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Thursday, November 16. Zoom. From where I sit on my couch in Jerusalem, it looks like a hot day in the Negev. The palm trees outside the large square stand calm: no breeze. Today my daughter Priya finishes her training course in the Education Corps. While families usually attend this celebration, this year the base is closed to visitors due to the war. As two hundred or so soldiers march out, I catch the briefest glimpse of Priya. Seeing her among all those girls and boys, in army green, I think—she’s really in the army.
I’ve sent her back and forth to her base since August; I have washed the crisp new uniforms she wears on the street and the soft old ones she wears at the base. Who else wore this shirt and these pants before her, I always wonder, as I hang them in the sun to dry. What stories are in its wrinkles, or the small tears at the back of the neck? The worn elbows and frayed cuffs? Then I turn to wondering what stories her crisp uniform will absorb before she comes home at the end of her service and returns to wearing civilian clothes like the rest of us. When I hang the laundry, I pause in the sun, recognizing the universality in this country of what I am doing. But because I am an immigrant, I turn the uniform in my hands, still astonished by a child of mine in this vast machine whose defining purpose is physical defense and whose defining impression is force. As a professor of literature, virtually none of my colleagues in North America or Europe have children serving in the armed forces. My social media feed features posts accusing the IDF and the United States of a genocidal campaign against Gazans, while neglecting to mention Hamas at all. Scholars seem to be resolving what appear to me intractable moral dilemmas far more rapidly and summarily than any one of them would ever dare to read a poem.
On the same computer screen as I read those posts, I now see a livestream of the new recruits of the Education Corps. “An army builds a nation builds an army,” Priya’s very young commanders have told her. Repeatedly. It’s a cliché but when your child drafts practically right into a war, you have to ask which of the clichés bear truth. This is an army of all. Civilians or soldiers, it’s just a matter of what day or year it is, what you happen to be wearing. As October 7 proved, it doesn’t even always matter what you’re wearing, or whether you’re armed. So many ordinary people became nothing short of heroes when the need arose. In jeans and a T‑shirt, with no weapon but a piece of broken glass, Aner Shapira defended thirty young people like himself at a music festival and ultimately saved eight lives by throwing seven grenades out of a crowded shelter as terrorists threw them in. Survivors say he introduced himself and told them not to worry. He assumed command. Lots of Israelis drove their own cars into areas that had become war zones in order to rescue their families, including four Bedouin family members from Rahat and a former IDF general and his wife from Tel Aviv. Both first rescued many who were not their family members, returning multiple times into unspeakable danger. What did unspeakable danger look like on October 7? Like the hail of missiles, endless grenades, fires, thousands of masked terrorists (some dressed to look like the IDF), swarming the main roads, then combing the shelters and forests for escaping Israelis. Corpses lying everywhere. The former general was in street clothes. He was armed with a pistol. Those he set out to rescue were his son and grandchildren.
An army of the people also means that among the more than two hundred hostages in Gaza are young women just like my daughter, eighteen to twenty-one-year-old citizens who were not given a choice about serving their nation. In captivity, they are classified by Hamas as combatants in spite of the fact that they were not armed at the posts from which they were abducted after seeing their fellow female soldiers murdered. We will almost certainly wait a very long time for the freedom of these young women unless our army can rescue them in some miracle of strategy and action.
A matter of a few months is not only the difference between combatant and civilian, but also the official difference between child and adult, so that the seventeen-year-old Ofir Engel, with whom my sixteen-year-old son played basketball in Jerusalem, will still be eligible to return from Gaza among the women and children. The heartache of whether to send a child to first grade as the youngest of his class this year or the oldest of his class next year, now rewritten as the question of whether your basketball player is still “child” enough to be returned from Gaza, or “adult” enough to die there. We are not alone in such conditions; war and even everyday inequality and injustice make some people’s children somehow undeserving of the protection accorded other people’s children. It is worth remembering that “child” is a political category.
But on my laptop screen, the soldiers march into formation. Having heard Priya and her friends complain, I can’t help but notice how ill-fitting so many uniforms are. Which suggests to me how ill-fitting army service probably is to so many eighteen-year-olds who are drafted involuntarily. Yet, by and large, I have to say these soldiers look pretty happy. Zoom is better than in person for checking faces. These faces are young, unlined with worry, quick to animated expression and joy, even in a military march. As the camera pans the large group, beneath the berets, amidst all the identical clothing, I recognize a few of Priya’s friends who drafted with her. Their parents had brought them to Tel HaShomer, too, dropped them off in street clothes with big backpacks, as if they were headed to summer camp. They had greeted each other with big hugs and yells, as if they were headed to summer camp. Two hours later, I got a photo of Priya transformed. In uniform, arms around her friends, all of them in clunky boots and thick black socks, in late Israeli summer.
