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This is tlv1. Today is the shloshim of ron Gvili, the 30th day since he was laid to rest in maitar on Wednesday, January 28th. Ron Veli was 24 when he died. When he was killed on October 7th, he was at home on sick leave from the police, where he was in the special patrol unit. He was a motorcycle cop because two days later, on October 9, he was scheduled for surgery to set and fix the clavicle he broke riding his motorcycle out in the fields near his house a couple of weeks before. A few years before that, Ronville's army career was almost ended just. Just when it was starting. He was hurt badly, training in a tough Golani infantry unit. The doctor said he'd never be fit for combat again. But he ignored the doctors and he rehabbed and exercised himself back into fighting shape and back into his unit in Golani. And it was like that. Now with the police, he would do whatever he had to do to get his shoulder fixed. And when his phone got message after message early in the morning on October 7, even though his shoulder was a mess, he put on his uniform. And when his father Itzikvili said to him, where do you think you're going? Ronvilli said by Itzikvili's report, quote, what do you think? Do you think that my friends are going to fight alone? I am going to help them. And the thing was decided. He did not ask me, Itzikvili said. And when Ron decides something, Itzikvili said, he cannot be stopped. And so Ron Vili left his home at number 1 Morag street, the very furthest house from the entrance to Maitar, a tiny community just north of Deersheva, just south of the Hebron Hills. The Gvili home is at the edge of town on the frontier of the Negev, facing a small stand of trees they call a forest that the JNF planted behind the town, which is the site of Mitzpe Noam Rosenthal, a birding stand built in memory of Noam Rosenthal, a kid from town killed in the tank corps during the last big war with Hamas in the summer of 2014, nine years and a bit before. Ronville was killed by Hamas on October 7, near Kibbutz Alumim, where he had come face to face with Hamas fighters, taking cover behind an eucalyptus tree when he was shot in the leg and arm. And after running out of ammunition, being taken hostage into Gaza, either already dead or still barely alive. And he was taken to Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, which is where his picture was taken for the last time. And months passed before the family heard for sure that Ron was dead. In fact dead. This after a committee of doctors, forensic scientists, intelligence officers and rabbis studying film and such reports as they got out of Gaza determined with certainty that Ron Gvili had not survived. The day after that, almost two more years passed before Ron Gvili was returned to his family and to Maitar and to the rest of us for burial. He was the last hostage, dead or alive, to come home, giving rise to an observation very often observed here, that Ron Villi was the first to leave his home when the WhatsApp started to ping on his phone so early on that Saturday morning, and Ron Villi was the last to make it back to his home. The war is demarcated by Ron Veeley, which is a strange distinction. When I learned of Ron Veeley's homecoming, I was in a meeting at City hall and I got a call from Susan and I answered in a whisper so as not to disturb the discussion around. I said, hey, sj. And on the line Susan was sobbing and I said, what is it, sj? And she said, they found Ron. After a pause, she said, he is coming home. Just who found Ron Veele were more than 700 soldiers in something called the Southern Search Unit of the Army Rabbit, led by a reserve lieutenant colonel named Eliashav Varman, who in civilian life is the head of the Department of Policy, Planning and Budget at the Central Bureau of Statistics, though for two years more of his time has been spent recovering bodies than crunching numbers. And who a week earlier, after intelligence reports that Islamic Jihad people had buried Ronvilli alongside hundreds of Gazans killed in the war, maybe by mistake not knowing that his was the body of an Israeli hostage, a terrible confusion made possible by the terrible fact that there were so many, many bodies to be buried in Gaza. And the intelligence reports pointed to a place. So Lieutenant Colonel Eliasaf Verman again called back into service his search team of hundreds of people. Seven hundred people, some of them soldiers working for the rabbinate, trained special to find fallen soldiers and some soldiers from the engineering corps able to operate heavy ground moving equipment. And there were also reserve anthropologists and reserve pathologists and reserve architects whose job it was to say best where it was safe to dig and where it was not. And a camp was built for the Southern Search Unit on the edge of the de facto cemetery the intelligence people sent them to. And near that another smaller camp was set up as a mobile laboratory for the police Forensic Science Division's Volunteer dental unit, an operation headed by Dr. Esti Sharon, a Hebrew University professor and expert in facial reconstruction at Harassa Hospital, who, when the attack came on October 7, volunteered to help identify victims by their teeth, which he was able to do with a kind of scientific certainty trusted by the police and the rabbis and most importantly, by the families who needed to know 100% what happened to the people whom they loved and the people whom they did not know for sure whether they had lost. Ron Gvili was the 251st person whom Dr. Esti Sharon identified during the war. The work in the field in Gaza went slowly. The place Intelligence sent them to was the size of a doz, soccer fields or more. The 700 soldiers made their way through the unmarked cemetery on their knees, digging with their hands moving forward another step only when they were sure that there was no one buried beneath them at this step. And the soldiers found many bodies. The place was, after all, a kind of cemetery. And each body they found was taken to the forensic field lab where Dr. Esti Charon and her people compared the patterns of their incisors and their molars to. To the pictures in Ronvili's dental file. A day after the thing Eliasaf Varman described what happened like. The people are not talking. There is silence. The people know the work. They start removing bodies from the ground. We worked straight all night. We worked. It was freezing cold. We did not stop for a moment. We take bodies out of the earth. We set them out in an organized fashion. We