The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Institute of Politics & CNN Podcasts

Ep. 597 — Ilana Dayan

·1 hr 2 min·5 clips

A six-year-old girl asks a policeman, 'Do you belong to Israel?' revealing the broken promise of safety after October 7th.

October 7 sits at the center. Axelrod brings Dayan back almost a year after their first conversation in the immediate aftermath of the massacre, and he starts with the thing she still cannot quite name: how it feels. Dayan does not try to tidy that up. Her answer has a blunt kind of clarity because she admits where clarity runs out. From there, the conversation moves into evidence, memory, and the work of journalism after horror. Dayan says she does not rejoice in innocent suffering, but she keeps returning to what Hamas did, how its power lasted, and what that says about the people caught inside it. That uneasy balance gives the interview its weight. Her account of Kibbutz Be'eri is the hardest part. Dayan describes Ben Shani piecing together footage from security cameras, body cameras, and other sources until the attack can be seen almost minute by minute. Three young men flee the music festival, enter Be'eri looking for safety, and are executed at gunpoint. Then one body opens another question. Dayan identifies Jonathan Samarano and says his body was taken to Gaza by a man later identified as an UNRWA employee. She is not asking out of idle curiosity. She wants to understand who these people are, what they believe, how Hamas kept such a grip on a suffering population, and whether reality can change. Axelrod lets the difficulty sit there. He admits that imagining a better future is hard, then turns to the hostages. The ending stays unresolved: honesty, grief, a wish for peace and stability, and no clean path to get there.

As heard by us

A clear-eyed conversation about October 7, the hostages, and the questions that remain unresolved.

David Axelrod uses the anniversary of the October 7th massacre by Hamas in southern Israel to keep the conversation on grief, evidence, and the questions that still do not have clean answers.

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Why you'd press play

You want a sober conversation about October 7, the hostages, and what comes after.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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