ISRAEL TRIP (Part 2). Identity, worldview, the civilian, and the soldier
An MOR series: My trip to Israel during the Hamas-Israel War
“When he died, he died on the [Gaza] border, protecting the civilians behind him (…) In Jewish belief, when you die for your country, for your nation, this is the best death. I think the best way is to go on with living and making good things for others. But we have to fight in Israel for our existence, for our survival. And it’s very difficult, in a personal way. No matter what they say about how important it [my son’s sacrifice] was, the personal grief is very, very deep.”
—Yaron Shor, father of an Israeli soldier fallen in Gaza.
If you missed Part 1 of this series, here it is:
In Part 1, I shared my initial impressions as I made contact with Israel. I was there for one week, the first of 2024, to get better acquainted with the Hamas-Israel war.
I had been meaning to share more about my trip sooner. But the world has been moving fast and I felt the need to write and publish many other pieces. Yet now my frustration at having interrupted my trip series, so chock-full of important experiences and deep lessons, has reached a boiling point. I must get this one out, at least.
Below I have disjointed impressions from my trip, from different days, that made me reflect on questions of culture and identity for Israelis and Arab Palestinians. On either side, culture and identity determine the relationship between civilians and soldiers, and the manner in which this war is fought.
Israeli and Jewish identity, rebuilt in trauma
After some days of hard travel and research my friend Isaac wanted to see his cousin Gil, briefly in Jerusalem on leave from fighting in Gaza. I remembered Gil from an earlier trip to Israel, also with Isaac. Gil had been in his early teens. Now a man, he was the handsomest in the entire family—or so Isaac kept telling me.
I was curious, for I remembered Gil vividly. Which is telling, because my memory is horrible. Too much world history in my head leaves little room for my personal history (Alas…!). But Gil I did remember. And the reason, as with all successfully encoded memories, was a strong emotion. Here: frustration.
On that earlier trip, Isaac and I had argued back and forth with Gil and his dad, Oron, long into the night—indeed, into the next morning. Inexhaustibly, enjoyably. Disagreement is like food to Jews, a choice meal to be savored in good cheer and solidary fellowship with one’s opponents. Religious Jews happily yell at each other over the fine points of Torah and Talmudic scholarship and interpretation—with zero hard feelings. Secular Jews, such as Gil and Oron, I have found, have inherited this debating spirit too.
Like most Jews on what they call the ‘left,’ Oron and Gil believe—like many Westerners do—that the formation of a Palestinian State run by the ‘Palestinian Authority’ would be safer and better for Israelis; Isaac and I believe, to the contrary, that this would be terribly dangerous for the Israeli Jews (and Jews everywhere).
Our views are anchored in the history of PLO/Fatah, the group that resulted when Al Fatah swallowed the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) in the late 1960s, and which was brought inside Israel, via the Oslo ‘Peace’ Process, to become the ‘Palestinian Authority.’ The two historical items we find especially relevant are these:
Al Fatah—the organ that calls all the shots, essentially synonymous with the PLO and the ‘Palestinian Authority’—was created by Hajj Amin al Husseini, founding father of the Arab Palestinian movement and mentor to Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas. Most Westerners still don’t know this, but Husseini was a top leader of the German Nazi Final Solution: the genocide of the European Jews during World War II.
This Nazi exterminator’s outfit, PLO/Fatah, is who created jihadi Iran, for they armed and trained Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s guerrillas (in training camps in Lebanon), and they helped set up Khomeini’s secret service, SAVAMA, responsible for internal terrorism against Iranianas, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, responsible for external terrorism against Israelis (and others).
The documentation to establish all this is in the following two pieces:
Based on the above, we argued our case to Oron that PLO/Fatah should not be tolerated inside Israel. For reasons that, still today, neither Isaac nor I fully understand, Oron was not swayed.
Anyway, on that long night, Gil had supported his dad’s position. But then Gil had gone further, saying he felt no special loyalty to the State of Israel and didn’t even consider himself a Jew. I never forgot that moment. It was deeply unsettling and troubling to me. Oron didn’t like it either.
Years went by.
During those years, as Gil approached college age, he decided to study film. Since leftists are crushingly dominant in the arts, this brought him into contact with many more young Jewish Israelis uncomfortable with a Jewish identity and even confused about the legitimacy of the Israeli State.
