(Or, it has been three days since Yom Hazikaron, and I am still seething).

In the space of one short summer, Yom Hazikaron went from being solemn to sacred, for me. In 1982, I experienced my first Yom Hazikaron in Israel, after making Aliyah on my fledgling kibbutz, Tuval. I had been in Israel barely two months. Standing at the ceremony we held on the freshly planted lawn by our dining room, I remember being more concerned with looking suitably solemn than being able to really immerse myself in the spirit of the event.

That didn’t last long. Because, barely a month later, an army bus arrived on the kibbutz and took all the Israeli men away, as the war in Lebanon began. They called it “Mivtza Shlom HaGalil” (Operation Peace for the Galilee). I never saw two of those young men again. They never came back.

Motti Dahan, a young man with a scraggly beard and a shy smile, who was a member of the Nahal Garin to our kibbutz, whom I first met when I picked him up at the bus station in Karmiel to take up to the kibbutz, was killed on the first day of fighting. He was the first Israeli I knew, albeit fleetingly, who was killed in a war. We had not even managed to digest the news of his death, when a fellow member of his Garin, Hana Mizrahi, was killed in a car accident on the way back from Motti’s funeral. The kibbutz, barely a year old, was devastated.

I got to know Ilan Alexandrovitch personally. He was a member of the first Nahal Garin to Tuval. He organized our Aliyah group’s trip to Sinai during our first month in Israel. During that week, he taught me how to appreciate “botz,” the strong black coffee, double-boiled over an open flame. When the desert wind blew our tent into the sea at Dahab, I toiled by his side, knee-deep in the waves, fighting to salvage it. He had a strong and charismatic personality; it took little effort to like him.

Ilan was killed a month after Motti, when a hand grenade exploded in his APC, while he was cleaning it out, after leaving Lebanon. Ilan’s death was the first time I felt that gaping hole inside, that sudden lack of presence when someone you know leaves you behind, when he is taken so suddenly and violently. It’s a feeling that so many Israelis know all too well.

When my brother died by suicide, I became acquainted with the sense of loss that you feel when someone dear to you is wrenched from your life. But that grief is a private grief. When a soldier you know personally is killed, the sense of loss creates a sense of kinship with the national Israeli experience, as if it gives you the “credentials” to participate in the mourning on Yom Hazikaron, without it feeling vicarious.

And, just like that, I, a newcomer, not even four months in Israel, was cruelly inducted into the ethos that suffuses Yom Hazikaron.

Anyone who was in infantry and has done reserve duty down south in the summer knows about the oppressive desert heat. They know about long and arduous days, training in the sun, when you sweat so much that you pray for a breeze to cool your body through the sopping shirt of your uniform, which has leeched to your back.

They also know about savoring the cool nights by a bonfire, relaxing with your comrades. A respite well deserved. It was during these nights that I became buddies with Rami, Spiegler, Joe, Marius and Bitton, on Ze’elim training base in a preparation week for war games which were supposed to be held for a week. July 1990. We went home on furlough on Friday, to be back again on Sunday for the exercise. When we met again on the Sunday, it was with the familiar camaraderie of soldiers having gone through hardship together.

Little did I know that that Thursday night would be the last night around the bonfire with them, with Rami playing guitar and jokingly joshing Joe, singing “Hey Joe, where you going to with that gun in your hand,” when he got up to go to the bathroom and took his weapon with him. Three hours later,  in the confusion and pressure of the exercise, the artillery officer got confused with the code word for the target, and an artillery shell landed on the hill we had just taken in the exercise, landing 100 meters from me as I lay on my belly in defense mode, but landing right on top of Rami, Joe, Spiegler, Marius and Bitton. Had I been upright, I’d have been a goner.

What can I say? Spending two days traversing the length and breadth of the country to attend five funerals, and at each one, harboring the thought that it could have been mine, and I was looking on, surreally feeling that I was having an out-of-body experience, leaves one … well … shell shocked.

This experience added a deeply personal and humbling dimension to Yom Hazikaron. For me, it underlines the sanctity of sacrifice that every single soldier reluctantly made in service of the defense of our country. Each one, a precious jewel embedded in the clothing we collectively wear, as a nation. It is a sacred day – just one day – when we are asked to be selfless, and to focus all our thoughts on our fallen, to remember them and what they have given so that we can live our lives with confidence and security.

Instead of allowing us to focus our thoughts on them and to contemplate the unfathomable price our fathers, sons, daughters, friends and comrades – and their families – paid for us to be able to celebrate our independence 24 hours later, with the sensitivity of a demolition worker slewing a wrecking ball, Netanyahu chose to use them – all 25,644 of them – as a backdrop to make it about himself, and to harangue us in the most tone deaf-diatribe ever witnessed on a Yom Zikaron, about how his decisions and acts of “heroic leadership” have saved us from an impending holocaust at the hands of Iran and Hezbollah.

He came across like a man desperately seeking to redeem himself, to compensate for his dereliction (which at the same time he vehemently denies), which resulted in the massacre of October 7, even while he writhes like a snake trying to shed its skin, of responsibility for the worst security failure in our short history.

Is it not possible, even for Bibi, for there to be ONE DAY in the year that he would cringe at the indecency of making it about him? Not one?

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)