The Personal Costs of War

The reality of this war, which Israel did not start, can only be understood at truly the most personal levels.

IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi saluting fallen soldiers (photo: IDF/X)

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This is a guest essay written by Gavriella Zahtz, founder of Partners in Hope.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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For more than two months, I have not been able to write this post — but I think about it all the time, all day long, every day.

What are Israelis thinking? Feeling? What’s the national consensus? What matters that people need to know? What is absolutely true and does not help to tell the outside world?  How much of our hurt should I show? How much privacy do Israelis deserve in this time of grief and loss interwoven with literally a direct view into the very best humankind is possible of being?

Despair enveloped by hope. Fear tugging on the fringes of faith.

The longer that I am here in Israel, the more I realize how big the lie is that the Diaspora is told; every day I hear how the vast vast majority of Diaspora Jews and non-Jews have come to digest and accept these lies. This Western media version of Israel is so far from the truth that it is like, “Why bother trying to tell them?”

I mean, seriously. Westerners have seen every possible proof of the truth provided in nearly every kind of medium, sent by the perpetrators themselves, defended with facts and figures that have been provided by both the Jews of the Diaspora and from Israel.

After having all of that proof of black-and-white evil, Western leaders have not only turned truth upside down but welcome the evil into their streets and campuses, into their governments and societies. So, this is not euphemistic: Why should we bother to convince you of truth?

And secondly, outsider opinions are irrelevant to nearly anything that matters to us. Every Israeli with whom I speak, in any language from any background, in any age group, has said some version of the following: “Of course we’re going to survive. So what difference does it make?”

Bolstered by Biblical covenants and/or by the year-over-year return on miracles that is living and loving in the modern State of Israel, Israelis are absolutely confident that both this war and the long-term survival of the State of Israel and/or the Jewish People is a given. And resolute. To a person.

There is no disagreement of the country’s moral imperative to this seven-front war for survival. No one within the borders is questioning that as long as they are shooting at us, we have to keep shooting at them. The fact that this confuses our supposed friends and family in the West is endlessly perplexing to Israelis.

Why do they not believe us?

Oh, yeah, because we are the Jews. Oh well, we know the Jews survive anyway.

So, if that’s not what is on Israelis’ minds, then what is?

Making a living.

The country has been in a seven-front war after suffering the most horrific national trauma not ever before imaginable — even for those with cinematographic imaginations. Tourism is not down. It is non-existent. This makes the economic downturns of COVID look like a Hasbro board game.

The real Arab issue: workforce. For many years Israel has provided millions of days of passes for an Arab workforce that lives in the Gaza Strip or the West Bank. This has been the backbone of cheap labor for jobs that Jewish Israelis don’t want to do.

“The Jews want to work in hi-tech or nothing,” the owner of an electric installer business told me. The Palestinian labor is a quarter of the price of other foreign or domestic labor at their lowest. This workforce has also made up virtually the entire constant new construction industry in Israel. And there was already a housing shortage in certain areas.

Plus, this labor relationship has been good for the Palestinians. In neither the Gaza Strip nor the West Bank have they been able to create societies with self-sufficient economies. The majority want to come back to work. And without work in Jewish Israel, residents of both Gaza and the West Bank have all of the realities of abject poverty.

But it was exactly these workers who had been trusted for years, who had eaten at the family tables, then provided the floorplans of Jewish homes and communities to their colleagues and neighbors in Hamas. Supposed aid workers used their credentials to cover and celebrate the burning of our babies in their parents’ home ovens. Needless to say, the Israeli government is not granting “come across our border for free” work passes.

So, who will be Israel’s workforce? And how will they be paid? And how will I pay my bills this month? And what will the country be like for our children, spouses, and loved ones when they return from putting everything else on pause for over a year to serve our country? Can we achieve unity, or will issues like the draft or the courts tear us apart?

What about the businesses that have all closed down? How will the thousands who have lost limbs navigate in a country of cobblestone and stone stairs thousands of years old? Students with degrees on pause? The institutions now manned by Arab Israelis who, exempt from army service, chose not to serve, and now are running the hospitals and other institutions? 

The reality of this war can only be understood at truly the most personal levels.

The other day I heard of a boy who was one of the “minor casualties” of an “incident.” Half his face is paralyzed. His eye is blown out. He is a boy. And this will be his happily ever after. He is one of tens of thousands.

Every Israeli has someone they love called up; dead; forever changed physically, mentally, and/or spiritually. Tens of thousands of people displaced in their own country, living in government-subsidized hotel rooms meant to comfortably hold two for a week’s fun vacation at the beach, not a family of six for over a year.

And school. Half the country is having the status of school changed on a daily basis. Open or closed or only partially open depending on the proximity to bomb shelters, how much rocket shrapnel clean-up there was, what burned down, what is still on fire. Israel started a new school year with displaced kids all separated from their schoolmates across the country in districts that may or may not be open based on rockets and missiles from any direction.

Bigger yet, many of these children have parents who are actively serving in the IDF for more than a year now in the most horrific urban war on seven fronts. Or their parent has died. Or their gym teacher was killed in war. Or their gym teacher lost his or her leg, or arm, or both in this war that Israel did not start and did not want — but will fight and will win.

Because there is no other choice. Totally regardless of whether the West recognizes it or rejects the truth, we know that Iran and their proxies want to annihilate us. There is no option: We will  keep shooting as long as they are shooting at us. 

But yeah, we are a little sad. And sometimes we feel guilty that we are not fully sad all the time. We still go to the beach and dance and work and love and laugh, and sometimes we look over our shoulder if maybe we should not have laughed while our loved ones are still captive in the tunnels, while our children and parents are for months gone mere kilometers away from home, while we schedule going to funerals and houses of mourning with greater frequency than soccer games. 

To be Israeli or almost Israeli is to be able to sit with all of this at the same time. This land and living in this place is not easy. It is not simple. It is not gentle or quiet. But it is our home. And that is everything.

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This essay also appeared in The Judean People's Front by Reuben Salsa.