Attitudes, however, have been changing in the years since, even among this far-leftist crowd, and a lot faster since the massacres of October 7th, 2023. Following that disaster, many Israeli Jews on the left—even on the far left—have responded to the patriotic call. Gil is among them. He volunteered to fight even though he has a legitimate and legally invocable medical exemption. He has chosen to risk his young life for the State of Israel.
On the right, too, many Haredi religious Jews, casting their traditional exemption from military service to one side, and no doubt feeling shame that others should fight for them, have also volunteered to fight.
Israeli reservists living overseas abandoned lives of relative comfort and flew back home so they could risk their lives, with their brethren, for the Jewish State.
And a growing number of Jewish religious women want to be soldiers.
Right, left, orthodox, conservative, reform, atheists, men, women—no matter. At the front they are all Jews. And all Zionists now.
Even in the middle of all this horror, that’s rather exciting. To watch the Israeli Jews come together in this moment of existential threat; to see them set aside their differences because they’ve remembered that they are all Jews, and that nothing matters more when the nation is in mortal danger—it’s really quite inspiring.
Gil was living this experience.
As we sat down for drinks I had to agree with Isaac: this kid could be a magazine model. Or an actor—that good looking. And the confident, easy smile and cool demeanor didn’t hurt. Whew, I thought, the ladies must be all over this guy! I also thought: Golly, he is so young, and now risking his life on the Gazan front… (And that’s what wars do: they kill us in our prime.)
I was curious, because I’ve never risked my life in uniform to defend my country. And because I am an anthropologist. So I asked Gil about his experiences at the front. I thought I could sense some discomfort, as if my taste for war stories challenged a certain modesty and reserve that wished to protect his experiences and those of his fellow soldiers from my ‘pornographic’ interest. Eventually, though, he opened up.
A wistful smile came over him as he related how everyone in his unit had developed a unique specialty to support everyone else’s morale—a therapeutic division of labor. One told silly jokes, another cleaned up the space they shared, someone else cooked, and so forth. Each found something to give.
“There were 13 of us in that house. When we first went in, it was bombarded, full of wreckage and dirt. Slowly we made this place into our temporary home. To be clear, this was a private family house, but it also housed terror infrastructure. Other houses in that street have had hostages in them prior to our arrival (we found some of their belongings).
Every few days one of us got to go home for a couple of days and returned with gifts for the whole crew to help spend our time. One friend brought backgammon, another brought a bottle of olive oil that his family made. I brought 5 disposable film cameras so that we could take pictures of our experiences (we could not bring phones or digital cameras into Gaza). A good friend of mine brought books; one of them was a collection of short stories by Kafka. We would read them out for all of us to hear. Another friend brought an old radio that works on batteries, and we started listening to music and the news. The first song we heard was ‘The Girl From Ipanema.’ Our most popular song was בוא הביתה [Come Home].”
There was no politics—by common agreement. Better that way. Jews of different kinds were in that unit, but this was a time to be Jews, period, not Jews of different kinds. Brothers in arms.
About those arms, Gil and his buddies do use them. And we did also hear about Gil’s combat experiences. But this is what Gil had really wanted to share: the extended behavioral ‘hug’ that Israelis were all giving each other to heal from their national disaster, which in tiny Israel feels more like a family trauma.
I cannot fully apprehend the depth of this trauma. I was given the chance to watch the footage of the October 7th butchery which the Israeli government prepared for journalists, but a friend of mine who’d already seen it cautioned me, explaining that she couldn’t sleep and had had to seek therapy. She wouldn’t even describe it to me, because that would force her to relive it.
I didn’t watch.
“People outside don’t believe what happened,” Gil complained, but softly, without rancor. It was more like resignation and moral fatigue, it seemed to me: the futility of expecting more from the goyim. “Our experience is very different. We all had to see the atrocities because the terrorists videotaped what they did and then sent the videos to contacts on the cellphones of their victims.” For example, “Some terrorists sent such videos to the victim’s mom, or posted it on the victim’s Facebook page, which is why we at home were also targeted as victims of these videos. Their attack had a double impact that way.”
I imagined a mom receiving a video of the torture of her child. I saw that scene in my head. I made my brain think of something else. We were all three silent for a minute.
