Watching A Country Mourn its War Dead
This morning I sat in my hotel in Tel Aviv and watched a country mourn its dead. For an American, it was an amazing experience. And, no many how many times I travel to Israel and how much intimate knowledge I gather regarding the mores of this country, it never fails to amaze me how one life counts when Israel marks its war dead.
In this case, today there were two military funerals, for the two young soldiers who died in the war two years ago against Hezbollah, Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser.
I remember the day that they were abducted. I was in Israel then, too, and I watched the aftermath of the abduction on a television in a wine star in Jerusalem. As the clerk and I watched the soldiers amassing on the border we both knew that the summer was about to shift dramatically and indeed, war broke out within days.
For two years, the country kept up a false hope that these two young men, one in his twenties and one doing reserve duty at age 31, would be returned alive. Ehud Goldwasser's wife Karnit became a symbol like a candle flickering for hope, as she travelled the world requesting intervention to garner information on her husband and his comrade.
It is likely that one soldier died on the border and another minutes after and that these past two years have meant a terrible and cruel tableau upon which Hezbollah has played its own domestic and international politics, but it is also likely that the Israeli government knew that the soldiers were dead too. However, without 100% knowledge, which Hezbollah was unwilling to give the Red Cross according to international norms, the families and the nation here kept up the hope that perhaps these men would return alive.
I watched the funeral of Ehud Goldwasser broadcast live on television this morning, as friends, government and military officials and the head of the Technion, one of Israel's top universities where Ehud was a student, laid wreaths on the newly dug grave. In the mourning crowd were Gilad Shalit's parents; Shalit, who was also captured two summers ago by Hamas in Gaza, is still alive in Gaza and presently, there are negotiations about prisoner exchanges between Hamas and Israel to secure his release.
It is an amazing thing for an American. To watch a nation come to a nearly complete halt--and to do the unthinkable--after all, Israel traded a known terrorist who killed a parent and his four year old daughter and sent him over the border to Lebanon in return for the two bodies of Goldwasser and Regev.
But it is not simply a cliche that Israeli society has a coherence about it based on this civilian army. It is also a reality. One hopes that each of these persons, whose lives and deaths we see portrayed so visually and starkly --and richly--on the television screen--will propel Israel's leaders to push harder for peace, but one thing is sure. It is not like in America where the countless deaths from an ill-conceived war in Iraq remain nearly anonymous to all but their families, some colleagues in the military and the towns where they lived. At the very least we, Americans, owe it to those we send to war, to see their faces when they return, to know their wives and their parents and to mourn with them for their tragic loss.
Civilian army? They're conscripts! Lucky for us, it's the kind of coherence that the United States can happily do without.
July 17, 2008 9:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
How touching that the loss of one Israeli's life is so mourned. How sad that the theft of Palestinian lands, the humuliation and killing of Palistine's people means nothing.
July 17, 2008 11:52 AM | Reply | Permalink
Why not applaud the release of the child killer while you're at it. Or applaud Hezbollah for not verifying the soldiers (that they killed) were dead.
July 17, 2008 4:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
What a tragic area, constant death and destruction.
People there live with the constant thought that on any given day, they or their loved ones could die from violence.
July 17, 2008 3:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
How wonderful for the Israelis. They can mourn their dead without the restraints of guilt and shame. No one wants to die, and Israel sees its war dead honestly, as native sons and daughters caught in the violent margins of our very human, very perilous world. It's an old story for a very old part of the globe. They're martyred service is laudable.
In this country, we ferry our dead warriors through the veil of night, anonymously, and hide them away - like garbage. We constantly demonize them as baby killers or cheapen their service with fabricated heroism. They are social and political symbols; we never bother to see them as anything real and human. Then, it's too late: Their very real flesh and blood rots in caskets, forgotten.
How wonderful it must be for the Israelis, that it is so very, very different.
July 17, 2008 5:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
The negotiations for the return of Goldwasswer and Regev began several days after Israel started it's bombardment of Lebanon. Hezbollah was on board.
The Israeli government put a halt to the proceedings. Evidently, the captured soldiers were more valuable as a casus belli for continuing the stupid summer war of '06 and were more valuable as pawns in a "terrible and cruel tableau upon which" [Israel] "has played its own domestic and international politics".
As per usual, the fact that Israel is responsible for prolonging the agony for the reservists' families and that of those mourning their own dead in Lebanon, is completely ignored by Israel's fabulous "friends".
Jo Ann. The war began ON THE DAY OF THE CAPTURE unless you don't count massive IAF bombardments as "war".
I see you are also doing your part to help the Olmert government in it's worldwide campaign:
"Israel yesterday launched an international media campaign against Hezbollah. The Prime Minister's Office's public relations unit is handling the information, which includes an Internet film for YouTube about Samir Kuntar, portraying him as a murderer who crushed a four-year-old girl's skull.
