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SDEROT, Israel — It began as a pleasant Saturday morning. Leeor Katz, a 37-year-old dental hygienist, was visiting her husband’s family in central Israel for the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah. Then she started receiving texts from the Nir Oz kibbutz where she lived, just two miles from the Gaza Strip border: Fighters from the Palestinian militant group Hamas had entered the property and were burning down houses. “They were walking freely inside Israel, in a kibbutz inside Israeli borders,” Katz said. “We never thought it would happen.” The text chain, on a messaging group for kibbutz residents, said people inside safe rooms were struggling to breathe because of smoke from the fires. Katz did not realize that the attack was part of a sophisticated, multipronged assault by Hamas that saw i...

I don’t understand the stripe of Americans whose first response to Hamas’ recent attack on Israel is “yeah, but ….” Hundreds of attendees at a music festival murdered. Children and elderly people taken hostage. Civilians shot dead in the streets. When it comes to war there are no angels, but there are demons, and what Hamas did on Saturday represents the latter — full stop.However, I do understand the many Americans who see what Hamas did and think about the danger at our southern border — the Americans who are genuinely worried about the drug cartels’ growing influence in border towns and beyond. I do understand the part of America who saw Saturday’s horror and wondered how vulnerable we are to infiltration and attack, given the surge of asylum seekers and the U.S.’s inadequate systems fo...

Defining a decade is a difficult task. Trying to summarize a span of time like the 2010s, built by financial crisis, capped by pandemic and split nearly down the middle, at least in the American imagination, by the ice pick of the Trump victory, seems like a task best set aside for at least a few more years.But in a new book, “If We Burn,” journalist Vincent Bevins takes a staggeringly ambitious shot at understanding the very recent past by planting chaos, upheaval and unintended consequences at the heart of the story. On the Shelf If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution By Vincent BevinsPublicAffairs: 352 pages, $30If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. Bevins foun...