Jewish civilians and soldiers
Yes, Israelis needed to give each other a big hug, and they were all, it seemed, finding ways to do that.
After visiting Kfar Aza, one of the kibbutzim attacked on October 7th (more on that in a future piece), our ILAN foundation friends took us to the Shokeda moshav (agricultural community) nearby, where we witnessed another case of Israelis ‘hugging’ each other.
There was a sort of makeshift camp, there, right next to the synagogue. Israeli soldiers were there, resting on their day off, and getting pampered by Israeli civilian volunteers, and Jewish volunteers from other countries. These civilians made sandwiches, cooked food, and squeezed out lots of orange juice. The soldiers rested from their labors in Gaza, relaxed, chatted, ate, drank, and even got a massage.
This is not an Israeli government operation. Israeli civilian volunteers do this on their own to express appreciation for their soldiers, who risk their lives to fight the Hamas terrorists and thus protect Israeli families and homes. The driving emotion is gratitude.
It was sunny. The atmosphere was relaxed. And mostly quiet. Not too many people on this particular day. The civilians making juice and sandwiches next to an RV and milling about were about as numerous as the handful of soldiers there. I took the opportunity to chat with some of them, and also with the civilians.
It felt like a large picnic. The soldiers I spoke to were friendly. I was especially touched by my conversation with three female soldiers in fatigues who sat with me for a while, guns on their laps.
Children, I thought. I couldn’t help it. Girls…
“How old are you?” I asked one of them. She replied in a native US accent that she was 19 (she seemed younger). Her family had “made Aliya” (had immigrated to Israel) a few years before.
I recruited her American gaze: I was struck, I told her, by the enthusiasm with which it seemed that young Israeli soldiers were serving. She shared my amazement—her whole face lit up—and agreed. “Yes, this is very strong here,” she said with a big smile.
She was very, very friendly. Bubbly. This girl had been given a uniform and a gun to go fight terrorists who rip open the belly of a pregnant woman, stab the fetus, shoot the mother. Terrorists who rape women at a music festival, cut off their breasts, throw them around like footballs, do the same with their severed heads.
She was chirpy—they all were.
I was in awe of these girls. I could understand why these Israeli civilians were there to feed and take care of them for a few hours. I wanted to take them away someplace safe.
The source of identity
When I later expressed to others in Israel that I had found the closeness and solidarity between the Israeli civilian and the soldier moving, I invariably got some version of the following reply:
“That’s because we are all the same, don’t you see? There is no real difference between the civilian and the soldier in Israel. We all do military service. Lots of people fighting are from the reserves. And in any case the soldiers are our children, our spouses, our siblings.”
Ah, yes: Israeli unity, a striking post-October 7th phenomenon, so different from the near-civil-war that still threatened to tear the country apart on October 6th, back when giant opposing protests confronted each other on the streets and many soldiers and reservists threatened not to serve unless the government changed course…
But Israelis have found each other again. As often before, antisemitism has renewed Jewish identity.
I believe a healthier anchor for Jewish identity would be chest-bursting pride in the transcendent, positive impact on this world of the Jewish movement, surviving avatar of the original revolution in Mesopotamia, 4,300 years ago, that ushered semitism into this world.
Think about what the Jews have done.
Western societies in ancient times were the most violent and cruel on Earth, governed by power elites who found aesthetic release in gratuitous violence imposed on oceans of slaves (consider only the psycopathic spectacle of the Roman ‘games,’ where human beings were destroyed for the corrupt entertainment of the oppressors). But centuries later, thanks to the influence of Jewish ethical philosophy and law, anchored in the memory of a slave revolt (Exodus) and in the commandment Leviticus 19.18 (“You shall love your neighbor as you love yourself”), which inspired Christian ofshoots of Judaism to revolution, our societies became the best on Earth, where universal human rights are protected by democratic laws.
If Jewish identity were organized around intense consciousnes of this astonishing historical achievement, this heroic, persecuted people could more easily come together for their own self-defense, and well in advance of the next giant attack, because they’d understand, then, that Jewish survival is the key for world peace.
They have a cosmic duty.
Nothing like a cosmic duty to fix the attention and motivate the spirit, hey? The Ego is like that. On the day that the Jews will really know it in their bones, top of mind, center of their identity, that Peace on Earth can only happen if they succeed, on that day they will win. Because they’ll do it for us. That’s the motivation they most need.
