Bari Weiss: The Holiday from History Is Over

[Valin]

The Free Press

A free society is only as strong as the citizens willing to defend it. Reflections and videos from my time on the ground in Israel.

Bari Weiss

March 12, 2024

KIBBUTZ KFAR AZA — On a recent Tuesday morning I found myself two kilometers from Gaza. Every few minutes we could hear the boom of a 155 mm howitzer sending fire across the border, but I was trying to focus on the historian Michael Oren, who was talking to me not about the war raging around us but about Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, a Roman general who walked the world 500 years before Jesus was born, some 200 kilometers from the spot we were standing.

“Cincinnatus was a farmer. All he wanted was to be at his plow,” Oren told me as the winter rain poured down. “But every time he went back to his farm the Roman Republic came to him and said, ‘We need you to come back. We need you to lead an army.’ ”

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For twenty-first-century inhabitants of the Middle East’s start-up nation, such individual and collective courage had become something to be studied in the past—not enacted in the present. Not inside the land of Israel. Not in the twenty-first century. And certainly not by them.

But I met successors to Cincinnatus everywhere I went.

They are ordinary Israelis like Inbar Lieberman. Lieberman is a 25-year-old woman who is the security coordinator of Kibbutz Nir Am. She killed five terrorists by herself on October 7. The rest of her team repelled an additional 20 over the course of four hours. “I’m not a hero,” she says. “I wasn’t there by myself.”

Ordinary Israelis like my friend Jessica’s father-in-law, Noam Tibon, a 62-year-old grandfather who got in a jeep with his pistol and his wife, Miri. He drove south from Tel Aviv and shot his way through terrorists to liberate his son and granddaughters, who were hiding in their safe room in Kibbutz Nahal Oz from hundreds of Hamas terrorists who were swarming the kibbutz. 

Or like Yair Golan, another 61-year-old retired general—his career cut short because of his leftist views—who drove alone through the fields near the Gaza Strip and followed pins dropped by panicked young people hiding in the bushes at the Nova music festival to save them. 

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Since the earliest hours of Saturday, October 7, we have been reporting on the war in Israel. Within 48 hours of the attack—before we understood that the southern part of Israel was still overrun with terrorists—our team had interviewed dozens of people: survivors who crawled out of the music festival, off-duty soldiers and older men who grabbed guns and headed into the fire, families whose loved ones had been stolen away into parts unknown. In the weeks and months since, we have published more than 50 pieces about this subject.

So I thought I knew. 

But there is a difference between knowing something intellectually and standing in a killing field.

That’s where I met a young woman named Michal Ohana one recent afternoon. 

Watch Michal and other survivors:

 

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The fires that raged at Kibbutz Kfar Aza have long since burned themselves out. I stood there in what was once a family’s home but now was just blackened walls with no roof. The people who lived in this home were identified by their bones and their teeth. What was once a floor is now dust.

A few blocks away I stood in the burnt-out shell of a humble bungalow. A young couple named Sivan and Naor once loved each other here. There are remnants of them: a new pair of Sambas. An old bra. Some dirty dishes in the sink. But mostly there are holes. Hundreds and hundreds of gaping bullet holes in the room where the 23-year-olds were slaughtered. There are words scribbled on the wall: “Human remains on the sofa.” 

Step into Kibbutz Kfar Aza:

 

 

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“It’s like after you knock your finger with a hammer, you don’t feel anything for a while,” the journalist Gadi Taub said, describing what Israelis have gone through since Hamas’s invasion. “People haven’t begun to understand the extent of this earthquake and how it will change Israel. The tectonic plates have moved, and nothing in the system has yet absorbed or changed to accommodate what happened.”

The public intellectual and Bible scholar Micah Goodman told me in Jerusalem that the country went through a collective near-death experience. Imagine an entire society that, between sunrise and sunset, peered together into the abyss. “For the first time in our lives, we had a moment where we could imagine that the whole thing was over. That the whole thing ended. You know how when individuals have a near-death experience, they’re transformed. Because they learned that life should not be trivialized. As a country, we had a near-death experience, and now we’re transformed because we know that Jewish sovereignty should not be taken for granted. It can’t be trivialized.”

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Listen to the voices of Palestinians:

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Questions like: What would I do? What would the people I know do if we were thrust into a near-death experience? If we had to fight for homes and our families, and the homes and families of our fellow citizens? The kind of seriousness I saw in ordinary Israelis—where does it come from? Does courage emerge spontaneously out of necessity? Or is there a quiet wellspring inside some people or some cultures waiting to be tapped? Do we have that here in America? Would we answer the call if it came? Or would we be like the Americans in this recent poll who admitted that they would flee rather than fight? 

Those are questions whose relevance grows more urgent by the day for those of us living in the free world.

I asked Haviv Gur if he thinks that a similar waking-up moment will come for America and Americans.

“When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, there was a long period of time when there was nothing in the Pacific that could have stopped a Japanese landing in California. And that sense of vulnerability created what Americans still today think of as the greatest generation,” Gur said. “Everyone should feel safe all the time. But crisis is a powerful and profound and often extraordinarily positive influence on our lives.”

Today we feel so far from the truths that reality forced on our greatest generation. So many have lost sight of the fact that there are some things worth fighting for if they are not to perish from the earth.

But as Gur put it: “The basic Israeli message is we are still human. We’re still living in a human world. We are still living in history. Be ready.”

[Valin]

Ma. 25 2024