A coping mechanism against evil
Alongside its volunteer army, Israel has become an army of volunteers
This is an expanded version of my column today in The Times of London (£).
Sunday morning saw me volunteering at an Israeli army base to help make thousands of sandwiches for the country's troops, now fighting in the war that's been raging since the Hamas pogrom.
These troops aren’t a professional fighting force but a conscript army. Until eleven days ago, they were going about their daily lives as shopkeepers, lawyers doctors, high-tech nerds, university students. Then the unthinkable happened.
For Israelis, this war is not some distant conflict. Given Israel’s tiny size, the front is only a reasonably short drive away from anywhere. Almost everyone you meet is personally touched by this emergency. One acquaintance has five sons and a son-in law now at the front. Another said, with his voice trembling, that one grandson was wounded and another was still on the front lines.
Stories abound testifying to extraordinary acts of raw courage and heroism, to unthinkable suffering and grief, to a love of the Jewish people and a summons to a historic destiny and obligation that has tapped deep into the soul.
The call-up has produced an enormous response rate of some 150 per cent, with Israelis considered too old for the reserves joining up nevertheless. They have flown in from all over the world to defend their homeland. There are so many that the IDF (Israel Defence Forces) hasn’t got enough equipment for them all.
So the volunteer war kitchens have gone into action around the country. At mine, we tried (with varying degrees of success) to produce an efficient production line. Some of us sliced pita and rolls; others stuffed these with falafel or sausage, tahini and pickles; others stuffed these into paper bags; still others packed the bags into containers to be driven by yet more volunteers to the front lines.
The scale of the volunteer effort here is astounding. With Israeli troops comprising a volunteer army, the whole country has effectively become an army of volunteers.
The need is intense. At a stroke, the Hamas massacre shattered families and communities. Babies were abandoned when their parents were slaughtered; homes and entire communities were burned down; survivors whose relatives had been butchered or kidnapped in front of them were traumatised.
As soon as the scale of this pogrom became known, individuals sprang into action. They opened up their homes to survivors, matched those burnt out or evacuated from their homes with empty holiday apartments, transported evacuees to temporary accommodation, looked after the children.
Now hundreds of volunteer groups are providing welfare, equipment and other necessities to the victims of the war and their families. Volunteers have transported hundreds of people to hospital.
Teams are counselling children and teenagers displaced from their homes. Others are providing trauma support to those from the army and police who have had to deal with the results of unspeakable atrocities.
Ultra-orthodox boys studying in religious institutions or yeshivas have been volunteering as gravediggers because there are now so many graves to be dug.
In a society that remains collectively traumatised by the Holocaust, tears are never far from the surface. The enormous volunteer effort, however, is an astonishing demonstration of national spirit which is itself proving a crucial source of strength.
Volunteering is a way of helping stave off grief and depression arising from the profound trauma of the massacre. It also helps numb the dread of what lies ahead, both from the possibility of infinitely more deadly missile attacks from Lebanon and the all-too likely toll among the troops about to go into Gaza.
The horror of what happened in the Palestinian pogrom continues to deepen. The Israeli death toll has now risen to 1400. Bodies are still being recovered, including the charred remains of those burned in their homes. Horrific details of victims having been tortured and their bodies desecrated are slowly coming to light.
The number of hostages has risen to at least 199. Rocket attacks against civilian communities continue, including volleys from southern Lebanon where at least six Israelis have now been killed. Almost 300 Israeli soldiers have also been killed so far. In British terms, that’s equivalent to 2100 military casualties. Israelis are attending funeral after funeral.
The death toll among the conscripts is likely to increase much further once the IDF launch their planned ground invasion of Gaza, with the soldiers having to fight house by house to root out Hamas forces and having to engage with them in Gaza’s infernal underground network of booby-trapped tunnels.
In Israel, the pain of losing yet more of the flower of its youth simply because a depraved enemy wants to murder Jews and annihilate their homeland threatens to pile further agony upon trauma.
Yet in Britain and Europe, this suffering is likely to be waved aside. Instead Israel will find itself blamed for civilian deaths in Gaza, which it always tries to minimise but will ultimately be powerless to avoid.
The former Mossad chief, Yossi Cohen, says that not just Hamas but also regular Gazan civilians were involved in the pogrom. Reports suggest that the Hamas attackers were followed by waves of ordinary Palestinians who looted the communities and also took their own hostages.
Nevertheless, there will unfortunately be genuine civilian Gazan deaths. In war, there always are; it’s unavoidable. However, as in previous wars Hamas is intent on causing the death of as many Gazans as possible in order to produce a western outcry that forces Israel to retreat.
That’s why it has sited its missiles around and below apartment blocks, schools and hospitals; that’s why it has set up roadblocks to prevent civilians from fleeing to Gaza’s south as Israel has warned them to do for their own safety.
At present, both Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer are staunchly supporting Israel’s right to defend itself.
Yet at the weekend, thousands of people in Britain demonstrated their support for those who had decapitated Jewish babies, raped women and burned Israelis alive.
Worse still, the media is now dominated by reports of Gazan civilians being killed in the war (with no attempt to disaggregate civilians from terrorists being killed), with increasing claims that Israel is causing a humanitarian catastrophe — condemnation which is likely to get much worse if the Gaza toll rises.
Such a refusal to acknowledge what needs to be done to eradicate a very great evil, labelling as evil instead the attempt to eradicate it, displays shocking moral degeneracy and intolerable indifference once again to Jewish victimisation. The sense of abandonment that creates is very hard for Jews both inside and outside Israel to take.
At my volunteer war kitchen on Sunday, a principal element among the organisers was a group of Christians from a disaster relief organisation based in Texas. They had come to help the Jewish people in their hour of need.
Faced with this simple human decency, among people who really do understand the difference between good and evil and whose open hearts had brought them thousands of miles to help, the tears flowed again.
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