Here’s hoping they get it—and soon.
What they have already, however, is nothing to scorn. Jews who don’t know why the fascists always come for them, or why they have to be Jews; who join as one national body because they understand only that they are all together in this, and that, by golly, they will not let each other down, well, that’s still a tremendous thing, a sight to behold, and powerfully moving.
The Israelis… are an impressive people. They made me wish I were Israeli!
Gaza civilians and soldiers
What about the other side? What is the relationship between civilians and soldiers in Gaza?
We’ve heard about ‘human shields’: the Hamas practice of stationing Arab civilians in various structures in order to dissuade the Israelis from attacking those structures. This is a phenomenon worth reflecting carefully upon, because it reveals something fundamental about the identity and culture of the Hamas terrorists. They simply don’t have any ethics, even towards their own fellow Arab Palestinians!
The same policy reveals something dramatic about how these terrorists perceive the Israelis, something that Israel’s accusers, who charge ‘genocide,’ have not stopped to reflect upon (assuming the problem is confusion). And it is this: Hamas is quite sure that the Israeli military will try to protect the lives of Arab civilians.
Think about it. The entire ‘human shields’ policy makes zero sense unless Hamas has the highest opinion of Israeli soldiers. ‘Human shields’ yield no tactical advantage for the terrorists unless it is true that Israeli soldiers will do the utmost to protect Arab Palestinian civilians—that’s what makes ‘human shields’ work: Israeli ethics. Since Hamas regularly resorts to this policy, it follows that Hamas bosses have the highest confidence in Israeli ethics.
The same Hamas policy is eloquent on the relationship between civilians and soldiers in Gaza. Most unlike the Israeli military, Hamas is not concerned with protecting Arab civilian life. To the contrary, they endanger their own civilians in order to protect terrorists.
And in addition to ‘human shields,’ there is also a ‘human bait’ policy.
I learned more about this when I visited a dear friend who lives in Shomron (Samaria) and whose sons were fighting in Gaza. By remarkable coincidence, her fighting brood were all there for a family visit on their one day of leave (some anthropologists have all the luck). These young soldiers shared with me their frontline experiences.
One, in particular, is an especially talented soldier and may get a medal for his astonishing feats protecting his brothers in arms. I’ll share the most shocking anecdote.
On this particular day, he told me, they were patrolling some area in Gaza and an Arab kid was asking them for water. The kid was standing behind a low barrier of some sort with his head and shoulders sticking out. He kept calling “Mayim, mayim!”, the Hebrew word for water. One of the soldiers in his unit grabbed a bottle of water and walked over to the kid.
(Why would a Palestinian kid cry ‘Water, water!’ to an Israeli soldier? Because Arab Palestinians expect Israeli soldiers to care that an Arab Palestinian child is thirsty.)
My friend’s son has sharp instincts and swift reflexes. When he saw his mate walking over to the kid he yelled: “Throw him the bottle, you idiot! Don’t go there!” The other was already close but he complied and lobbed the bottle at the kid. In that second, the bomb exploded.
The hidden terrorist, realizing the soldier would come no further, had tried anyway to get him. And missed—barely. But in another sense he did get him, for the flesh of that poor Arab kid ended up splattered all over the soldier’s uniform.
That soldier was traumatized—a psychological victim of the Hamas ‘human bait’ policy. He is getting therapy.
I find the following obvious: A ‘government’ that uses children—children!—as bait and blows them up in an effort to kill enemy soldiers; a ‘government’ that thinks of children as munitions, that ‘government’ must be utterly destroyed.
Gaza is Mordor.
The crowds protesting against Israel in the West obviously don’t get this. Why don’t they? Because the Western media create reality. And this is what’s on offer:
“We have to be able to rehumanize, to be able to see our humanity reflected in the other’s eyes. An Israeli mother should understand that a Palestinian mother cares about her children just as much as she does. And there’s just no way around that.”
That’s Queen Rania of Jordan—on CNN.
That’s interesting, no? CNN brings you Queen Rania, who claims that Israeli mothers are such awful racists they cannot recognize the humanity of Arab Palestinian mothers. She claims that Palestinian mothers are no different from Israeli mothers and care just as much about their children. “And there’s just no way around that,” she insists.
