October 15th 2023: Second Report

 

October 15^th 2023

Dear Family and friends,

Some of you have asked for additional reporting. So I’ll use this place as a sounding board for my own confusion as we enter the second week of our war with Hamas.

Family update: the three mobilized nephews are all still mobilized, obviously. No one expected otherwise. All three are combat-trained, but they’re not all in equally front-line units. We can only hope for the best.

As the names of our dead become clear, there’s no-one in our immediate circles, but there are more distant connections. Dr. Eitan Neeman, the son of Abba’s late partner Yaacov Neeman, was killed near Gaza on the third or fourth day of the war. A news item reported him as a medic, but since he was a top pediatrician at Soroka hospital, I assume he was a brigade physician or something. Alex Danzig, who worked with friends at Yad Vashem, is assumed to be held hostage by Hamas. As the ground operation advances, there will be additional casualties, and if Hezbollah decides to fully join the war, there will be lots more.

The Hamas marauders broadcast lots of gleeful films of their atrocities, celebrating their bloodthirst. I refused to watch, preferring not to scar my soul. Now the Israelis are broadcasting films from the aftermath of the killings, to drive home the justification for our response, and I’m refusing to watch those, too. The scenes are horrific. You can find them on Google.

There are fewer films of the many acts of heroism. The heroes didn’t have time for filming. As I noted last time, in a moment when the normal defense systems collapsed, it was the rank and file who stepped up and desperately tried to stop the horrors. As the days pass, the numbers of these stories rise – there are hundreds of them – some about successes, others about dying while trying. I recommend Sabrina Tavernisy’s English-language interview with Golan Abitbul, a regular guy who’s military training kicked in as Hamas men approached his home in Be’eri. Moving rapidly from window to window, letting off a single pistol shot from each angle, he caused them to wonder how many armed men were in there, so they went on to the next house, sparing his entire family. “If you aren’t scared, you’re an idiot” he says. Here: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/13/podcasts/the-daily/israel-hamas-kibbutz.html?rref=vanity

The marauders intended to conquer territory and hold it. They brought enormous quantities of ammunition, and food to keep them active for days. The fact that by Monday the IDF was in control of all the towns villages and military camps is because of those desperate fighters on the ground, and the reservists who sped into action even before they were summoned. Among them the brothers Yishai and Noam Slutki, each the father of an infant. When the rockets started falling in their home town of Beer Sheva, they donned their fatigues, took their weapons, and drove to Alumim. By the time their units tried to mobilize them later that afternoon, they were both dead. Yet Alumim was one of the few places which the attackers didn’t manage to take; the residents, some soldiers and the Slutki brothers held them off.

The more stories you hear, the clearer it becomes that that had there been even a single hour of warning, the defenders would have fought off most of the invaders. The army as an institution was missing in action, but the soldiers and the armed and trained citizenry would have been able to fend on their own, at least in the villages and towns. The thousands at the rave party might have dispersed in time. This is important, because once we have the time, Israeli society will have to work through the multiple layers of our colossal failure. Very colossal. Very multi-layered.

But here’s the thing. We’ll be investigating our own failures, with an eye towards fixing them, even if the fixing takes years of painful and exhausting national effort. (It will). We’ve got the ability to do it. It wasn’t always so, nor should it be taken for granted.

There’s a lot of talk around these days of how Shoah-like some of the stories are. I recognize the emotional urge, but it’s wrong. We’re humiliated and furious that Jews in their homes waited 12 hours for help, and some didn’t get it. In the Shoah help never arrived. Twelve hundred Israelis, mostly civilians, died on the first day of this war; in the Shoah there were hundreds of such days.

Yesterday I reread Haim Nahman Bialik’s epic poem In the City of Slaughter. Written in 1903, shortly after the Kishinev Pogrom. My grandfather Bill Kleinman was a five-year-old in Kishinev at the time; the stories he told stayed with his daughter, my mother, throughout her long life, and deeply informed her understanding of the world. Yet although Bialik’s poem opens with depictions of the brutality and its victims, it soon turns elsewhere and becomes a damnation of the wretchedness and cowardice of the Jewish victims. Bialik’s poem became an early rallying cry for young Jews to learn how to defend themselves.

If anything, our present moment is a demonstration of our having learned Bialik’s lesson too well. Tomorrow, or the next day at the latest, our ground forces will start conquering Gaza. Some of this is natural, human, vengeance. Mostly, it’s the determination to destroy Hamas’ ability to ever harm us again; that, and the need to demonstrate to the entire neighborhood, and perhaps the world, that the descendants of the Russian pogroms and the survivors of the Shoah won’t allow Jews to be slaughtered in their homes. These, also, are perfectly reasonable goals – necessary goals, even. Essential.

Yet our natural and justified rage and its related icy resolve carry with them a large portion of callousness. I find myself part of a small segment of Israeli society that assumes that furious, icy, and very powerful callousness will not serve us well in the long run, not unless they’re tempered. But that’s a subject for another day.

While I was writing this report, a message come in on one of the WhatsApp lists with which we’ve been organizing our lives since the beginning of the protest movement in January. It was a call to come to the funeral of Yitzchak Levi, who was murdered at the rave party and hardly has any family. It took a week to identify him, and you might have expected the cemetery to be empty except for the few of us.

It wasn’t. We arrived a bit early, and found ourselves at the funeral of 25-year-old Idan Dor, who once played in a minor local soccer team. There were thousands of people. Almost all of them were typical Sephardi Jerusalemites of all ages. Middle class. Most men wearing kippas, most of them unnaturally. The rave party was about as far from orthodox Jewry as can be, but most of the thousands of mourners had no trouble murmuring the traditional texts of the ceremony from memory – psalms, sections from the prayerbook. The service took longer than intended, it began to rain, but no-one moved. Eventually it was over and people dispersed, making way for the next victim from the same rave party.

By this time, we had talked to some of the mourners who had come to say farewell to Yitzchak Levi. The mayor of Beit Shemesh, his parents’ hometown, was there, but mostly it was Bratzlavers. Remote cousins of the hippies of the 1960s, devout Jews of a particularly mystical other-worldliness, who are famous for their ecstatic dancing in public spaces. Gigantic kippot, and wild, flowing ear-locks. Once they figured out who we were, they commended us for our luck at having garnered such an important mitzva of accompanying a deceased Jew we’d never even met. Though it rapidly turned out they hadn’t known Yitzchak that well, either. He was newly approaching their world; he had joined them at the annual pilgrimage to the (purported) grave of their Rabbi, the 18^th century Hassidic mystic Rabbi Nachman, just last month in Uman (Ukraine), where Yitzchak had stood out for his great joyfulness. The fact he’d then been murdered at a totally secular dance event didn’t bother them in the slightest – ecstatic dancing is ecstatic dancing, I suppose. There were a few hundred of them there.

The diversity of this place never ceases to astound. And the ability to come together at some crucial moments. At least for the moments.

Yaacov