Person of the Year: Herzi Halevi - opinion

More than any other Israeli, he personified what the Jewish state faced, endured, and did during the most testing of its 76 years 

Our person of the year 5784 must be an Israeli. The October 7 massacre and the multifront war it sparked are not only the obvious events of the Israeli year, they are an earthquake, whose aftershocks unsettled the entire world and will be recalled for ages. 

This distinction makes 5784 markedly different from the previous year, which also saw a dominant drama, but one that was narrowly Israeli: the constitutional crisis that made us choose its inverted heroes, Justice Minister Yariv Levin and protest leader Prof. Shikma Bressler, as our joint persons of the year 5783. 

This year’s drama was global in its aftershocks, and regional in its substance, involving the Palestinians no less than us Israelis, in addition to a host of other Middle Eastern belligerents.

Moreover, the year’s mayhem was triggered by non-Israelis, one of whom – Yahya Sinwar – looms taller than the rest. 

The 61-year-old native of Khan Yunis could well have been our person of the year, the way the suicide bomber was in 5761, and former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was in 5766. 

Sinwar was clearly the driving force behind the October 7 attack, and is widely believed to have both masterminded and micromanaged its every military ploy and moral perversion. 

Then again, the events Sinwar uncorked produced on this side of the border a range of intense experiences, from grief and dislocation to sacrifice and solidarity, all of which he caused, but obviously does not represent. That is why Sinwar cannot be our person of the year. 

The field is thus narrowed to Israeli nominees, leading us to the question that big events often raise, namely, who are history’s heroes: the people or their leaders? 

Many eligible candidates 

THE LIST of ordinary people who could be our persons of the year is endless: 

Aner Shapira, the 22-year-old soldier on leave who was killed after shielding with his body Supernova music festival celebrants while deflecting seven grenades hurled at them by Hamas terrorists. 

Sarit Zussman, who moved millions with her oration above her fallen son Sgt. First Class Ben Zussman’s open grave, vowing “We will live, prosper, and build,” while admonishing our politicians: “If our soldiers managed to set themselves aside and place the people at the center, then our leaders should do the same.”

Or the Siman-Tov family – parents Tamar and Yonatan, five-year-old twins Shahar and Arbel, two-year-old Omer, and their grandmother Carol, 70, an entire family massacred in Kibbutz Nir-Oz. 

Or any of the hundreds of farmers along the northern border, the thousands of volunteers cooking meals for soldiers and helping the wounded recover, the tens of thousands of Galilean refugees, and hundreds of thousands of reservists, not to mention the hostages and the parents, siblings, and children struggling for their loved ones’ release. 

All these ordinary people are certainly heroes of 5784’s drama but the person of the year, in this case, must be a leader, because our leaders’ role in what happened before, during, and since October 7 has been decisive. 

Seen this way, a natural candidate is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. 

The man who cultivated Hamas for years as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority towers head and shoulders above a whole generation of Israeli politicians, generals, and spooks who engineered the delusion that “Hamas is deterred.”

Moreover, Netanyahu has been, for better and worse, the key Israeli policymaker and decision-maker throughout this war, and is therefore responsible for its navigation more than any other politician. 

One who stands out 

Even so, in this case, our person of the year must be someone who not only shaped events, but also radiated the average citizen’s sense of trauma, and that is not Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s the IDF Chief of Staff, Lt.-Gen. Herzi Halevi. 

GENERAL HALEVI has been in this war every day, night, and hour, and thus experienced what hundreds of thousands of troops under his command underwent along with their millions of parents, siblings, and children. 

However, unlike anyone else, Halevi has been part of this war’s every operation and skirmish, north, south, center, and beyond, from Yemen to Iran. 

Yes, he is part of the military-political leadership that produced the October 7 fiasco. However, Halevi is also responsible for the army’s subsequent delivery. 

The fighting he led in Gaza has been wise, sophisticated, cautious, and yet resolute, and the task Halevi was assigned – to decimate Hamas – has been achieved. 

Then, as the war traveled to Lebanon, Halevi’s army showed what it was up to during the years it did not prepare for Hamas’s assault. 

The precision, scale, and lethality of the IDF’s counterattack in Lebanon demanded meticulous intelligence-gathering and Sisyphean training. 

Just how all this will end remains to be seen, but it isn’t too early to say that in this theater, Israel was not surprised; Hezbollah was, and that was in large part thanks to the resourcefulness, dedication, and courage that Halevi inspired. 

Still, impressive though his military performance has been since October 7, the most impressive thing about Halevi’s conduct was his psychological response to what befell him that day. 

On the one hand, Halevi displayed nerves of steel. People who have been challenged by much less cataclysmic setbacks collapsed under trauma’s weight. 

Halevi never collapsed. He pulled his act together, regrouped the army, and led its counterattack from the front, in line with the IDF’s ethos. 

On the other hand, during a year in which he appeared in our living rooms almost daily, he was never seen laughing, or even smiling. 

The Israeli year’s trauma is visible in his melancholy face’s every muscle, wrinkle, and crimp. A humble man and tragic hero, the people’s agony is his. That is why Herzi Halevi is our person of the year 5784. 

www.MiddleIsrael.net

The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of the bestselling Mitzad Ha’ivelet Ha’yehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sefarim, 2019), a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s political leadership.