The Free Press

Few people outside of tech knew the name Jensen Huang as recently as Donald Trump’s first term. Today, he leads the only company more valuable than Apple; he’s the biggest celebrity in his native Taiwan; and at the White House gathering of the most prominent names in artificial intelligence last week, he was seated next to the president.

Huang, of course, is the CEO of Nvidia, and he is, without question, the most powerful person in AI—more even than Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, who lead OpenAI and Anthropic, respectively. The graphics processing chips Nvidia patiently pioneered in the 33 years since Huang co-founded it undergird the massive boom in data centers and AI. After Nvidia earned an astonishing $96 billion in revenue and $60 billion in profits during the most recent quarter, a Wall Street Journal reporter was moved to ask whether there would even be an AI revolution without Nvidia. Stephen Witt, Huang’s biographer, has called him “the emperor of AI.”

“Is it your quinceañera?” asked Saritha Komatireddy, the Republican candidate for New York attorney general, during a campaign stop at a pizzeria in the Bronx last week.

A Hispanic teenager wearing a sparkly headband and a floral dress stared back blankly. “Um, no,” the girl replied politely.

The encounter was Komatireddy in miniature: earnest, but slightly awkward—as though she were still getting the hang of the whole shaking-hands-and-kissing-babies part of campaigning. She had just introduced herself to the teenager’s parents, explained her plans to get repeat offenders off the street, hospitalize mentally ill homeless people, and prosecute government fraud.

A former federal prosecutor who brought successful cases against ISIS terrorists and Mexican drug cartels, Komatireddy, 42, is in an uphill battle to topple incumbent Letitia James, who Komatireddy accuses of “totally failing” to keep New Yorkers safe. If Komatireddy wins, it will be because she was able to weave together several threads—homelessness, subway violence, and locked-up store shelves among them—into a tapestry of urban dysfunction and persuade voters to blame them on James.

Earlier this morning, we brought you a collection of stories on the world October 7 made. You can find those stories here.

This afternoon, we’re bringing you something a little different: a window into the response to Hamas’s 2023 attack on Israel, from someone in the room where it happened. Brett McGurk served as National Security Council coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa under President Joe Biden, making him the point person for the grueling negotiations to free the 251 hostages abducted by Hamas that day.

McGurk has pulled back the curtain on that effort in his new book. Brink: Inside the Race to Free the October 7th Hostages, published Tuesday, traces his time in the Biden administration, all the way to its very final hours, when Hamas agreed to release 33 hostages, and the first stage of a ceasefire took effect. Today’s piece, adapted from Brink, drops you inside those last weeks, as McGurk worked alongside the incoming Trump administration to push the deal over the finish line. —Jillian Lederman

Wednesday, November 20, 2024

Washington, D.C., U.S. Capitol

Two weeks after Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris, Jake Sullivan and I went to a secure room in the U.S. Capitol to brief our successors. Sullivan’s was Mike Waltz, a congressman from Florida. Mine was Steve Witkoff, a real estate tycoon and Trump’s best friend.

Shortly after the election, I had called Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and former Middle East hand. My message was that we had a chance to secure a Gaza deal so long as we could be seen as working together without any daylight between the incoming and outgoing teams. For the first time in months, circumstances trended in our favor.

Following the collapse of the hostage talks, Israel had won a string of military victories. It started on September 17, with an operation that exploded thousands of beepers carried by Hezbollah militants in Lebanon. I first heard about what became known as Operation Grim Beeper from a contact in Mossad, who told me, “We just blew the dicks off Hezbollah.”

In many cases, that was not metaphorical.

It’s Wednesday, October 7. Today, we’re bringing you a different Front Page. It’s dedicated to one thing: the third anniversary of Hamas’s attack on Israel—what it meant then, and what it means now.

Many of the ways in which the world changed over the last three years are by now familiar. A disorienting new normal for Israelis, who suddenly found themselves in a fight for national survival. A region turned upside down by the attack and the wars that followed. The celebration in the West of terror attacks as “resistance.” The emergence of Israel as a litmus test in American politics. The explosion of antisemitism across the world.

But on that terrible day three years ago, none of these consequences were clear.

Today, we bring you stories on the world October 7 made. Douglas Murray on Israel’s determination to fight on—and why it is winning. Eli Lake on how the American foreign policy establishment is rewriting the history of the Gaza war. Simon Sebag Montefiore on the October 7 wars and how they will change the Middle East. Former British prime minister Tony Blair on the latest example of how October 7 has helped mainstream antisemitism in Western politics. And MIT engineering systems professor Yossi Sheffi on what happened after he published a book about antisemitism on campus following the attacks.

But first we want to tell you about the people on the ground who October 7 left behind, starting with those who survived the day, but never fully recovered.

