Finding hope amid the killing fields - opinion

If foxholes turn atheists into believers, then wars transform historians into mystics.

Academics call it “morale,” but liberal democrats cannot win wars without great spiritual power. Ironically, the enemy’s evil – especially in this conflict – and the brutality every effective army must harness to win, generate spirituality too: softness, altruism, a goodness, even a holiness, that’s palpable in Israel today.

Our soldiers live that paradox in battle every second. We feel it at funerals and in hospitals, especially yesterday as we buried 21 more of our best and bravest. And we touch it down South. There, where ghastly crimes occurred, you absorb this moment’s spiritual power: on the kibbutzim, in Sderot, in Ofakim, and on the Supernova music concert site turned slaughterhouse, consecrated by the beautiful lives lost, not just profaned by their gruesome deaths.

The rubble-strewn, flag-draped lot that was Sderot’s police station illuminates Hamas’s evil plan. “They targeted our symbols of sovereignty,” Sderot’s spokesperson, Yaron Sasson, explained – while nevertheless appreciating “our mazal, luck.” Busy targeting the police, the terrorists missed Sderot’s hesder yeshiva filled with hundreds of sleeping students, 190 meters away. Still, 60 terrorists murdered 50 civilians and first responders.

Sasson’s framing, finding “mazal” amid massacre, captures the South’s eerie profundity. Visitors toggle between mourning Palestinian evil, Israel’s failures, the staggering loss so concentrated in one small area, and celebrating the miracles, the self-sacrifice, the courageous goodness that saved Israel on October 7 – and keeps reverberating.

Sderot is eight miles from Gaza – Ofakim, twice as far. That two truckloads of terrorists penetrated that deep into Israel is stunning. Fortunately, there too, citizen commandos and super-heroic police officers mobilized. One cop, Itamar Alus, a 39-year-old husband and father, defines himself to TikTok fans of his cooking videos as a “simple guy who likes preparing appetizers for our holy Sabbath.”

Soldiers stepping up on October 7

That black Shabbat, Alus battled valiantly for hours, armed with his pistol, faith in God and country, and a fighter’s instinct he never tapped before. “Every cop imagines encountering terrorists – one or two ramming cars, knifing, shooting – but nothing like this,” he explained. “The terrorists shot ‘rat-tat-tat-tat-tat’” with Kalashnikov assault rifles. “We were just ‘pop-pause-pop-pause-pop.’

“They had so much ammunition,” he said with a sigh – and detailed maps and timetables, planning synagogue slaughters. “But they never anticipated our citizens’ resistance.”

Alus, the kind of guy you meet for five seconds and befriend for life, winces when neighbors call him a “hero,” recalling his buddies, his neighbors – murdered – generating so many circles of anguish here. While walking you through the neighborhood-turned-battlefield, he dazzles, in his soft-spoken way, describing so many gutsy, inspired, moves.

Running down streets in a hail of bullets, he saw a rabbi shot, then a soldier. As a medic, does he help them – or keep firing? Both times, he stabilized the wounded as bullets whizzed over his head – saving their lives – then continued fighting.

After killing one terrorist, and being low on ammunition, he picked up the killer’s weapon. But, quickly realizing the Kalashnikov makes him look like a terrorist, he dropped it.

Finally, after transporting the wounded soldier to Beersheba, he returned to see commandos surrounding the Bilyas’s house. Scrambling to the roof, he rescued the family, who hid behind their neighbor’s solar water panels for hours. Then, the remaining terrorist, raising his hands to surrender, dragged one foot, hiding an IED, rigged to kill everyone. Alus shot – saving more comrades.

Alus defeated death six times that morning. He credits God – and his fellow citizen-warriors. Describing a father-and-son team and two brothers who rushed toward the bullets, each sharing one gun between them, he marveled: “What love of this country! What love of the other!” All four heroes died.

Back toward the border stands the Supernova music concert site – a breathtaking forest clearing, with sticks in the ground capped by pictures of hundreds murdered or kidnapped. Forty yeshiva students happen to circle around the photo honoring my family’s beloved 22-year-old friend, Ben Mizrachi.

“Walk around, stare at each picture,” their rabbi directed. Knowing what they would think, he warned: “Don’t judge them by how they dressed. We all wear uniforms,” he said, touching his black-and-white outfit. “We wear uniforms. The soldiers wear uniforms. And the partygoers wore uniforms. But, underneath, we’re the same. Every one of those murdered was murdered for being a Jew like you.”

Those words went far beyond kumbaya calls for Jewish unity. They reverberated through millennia of Jewish pain, horrifically updated on October 7. They transcended centuries of fragmentation and finger-pointing. And they reinforced the healing, transcendent spirit now blossoming in our blood-soaked South.

While saying kaddish for Ben – and all the others – my friends and I heard a family singing “Happy Birthday” to their hostage son. “What do you want from the people of Israel, the State of Israel,” I asked his younger brother. “Just unity,” he replied. “We cannot return to pre-October 7 divisions.”

I asked his mother the same question: “Please, just read Psalms to help my son and the others return home,” this noble, generous-hearted, super-strong woman replied, distributing magnets celebrating his birthday, with Psalm 28.

In Psalm 28, King David begs God to hear his cries, and help resist our enemies’ lies, while defeating them. David affirms that God strengthens us, shields us, and protects his people.

Like Itamar Alus, many of us wondered how we would respond to threats, to tragedies, though we never anticipated the scale of the October 7 Hamas invasion and massacre. So far, the grief and peril have unleashed the best of us collectively. Day by day, our military, political, and spiritual challenges align.

This is our moment to be gutsy and inspired, to make Israel flourish again, like the red anemones making the Supernova killing fields bloom.

The writer, a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute, is an American presidential historian and the editor of a three-volume set, Theodor Herzl: Zionist Writings, the inaugural publication of The Library of the Jewish People (www.theljp.org).