exhumed more than 700 slain people from the ground. All of a sudden I hear the doctor yell, bring me number of such and such, stat. They put the slain on a stretcher and run to the place where they can do a more comprehensive examination. And they put him on the table. Six dentists around him from every direction. Everyone starts to pray in a way that's to describe we've been searching for the hostages for 800 days. And we see this happen in front of our eyes. And I remember the dentist who is the final authority to determine the identity. And I see all at once her hands are trembling as she touches the instrument. I can see the tremor in her hands. And as her examination moves forward, I see her eyes getting red. And suddenly at some point, I see a tear coming from her eye. I see a smile. And we have a procedure in place in case we find him so that no information will get out, heaven forbid, before the family knows. And the procedure is when we find who we are looking for. We keep working like normal the commanding officer of the unit that stays in touch with the families of the hostages says, we will call the family now and tell them. And immediately after that, we gather everyone together. The family got an update. 150 soldiers get off their excavators and bulldozers and front loaders. They come from all over the area where we are working, and they gather and stand in silence. And then my deputy battalion commander who oversaw the whole operation, he tells them that we found Ron. People start to cry. I don't know how many people cried on my shoulder. It is hard to explain all the places we were, all we did to recover the bodies, the wait of two years and the failing of a responsibility on our shoulders that there is no one to do this work if we do not do it. And somewhere around the 600th victim, the 700th victim, you are deep in it, and it is only the sanctity of the mission that moves you to action. And then all at once you hear that you managed to close a circle. From the first victim at 6 in the evening on October 7th at the entrance to the Gaza Division base to this last victim on the 4th of the month of SHVAT 3 in the afternoon inside Gaza, people cried, we hugged, we said Kaddish in front of the victim, we wrapped him in an Israeli flag, we stood and we watched over him until we transferred him to his family in a box. It is important to me that every family and every mother and father, brother and sister knows that the army does everything. Really. I cannot describe to you what we did and where we found ourselves. End quote. Dr. Esti Sharon, the dentist, she said. My hands were shaking, a feeling of crazy emotion, my heart beating 200 beats a minute. And still I know I have to be super focused because there are no mistakes with things like this. I do not have the option of making a mistake. I have to stay focused. But the emotion was enormous. When I finished signing the form indicating that I identified Ron Gili at that moment, from all the emotion, a terrible sadness settled over me because that is it, it is final, it is over and he is the last of them. It is over and he is the last of them. And he is a police officer and I am a volunteer for the Israel police. And to me this was very symbolic. People there cried, we hugged with sadness. We did not believe that it really happened. We understood that it is over, that that is that. So then I took off the chain with the hostage pendant that I had always had around my neck. I put it in my pocket and that Was it? My work was done the next day when Ron Gvili was buried in the small cemetery in Maitar, just a short walk southeast through the desert from the Gvili home at number 1 Morag Street. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people were there. The president was there, the prime minister. And there were singers and writers, rabbis, reporters, and lots and lots of people who just came. And in front of all of them, Talik Vili, Ron's mother, talked to her boy, talked straight to Ronnie. And she. I imagine you now saying, oy, you're embarrassing me, Ima. Enough with the I am proud, I am proud. But the I am proud, I am proud is because of you. On that awful day, I imagined you looking me in the eye and saying to me, you listen to me, you should not cry. You should be proud. You should be proud. And from then on, from that damned day, I remember you whispering to me, my proud mother, for all of the past two years and four months, we went on and on about you. We talked about you, we talked about you endlessly. And it seems to me that you became the child of everyone. During these two years, I heard many eulogies for the heroes of this war of renewal. And every eulogy reminded me of you. The same values, the same spirit. It is like they reproduced you each and every time. Mai Rani, the number of hugs and the amount of love from all sides we have gotten is impossible to grasp. The number of presents and notes and flowers and cakes is endless. Ronnie, you went out to defend everyone, and they all deserve your sacrifice. 700 soldiers searched for you. 700 soldiers found you. 700 soldiers brought you home. There is nothing like this people anywhere in the world. The eye cries bitterly, yet the heart is happy. That was 30 days ago. The Rambam Maimonides writes in his Mishnah Torah in Hilchot Avdel, chapter six, that a mourner should grieve for all of 30 days. These are the things it is forbidden for a mourner to do for all of 30 days. To take a haircut, to iron his clothes, to marry, to find joy in the company of others, and to travel from country to country for the sake of business. These five things in all. End quote. And this is an odd list that can be taken, I think, to mean that for the 30 days, the most normal things, a haircut, a fresh shirt, and the things that bring us pleasure, love, friends, these things are beyond us. It is only when the 30 days have passed that they start to come back. Since October 7th, for 873 days we have at every moment been in some 30 days or another for someone killed in this war. For most of those 873 days, we've been in a Shiva, the raw first seven days of mourning for 873 days. We have never not been in a shloshim from this war until today, when Ron Veli's shloshim comes to a close. Now, for the first time in all those 873 days, we can wash our clothes, trim our hair, declare our love, meet friends for drinks and all the rest, which I think is as close to an end of this war that started on October 7, 873 days ago as we are going to have. We think of wars as having a fixed end, a moment when a state of fighting is replaced by