One Year Out: A Personal Look at Israel’s War

As we mark the first Hebrew calendar anniversary of the Simchat Torah massacre, I try to take my usual analytic look at what this past year has meant for Israel, the Middle East, America, and the world. I cannot. My entire career, from IDF intelligence to Capitol Hill, has revolved around cold-hearted and cold-blooded analysis of problems and solutions. When it comes to the events of this past year, I find that my own take is almost entirely introspective, and deeply enrouted in my own experiences as a three-time immigrant.

As a small child in Israel, I had just barely begun to develop a sense of national consciousness. Throughout the Israeli mid-90’s I had grown accustomed to hearing “keywords”, such as Netanyahu, Clinton, Palestinians, Arafat and Intifada. These words, emanating every evening from my television screen, did not spark any reaction from me, as my awareness of every-day events was skewed at best. Living in central Tel Aviv, a remarkable number of suicide bombings had happened a mile or less from my home. Still, I was lucky enough not to witness any of them, much less lose a loved one. Being Israeli did not feel unique to me in any way, nor was I aware that my experience was profoundly different than that of children in most other modern countries.

On August 1^st, 2001, I landed in America for the first time. My father’s work had our family relocated abroad for five years, and we found ourselves setting up shop in Dallas, Texas. At eight years old, this was my very first time outside of Israel. It was my first taste of “foreignness”, a rude awakening to the fact that the world is full of very different-looking people, and that the Hebrew-speaking world, which had been all I’d known, was just a drop in the ocean. The national consciousness I’d just started to grasp at, it seemed, could be set aside and forgotten for the next half-decade. If only the horrors of September 11th hadn’t unfolded a mere 40 days after my move, perhaps that would’ve been the case.

The post-9/11 years had engulfed my American childhood experience, perhaps the most formative years of my adolescence. Ironically, my own sense of Israeli national identity was formed during these years abroad. It was in The United States, a country that was I knew would only be a temporary home, where I had grown to admire concepts of national belonging, patriotism, and the need to make individual and collective sacrifices for one’s home and freedom. I was particularly impressed with the idea of American exceptionalism, and the notion of making no compromises when it comes to matters of national security and the lives of fellow countrymen, even when that means unapologetically exerting untold military force halfway across the world. That was the standard to which I had become accustomed, and it set me up very well for my second rude awakening.

On July 12^th, 2006, my American childhood chapter had ended, and my plane had touched back down in Israel. That very same morning, Hezbollah terrorists had infiltrated the country’s northern border, killing five soldiers and kidnapping the bodies of two of them. This attack sparked the 2^nd Lebanon war, which had dominated my first month back in my home country. A new set of keywords was entrenched into my vocabulary – Hezbollah, Nasrallah, 1701, UNIFIL.

My return to Israel amidst the 2^nd Lebanon war put the stark contrast between the American reality I had grown accustomed to and the Israeli reality I now had to cope with on full display. The war had come to an abrupt ceasefire through a United Nations resolution, seemingly without any of Israel’s goals or needs being met, and without any real consequences for Hezbollah. For the first time, I had seen how Israel’s right to self-defense and retaliation for attacks against it was not a working assumption for much of the world. In fact, Israel’s very right to exist was something that was at many times openly questioned, and sometimes outright denied. While these misfortunes had always been a part of Israel’s reality, as an Israeli whose national identity was shaped through an American filter, they struck me hard.

Over the next 14 years, I had dedicated my time in Israel to bring it ever closer to the American golden standard of an unwavering pursuit of national prosperity and growth, and an unapologetic commitment to the people’s security and well-being, backed by assertion of power and might whenever and wherever necessary. Seven years of military service, and academic degrees that would put me on track to a career in diplomacy – were a means for me to revive the sense of national vigor I had felt as a child in America, and import it into my adult life in Israel.

In December of 2020, at age 27, I had moved countries for the third time – now back to America. My career path had landed me a job at Israel’s Embassy in Washington, DC, and I found myself forging my own path in our nation’s capital city. 2020’s America was my third rude awakening, as I quickly found out that this was not the country I had left 14 years prior. Political polarization, social division and endless grappling with questions of race, gender and other issues that point to a national identity crisis. For the past few years, America has not been a place of clear national purpose, much less national vigor.

This realization posed a logical impasse for me: I could no longer find in America the same American standards and core values I had attempted to import into Israel. With neither country now living true to the same standards I held dear, were these ideas doomed to become a distant memory? Could I even be sure they were real to begin with? It is the events of this past year that provided me with an unequivocal answer.

Israel’s insistence on pursuing all objectives of this war to the end, and its defiance of growing calls from the international community to stand down, instill in me real hope for its future. From ignoring calls not to enter Rafah, where Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was recently found and eliminated, to the “beeper operation” in Lebanon, to the daring assassinations of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and the entire leadership of Hezbollah in Beirut – Israel has shown that it has learned what much of America had forgotten.

The unwavering commitment of Israel and its leadership to pursue true national security, and ensure that the horrors of last year’s Simchat Torah do not repeat themselves, reassure me that the values America had instilled in me at the age of eight still have a valid place in our world. Just as my national Israeli identity was shaped through my American childhood, my adult self now looks to Israel as a true example of values which I cherish as deeply American. This touches me on a level that cannot be matched by highest level of geopolitical analysis.