A few weeks ago, a team of Free Press producers and reporters arrived at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv. The energy was somber and still, almost like the country and its people were frozen in time. As one mother of a hostage told us, “Every single second of our lives is trauma.” And as the journalist Gadi Taub told us, “People don’t even begin to understand the extent of this earthquake and how it will change Israel.” Since the earliest hours of October 7, we’ve been reporting on the war in Israel. We’ve published no fewer than seventy articles about it, and more than ten Honestly episodes. In other words: when we arrived in Israel, we thought we already knew all about what happened that day. But there is a difference between knowing something intellectually, and actually standing in a killing field. The events of October 7—and the ongoing war between Israel, Hamas, and other Iranian proxies—isn’t just about another war in another faraway place. This is about the difference between democracy and tyranny, between freedom and unfreedom—in a world that seems to have lost the ability to make a distinction between the two. As one reservist told us, “We’re doing this for the world. Hamas is an idea. It looks at you in L.A. as the enemy, not just us in Israel. We just happen to be their neighbors.” So over the next few episodes, we’re going to bring you The FP in Israel: a special limited series about our time reporting on the ground. We hope you listen. And for more of our content from Israel, subscribe to The Free Press at thefp.com, and check out our YouTube channel, where you will find additional videos and documentaries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.