Some 1,200 people were slaughtered three years ago today, and 251 taken hostage. But there were countless others whose lives were forever changed.

Today, Polina Fradkin talks to the families of those lost to suicide in the wake of October 7, the therapists who work around the clock to spot suicidal ideation before it’s too late, the lingering fear among Israelis that their loved ones could be next—and the people who refuse to lose hope in their home. Read her story about the long psychological shadow cast by the atrocity.

For Avinatan Or, October 7 was the start of what would become 738 days in Hamas captivity, after he was abducted from the Nova festival. Last month, his memoir was published in Hebrew in Israel, and swiftly became a No. 1 bestseller. Today, we’re proud to bring you an exclusive English excerpt from the book—about the experiences that led him, five months into captivity, to literally dig his way to freedom. His tale is one of extraordinary resilience and bravery in the darkest circumstances imaginable. Read Avinatan on his time in the tunnels.

And now we turn to the Palestinian people, for whom the shadow of October 7 is impossible to escape. They live among its consequences: Much of Gaza has been reduced to rubble, their cause has been warped into a Western protest movement and, somehow, Hamas still operates amid the wreckage. The attacks three years ago, writes Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a Gazan who himself lost family members and his childhood home in Israel’s retaliatory response, triggered “the most catastrophic chapter in contemporary Palestinian history.” Read his piece on how Hamas turned Gaza into the “fulcrum for instability, devastation, and conflict in the Middle East,” and what Gazans—and their ostensible allies across the West—must do to chart a path forward.

Last week, the world was captivated by an extraordinary act of bravery, when ordinary Israelis stormed the cockpit to avert a hijacking on a flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv. (Read our exclusive interview with one of the heroes.) For Douglas Murray, these heroics were emblematic of Israel’s approach to its enemies over the past three years: “The Israelis saw an existential threat, took matters into their own hands, and decided their own course,” he wrote. “The rest of the West will have to decide whether it will follow the Israeli model or let its own future be dictated by terror and the hijacking of its entire society.”

Read his full column on how Israel put victory ahead of the approval of its critics:

Here in the United States, Israel is at the center of debates about American foreign policy—and the tide turned against the Jewish state almost immediately after October 7. A new book, Crossing the Red Line by Akbar Shahid Ahmed, claims to offer an objective view of the divide within the Democratic Party on the issue, but Eli Lake says it does nothing of the sort. Read Eli on the fight over Israel—and whether there are any pro-Israel voices left in the Democratic foreign policy establishment.

As for how the wars that followed October 7 changed the Middle East, don’t miss Simon Sebag Montefiore’s latest essay in our pages. It’s a deep dive into the war that upended everything, and which regional power is likely to come out on top.

As we at The Free Press have documented over the last three years, October 7 and its aftermath revealed disturbing truths about our own societies here in the West. An antisemitism lingering just beneath the surface, now paraded without embarrassment; a surprisingly widespread sympathy for movements and ideologies defined by their hatred of America.

Today, we offer two stories unpacking recent examples of these trends.

This weekend, the UK’s Green Party passed a motion entitled “Zionism is Racism,” which commits the party to a single Palestinian state and a world where Israel does not exist. The motion isn’t trivial, nor is it an instance of simple virtue signaling, argues former British prime minister Tony Blair—it’s an adoption of antisemitism as party policy. Read his essay on why the moral confusion of a once-marginal political party is something no one worried about the future of the UK, or the future of the Holy Land, can ignore.

In the wake of October 7, MIT engineering systems professor Yossi Sheffi published a book about antisemitism on campus following the attacks. But shortly after the book was published, MIT’s administration told Yossi to stop promoting it. Then they accused him of conducting an unauthorized experiment by interviewing Jewish students about their campus experiences. What happened exposed an institutional rot that made Yossi’s book all the more urgent, and is a revelation about higher education post–October 7 that still stings every year thereafter.

The Free Press has published many more stories about October 7 and its aftermath. If you want to revisit some of them today, start with the collection we put together on the first anniversary of the attacks:

As the grim third anniversary of October 7 befalls a decimated Gaza Strip, the state of the discourse among many in the so-called “pro-Palestine” movement remains as embarrassing, dismal, and disastrous as it was when Hamas initiated the attack in 2023. Over the past three years, I have seen countless posts by self-described Zionists criticizing the conduct of Israel’s government, the behavior of Israeli officials, and the excesses of the Israeli reaction to October 7. And yet, I have struggled to see even a dozen posts by “pro-Palestine” activists, advocates, or organizations explicitly condemning Hamas for triggering the most catastrophic chapter in contemporary Palestinian history.

And let’s be clear: That’s exactly what this is. Three years after October 7, the Palestinian people face their greatest crisis of the modern era.

