Bari Weiss: The Holiday from History Is Over A free society is only as strong as the citizens willing to defend it. Reflections and videos from my time on the ground in Israel.
EXCERPT:
Like everyone paying close attention to this war, I am thinking about the future or death of the two-state solution. I am thinking about Hezbollah in the north and when that front might explode. I am thinking about the impossibility of a nuclear Iran. I am thinking about the Red Sea and Rafah and the young men setting out to those places. I am thinking about the innocents killed in Gaza. I am thinking about the women and children trapped there by terrorist leaders and the kidnapped Israelis still held there—all of them hostages.
But the questions that echo inside me since I returned home—flying from a country living inside history to a country where many people believe we are still outside of it, immune to it—are more basic ones.
Questions like: What would I do? What would the people I know do if we were thrust into a near-death experience? If we had to fight for homes and our families, and the homes and families of our fellow citizens? The kind of seriousness I saw in ordinary Israelis—where does it come from? Does courage emerge spontaneously out of necessity? Or is there a quiet wellspring inside some people or some cultures waiting to be tapped? Do we have that here in America? Would we answer the call if it came? Or would we be like the Americans in this recent poll who admitted that they would flee rather than fight?
Those are questions whose relevance grows more urgent by the day for those of us living in the free world.
I asked Haviv Gur if he thinks that a similar waking-up moment will come for America and Americans.
“When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, there was a long period of time when there was nothing in the Pacific that could have stopped a Japanese landing in California. And that sense of vulnerability created what Americans still today think of as the greatest generation,” Gur said. “Everyone should feel safe all the time. But crisis is a powerful and profound and often extraordinarily positive influence on our lives.”
Today we feel so far from the truths that reality forced on our greatest generation. So many have lost sight of the fact that there are some things worth fighting for if they are not to perish from the earth.
But as Gur put it: “The basic Israeli message is we are still human. We’re still living in a human world. We are still living in history. Be ready.”
They are ordinary Israelis like Inbar Lieberman. Lieberman is a 25-year-old woman who is the security coordinator of Kibbutz Nir Am. She killed five terrorists by herself on October 7. The rest of her team repelled an additional 20 over the course of four hours. “I’m not a hero,” she says. “I wasn’t there by myself.”
Ordinary Israelis like my friend Jessica’s father-in-law, Noam Tibon, a 62-year-old grandfather who got in a jeep with his pistol and his wife, Gali. He drove south from Tel Aviv and shot his way through terrorists to liberate his son and granddaughters, who were hiding in their safe room in Kibbutz Nahal Oz from hundreds of Hamas terrorists who were swarming the kibbutz.
Or like Yair Golan, another 61-year-old retired general—his career cut short because of his leftist views—who drove alone through the fields near the Gaza Strip and followed pins dropped by panicked young people hiding in the bushes at the Nova music festival to save them.
Or like the special forces reservist who had just returned from vacation outside Israel. Then he got the call. “I didn’t understand by any means the scale of what we were about to get into. We’re on our way out and the commander says, all right, guys, load your weapons. We’re about to get into a firefight. And I was like, oh, shit, I did not see my Saturday going this way.” He went on: “There was no centralized command. No one was telling us what to do. We were just doing our job and going from one place to the other and doing our best.”
Or like Masad Armilat, the 23-year-old Arab Israeli I bumped into at a gas station where we stopped to buy a coffee near the killing fields of the music festival. On that day Armilat, who typically works in the storeroom, saved scores of wounded people. Meantime, his father “left his house and helped close all the paths into Ofakim, where the terrorists would have entered.”
Or like Rachel Goldberg Polin, who told me more than 100 days after her only son, Hersh, had his arm blown off and was taken into Gaza—she didn’t know if he was alive or dead: “I still think we have so many blessings.” She invoked Psalm 23—the poem King David wrote about his cup overflowing. “Right now it overflows with tears,” she said, “but I know it will overflow with joy again.”
Or like Arab Israeli news broadcaster, Lucy Aharish, who recalled watching that morning as her husband, Fauda actor Tsahi Halevi, having aged out of the reserves, nevertheless put on his old uniform and walked out the door. She thought through a plan she never imagined she would need: “If the terrorists come into this building, should I hide my son Adam in the washing machine? Or in the closet?”
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