a state of peace. World War I ended poetically at the start of the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, the morning of November 11, 1999. But usually wars end in fits and starts and stages, like the 1948 war, Israel's war of independence that ended after Israel signed an armistice agreement with Egypt in February of 1949 and with Lebanon in March and with Jordan in April and Syria in July. In March 1949, weeks after a ceasefire agreement was signed in Rhodes by, for the Egyptians, a general named Muhammad Ibrahim Sif Al Din, and by for the Israelis, Yigal Yadin, who was head of army operations during the war and who would soon be appointed IDF Chief of Staff and who would go on to become a renowned archaeologist and later Deputy Prime Minister under Menachem Begin. On that day that the armistice agreement was completed in Greece, Prime Minister David Ben Gurion wrote in his diary, the Rhodes armistice talks will be decisive. Now we have to plan the absorption of 800,000 immigrants within four years. How many industrial plants will be needed? What type of industry will be developed? Which lands will we settle? How much money will be needed? What equipment will be required? What will we import and export? What of the machinery in the factories? Can we keep it in good repair ourselves? Can we design on our own the machines that we need? What industries can be transferred to Jerusalem? A road must be constructed from Beersheba to the south via the Dead Sea. Workers committees must be created to support the state on the basis of the government's plan for occupational training. Improvements of the standard of living, improvements of production, labor laws and time must be found. How to manage within the limits of a 24 hour day. I should establish a rigid daily schedule for the Ministry of Defense for economic planning, coordination of Government ministries. Contact with the workers with the academic and free professions. With army commanders. Visits to camps, factories and settlements. With the ministries. With the state of labor, housing, settlements, Arabs State of industry, finance, a science council, arms industry. State of supplies, police and internal security. Foreign affairs. Connections with Jewish communities in the with the labor movement and the press, the Israeli press, Jewish press, General press. We must begin to write laws. Laws protecting civil equality. Freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, language, education and culture. Equality for women. Freedom of association and expression. Universal suffrage. 2. General conscription law. 3. Nationalization of water sources, natural resources, unused land. 4. Control of imports and prices. 5. Taxes on income and inheritance. 6. Encouragement of childbirth. 7. General education. 8. Demobilization benefits. 9. Labor laws. 10. Administration of civil servants. This is how that war, the war of Independence, ended with tireless manic activity. Decide this plan that build this and then this and then this. After the war, new settlements to absorb immigrants were set up at a rate of one every three days. Within just a few years, more immigrants arrived than there were people in the state to greet them them. And all this frenetic activity came despite suffering of a sort that had no precedent, or maybe to keep at bay suffering of a sort that had no precedent. One in every 100 citizens of the new state of Israel had been killed in the 14 months of the War of Independence. There was no one who knew, no one who died. But all that was simply put aside, at least in public. 6 of 10 Israelis believed at the time that the papers should not print death notices of people killed in the war, because focusing on all that death would, well, make this a place focused on death. It was easier to ignore it. And for each person killed, there were many more who were injured. And these people missing limbs, bearing scars, some unable to sleep or to work. No one wanted much to talk about them. And of course, hundreds of thousands of people who went through the Holocaust were everywhere in the country. I saw an article in a February 1949 edition of Ma're between articles about the ceasefire negotiations in Rhodes that was headlined a dramatic meeting between a mother and her son, the soldier. And it told how one Rivka Waxman, a new immigrant from Poland, was walking on Herzl street in Haifa in front of the Ora Theater, and she saw a young man in uniform get out of an army car to go to the box office to buy a ticket. The woman stopped and from her mouth erupted a cry. Chayyim. The soldier looked back, stopped, gazed at the woman, and for two minutes the two of them stood stock quiet. Suddenly the woman reached out her arms and, fainting, fell upon her son's neck. When she regained consciousness, she said between sobs that her son was 14 when he and her husband were taken by the Germans. She was saved by Polish acquaintances. Later she heard about them. Both had perished. Now, eight years later, she found her son, who survived and came to the land two years ago and is now a soldier. End quote. There was so much suffering from the war and from the war before the war, and it was mostly not talked about, not recognized, not acknowledged, because the thinking was there was no time for all that. David Ben Gurion said, we will miss the mark if suddenly we should begin philosophizing about who I am and what I am. Right now, the only questions that stand before us are pragmatic ones, and we must solve them. Which is how that war ended. In a rush of planning, training, moving, organizing, collectivizing, absorbing, paving, draining, irrigating, transporting, cultivating, forgin, fabricating, constructing, building, establishing, planting, harvesting, settling, enlisting, legislating, regulating, codifying, administering, guarding, patrolling, pragmatics, pragmatics, pragmatics. Eighteen years later, the Six Day War ended with a ceasefire with Egypt on June 8, 1967, and a ceasefire with Syria two days later, on June 10. And at first, when that war ended, there was a kind of hushed shock at the victory. In the anxious months ahead of the war, lots of people here had worried that the country would not survive an attack by Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. But after what happened, happened, all the angst and existential worry was replaced by joy, relief, exaltation, a euphoria that went so deep it could feel metaphysical. The photograph of the chief Rabbi of the idf, Rav Shlomo Goren, blowing a shofar or ram's horn at the Western Wall on June 1967 was all at