Westerners will nod their heads: of course! All mothers are the same. They’re mothers! What’s more universal than motherhood?
What these Westerners don’t see, because CNN makes the editorial choice not to show them, is an Arab Palestinian mother on Arab TV gushing and beaming with joy as she explains a most “beautiful” aspect of Arab Palestinian culture:
“Why do [the Arab Palestinians] give birth to so many boys and girls? I heard a beautiful answer to this question: We give birth to so many so that we can push them to death, to martyrdom.”
(Click here to watch both snippets.)
This Palestinian mother who wants to push her children to death has internalized what Hamas bosses such as Fathi Hammad, member of the Hamas Political Bureau, tell Arabs in Gaza:
“For the Palestinian people death has become an industry, at which women excel and so do all the people on this land. The elderly excel, the jihad fighters excel, and the children excel. Accordingly [Palestinians] created a human shield of women, children, the elderly, and the Jihad fighters against the Zionist bombing machine, as if they were saying to the enemy: ‘We desire death as you desire life.’ ”
He is not kidding. The Hamas bosses indeed do want the Arab Palestinians to die. Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas mastermind of the October 7th attack, has exchanged messages with others in the Hamas structure that make abundantly clear that his entire strategy is to get giant numbers of Arab Palestinians killed.
Mordor.
How many Arabs in Gaza agree with this madness? I don’t know whether Palestinian polls can be trusted, but if they can, then support for Hamas is as high as 90%.
But why have Arab civilians in Gaza become suicidal? Why do they agree that Hamas terrorists should sacrifice them in order to murder Israeli civilians? How can this be?
It’s the consequence of a heavy program of indoctrination that is very well documented and that begins early, when Arab Palestinians are still little kids. The terrorists have even created children’s TV shows to teach hatred of Jews and the cosmic significance of killing them all.
These civilizations are ethical opposites. As Fathi Hammad clearly says: “We desire death as you desire life.”
There is no question which side we should be on: TEAM LIFE. Lechayim!
Afterword: the Israeli responsibility for this conflict
I wanted to end my piece there. But then you would have gotten the impression that I assign no responsibility to the Israelis for this conflict. I must therefore close by dispelling that impression.
PLO/Fatah were defeated in 1982 when Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin invaded Lebanon, destroying their bases there, and chasing the remnant to their new refuge in Tunis. They were finished. But later, Israeli bosses decided to participate in the Oslo ‘Peace’ Process, which US bosses organized to revive PLO/Fatah. And so, Israeli bosses let the PLO/Fatah terrorists into the Jewish State—to govern the Arab Palestinians.
Since then, PLO/Fatah has done nothing but oppress those Arab Palestinians and turn them into the most dangerous antisemites.
And PLO/Fatah gave Gaza to Hamas, and Hamas also oppresses the Arab Palestinians and turns them into the most dangerous antisemites.
Israeli bosses brought PLO/Fatah into Israel with the support of about half of the Israeli population. There is no question, therefore, that Israeli bosses and citizens bear responsibility for what has happened to the Arab Palestinians. And they have accrued a moral debt to them.
To discharge that moral debt, I have argued, the Israelis must save the Arab Palestinians. That means defeating utterly the terrorist organizations, all of them, including PLO/Fatah. And thereafter they must protect the Arab Palestinians from harm, which requires that these terrorists may not come back to govern them.
The true pro Palestinian position, therefore, is full support for Israel in this war.
I made a careful presentation of these arguments, backed by historical documentation, at the UCSD Rady School of Business in March of 2024. I invite you to consider them:
P.S. I watched the video and I’m in awe. Your presentation and the care taken are a rarity, as was the seriousness with which you addressed audience comments and questions. Will be sharing. Also, I am just a little younger than you, but when I was growing up I recall people debating issues with civility, particularly philosophical debates, all the parameters you laid out in the beginning for those that either never have experienced meaningful and civil debate/disagreement or for all who have forgotten what it is like. Thank you for underscoring the importance of that as well.
Another brilliant piece which forces us to face hard truths. I’m still reeling from the story of the kid being used as bait and blown up. Your series on hirhome about Israeli leaders is must-read material, I have returned to it often and am looking forward to watching the video posted with this piece.