Israeli envoys abroad and the Foreign Ministry are telling international and Arab media that Kuntar is "no freedom fighter but an abominable murderer." The campaign, which emphasizes Israel's moral values compared with its enemies, is also intended to prevent the possibility of international recognition and legitimization of Hezbollah.
Another message is that the soldiers were abducted on a mission on Israeli territory while Kuntar came from Lebanon to attack civilians."
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1002774.html
Too damn late, fools. Hezbollah is a permanent part of the Lebanese polity because, they are LEBANESE first and foremost, not some imported band of terrorist refugees from Iran. Israel's serial invasions and occupations of Lebanon gave birth to them and provided decades of succor for the military wing of the party. The sectarian marginalization of Lebanon's Shiites gave Hezbollah the wide-open opportunities to provide for their own people as is their tradition; the rest is history.
Hezbollah is an integral part of the warp and weft of Lebanon and the top Lebanese politicians from all sectors hailed the swap as solidifying Lebanese unity. Other world leaders also see this swap as a positive sign for the stability in the region.
PS. Just in case anyone has the mistaken impression that Sami Kuntar is a Hezbollah "terrorist"....he belongs to the Druze.
July 17, 2008 6:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
I know you mean well, but your post really ticks me off.
Maybe if you spent more time in America and less time in Israel and more time in the places in America that have received many war casualties you would be equally amazed at the caring of many Americans. Visit a VA cemetary. Visit a VA hospital. And make a point of visiting some small towns in Iowa or Nebraska or South Dakota and ponder how far from home their young people were when they died and how far they were from anything that matters to the people in these little towns.
These Americans are not valued less. You just don't know where they lived. You don't know their home towns.
July 17, 2008 7:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
@ bluebell
Has San Fernando Curt spent time in Israel? I thought he was one of the many, many Israel haters who post to this site...and interpreted his latest as just another vile ill-informed criticism of American culture.
July 17, 2008 8:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
Walk it off, jackass.
July 18, 2008 10:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
offensivetoyou says:
"Has San Fernando Curt spent time in Israel? I thought he was one of the many, many Israel haters who post to this site...and interpreted his latest as just another vile ill-informed criticism of American culture."
Please give 3 examples of "the many, many Israel haters who post to this site..." and also examples of their hatred for Israel.
July 18, 2008 11:03 AM | Reply | Permalink
@ lally
What Sami Kuntar did to my family
I don't know how you escaped from the sewer but you'll never be able to escape the stink of it. You're the worst sort of leftist scum, an apologist for anything vile just so long as its in the service of your rotten ideology.
July 17, 2008 7:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm kind of surprised at your reaction, offensivetoyou. It's not like you to be so accepting of politically motivated stories.
There is no doubt that Mrs. Haran suffered terribly and that Abu Abbas and the PLF terrorist squad were responsible for that suffering. But Mrs. Haran was not an eyewitness to the actions of the terrorists.
The trial of the squad leader Kuntar, oddly the youngest of the four members but still the "leader," was held in secret and the transcript withheld until now. For myself, I'm not prepared to believe in the truthfulness of any military court anywhere adjudging its own actions, ever.
July 17, 2008 10:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
oty, littleman.
Facts are hard things.
I consider it a badge of honor when you and others of your rightwing ilk freak out when confronted with them.
:>)
July 17, 2008 9:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
Wow, I can almost hear the weeping violins from way over here in the Western Hemisphere! Israelis certainly do have powerful psychological techniques for perpetuating their own version of the sick militaristic cult of guilt, chauvinism and undying ethnocentric devotion that we call the "nation-state". If only we Americans were equally awesome. We could then pound the crap out of everyone with an unshakable national unity, and no one could stop us!
I can't decide which spectacle wins the weekly Misanthropy Prize: the Hizbollah crusher of toddler skulls getting his hero's welcome back in Lebanon, or the nation of citizen-soldier-occupier-landgrabbers boo-hooing over the return of a couple of their dead enforcers. They both make me want to resign from the human race. Do you think I'm suffering from Obama's famed "empathy deficit"?
"Every life counts." I think that's what that guy said when he was bulldozing Rachel Corrie.
July 17, 2008 11:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
If only we Americans were equally awesome. We could then pound the crap out of everyone with an unshakable national unity, and no one could stop us!
We certainly were--it's just that we ran out of land to grab. Actually, when you think of the amount of land Israel has grabbed compared to say, oh, any country in the Western Hemisphere, they are but pishers.
Now that we have all the land we need (more or less) we have the luxury of sitting back and judging others.
July 18, 2008 10:10 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thee is little unique about Israel's very proper mourning of its war dead. The bodies of British, Spanish, Polish and German soldiers killed aboard are brought home to red carpets, Ministers, military bands, and a respectful press. The outlier here is the United States, that shamefully airbrushes out its casualties.
July 19, 2008 3:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think Israel would be a better place, and get along with its neighbors better if the US withdrew its unquestioning support.
July 20, 2008 4:38 AM | Reply | Permalink