"We just did what we had to do.”

The People of Israel are Soldiering On.

(The following is a guest post by my old friend Fred Litwin, who is also a dear friend of the Real Story newsletter. It speaks perfectly for itself, so I’ll get out of the way here and let Fred tell his story. No paywall today.)

You’re Coming Here Now?

Back in 2013, when I arrived in Israel for the first visit in twenty years, the passport control officer gave me shit. “Why haven’t you been back before? What’s taken you so long?” She was clearly annoyed, and I fumbled for an answer. She allowed me through but left me with a warning. “Next time, don’t wait so long.”

When I arrived last week for a five-day-trip, I was greeted with a different question. “You’re coming here now?”

I knew that I really had to be in Israel now, even though when the opportunity first came up I wasn’t entirely sure whether I should go. It would be expensive. Airfares were through the roof. There were no direct ways to get there.

But when I read the notice from Adina Lewittes, the interim Rabbi at Ottawa synagogue Kehillat Beth Israel, that she was putting together a trip, I knew I really had to be in Israel. Eighteen of us – from New York, Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa -- made the trip. We met up in a nice hotel in Jaffa, and it was immediately obvious that things in Israel weren’t normal.

The restaurant we’d reserved for our opening dinner was closed and we had to find another place to eat. Because so many Israelis have been called into the reserves, many businesses can’t always open. Our restaurant just didn’t have the staff that day.

Death and Destruction

Our first day began at the Royal Beach Hotel in Tel Aviv where we met Ronen Avisrul, an October 7 th survivor from Moshav Nativ Ha’asarah, just north of the Gaza border. A moshav is like a kibbutz, except not so communal. Nativ Ha’asarah is an agricultural moshav that was established in the Sinai Peninsula in 1973, but the community moved to its current location after the 1978 Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement.

Before the devastating surprise terror attacks that Hamas carried out across Southern Israel last October 7, about 900 people lived in Nativ Ha’asarah. The 35 Hamas intruders who attacked the moshav that day killed 21 of its people. Only about a third of the community’s families have moved back. The rest are still living in hotel rooms far from Nativ Ha’asarah.

A display at the Royal Beach Hotel, depicting the dead of Moshav Nativ Ha’asarah.

On the day of the attacks, Ronen was lucky. He woke up early to take some photographs of the sunrise. He found that the gates of the moshav were not working (the terrorists had destroyed the transmission tower supplying electricity to the border areas). Then he heard sirens.

He knew that something was amiss, and hurried to a shelter. While peeking out for a few seconds, he managed to take a photograph of a Hamas terrorist paragliding directly above the moshav.

Eventually, Ronen fled to a safe house and sat there for about twelve hours with a friend, both of them texting relatives and friends and as they heard the horrible news. They protected each other by withholding information.

While Ronen’s family survived, they were not spared the psychological pain. One of Ronen’s daughters was in a catatonic state for about a month. Another daughter suffered from panic attacks. It’s not conducive to mental health to have children attending funeral after funeral.

Shabbat and Simchat Torah - which fell on October 7 last year at the conclusion of Sukkot, the day of the Hamas pogrom - will always resonate with Ronen. It’s in the week after Simchat Torah that the annual cycle of Torah readings begins anew. That was when Ronen decided that he, too, could begin again.

On the farms

On our second day, we visited Moshav Sde Nizan, where we worked in the fields of a farmer who had lost his son Dudu at the Nova Music Festival.

We helped plant zucchini. Believe me, this is difficult work. You have to distribute the buds along the rows of the field, and then you have to plant them. There’s a paucity of workers everywhere right now. Most of the southern moshavs and kibbutzim are empty, or close to it, although some workers do commute to work in the fields.

The next day we picked oranges on Moshav Shuva. Only two foreign workers were there, and there was an awful lot of oranges to be harvested.

On our last day we met with Jacqui and Yaron Vital, the parents of Adi Kaploun. She was killed at Kibbutz Holit, shot to death in front of her two sons, four-year-old Negev and the baby, Eshel, who was not yet five months old. Before being murdered, Adi convinced her killers to take the children to her neighbour’s house.