once on Falafel stand walls everywhere. And the clip of it and of General Motagore saying, Har Habayt b', Adenu, the Temple Mount is in our hands, was played over and over again on the radio. And after the war ended, a two record set released by CBS was in all the shops. It was called the Six Day War. Voice of Israel and IDF Radio Reporters in battle and it is four sides of news reports in real time like this one of what happened when the paratroopers and generals and rabbis reached the Wall by. It was this triumphant spirit, this triumphalist spirit that was mostly what remained when the Six Day War ended. It was a time of enthusiasm. David Ben Gurion by this time, four years retired from the Prime Minister's office, retired for the second time, wrote and said on the radio that Israel ought immediately to bring a wrecking ball to the walls around the Old City, which he said, quote, have no sanctity and no necessity. Having been built after all by an Ottoman sultan, a united city demands the destruction of those walls. Moshe Dayan disagreed, but offered that a new gate be cut into the ramparts to be called the Gate of Return. Prime Minister Levi Eshkol wrote Dayan with excitement over the idea, offering to form a planning committee. Such a gate will fill the hearts of Jews everywhere with joy and pride. End quote. There were proposals to construct a great victory arch in the city, 30 stories high, in tribute to the IDF soldiers who had won the war. Mayor Teddy Kollick proposed moving the headquarters of the United nations from New York to Jerusalem, where surely they now belonged. There was a giddiness to all of this. The poet Nathan Altman wrote in his diary, quote, the people are drunk with joy. When the next Independence Day came, half a million people, one of every six women, men and kids living in Israel at the time, made their way to Jerusalem to see the biggest military parade in the country's history. Tanks rumbling through the streets, planes streaking above, celebrating the reunification. Jerusalem. The end of the Six Day War produced two books with influence that never really went away. One was called Hakolot Hashalom Shel Eretz Yisrael, the Borders of Peace of the Land of Israel. Which book gathered writing by some of Israel's greatest poets, essayists, professors and politicians, arguing, as Nathan Alterman had in Mariv just a week after the war ended, that, quote, what matters about this victory is that it effectively erases the difference between the State of Israel and the Land of Israel. Israel. This is the first time since the Second Temple was destroyed that all of the Land of Israel is in our hands, end quote. Everything was a founding document of the Movement for Greater Israel, a group of intellectuals and activists, professors and poets, many, most of them secular Zionists who saw in the capture of the Old City, the West bank and Gaza, maybe God's hand, and in any case, something like the ultimate fulfillment of the aims of Zionists. The other book to come from the end of the Six Day War was different. It was called Siyach Lohamim Pirkei Hakshava Vihidanut, Conversations among soldiers, moments of listening and introspection. Though when it was translated into English, it was called the Seventh Day. Soldiers talk about the Six Day War. The book was also translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Arabic, Dutch, Japanese and Yiddish. The book was an edited transcript, redacted, of discussions among kibbutz men back from the war, organized by a few young kibbutz intellectuals, including Amos Oz Mukitzur, Yariv Ben Aron and Avraham Shapira. Amosoz said of the project, quote, there were a few of us who, thinking together, came to the idea that there is value in putting together a volume, trying to give authentic expression to what the people who came back from the war feeling. I would say in a very general way that the volume tries to explain the fact we all experienced, that people did not come back from the war happy. There is a distress that the people writing in the newspapers do not capture. We have no desire to put out another victory album or collection of war stories that go. We outflanked, we surrounded, we smashed, we conquered. We did not want people to say what they did in the war, but rather what they experienced, not what they carried out, but what they felt. Maybe this is not a great service to the national morale, but it is a small service to the truth. End quote. When the book got to the bookstores, it was a shocking thing. Not giddy, not joyful, not proud, not triumphant. It was rather a record of melancholy and confusion and heartbreak and distress and worry. One of the young kibbutz fighters, for instance, had said, as part of the operation, we were assigned to carry out what is called an evacuation. The transfer we did, it was like you take an Arab who has roots in his village and you make him into a refugee. You just expel him from there. And it was not just one person or two or three. And when you see a whole village going like sheep to where you take them without any resistance, you see the meaning of the word holocaust. And quote, the kibbutz soldiers who talked in this book, lots of them felt like they'd seen and done things that were wrong and terrible, and they were troubled. And the official joy of official government ceremonies and the constant stories on the radio about the things that the soldiers had done in jeeps and tanks and planes, it made them feel more troubled. Still, to I think, everyone's surprise, The Seventh Day was a bestseller. More than 150,000 copies sold, one copy for every 20 people in the country at the time, which says, I guess, that the Six Day War ended with feelings more fractured than you'd get if you paid attention only to the parades, the victory albums and the speeches of politicians. The Seventh Day said something that these other things did not. And this was something that maybe people needed to say and to hear at the time. And that is how the Six Day War ended. In exaltation and triumph and expectation, and in doubt and unease and worry that maybe our pious confidence was somehow misplaced. Whatever euphoria there may have been when the guns and cannons of the Six Day War fell silent, and whatever heedlessness and whatever feel of invincibility there was that came with the end of that war, for many, though not all of us, these feelings all disappeared with the sirens that shattered the silence of Yom Kippur. In 1973, the great Scottish philosopher Alastair MacIntyre wrote about what he called epistemological crises. Moments