Nobody is digging graves in the parks this time |
Before the Six-Day War, Israelis dug mass graves in Tel Aviv’s public parks.
That detail doesn’t make it into our consciousness often enough. But it’s documented. In the weeks before June 1967, as Egypt massed its forces and Arab leaders openly declared their intention to annihilate the Jewish state, Israeli authorities quietly prepared mass temporary burial sites in city parks for the tens of thousands of casualties they expected. Jonathan Sarna, then twelve years old in an American Jewish home, remembers watching it on television. A rabbi in the Bronx told his congregation: “If they wipe out Israel, there’s going to be a sign up: The shul is closed.” Yossi Klein Halevi, then a teenager in New York watching the broadcasts alongside his Holocaust-survivor father, later wrote that both of them shared the same dread: that some version of the Holocaust was about to reoccur. “That feeling,” he wrote, “was repeated across the Jewish world, from Moscow to Tel Aviv.”
Six years later, on the afternoon of Yom Kippur 1973, Egypt and Syria launched their surprise assault. Within twenty-four hours, Moshe Dayan told his senior commanders: “This is the end of the Third Temple.” He sought authorization to arm nuclear weapons. More than 2,600 Israeli soldiers were killed in three weeks of fighting. The country emerged victorious, but the margin had been razor-thin, and everyone knew it.
That was the zeitgeist in which Israel was built in its founding decades. A world where Jewish survival could not be assumed or taken for granted. The question “will Israel still exist?” was something real people asked about a real place they loved.
I’ve been thinking about that world a lot lately.
The Silence That Speaks
Something struck me when Iran’s retaliatory strikes began hitting Israel on February 28th. My phone was mostly still. Very few people from abroad checked in to ask if we were okay. Certainly felt like I received fewer messages than during the 12 Day War in June 2025.
I’ve sat with that – and so have many of my Israeli friends and family. My read is that people abroad sense, on the whole correctly, that Israel’s defensive capabilities have transformed what conflict looks like here. The Arrow system, David’s Sling, and Iron Dome are intercepting wave after wave of Iranian ballistic missiles and drones. Iranian attack waves peaked in the opening days of the war and have since dropped by more than 90 percent, attributed to a combination of Israel’s interception efforts and the systematic destruction of Iranian launch infrastructure. The architecture protecting us was decades in the making, built by Israeli engineers who understood that Jewish survival in this neighborhood requires invention, courage – and perhaps a sense of humor by making Israelis gather underground with their neighbors for hours at a time and seeing what comes of it.
And yet. Israelis have been murdered.
Dimona. Arad. Tel Aviv. Misgav Am. All have been hit. There was the apocalyptic hit on March 1st when an Iranian ballistic missile struck a synagogue in Beit Shemesh, people torn to shreds sheltering in the one place they thought they’d be safe. There is immense damage. People in the North of the country are spending hours at a time in shelters, peppered by Hezbollah fire. Families have spent days moving between bomb shelters and reinforced........