Negev had been shot in the leg. His brother had difficulty breathing. The terrorists ending up using the neighbour and the two children as shields as they killed their way through the kibbutz. The three were taken to the Gaza border but, for some reason, were released.

Jacqui told the story of her daughter and son-in-law. They had worked so hard to become farmers, and now the son-in-law cannot go back to the kibbutz. So much had been destroyed there. Nowadays he spends his time looking for ways to return with his children to the farming life.

As we were leaving, Jacqui told us that another group was coming to hear her story. That’s her life now – telling as many people as she can about what happened to her family.

At the festival site

The bloodiest attack of October 7 occurred near Kibbutz Re'im in the Western Negev, at the Supernova Music Festival. Three hundred and sixty-four people were brutally murdered there, and another 40 people were taken hostage.

There is a makeshift memorial at the festival site for the young people who were killed there or kidnapped, and there is a section containg the graves of some of the dead. As I walked through the tributes I couldn’t help but notice just how young and beautiful these people were. It was heartbreaking.

These people gathered for music. Now they’re gathered in graves

It won’t be long before the tributes at the festival site are turned into a museum, and Israel will have yet another permanent exhibit to murder. How long will Israel have to keep building such memorials?

At Mount Herzl

On our last day we visited Jerusalem’s Mount Herzl, Israel’s national cemetery and a place of commemoration for the country’s fallen soldiers. There is, of course, a new section for the dead from October 7 and the mobilization of troops into Gaza. How big a mountain does Israel need for its fallen?

We visited the graves of soldiers who had just been killed. We comforted the mourners who were there, or at least we tried to. At the grave of a soldier killed by a booby-trap in a Gaza hiding place, two of his comrades were crying. Their friend was a commander who had just taken the place of a soldier who lacked the proper training.

They said that despite their grief, their friend’s death gave them the courage to carry on.

Unity and Hope

The influx of so many additional reservists into the Israeli military means that equipment like helmets, underwear and gloves are in short supply. Fortunately, many Israelis have banded together in various ways to help.

One of countless initiatives is Soldiers Save Lives (SOS), launched by five men to help collect needed gear after their friend David Newman was murdered at the Supernova festival.

So far, SOS has supplied more than 10,000 pairs of boots, more than 1,000 bullet-proof vests, at least 20,000 pairs of tactical eyeglasses, thousands of toiletry kits, more than 1,000 hydration packs and 20 drones. SOS works closely with the Israeli Defence Forces DF to ensure that everything it sources meets proper specifications.

The Trabelsi brothers

Down south at an impromptu oasis, a project called Shuva Ahim (return of brothers) has been set up by three brothers, Kobi, Eliran and Dror Trabelsi, to provide soldiers with free hot meals, coffee, and sundry supplies like socks, underwear, winter clothes, tents and sleeping bags.

A break from battle, at Shuva Ahim.

Located next to an intersection the IDF uses to fly the wounded to hospitals, the oasis now has a massage station, a small stage for people to perform as they like with a collection of guitars and other instruments, and a place wher soldiers can rest for a coffee or a meal.

Volunteers at the oasis come from all over the country. “This is Am Yisrael, the Jewish people,” Eliran Trabelsi told us. “We just did what we had to do.”

Hostage Square

Kikar Hachatufim (Hostage Square) is what has become of the plaza just outside the Museum of Art on HaMelech Boulevard in Tel Aviv. It’s where the friends and family of the hostages have set up displays and booths to tell the hostages’ stories, and to pressure the Israeli government to focus on bringing the hostages home.

At the centre of the square is a long Shabbat dinner table, with empty seats, each representing a hostage. When I was there, a lovely group of teenagers was singing Israeli folk songs. In a memorial tent, another group of young were singing Hatikvah, Israel’s national anthem.

A clock on an adjacent hospital displays the length of time the hostages have been in captivity.

Waiting. Waiting. Waiting.

“Let me tell you, we want to hug you.”

At the IDF base at Tze’elim, at a barbeque dinner for a battalion of reserve soldiers, we handed out gloves, hats, warm socks and letters that kids from the Jewish school in Ottawa had written them.

Some of the soldiers there had served in Gaza. Others were doing duty repairing tanks, and others still were communications specialists. They came from all walks of life.

A soldier at the Tze’elim IDF base reads a letter from an Ottawa schoolchild.