I begin on the ground, in Gaza itself. The majority of Gaza’s buildings are partially or fully destroyed. Tens of thousands have lost their lives, including entire families wiped out by ferocious Israeli bombardment. People will argue to the moon and back about who was ultimately responsible for the level of devastation in Gaza. I personally believe Israel killed far too many civilians, including dozens of my own family members. Israeli air strikes destroyed both of my childhood homes. I will never not be angry or upset about this.

But I will also forever be furious at the fact that Gaza would still be standing had Hamas simply kept its terrorists at home on October 7. I will forever be rageful at the fact that Hamas not only weaponized every aspect of Gaza’s infrastructure but also held Israeli hostages in a manner that was inevitably going to invite more devastation and suffering for Palestinian civilians. I will forever be resentful of the useful idiots who ignored Hamas’s sadistic tactics, hiding behind vacuous appeals to “international law” despite there being no legal framework to justify a terrorist group entrenching itself in medical facilities, educational spaces, markets, and areas meant to shelter the displaced.

The Free Press has published numerous stories on the ordeals faced by the Israeli hostages seized by Hamas on October 7, 2023. But the words of Avinatan Or—published here in English for the first time—stand out.

Three years ago, Or was abducted from the Nova music festival by Hamas terrorists. He then spent more than two years as a hostage, most of it alone in a tunnel cell beneath Gaza. Last month, Avinatan published Through the Earth, a harrowing, Hebrew-language memoir about his experience, which has swiftly become a No. 1 bestseller in Israel. We are proud to exclusively share two parts of the book—one from 20 days into his captivity, and one from about five months later.

Avinatan’s attention to detail in captivity was extraordinary; his will to live, even more so. During his captivity, he literally dug himself out of his tunnel in a daring escape attempt, only to be caught, beaten, and tortured. Today, he describes the experiences that led him to try to escape—and the moment that made him realize he had the opportunity to try.

Or’s story, translated here from Hebrew, is essential reading as we mark the third anniversary of the October 7 attack. Read it to understand what Or went through and how, against all odds, he survived years of war and terror in the darkness beneath Gaza.
—The Editors

My only goal is survival. From now on, everything, and I mean everything, is a numbers game. And that means I start to collect every scrap of information that comes my way. I count the rungs of the ladder, count steps, catalog the sounds and key words I manage to catch, measure my paces, memorize turns, feel out the space around me. I know that we have climbed nine meters down the ladder into a tunnel with a low ceiling a little under six feet, one that won’t let me stand up straight for the next 24 months.

No cutting corners, no losing focus, no missed opportunities. I’m here, and I must be the master of my fate.

One day, Khaled-Hamdan, the Hamas commander in charge of the tunnel where I have been taken captive, comes into the room where we’re all sitting and tells me to follow him. We start climbing up out of the tunnel, and my heart and my head start working overtime. I have no idea where we’re going or what’s about to happen. As we come out of the tunnel I see that it’s nighttime, and the darkness of underground Gaza blends into the darkness of Gaza above. The tunnel opening lets us out into the storeroom of a house. The voices of women and children come from the second floor. I think about the monstrous use of a civilian population, and how low a man has to go to use his own children as human shields. The thought is cut short when they lead me into a side room with a tripod and a camera in the middle. The cameraman is standing next to them. It’s time to film my first video as a hostage.

On August 1, 2026, Lihi Asraf found her brother, Bar, lying on the grave of his best friend, Liron Barda. Liron was murdered in the Nova music festival massacre on October 7, 2023. She was buried in Elkana, in the West Bank, where she and Bar had grown up together in neighboring towns.

Lihi shouted Bar’s name, thinking he’d fallen asleep there—it was a place he regularly visited—but he didn’t answer. He had shot himself in the heart. He was 30.

“I think about the day I found him a lot,” Lihi told me. “Finding the person you know and love, a person who is so happy. . . and you’re calling his name and he’s not answering.”

“We couldn’t even cry,” she said. “We were too shocked.”

It was a Thursday in September, and she spoke to me while on break from guard duty at Israel’s border with the West Bank, where she serves in a light infantry defense unit. “My family has fallen apart,” she said. There were five Asraf siblings, and they used to regularly return to their parents’ house on weekends. Now, Lihi told me, there isn’t as much of a reason to do so. “We went from being the happiest family in the world—full of love and laughter and connection—and suddenly it’s extinguished. The house isn’t fun like before.”

I am a professor of engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who discovered, in the aftermath of the massacre of Israelis on October 7, 2023, that the university where I have taught for 48 years was rife with defenders, supporters, and celebrants of Hamas’s atrocities. I also discovered that the institution was unwilling to defend Jewish students and faculty during the months of harassment and torment that followed.