when we all of a sudden realize that what we thought we knew may be all wrong. Someone who is believed he's highly valued by his employers and colleagues is suddenly fired. Someone proposed for membership of a club whose members were all, so he believed, close friends is blackballed. Someone falls out of love and needs to know how she or he possibly could have been so mistaken. In the other end quote. When the Yom Kippur war ended, lots of Israelis were deep into an epistemological crisis. By the end of October 1973, people knew that at least some of what they knew about the country at the beginning of October had been flat out wrong before the war. They knew that Israel was secure. They knew the country's generals were mostly competent, its army mostly good, and its politicians mostly capable. They knew that in Israel, human life, or at least the lives of Jews really mattered, and that no one would let lives be lost because of stupidity or folly or vanity. When the war ended, they knew that Syrian soldiers might have reached Haifa and Egyptian tanks might have made it to Tel Aviv. They knew that the army had been caught off guards and that the ministers in Jerusalem had been in. They knew that soldiers had been left to die in bunkers along the Baar Lev line, in Sinai and in the Golan Heights facing Syria. They knew that things they thought were solid barriers at borders, early warning systems, intelligence gathering processes, lines of military command, defense strategies had crumbled into sand. It took time to absorb this new knowledge. Though the war ended on October 26, 1973, 20 days after it started, the borders remained tense. Shots continued to be fired in the Golan, and Israelis spent nights in shelters and reserve soldiers were decommissioned. Slowly, over long, long months, hospital wards cared for 8,000 wounded soldiers. 25 days after the war ended, on November 21st, a committee began to investigate how the war had started and why the army and government had failed to see it coming. The inquiry commission was headed by the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Supreme Court, Shimon Agronath, and it held 140 sessions, hearing testimony from 58 witnesses. As the committee quietly did its work, the country collected itself. The elections scheduled for October were rescheduled for December 31, 1973, and grave and subdued campaigns were launched. When the votes were tallied, the ruling labor alignment had lost five seats and its senior partner, the National Religious party, had lost two, with the Likud earning all of those seven seats. Still, Golda Meir easily made a coalition of 65 seats a very comfortable majority. But things were churning. There was discontent. In February 1974, an infantry reserve captain named Moti Ashkenazi was finally sent home from his position at Fort Budapest, 10 miles from Port Fa' Ud in Sinai near the Suez Canal. He'd gotten there with the reserve soldiers he commanded just before Rosh Hashanah, two weeks before the beginning of the war. And in the end, he stayed there for five long months. Fort Budapest was the only Israeli position on the Baar Lev Line that was not captured by Egypt during the war. None of Moti Ashkenazi's soldiers died. The Bar Lev Line was named after Chaim Bar Lev, who replaced Moshe Dayan as IDF Chief of Staff after the Six Day War. And he oversaw the construction of a charm bracelet of 22 outposts placed at intervals along 150km of a massive sand and concrete wall running along the eastern side of the Suez Canal. The barrier cost $300 million to build at the time, which would be $2 billion today. And for the money, Israelis were told that we were getting the defenses that would become, quote, a graveyard for Egyptian troops if ever they were rash and reckless enough to attack. What Modi Ashkenazi found when he went down to Sinai with his soldiers was a mess. As he later told the Agranath Committee, the electricity in the fortress was sporadic and unreliable. Observation and guard posts were poorly planned. You could get to them only by walking unprotected along the Egyptian border. There were no spotlights or floodlights to help see the enemies at night. There was an inventory of weapons that was incomplete. A lot of the guns and mortars and rockets just plain did not work. What's more, soldiers were poorly trained and unready for battle. Quote, when the war broke out and Egyptian soldiers approached in attack, my soldiers were too terrified to load up their combat vests with grenades. They worried that they would explode themselves by Mistake. When he was finally let out of the army in February, three and a half months after the war ended, Moti Ashkenazi. He set up a small protest table across from the Prime Minister's office in Chile, Jerusalem in February, surrounding himself with crudely markered placards, demanding, among other things, the resignation of the Minister of Defense, Moshe Dayan. Before a week had passed, first tens, then hundreds, then thousands of people joined his protest. A new Russian immigrant brought him a bottle of vodka so he would be warm in this cold. Members of Moshav Beitzayat brought him a crate of apples. Lecturers and students from the Hebrew University campus nearby came. Someone presented him a petition of support with 3500 signatures. Moti Ashkenazi announced a two day hunger strike. The university organized a marathon discussion of protests. Legendary professors like Yeshaya Leibowitz spoke one after another in support of Moti Ashkenazi and what he was trying to do. On April 1, 1974, the Agronat Committee published its interim findings, which placed considerable blame on Major General Elie Zaire, Director of Military Intelligence, and Brigadier General Aryeh Shalev, the head of Military Intelligence Research. But the committee found Moshe Dayan's performance in the war beyond reproach and praised Golda Meir's leadership. The general's resign shamed the politicians did not. The call continued to fire Dayan and a greater, more diffuse anger grew towards the country's political leaders. Dayan insisted he was vindicated by the Agronat committee. But on April 10, Golda Meir announced at a Labour Party meeting that she would resign because she could no longer bear the yoke of the premiership. I have listened to what is transpiring with the public. There is discontent that should not be ignored and it has many manifestations. End quote. Just under two months later, Yitzhak Rabin was sworn in to replace me. But the epistemological crisis and the feeling that something had gone terribly wrong, those persisted. The Yom Kippur