Three months into Priya’s service, as a mother, it seems to me that the IDF, at least in its non-combat units, is some social organism I may never understand: other and self, institution and club, strenuous discipline and strange fun, school and camp, sweat and style, to be gamed but also to be lived. “An army builds a nation builds an army”: Priya is just as likely to say this seriously as she is to say it cynically. And then seriously again.
Outside of Israel, the IDF is known for its might, and many associate it with sheer ruthlessness. Near total skepticism greets its claims to minimize civilian death and damage. I have learned most immediately from my Palestinian students how threatening the IDF uniform can be. I grew up in a world in which the image of a (male) soldier with a gun and a Bible, and a praying (male) soldier, was seen to be deeply moving. The Jewish army was imagined to be relentlessly moral. Perhaps in the 1970s and 1980s, this was still a post-Holocaust reverence. I don’t imagine a perfectly moral army; no army can occupy another people and remain who some of us want them to be. This is the fix the army and the nation find ourselves in, and we will not be able to get out of it until the occupation ends. But should the occupation end tomorrow, soldiers will probably still be sworn in at the Western Wall; Bibles and guns will go together. Not only do such images not move me anymore, they frighten me because they can underwrite a very wide range of actions, and a very wide range of values and attitudes. Religious force (which is what a gun and a Bible stand for) does not usually end with self-defense but enthusiastically exceeds it. And self-defense, too, tends to be far more extreme if you see the enemy in religious terms (and if they see themselves in religious terms, too).
Here is my problem, though. I may not have illusions about the morality of Israel’s occupation. But the army — unlike the government — cannot be the receptacle into which I pour all my anger and disbelief and cynicism because the army builds the nation builds the army.
I don’t know how to evaluate the army in macro because I know it mostly through the micro. Which is also an important form of knowledge. I know it now from this unfolding Zoom ceremony. I know it from the funerals I have attended in the last month in which the families and commanders and friends of fallen soldiers are themselves a revealing testimony to just who the fallen person was. I know it from the most recent and current Chiefs of Staff who may be personalities on TV and the radio but have also been, respectively, the brother-in-law of a dear friend, and an alum of my son’s storied Scouts chapter in Jerusalem. So that when men of this kind say they take all precautions to avoid collateral damage, I believe them. These are not men who tweet in the middle of the night and then erase their tweet. There are personal connections, and they do not strike me as liars, or unreliable, or anything less than extraordinarily serious and cognizant of their responsibility. Very little they say has given me cause to doubt their intentions. And public people here say what they mean: see, the government. If I worry about their leadership, it is a worry that equally powerful female leaders are still missing in the top echelons of this democracy’s military.
Meanwhile, the male and female reservists who are now fighting this war are people to whom I am connected through my university and synagogue. They are volunteers in political protest movements. They are doctors and teachers, journalists and tour guides. Lawyers, social workers, even some pacifists and anarchists who served in ways they could tolerate because their philosophy came up against other truths they acknowledged. And I know countless parents of the young soldiers in mandatory service. I know the way they raised their kids.
I know an army that reflects the world I know. I know there are other armies inside the same one that holds mine, because there are other worlds in Israel, too. I know this very, very well. Again, in the micro, soldiers wrote cynical and cruel messages to Gazans on rockets that they then fired into Gaza. It makes my stomach turn. That is the army, too. But I also know someone who wrote to the Chief of Staff to demand that he make that act a punishable offense. My friend thought it wasn’t “worthy of our army,” which may need to fire rockets but cannot do so as a bully takes pleasure (you could argue a rocket is a rocket, but perhaps not). The army suffers from racism and sexism, both of which end up devaluing and costing Israeli and non-Israeli, Jewish and non-Jewish, lives. This, too, is true. And the statements and programs of our current government, in the persons of prime minister, defense minister, and so many in the cabinet, make it much harder for the army to think about its defensive mission without broadly dehumanizing a full, various people. Here, too, “an army builds a nation builds an army,” in the worst way.
Yet this same army persists in training an Education Corps even while it wages the most critical war of a generation. The many girls and the few boys with whom Priya drafted all elected and were selected to serve as teachers or counselors within the military. Some will work with soldiers who didn’t finish high school with a diploma or who were at risk as teenagers and want to complete their education before they finish their military service. Some will teach soldiers who are recent immigrants from all over the world to Israel and don’t yet know Hebrew. Some will teach soldiers who are not legally Jewish and want to find out more about Jewish history, culture, and religion. Some will teach rehabilitative courses in military jail. All of them will assume responsibility for others approximately their own age or older in ways they never have before, wearing uniforms that I imagine growing softer and softer as their own edges get harder, tougher, more confident.
