Israel's mournful isolation six months after attacks

To visit this traumatized country as an American Jew is to begin - just begin - to grasp what one U.S.-born Israel Defense Forces soldier described to me as the “existential loneliness of Israel.”

Israelis, of all political persuasions and degrees of observance, feel besieged and misunderstood. Six months after a day on which more Jews were murdered than since the Holocaust, Israel finds itself nearing the status of international pariah. How could this have happened?

Is this the predictable denouement of a struggle for survival that was inevitably going to involve heartbreaking numbers of civilian casualties and suffering, and the resulting criticism? Or is it the product of a war waged with such heedlessness toward humanitarian concerns that Israel has squandered whatever public sympathy was initially inclined in its direction?

Is this the bitter fruit of years of Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians and mistaken policies in the disputed territories? Or does it reflect the ugly reality that much of the world has never accepted the existence of Israel as a Jewish state?

A short visit - I came here on a trip organized by my synagogue - cannot answer these questions. But it does suggest a different, and more layered, perspective than from the comfort of the suburban Maryland kitchen table from which I ordinarily write.

To visit the sites of the Oct. 7 atrocities, as well as to speak with survivors, feels as gutwrenching as visiting a concentration camps, but it's as if the Holocaust were only months in the past, and the enemy as yet undefeated.

To bear witness is to come to Kfar Aza, the kibbutz just a few miles from the Gaza border, with the smoky skyline of Gaza City visible past the barbedwire gate and empty fields. It is to see the youth dormitories pockmarked with bullet holes and burned by Hamas terrorists - and to understand how shattering Oct. 7 was even for those who had become inured to rocket fire and warning sirens.

It is to meet with a farmer who displays the chair, broken by rambunctious grandchildren and stashed in a Kfar Aza safe room, that saved his family. On Oct. 7, the farmer's son jammed the chair under the handle of the door of the safe room, designed to protect against rocket attacks, not terrorists.

Elsewhere in the kibbutz, his son's brother- and sister-inlaw were not so lucky. The terrorists murdered them - and his son has now adopted their 10-month-old twins, who remained safely out of the line of fire, crying together in a single crib before being rescued 14 hours after the attack began.

And it is to come here to Re'im, the site of the music festival where 364 concertgoers were murdered, and walk among the individual memorials to each of them, 364 saplings planted in their memory.

It is to light yahrzeit memorial candles and recite Kaddish for the dead underneath a grove of olive trees, with the intermittent boom of Israeli artillery shells sounding unnervingly nearby, and to recognize: This threat is not remote - it is palpable and accompanied by anxiety over the potential for a more dangerous war erupting on the northern border with Lebanon.

None of this dictates answers, but it provides essential context about the degree to which Israelis continue to believe their country will remain in peril if the enterprise of destroying Hamas's military capabilities is left unfinished.

At home, I mourn the deaths of innocents, especially children. I worry that the toll of casualties, whatever the correct number and whatever the mix of terrorists and civilians, has become too great to accept as moral and justified. I fear that Israel's stance has been unnecessarily counterproductive - even before the horrific killing of the World Central Kitchen workers who were feeding Gazans.

Here in Israel, on the surface, much of ordinary life has resumed, but with a mournful pall. On Easter weekend, Jerusalem's Old City, normally thronged with pilgrims, was disquietingly empty.

Some surprises, both welcome and disappointing, about the Israeli response:

On the positive side, I was not prepared for the gratitude that members of the Israeli public would express to us Americans simply for visiting. But it illustrated Israel's deepening sense of isolation - including, most disturbingly, from American Jews.

On the less attractive side, I did not realize how the Israeli public resists providing humanitarian aid to Gaza while the hostages remain in captivity.

You see posters of the hostages' faces, so many, so young and so old, under the banner of “Bring Them Home.” Though missing, they are everywhere.

And yet, to be here is to better understand the imperative to do whatever it takes to bring them home now - Achshav! - even if that means inflicting suffering on other innocents.

So, I am haunted by that phrase: “existential loneliness.” Few other countries have had to worry, for so long and with such new intensity, about their very survival. Few have felt so isolated in that enterprise.