It’s a strange world when an airport hallway can take your breath away.
When we’d left Israel a few weeks earlier, it was still lined with hostage posters on both sides of the walkway, in both directions, the one for people arriving and the one for passengers departing. When our son-in-law flew home from a work trip a few days before we returned, he took this shot of a few posters remaining.
When we got back just days later, there were just three.
After two years of seeing that walkway plastered with faces that reminded us all (as they were meant to) of utter horror, even the airport’s getting “back to normal” felt like a metaphor for a subtle change that’s in the air here.
Yes, all the complicated stuff still remains, but still, it’s starting to feel different. Are we about to witness the beginning of a long overdue season of reckoning?
More on that below.
If you Google Prof. Dan Turner, a highly respected physician in Israel, what shows up in the “images” row can stop you in your tracks.
Our plan for Wednesday
Which guy are we talking about? When I first spoke to Professor Turner, I, too, was momentarily stumped. Turns out, of course, it’s the same person.
There are two extraordinary sides to Professor Turner, who is both a highly respected pediatric gastroenterologist as well as a courageous social activist who was involved in projects that will surprise our listeners during the war.
To me, those two photos represent the best of Israel — professional/medical/scientific excellence, combined with moral passion and courage. For the two years of the war, for reasons he will explain in our podcast conversation tomorrow (a conversation which deeply moved me), Professor Turner didn’t cut his hair much and let his beard grow. I suspect our listeners will find him riveting as well.
Our plan for Thursday
Thanksgiving isn’t an Israeli thing, obviously. Most of our American friends who’ve made aliyah don’t observe it any more. We still do, sort of, as I’ll explain in my conversation with Deputy Editor of the Times of Israel, Amanda Borschel Dan, on Thursday. Amanda, in addition to being a talented editor and interviewer for the TOI podcasts, is also a soulful writer, and a post that she wrote on Facebook in August touched me.
Some of the sentiments she expressed in her post struck me as very relevant to the theme of “giving thanks,” so I asked her to speak with us on Thanksgiving week. That conversation will go live on Thursday.
Ynet’s headline last night (mirrored in the Times of Israel screenshot from this morning, above) might not have seemed all that extraordinary to the casual reader, but in some ways, it was.
The day after he announced a series of dismissals of top officers and freezing of ranks of others, IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir found himself in the cross-hairs of Defense Minister Yisrael Katz.
Zamir took the steps that he did after a report generated outside the army suggested that the IDF’s own investigation of itself (done before he assumed his position) had been flawed to the point that the reports were essentially useless. The “Turgeman Committee” did its own investigation and submitted scathing conclusions. The steps that Zamir took (which some people believe were insufficient or less meaningful than others might assume, because several of these officers were about to retire anyway, and many others went unpunished) followed the Turgeman report.
So why did Katz take aim at Zamir? Because, well, the IDF publicly and proudly embracing an outside investigative committee doesn’t fit that well with the government’s continuing refusal to appoint a National Commission of Inquiry. Katz, widely considered a Netanyahu yes-man, took aim at Zamir in order to make the issue anything but the idea of unbiased investigation, resignations and firings.
Zamir, who many people worried would also be a bit of a yes-man in his role as Chief of Staff, has shown far more spine than the political echelon apparently hoped. He argued that it was time to end the war when the government wished to continue it, but he did so subtly. There were other disagreements, and those, too, were kept largely private or only hinted at.
Now, the gloves are off.
It’s not only Zamir, though. Look here and look there, and you sense change in all sorts of ways. Today, to give a sense of what’s in the air, a few quick examples.
MK Michal Shir, from the Yesh Atid party , took to the podium at the Knesset (the clip, which went viral, is from the Knesset TV channel] and summed up what many people here have long felt.
Her words speak for themselves.
Far from the hallowed halls of the Knesset, out in the street on Saturday night at the Tel Aviv protest, a protester held up a sign that in its own way, mirrored what MK Shir had said. The sign reads:
There's a greater chance that I'll get arrested for a sign critical of the government than for burning a village in the Shomron [West Bank]
Don’t laugh, even if you’re tempted to. The claim is a lot more accurate than many of us might wish to believe. Precise numbers are hard to come by, but almost any search one does on-line shows that many more people have been arrested at the protests than for violence (that has at times left Palestinians dead) in Judea and Samaria (West Bank).
After that very same protest in Tel Aviv (which is now referred to as a protest for a National Commission of Inquiry rather than on behalf of the hostages, almost all of whom are back), Naftali Bennett, whose campaign is now well under way, posted this:
At the rally for establishing a National Commission of Inquiry with Yokhi and Israel Moses, the parents of Sergeant Or Moses z”l, heroine of the battle at Be’eri, who together with Sergeant Major Adir Avudi z”l, ordered: “Commanders go out and defend this place, new recruits get into the shelters!” and they pushed back the terrorist attack at the cost of sacrificing their own lives and those of more officers and fighters.
The people of Israel deserve answers about how the terrible failure happened and how we ensure that it never happens again.
Heads up!
We’re soon going to fix things! 🇮🇱
None of this is a guarantee that the Commission of Inquiry will be created. No one knows when we’ll have elections, or what the results to be. On many fronts, to be sure, turbulent days lie ahead.
Still, just as that airport looks and feels entirely different than it did just a month or two ago, it now seems like it’s possible, just possible, that with the hostage horror almost behind us, it’s no longer sacrilegious to make other issues the primary focus — and who knows …