I watch now as the commanders begin to walk among the soldiers, affixing the ropes and pins. The camera moves slowly, capturing the relations among the soldiers, and between each one and their commander. Military order is released during this part of the ceremony and suddenly soldiers are hugging each other, waving to the camera, making hearts, calling out, “Hi Ima!,” with broad smiles while some turn away from the camera shyly. A happy, sweet disorder holds for a few minutes as the commanders move from soldier to soldier, but even over camera, I can feel something begin to shift. A subtle current in the air, a buzz that moves from body to body. The laughs and smiles yield to tears. First you see one soldier wiping her eyes, and then another, and then you see longer hugs, of comfort; one soldier is really weeping, and a commander leans in for a long hug and a whisper in the ear.
And suddenly this ceremony, with parents absent, strikes at me as a moment in history. These girls and boys drafted in August 2023. They are finishing their course in November. They will always be the soldiers who joined the army on the eve of October 7, the Black Shabbat. They will always be the soldiers who were returned to base two days after that Shabbat, to weeks of guard duty, knowing that guard duty had failed at neighboring bases, that soldiers and civilians had been murdered and abducted, and that for days, the army had engaged in bloody battles to regain control of Israeli territory.
That first week back at the base, Priya told me, was a long series of soldiers walking with cell phones through the base, sobbing out loud. An unimaginable amount of bad news gotten almost exclusively by phone call or, at slightly broader circles, on social media. A base sealed from all outsiders. More than two and a half weeks without a break to come home, except for funerals. It was that week that Priya let me know that one of the soldiers who was in her company, Idan Baruch, had been murdered in his home at Kibbutz Be’eri. He had been shot when he left his burning house, and he had left because he was asthmatic and couldn’t breathe in the smoke. His grandmother was also killed, and one younger sibling is still, to this day, unaccounted for. And so now, today, at the course graduation, the colonel at the head of their entire division, an impressive woman, congratulates them all and notes the single student who did not complete the course, no longer among the living.
I remember that among the assignments Priya had to complete for the course was something called “Mesimat Perach.” She explained to me impatiently that this was an element of hazing: with no explanation, they were sent home one shabbat in September with a “flower assignment,” and asked to make of it what they would. Priya took a poem she loved and dried flowers against the paper on which she’d copied the poem by hand. She told me that Idan came back describing “Darom Adom,” his pleasure in the way the whole south turned to fields of red blossoms in the season of the anemone flowers. He told the group how much he loved his home on Kibbutz Be’eri, that it was where he wanted to live always. Today, at the graduation, they all wear a tag with his name on it. I don’t wear a tag but it is fair to say that I think about him very frequently. I think of his family. I think of the way their company should be one more than it is.
By the end of the ceremony, maybe forty-five minutes, I can see that Priya’s cheeks are red with the heat. I am reminded of the dance recital she was in when she was twelve. I was seated at the back of the orchestra section at the Jerusalem Theater, and she was dancing among many other girls dressed in black leotards, but even from there, somehow I could see that she wasn’t feeling well. When I went backstage to find her after the show, she nearly fell into my arms, sick. So now I see her red cheeks and know she didn’t put on sunscreen, that she needs water. Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail under her tight wool beret and I can feel its texture in my fingers as if fingers can remember, too.
When “HaTikva,” the national anthem, comes to a close, the soldiers begin to hug and celebrate. One soldier who has received an award for excellence is taken by surprise by her brother, a combat soldier whom she had not seen since October 7, who has gotten special permission to surprise her at the base. (Priya explains this to me later, though I see it on screen.) It is not typical in Israel for any soldier not to get home for five to six weeks; it is a very small country and distances are quickly traversed for a Shabbat, or even for a few hours. But this wartime is intensive. Days and weeks have gone by without phone calls, let alone reunions. And so this reunion between siblings brings everyone who sees it joy, and also immense relief: he’s alive. And I know that I am not alone when its shadow image makes itself visible, too: all the siblings who have not returned, whether from the tunnels of Gaza, or from the music festival, or from the kibbutzim and towns of the southern border, or from the tanks in the south and the north.
I want to be there in person, too, like this brother. I want to hug my child. To try to understand this doubleness: child and adult, civilian and soldier; body and soul. At Aner Shapira’s funeral, his grandmother said in her eulogy for him, “love doesn’t die.” When she said it, I believed it. I heard its truth in her voice. And when I wash the uniforms Priya brings home, dirty, sweaty, worn, and worn again, when I shake them out to dry in the sun, I think, there is much we choose, and everything we don’t choose. I bring them in from the sun, she folds one, puts on the other, and goes back out into the world.
The views and opinions expressed above are those of the author, based on their observations and experiences.
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Ilana M. Blumberg is associate professor of English Literature and past director of the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv, Israel. She is the author of Open Your Hand: Teaching as a Jew, Teaching as an American, Victorian Sacrifice: Ethics and Economics in Mid-Century Novels, and the Sami Rohr Choice Award-winning memoir Houses of Study: a Jewish Woman Among Books.