One officer I spoke with wrote software for a living. Now he commanded men in battle. One soldier was with his fiancé in Brazil on October 7, and it wasn’t easy getting back to Israel. All flights had been cancelled. But he made it.

The camaraderie was heartwarming. You could see these guys liked each other, and towards the end of the evening, as we were preparing to leave, a soldier named Ochad hopped onto our bus and talked to us for a few minutes. “You all want to hug soldiers,” he said. “Let me tell you, we want to hug you.”

Ochad told is a story about his grandfather, a man who had been born in Libya and was an Israeli soldier during the War of Independence. It was Ochad’s grandfather who raised the famous “Ink Flag” at Eilat in the final operation of the war, in March, 1949.

Two Israeli brigades descended on Umm Rashrash on the Red Sea, taking the police station there without having to fire a shot. The operation secured the Negev Desert, which had been allotted to Israel in the United Nations’ partition plan that the Arab states so bitterly opposed. With Umm Rashrash in Israeli hands, the war was over, but the soldiers had no flag to raise. So one of the soldiers made a flag by pouring ink onto a white sheet. That was the flag that was raised by Ochad’s grandfather.

All these years later, the soldiers at Tze’elim were well contented with the food at the barbeque. But they seem more nourished by knowing how much they were appreciated.

There’s nothing quite like solidarity to lift an Israeli’s spirits.

The normalization of fear and war

A few days after we’d met Ronen Avisrul from Nativ Ha’asarah, we visited his moshav and spoke with soldiers who had responded to the massacre there and helped fight off the terrorists. One of the soldiers, a specially-trained sniper, said a something unusual about the Iron Dome system that has provided Israelis with such an effective shield for so many years.

Iron Dome’s rocket-intercepting missiles and the network of shelters adjacent to all the bus stations have had the unintended effect of creating “safe” space that normalizes the constant threat of Hamas terror. The soldier said he’d dismantle the whole thing. I don’t think he meant this literally. But his point, that terror should not be normalized, was a good one.

More than 16,000 rockets have been fired into Israel from Gaza since 2004. What other country would put up with such a thing?

As for me, what I fear is a short-term ceasefire and the release of some of the hostages in return for releasing terrorist prisoners. While I am writing this there is talk of a six-week pause, with Hamas releasing about 35 captives, which means Hamas would be allowed to continue its imprisonment of roughly 100 hostages in the meantime.

How is that acceptable? Aren’t the western powers supposed to be exerting maximum pressure on Iran and Qatar for the release of all the hostages?

On my last day in Israel, I wandered around Jaffa looking for a non-touristy shawarma restaurant. I found a small place, and started chatting with the man in front of me in the line. It turned out he’d served with the IDF in Lebanon many years ago.

His wife and his daughter had known people who had been murdered at the Supernova festival. Usually, he told me, these wars are over quickly, and Israel prevails. But everything seemed different this time, he said. Would Israel come out on top again?

“Who knows?” he said.

Controversially, Ultra-Orthodox Jews don’t ordinarily serve in the miltary, but about 540 volunteered for the IDF in the early days of the current war. Those numbers have since stalled. There are increasing calls for the Ultra-Orthox to be conscripted, like all Israeili Jews. That idea is gaining traction even from right-wing Israeli politicians.

Thousands of Israelis remain internally displaced, and the economy is limping badly, having withered 19.4% in the fourth quarter of 2023 alone. Moody’s recently lowered Israel’s credit rating. The government is barely functioning, and political arsonists like Itamar Ben-Gvir continually add to the tension.

The investigation into the failure of the IDF and Israel’s political leadership to protect Israelis from Hamas barbarism has opened up a wide breach of trust between Israelis and the government, Meanwhile, in the north, Hezbollah is waiting to pounce, with more than 150,000 rockets aimed at Israel from within Lebanon’s borders.

Few nations could face these challenges. What makes this all the more difficult is that Israel has to constantly fight world public opinion, an almost impossible task.

And who is there to help Israel?

Being alone is one thing, but being alone while suffering from a kind of nation-wide post-traumatic distress is another.

While I was in Israel, it seemed like all israelis wanted to talk.

But is anybody out there listening?