I published the book Unsafe at MIT: A Chronicle of a Campus War on the Jews not only to provide a record of what Jews have had to suffer at the university but to hold to account an administration that refused to acknowledge its failures, much less apologize for them. Though my previous work dealt with supply-chain strategy, logistics networks, and urban transport, I am no stranger to research; based on interviews and careful investigation, Unsafe at MIT received respectful attention from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, but a vindictive response from the MIT administration that has sadly reinforced my book’s central premise.

Shortly after my book was published, I was told by the dean of engineering that I was expected to work solely on operations research and supply-chain management, rather than issues of antisemitism. Academics, of course, routinely write and speak about subjects beyond their specialties; did MIT ever penalize linguistics expert Noam Chomsky when he started denouncing the war in Vietnam and other aspects of U.S. foreign policy? That’s called academic freedom. There’s a blatant double standard when such a limitation is invoked only in a case like mine—a Jewish professor telling the truth about the treatment of Jewish students.

In the weeks following the October 7, 2023 pogrom, President Joe Biden was in full solidarity with the target, Israel. He surged arms shipments and rallied the world against Hamas, the authors of that heinous crime. Among the lower ranks of Biden’s administration, though, an insurrection was brewing. Like the demonstrators on college campuses in the fall of 2023, the anonymous aides, assistants, and bureaucrats inside the federal government wanted the president to restrain the victims of the attack in their defensive war.

In the final year of the Biden presidency, the crowd that wanted Israel cut off from American weapons was largely stymied by the president and his senior staff. Now with the Democrats out of power, the dissidents of 2023 and 2024 are taking their revenge. And their tale is told in the new book Crossing the Red Line, by Akbar Shahid Ahmed, senior diplomatic correspondent for The Washington Sun.

Ahmed’s book is not an objective assessment or fair history of the Biden administration’s policy debates. It is rather a prosecutor’s brief against the senior foreign policy officials the American left wants to purge from the Democratic Party. Ahmed does not call Israel’s war against Hamas a “genocide,” but his sources clearly believe it was. And for the crime of enabling that genocide, the book blames former secretary of state Antony Blinken, former national security adviser Jake Sullivan, and former Middle East and North Africa coordinator Brett McGurk.

“I don’t know how to tell you this, but you’re kind of acting like a slut.”

My best friend’s boyfriend said this to me in ninth grade, as she sat next to him, soberly nodding in agreement. I had no idea what they were talking about.

It’s true that I often hung out with a rowdy group of girls who liked to let loose. Our main objective every weekend was to procure some mind-altering substance, then find a party somewhere—maybe at the beach, or at the house of a kid whose parents were away. When we couldn’t find one, we’d trudge back and forth on our southern Connecticut’s busy post road, between the video arcade and the Dairy Queen. It was glorious. Even now I can’t think of many things that are more fun than those nights—arriving at the party we’d finally located, buzzed on vodka or gin we’d nipped from our parents’ cabinets, catching the eye of some cute guy, flirting all evening, and then ending up making out in his car or someone’s random bedroom.

I was 14, not quite a self-described feminist yet, but already broadly steeped in sex-positive ideas, gleaned from novels and self-help books and my mother’s guidance. Hence why the “slut” accusation was actually confusing to me. It was 1984! Here we were, enjoying this golden era of equal rights, after centuries of girls and women living under brutal repression. Finally, we were free—to become CEOs or artists or maybe president someday, and certainly to have as much fun as we wanted in ways only boys had been able to for far too long. I was as sure of this as that we breathed oxygen and that gravity was holding us to the ground. I couldn’t believe how closed-minded my friends were, calling me a slut. Had they never heard of the sexual revolution?

I’ve thought about this episode in recent days, as I’ve followed the story of Jane Doe and the Cornell 7—the case of the sophomore who arrived alone at a frat party already “5 out of 10” drunk, as she later said in a sworn statement to the district attorney, and then proceeded to snort ketamine and engage in a threesome, which gained in participants, all male, as the night wore on. Initially, Doe seemed fine with the events of the evening, texting someone known in the statement as Male Number One that none “of the sexual stuff was illegal” and, in another exchange, “everyone needs to grow up cause sexuality and sex. . . is changing and stuff like this is going to become more common. . . I’m also really open minded tho. I luv u king.”

But as campus gossip gained traction, culminating in the fraternity president disinviting her from its Halloween party, Jane Doe’s reaction evolved; several days after the incident, she reported a rape to campus police. The county’s district attorney ultimately declined to prosecute, as Doe had said the sex was consensual. Now, two years later, in light of accusations that the university withheld significant information from the prosecutors and that the DA declined to review additional evidence, Doe has filed a civil case, bringing the incident to national attention. This has ignited an explosive conversation that at its heart is about how the old frameworks we once used to understand rape are buckling in a post–sexual revolution world where a woman may feel simultaneously free to do anything—and also suspect, in hindsight, that she has been violated.