War ended with a dull ache of disappointment. Those who were grieving were left with something worse. And this ache and this feeling that things were supposed to be different, it lasted for a long time. That is how the Yom Kippur War ended. Sadly, with the sense that we have been let down, that our leaders were not the leaders we maybe thought they were. And the idea that 30 years after the Holocaust there could be something glorious about the mere fact of Jews taking guns up to defend themselves, this no longer seemed right. A Jew with a gun was on its own Nothing to celebrate anymore. The only war I ever fought in, the First Lebanon War, started before I was drafted and ended 18 years later, not long before I got out of the reserves for good. I was BY Then the second oldest soldier in my reserve unit, just past my 40th birthday, which was back then when the reserves ended. For infantry soldiers like me, the Lebanon War started just after I graduated college, and it ended after I got a job at Bar Ilan and was well on my way to tenure when it started. It was supposed to be short. A response to the gunning down in London in 1982 of Israel's ambassador to the UK, Shlomo Argov, and a response to the shelling from Lebanon of Kiryat Shmone and other northern towns in Kibbutz. The idea was a quick push 42km into Lebanon to the Awali river, to set up a buffer zone that could then be handed off right away to the Christian Southern Lebanon army, or sla. But almost right away it became something more, which is maybe what Ari Charon, the Minister of Defense who convinced Prime Minister Menachem Begin to start the war, had wanted all along. The IDF went well past the Awali river to Tyre and Sidon and soon to surrounding Beirut. Ah Ri C Sharon also had fancy ideas about installing the charismatic and pragmatic head of the Christian Falangist Party and militia. Bashir Gamael was his name, as president of Lebanon and negotiating with him a peace agreement, which idea maybe had some plausibility. Bashir Gamayel was in fact elected Prime Minister in August. But two weeks later, in September, a bomb reduced to rubble the Phalangist headquarters in Beirut, killing Bashir Gamael as he gave his farewell address to the militia officers he had commanded. After that, there was the massacre in the refugee camps Sabra and Chatila, where the IDF looked away while Falangist soldiers got revenge by murdering 800 Palestinians in the camps. Maybe more. People still argue about the number, after which 400,000 Israelis gathered in the main square in Tel Aviv to protest the war. And a commission of inquiry was formed, the Kahan Commission, which found that Menachem Begin had some responsibility for the thing, and Ari Charon deserved even more but blame. The commission recommended that he resign, and he did, with Begin following him just months later. And in 1985, the IDF drew back to a security zone or band in places 10 km north of the building. In other places 20. After that, there was kind of a terrible stasis that settled through all the months and years. Of the war, people died. One here, three there. Kibbutz Gan Shmuel put up a huge sign with a tally of how many Israelis had been killed in Lebanon. Lebanon. Putting it in one of their fields, facing the coastal highways, where thousands of drivers saw it every day, marking the change in the sign from day to day. 651 dead. 652 dead. 655, 672. In the end, the number would go past 1200. The war in Lebanon was the first war protested while it was happening by hundreds of thousands of Israelis. In 1987, a young singer named Si Hae man had a song that was everywhere. Her first hit called Gibor Gadol, Great Hero. That started with this. Cold. Wars don't still happen in the winter Even for us it's a little cold to hate. Wars don't still happen in the summer Even for us it's a little hot to hate. So you big hero, come show me that you can. It's no trick to be strong Just in wars show a little love. It mattered maybe that Tsi Heman is the girl of Nahum Heman who wrote lots of songs that all of us sang in the youth movement. Ni tsa nim neru neru ba' are tsetsamirigiya et Samir. That song is one of his. And now songs like that love songs to this place. In their place, you have a song like this one by the daughter about pointless deaths in a pointless war and about how harsh we have become. And Siaman's second big song was called Yorimu Bochim, with lyrics about IDF soldiers that go, they shoot and they cry. When did we learn to bury people alive? There'd been protest songs before, but never like this. Peace now organized big demonstration after big demonstration and the war. In fact, many anti war groups came into being during the war in Lebanon, and one especially is said to have led to the end of the war. A claim that may be exaggerated, but maybe it's not. And no matter what, it was almost for sure the most effective protest group in Israel's history. The group started after a 1997 disaster that killed 73 soldiers. Two Sikorsky IDF helicopters collided in the air, exploding and plunging to the ground. Rachel Ben Dor, a Hebrew University Talmud scholar who had a kid in the army in Lebanon, said, we were sitting at home waiting for a knock at the door to tell us our boy was one of the victims. The next morning, I wake up. My boy survived, but a kid in his class fell. So I started to say to anyone who would listen, we have to do something now instead of weeping and mourning later. And there was plenty of weeping in the next days, funeral after funeral after funeral. And when the dead were all bur. Rachel Ben Dor visited grieving mothers at their shiva. And then she reached out to tens, then hundreds, then thousands of other people, mothers who saw things like she did. And she formed a group that she called the Four Mothers after the four matriarchs in Genesis, saying it was time to end this war that had started before. Most of the soldiers who were fighting it had even gone to nursery school for the first time. Every time a soldier died in Lebanon, Rachel Ben Dor and her group organized a memorial. Rachel Bendor wrote editorials. She went from TV studio to TV studio where she said things like, quote, my son is going back to Lebanon tomorrow morning. I will be protesting on the streets tonight to save his life. End quote. She organized a huge Hanukkah march with torches. She organized End the War Passover seders. Ahead of the 1999 elections, the Four Mothers group pressed the candidates for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak to pledge that if elected, they would end the in Lebanon. The Four Mothers set up stands in towns and cities around the country where people wrote letters to the candidates demanding an end to the war. And sack after sack of these letters arrived at Likud and labor headquarters. Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak both agreed. After the election, they promised they would order the IDF to leave Lebanon. It helped that by then, Rachel Bendor and the Four Mothers had brought public support for ending the war to more than 80%. Ehud Barak was elected, and like he said, at his order, within a year, the last IDF tank rumbled out of Lebanon. And when the war was over, the feeling was why it had happened in the first place, why all those people had died or been hurt over all these years, it was unclear. It felt so futile, so pointless. And alongside that, the feeling was the army and the generals and politicians. What they said, it does not necessarily have to go. The old idea that when it came to the army, there was no place for criticism. That idea was gone. Over the long course of that seemingly endless war, people in the streets had led a defense minister to be fired, a prime minister to resign, and an army to end an 18 year misadventure. In the end, a Talmud teacher, a mother, and the people she'd brought together had made an army retreat. And all this wars of the past and how they ended all of this is on my mind. Because like I said today, the Shloshim of Ron Gvili marks as clearly as anything ever will the end of our miserable war in Gaza. There will be other wars, of course. As I record this, I'm waiting with anxious nerves for the sirens that may send Susan and me and Lucy the dog, to the shelter up the street before missiles from Iran rained down on the city. But still, the end of Ron Gvili's Shloshi may be taken as the end of the October 7 war, the Gaza war. So I have been thinking about how this war ends on this day, when it ends. And I've been Remembering how just nine days after October 7, when the war was just starting, there was a wedding in a little community down south called Yad Binyamin, near Gadera, near Ashdod, which wedding almost did not happen because nine days before, on October 7, the groom, a man named Yonatan Peretz, was at his folks house in Yad Binyamin. And when the WhatsApp started to ping, Jonathan Peretz and his brother Daniil Peretz, they put on their uniforms and they went to their units. Jonathan Peretz is in Maglan, the paratrooper commando unit, and Daniel Peretz is a tank commander. And both of them ended up near Nachal Oz, the base of the Tajpita, the young women who kept tabs on the Gaza border through their computer screens that we've all heard so much about. And Yonatan Peretz led a squad of soldiers fighting for hours the Hamas fighters on the base until around three in the afternoon he was shot in the thigh and his soldiers somehow got him to Soroka Hospital, where the doctors told Jonathan Peretz the bullet went clean through his flesh. In time, not that much time, he'd be fine. But his brother, Daniel Peretz, his tank was found empty at the entrance of Nahalo's. He was missing, maybe a hostage in Gaza or maybe something worse. And after many bedside discussions at Soroka Hospital, it was decided that Yonatan and his Galia would go ahead with their wedding the next week without Dani' El Peretz. And at the wedding under the Chuppah, Yonatan and Daniyel's father robbed their own Peretz. He said, I will tell you what I learned in the last nine days. I learned that you have to live with feelings and sentiments and emotions that entirely contradict one another and that apparently cannot be contained together. All the feelings, the light and the dark, the pain and the fear and the grasp something in your soul needs to give Each of those things its place and somehow to connect to what you need to connect to. And after that, put it aside. Maybe the straightforward meaning of that passage in Qohelet, Ecclesiastes, you know, the one for everything. There is a time. A time to be born, a time to die, a time to cry, a time to laugh, a time to mourn, a time to dance. Maybe these are not all different times. Maybe it all happens together. That is what I saw at the end of this war. I think now it is all happening together. There is like after 1948, a great pull to just do stuff. A Ben Gurion's diary entry of stuff to be done. There are cranes everywhere in this city. The hole up the block near the beach that's been fenced off for 50 years. Last night workers worked all night night and cement trucks poured and poured and poured. The foundations of a hospital that has now for some reason got to be put up right away. 24, 7. Everywhere there are new initiatives, new programs. At the university, my department is hiring two new faculty people at once. That has never happened before. We got more students than ever wanting to do a master's or a PhD in something. One gets the feeling that they want just to be doing something now, working towards something, imagining a different future. At City hall, new programs are being talked about in every meeting, new initiatives. Political parties are worrying back to life. My friend Chakar Levy, a charming queer nightclub owner who started in city politics with merits, the liberal left, told me the other day that he just told the once and maybe future Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who used to be the head of the National Religious Party, that he, Shachar, accepted Bennett's offer to set up and run the LGBTQ caucus in Bennett's new party. And every night of the week, there are countless meetings of this party or that party in this or that, getting organized for elections that are going to happen soon. And alongside all of that doing, doing, doing, there is now, like after the Six Day War, a feeling, I think a lot of us have, that something historic just happened, something that will leave us changed forever. And there are like after 1967, hard conversations happening among soldiers everywhere about what they did, what we did in the war. And there is like after the Yom Kippur War, a dull feeling that when we needed them most, we did not have the leaders that we most needed. And there is like after Lebanon, a feeling that what happened in the city squares, the vigils, the protests, they made a difference. They made maybe the difference after Ron Gvili was buried. There was one of those TV and social media scandals, one of the those teapot tempests after Brigadier General Gal Hirsch, who was the government's, quote unquote, coordinator for negotiations over the captives and missing during the