one of the world’s preeminent authorities on Hebrew manuscripts, and his hunches were taken seriously. (He died four years later, in 2023.) The research team sent four parchment fragments for carbon dating, then waited for several months in suspense.
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