THE 70-YEAR MIRACLE
IN ISRAEL, AS EVER, HOPE AND PRIDE MINGLE WITH DETERMINATION AND GRIEF
Tuesday evening. Eight o’clock. For two minutes, a piercing siren wailed throughout Israel, marking the eve of Memorial Day, when 23,646 Israeli soldiers killed in military duty and 3,134 civilians murdered by terrorists are remembered.
In a country of eight million, in which all Jewish, Druse and Circassian nationals are required to serve in the military (other Muslims and Christians may volunteer for service), there is not a person untouched by such deaths.
And so, in the moments leading to the siren blaring throughout Israel and in our north Tel Aviv neighbourhood, families stream, dressed in white shirts, to the local schoolyard. Replicated thousands of times over throughout this tiny country, school-age children lead the very sombre but ever hopeful commemorations, with subdued song, dance and poetry readings. These gatherings focus on those from the school and neighbourhood who fell, remembering them as individuals and embracing surviving family. It is at once a celebration and a mourning of life.
In this brief interlude, the entire country pauses to reflect, in a moment that transcends partisanship and larger conflicts. A neighbourhood goes home, quietly, knowing that the next day brings visits to the graves of loved ones and friends, an opportunity for more private grief.
A second siren wailed on Wednesday at 11 a.m., as smaller ceremonies began in hundreds of military cemeteries across Israel. Everything in this country is overtaken with debate and conflict, but this day remains sacred, to the religious and secular alike. It is devoid of petty divisiveness and replete with sorrow and reverence for lives lost.
This day of collective remembrance gave way, on Wednesday evening, to the celebration of the founding of the State of Israel, 70 years ago. The transition is anything but smooth, jolting the country from profound sadness to the opposite extreme; a metaphor for the Jewish “condition,” always mingling the present joy with historical memory. Always remembering the good and the bad, past and present.
This national street party will mark the realization of what was beyond unimaginable: that a few hundred thousand Jews in the immediate aftermath of the most savage mass murder — the Holocaust — might prevail and establish a state that would remain generations later. In the era of “Israel the tech superpower” and militaryforce-to-be-reckoned-with, it is easy to lose sight of the implausibility of it all.
When Israel was attacked by five well-trained and supplied Arab armies upon declaring independence in 1948, the world watched, passively, expecting the demise of the Jewish state to be swift. It was Czechoslovakia, which supplied desperately needed weapons on an emergency basis, that gave Israel a faint hope of the victory that was, after many months of war, achieved.
On Wednesday night, I celebrated this miracle — of statehood and survival — with friends at Nahal Oz kibbutz on the Gaza border. Few communities in Israel live day in, day out with the constant threats that these several hundred civilians withstand. Just last week, the longest, deepest terror tunnel was exposed by the IDF, entering Israel adjacent to the kibbutz. Friends who reside there have told me of hearing the sounds of digging as they slept at night, thinking they were going mad.
I have been in one of these tunnels, preserved intact to show that they represent a real threat. As do riots by the border fence, where Molotov cocktails are hurled and burning tires emit toxic plumes, where grenades are planted and terrorists attempt to infiltrate through the border fence. Their intentions are anything but peaceful.
Yet, Israeli responses are ceaselessly parsed and critiqued for being “disproportionate.” Recently, a British newscaster, interviewing a senior Israeli press spokesperson, opined that the number of deaths on each side correlated precisely to some sort of moral equation. In other words, since more Palestinians were killed in the most recent border hostilities that meant that they and their cause were right and just and Israel was not.
It is an unfortunate truism that the victors in armed conflict tend to suffer fewer casualties than the vanquished. Yet only in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian-Arab conflict is that outcome declared, a priori, to reflect some sort of unique, core, unprecedented, unacceptable evil.
It is this particular hatred, reflected in absurd criticism and standards being applied to the Jewish state, that has kept alive Jewish suffering and separateness and is a constant reminder of the importance of the existence of the state of Israel.
As Israel, and those who believe the country has a right to exist, mark this significant milestone with joy, they will be keenly aware of the threat articulated constantly, by Iran and its proxies throughout the Middle East, to annihilate not only Israel but all Jews.
This is not an idle threat. Warheads on Iranian missiles are emblazoned with the names of Israeli cities; their leaders boast openly of the imminent destruction of the “Zionist entity,” and they are entrenched in Lebanon and Syria with a significant military presence. Iran finances multiple extremist and terrorist proxies — among them Hezbollah and the Syrian regime — with the clear and openly stated goal of destroying Israel.
There is no distinction, in their world view, between Israel and Jews. To wit: one of their more spectacular attacks was the bombing in 1994 of the Jewish Community Centre in Buenos Aires, in which 85 civilians were murdered and hundreds injured.
Iran is fully invested in Bashar Al-Assad and condones his use of chemical weapons. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards train and finance Hezbollah, Syria and a network of terrorist proxies worldwide. Following the recent bombing of various military facilities in Syria, Iran has threatened to retaliate against Israel, the root of all evil.
And so, Israel celebrated on a knife edge. Alongside with honouring the dead, one other issue unites the left and the right in this country today: the very real threat to this nation by the vicious antiSemitism that is a core ideology of Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and Syria.