war, said in an interview in Haaretz that the Bring Them Home now protest during the war, quote, caused very, very great damage because it gave Hamas the feeling that it had fuel to continue. And it kept the government on its heels, defensive about keeping the war going, forcing the focus always back on the hostages. What Galhirsch said made lots of people mad, people who organized the vigils and people who, like me, showed up at the vigils week after week. But in truth, Galhirs was right. We did put the government back on its heels. And he was right that there must have been people in Hamas who took the Bring Them Home now vigils as a sign that Israel's will was about to snap. And Gal Hirsch, Israel right that but for the protests, the war probably would still be going and some of the hostages would probably still be in Gaza. The four mothers of the Lebanon war were in the war that is now over in Gaza. Thousands of mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers, and then the rest of us. And we see now that once again they prevailed all around. Now there are big and small signs of us returning to life and of life renewal returning to us. The other day I met in a cafe of a bookstore named Tola Tsfarim Bookworm, a young woman named Lipaz Ella who'd started something called Minyan bayit le tarbootvi Tsirayu dit boetet Mignon, a home for. I don't know how to translate this bold, edgy, kick ass Jewish culture and creativity. She started it during the war as a kind of Jewish song for Friday nights. But since the war ended these past days, the thing has just exploded. Hundreds of people want to come each week to drink wine and learn and talk and argue into the night on Friday nights and holidays. She needs more space, bigger space. Can the city help her? After the meeting, I skirted the shelves and tables of books in the store, and there in the poetry section was a tall stack of probably 50 copies of a book with an Arabic title and underneath a Hebrew translation to Cry Twice at the Reading river by someone called Husan Ma', Aruf, a poet from Gaza City. And I leafed through a copy of the book. It is poems from the war in Arabic with Hebrew translation, some of them just a line long, like one called Wreckage. Who will get rid of the wreckage that has accumulated in our bodies because of the war. And I look up, and on one side of me is a guy with glasses paging through Husain Ma' Aruf's book, and on the other side is a woman in a hat reading Husa Ma'. Aruf. I was talking at a party in Tel Aviv for my beloved sister's Israeli friend from now from New York, Yael. I was talking to my friend Miriam Schler, who's telling about poker games they got going now for soldiers with trauma from the war. They come and they play and they talk as they talk while they play. It helps just to be together. And at the same party, I was talking to my friend Gili, and she's telling me about the group of Jewish and Palestinian Palestinian women who have taken to meeting again after meeting had become too hard after the war, but now they can do it again. Last week, our friends Rachel and Yonatan got married. I know Rachel from way back when we were kids, and young Judea, she was younger than me, but even back then she had what all of us wanted and I, anyone could never have, which was cool, cool without trying. What she put on was cool. What she listened to was cool. What she said was cool, cool. And she still got that cool today. And Yonatan is from Italy, and he's got cool, too, Southern European cool, but for all that cool, they also got warmth, and they are a thing. And from the bima in the middle of the gorgeous Italian chul in the middle of Jerusalem, Yonatan said to the crowd of us squeezed into the sanctuary. To make a statement. After tough years for all of us, we need in our own way to make a statement, to take a stand for hope, for optimism, for love, maybe even to give our friends and relatives a small opportunity for joy and happiness. And you could feel it. Yonatan and Rachel, beloved By all, after 20 years of living together, they got married. Because of course they got married, but also importantly, because this is a moment to get married, a moment to take a stand for hope, for optimism, for love. Next month, the city is going to select a new chief rabbi. And I got a call from my friend Avi Sagi, a philosopher I know from the university and a Hartmann guy, and he wanted to put in a good word from one of the rabbis up for the job. And I said, avi, I saw in the paper that you just wrote two books about hope. And he said, give me your address, I'll send them to you. Just off the press and A few days later I got a package and in it are two books. One big one called From Despair to Grief and Compassion and Hope in Times of Dread, and a small one called Yesh Tikva There Is Hope A Philosophical Existential Journey. This is the book that I needed at this moment. A beautiful book and it ends with a chapter called Final Words that is just one paragraph long and it goes quote. Throughout this essay, I have tried to inquire after the meaning of hope. We went on a philosophical and existential journey in search of it. We wandered in the worlds of literature, poetry and philosophy. We walked the paths of Jewish world thought. We drew distinctions between different concepts and different phenomena. But after all these things, I feel the need to say again that hope is an outcome of life. When we decide to get up in the morning and go back to our day to day lives, in raising our family at work, in our communities, in our society, we express our belief in the world and also in ourselves. Maybe this is the first step toward healing. Healing. Rising up from mourning and loss starts at the moment when, despite everything we have been through, we decide to get up in the morning to go to work and to live our normal lives. This is the first appearance of hope that after this will spread to our dreams, our prayers and our aspirations to mend the world. This is what shows who we really are, what it is to be human. Human. End quote. This past Sunday, 300 women, including my friend Gili, gathered at the Music Conservatory over on Stricker street, right over near where Itay lives, to record with Yael Dekelbaum an album of songs of peace that she has been traveling through the country teaching thousands of women over the past weeks and months. And if you listen, you can maybe hear like I do how now, on the shloshim of Ron Gvili of blessed memory, the hope is once again spreading to our dreams our prayers and our aspirations to mend the world. Sam. Shama. Sam.