As
we set out down Ibn Gvirol Street to the Herzliya Gymnasia high school,
all the stores were closing. The police cordoned off the street to
vehicles and, as on Yom Kippur, hundreds of people strolled down the
middle of the pavement. Past the city hall, where a concert was starting
up, we walked and then past the small memorial of restless stones that
marks the place where Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated.
That
night in November 1995, I’d come home from the peace rally that had
turned into a mass of mourners when the news spread that Rabin had been
murdered a few meters away. I walked, crying, into the small room, then a
family room and now our office where I’m writing this. Our daughter sat
on my wife’s lap.
Now
our daughter is 17 years old, playing a leading role in her school’s
Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day
commemoration program. In the school’s courtyard, plastic chairs have
been set down tightly, arm to arm, for about 1000 people. All of them
are full. The front two rows are reserved for the school’s graduates who
now are in the army and the parents of those former students who have
fallen.
At
precisely 8:00 PM, with an un-Israeli sense of discipline, everyone
rose at the same moment as the sirens went off. Those are the same
sirens as the ones I heard signaling incoming Iraqi missiles almost a
quarter-century earlier. A flag is slowly lowered to half-mast. The
father of one slain soldier-graduate says the Kaddish; a cantor chants
the al-Rahamim prayer, modified for
the occasion but rooted in the prayer for those martyred a thousand
years ago in Europe by the pogroms accompanying the Crusades.
These
are the parts of the program repeated every year. It is possible that
such things would grow stale and routine. But they don’t. They are
simply—literally—too close to home; too fresh in the mind and raw in the
emotions. For all of those students will have to serve, too. And every
citizen—not just every soldier—is a potential target.
Yet
it is what comes next that is most harrowing. Four students, including
our daughter, recite—as photos and details flash on two large
screens—the names of each of those martyrs and heroes. One by one they
march before us. And the list goes and photos go on and on, for longer
than I had expected.
The
first of the dead is from 1915; the overwhelming majority, it seems,
are from the War of Independence, when about one percent of the Jewish
population died. A number of them died on October 6, 1973 and in the
following couple of days, in the Sinai at the start of the Yom Kippur
war.
Some
were civilians; others soldiers. Most male; a few female. Only one is
well known, the writer Yosef Hayim Brenner who taught at the school,
murdered by an Arab mob in 1921.
At
the very end are the names of five people who were killed in the 1948
war, given a special emphasis as they hade each been the last survivor
of a family wiped out in the Holocaust.
They
are frozen with the haircuts and clothes of their time, mostly smiling,
happy students or young soldiers. Loved by their family and friends,
they were regular people, never intending to be martyrs and certainly
not heroes. They were deprived of life but we were deprived of their
presence and their achievements.
And
suddenly I remembered something I hadn’t thought about for years. A
dignified professor told me long ago about a conversation he had once
had, probably in the 1960s, with a cabinet minister who had been one of
the pillars of the governments of Prime
Minister David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father.
The
powerful politician began talking about the Holocaust and how, deep
down, he could not really believe that all of those people had died. For
many years, he believed, they were somewhere out there and one day
there would magically appear off the coast a vast fleet of ships. They
would land amidst rejoicing at the reunions that would take place.
He
had to believe that, he continued, for without such an expectation,
without all of those people and their talents how could anyone believe
that the Israel could be founded and survive and prosper at all? How
would it be possible that a people so wounded, so bereft, could survive
and be fruitful at all?
And
as he originally told this story, the political leader had become
deeply emotional and moved. And as the professor recounted the story to
me, he had become deeply emotional and moved. And as I heard the story
I, too, had become deeply emotional and moved.
“Then
He said unto me: 'Son of man, these bones are the whole house of
Israel; behold, they say: Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost;
we are clean cut off.”
Now, I watched as these many more people did briefly seem to walk before me.
“So I prophesied as He commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their
feet….”
And I had only to look around me to know that they had not—a cliché but here a truth—died in vain.
“Behold,
I will take the children of Israel from among the nations, whither they
are gone, and will gather them on every side, and bring them into their
own land; and I will make them one nation in the land.”
But
I have not invited you to read these words this day just to say this.
There is something equally or even more remarkable to tell.
In
all of this and throughout the nation on this day, there was not a word
of hatred, of reviling any enemy. No smugness of triumph, no desire for
conquest; no thirst for revenge or punishment. Thus behaves the world’s
most slandered nation.
Barry
Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs
(GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International
Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His book, Israel: An Introduction, has just been published by Yale University Press. Other recent books include The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley),
and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center and of his blog, Rubin Reports. His original articles are published at PJMedia.
Professor Barry Rubin, Director, Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center http://www.gloria-center.org
The Rubin Report blog http://rubinreports.blogspot.com/
He is a featured columnist at PJM http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/.
Editor, Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal http://www.gloria-center.org
Editor Turkish Studies,http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=t713636933%22
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