Well, my aunt and uncle live in kibbutz Be'eri, which is one of the communities that was attacked and occupied by the Hamas terrorists.

My aunt and uncle, who are 100 years old and 90 years old, hid in their house as the terrorists went systematically from house to house in their kibbutz, torturing, executing, and murdering people—their neighbors and friends—in the most horrific ways.

They somehow survived, and they, along with tens of thousands of other Israelis from the border region, are now refugees inside Israel.

I think we should avoid thinking in terms of revenge.

As a historian, I know that the worst thing about history is that people try to correct the past. People try to save the past, and this is impossible.

You cannot go back to the past and save the people there or to prevent the past injuries.

We need to look to the future, and in the present circumstances, this means that on the one hand, Israel must defend its citizens and must disarm Hamas and end the Hamas control of the Gaza Strip, not just so that my family and tens of thousands of other Israelis could go back to living next to the Gaza Strip, but also because Hamas is intentionally destroying any chance for future peace.

You know, the reason this attack was launched now, the reason for the timing of the attack, was that Israel was very close to signing a historical peace treaty with Saudi Arabia, which was supposed not just to normalize relations between Israel and the Arab world but also to restart the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and to include concessions that will alleviate the suffering of millions of Palestinians in the occupied territories.

The aim of Hamas was to foil this peace treaty and to destroy any chance for peace in the future as well by committing horrible atrocities that will sow seeds of hatred in the minds of millions of people.

So, even those interested in peace must be in favor of disarming Hamas.

At the same time, Israel should remain committed to international law and to the future chances for peace.

There will not be a peace just by disarming Hamas; we also need to give a future to the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and in the West Bank so that they can live dignified lives in their homeland.

Absolutely, and this is why Israel should be very careful about the way it operates.

Israel is not a terrorist organization like Hamas. It is not aiming to kill as many civilians as possible.

It is very difficult, of course, to fight a terrorist organization which is hiding inside a civilian population.

Ideally, there should be a way for civilians to move out of the combat zones. Egypt, which shares a border with the Gaza Strip, should be willing to accept Palestinian civilians for the duration of the war in order to protect them.

I would say that even Israel should explore the possibility of receiving at least women and children from the Gaza Strip into Israeli territory.

You know, maybe allow the Red Cross or some other international organization to build temporary safe havens for Gazan civilians on Israeli soil for the duration of the conflict.

Again, I don't know if this is feasible. I don't know exactly.

This is not my expertise, but certainly, if Israel wins the war against Hamas without providing for an alternative future for the Palestinian civilian population, we will only get something even worse than Hamas a few years down the line.

Well, you know, it's very difficult in history to, there is always something that happened previously.

People think about history as a chain of events, but there is always a link before the first link.

Even more importantly, it's not a chain; it's a system of roots.

Every event in history usually has a lot of different contributing effects, and people, for instance, talk a lot these days, and for many years and for good reasons, about the suffering of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who lost their homes in 1948.

Few people know that as a result of the 1948 War, also hundreds of thousands of Jews lost their homes in retaliation for the war.

Jewish communities all over the Middle East in Arab countries in Egypt, in Iraq, in Yemen, in Syria, who lived there for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years and had nothing to do with the war, they were driven out.

Hundreds of thousands of Jews.

The largest group of people now living in Israel are Jews that were expelled as refugees as a result of the 1948 War.

Now, does this justify what happened to the Palestinians? No.

Does this justify the Israeli occupation and the mistreatment of Palestinians? Absolutely not.

Then we shouldn't use historical injuries to justify more injuries.

But the thing is that it's very difficult to understand the root causes of complex historical conflicts, and the key message should be: don't try to go back to the past and change it; this is impossible.

Focus on the future. Past injuries should be healed and not used as an excuse to inflict more injuries.

We've been trying this way of inflicting more and more injuries for generations.

We have to stop at a certain point, and again, the key idea is if you have to choose between justice and peace, choose peace.

Every peace treaty in the history of the world was based on compromise.

No, we need some level of justice, of course, but there is never a possibility of absolute justice.

If you pursue absolute justice, you will only perpetuate war indefinitely.

Absolutely.

I mean, Netanyahu has been ruling Israel for most of the last 14 years.

He has based his political career on dividing the nation against itself, on pointing a finger at particular sections of Israeli society and calling them traitors.

He has weakened any state institution, including the security forces, that might challenge or limit his authority, as he recently tried to do to the courts and especially to the Supreme Court. He attacked the serving elites of the country, again calling them deep state traitors and so forth. The people who were foremost in serving the country in the security forces, in the courts, elsewhere, were labeled as traitors.

The very word elite became a kind of curse word as if there is something wrong in wanting to be foremost in service to the state, and this is the deep cause of the dysfunction of many governmental systems, not only on the day of the attack but in ever since then.

Ideally, if Netanyahu really cared about the state of Israel, he should have just taken responsibility for the disaster and resigned and allowed the Israeli people to come together at this very difficult time.

Alternatively, if he thinks he's the only one that can manage this crisis, he should have said, 'Okay, I'm calling an election in six months. I'm not running myself in the elections so nobody can suspect that I'm managing this war in a particular way for my personal interest. I'm stepping down; I'm just staying until the election, and then I will resign and take responsibility for what has happened.'

He's not doing that.

Absolutely, his propaganda machine is constantly blaming everybody else, the security forces, the intelligence, the protest movement, everybody but himself.

He was perfectly okay for all these years.

I, at the present moment, Israel has so many problems ahead of us, but it would have made Israel's position much stronger if at the present moment, we had a different, more trustworthy, more responsible leadership.

Ideally, we should be able to disarm Hamas and go back to the Saudi deal, to restart the peace process from a better position, with different Israeli leadership, which appreciates the fact that giving the Palestinians hope for the future and enabling the Palestinians to live dignified lives and to have their own state in their homeland is in Israel's best interest.

It's not a concession we are making for others; this is something for our future as well.

Whether this is possible or not, I don't know, but what I do know from history is that at a terrible time like this, any thought of future peace and reconciliation seems utterly impossible.

But you know, many people are comparing the atrocities committed by Hamas to some of the atrocities in the Holocaust, and seven or eight decades after the Holocaust, now Jews and Germans are very good friends.

So, if this is possible, I think even Israelis and Palestinians can eventually reconcile and be friends.