Heroism comes in all forms: a young woman who avoided captivity, and a woman who was much less fortunate but just as brave
This was a terrible week for Israel. Waiting for Iran to strike, everyone is on edge. And when the army shut down GPS in much of the country yesterday, things went nuts ...
At the end of a truly terrible week for Israel, which ends with Israelis all over the country bracing for a possible strike from Iran, we’re going to focus on bravery, today in the form of two women whose courage really defies comprehension.
But first, the bedlam that was Israel yesterday. Then, this week in review, and then, the heroism.
The aftermath of the WCK catastrophe
Earlier this week, we shared the column by Israeli military analyst, Ron Ben Yishai, who warned that the horrific mistake the army made by killing the World Central Kitchen workers could well leave Israel in a position in which it is forced to end the war without getting the hostages back (and obviously, without destroying Hamas, which might not happen in any event).
Sure enough, Biden is now calling for an immediate cease fire. Israel’s cabinet rushed to approve massive shipments of humanitarian aid to Gaza, something we should have done months ago once it was clear we weren’t going to starve the Hamas leadership out of hiding, and there was apparently no resistance from the cabinet members who have typically opposed this. They understand that Israel’s relationship with the US is at what may be an all-time low, and this with a President who was more supportive of Israel than any previous President in history.
So there is going to be hell to pay with the US. If the US does force Israel to adopt a cease fire, then the following needs to be recalled:
What that would mean for the hostages is too painful to even say. (Sources I’m hearing say that the army believes that about 60 of them are still alive… I have no idea if that’s true.)
Israel will not have won the war, and will look weak. The UAE, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia want normalization with Israel because it is powerful. If it’s not the power they thought, the normalization is also worth less than they thought.
If the hostage families feel that their loved ones are being jettisoned, the violence of this week’s protest will be but a mere overture to what’s to follow. Of course the violence was wrong and misguided—but if it was your daughter stuck there in that hell for what is now almost half a year, what would you do?
Waiting for the Iranian shoe to drop
Iran has promised to strike Israel in response to our taking out several of their senior people. Israel believes them. And to make their targeting us more difficult, the army shut down the GPS system from about Tel Aviv and north.
I was in Ceasaria yesterday. I got off the train from Tel Aviv and planned to take a Gett (Israel’s Uber) to the house where I was headed. It’s how I always do it. I fired up Gett and this is what I got:
It was very kind of Gett to wish me “enjoy your ride,” but it refused to pick me up. And when I manually entered a different pickup spot, it informed me that the pickup spot I chose was too far from where I was. Never got a cab.
On the way back to Jerusalem, Moovit, the app everyone here uses to buy train tickets, wasn’t working. The whole app works on knowing where you are. Where you got on the train, where you got off. So thousands of people who usually don’t need paper tickets were lined up a the machines that they haven’t used in years. To say that the trains weren’t running on time yesterday would be a gross understatement.
The whole country was in a very bad mood. The government spent part of the day urging people not to buy generators and water (we had already bought a generator and have more water than imaginable in our safe room). The combination of everyone being scared and also unable to get home because the GPS system was down made for a lot of stress.
Israeli army radio at least had a sense of humor, and Haley Weinischke, my partner in all aspects of Israel from the Inside, sent me this screenshot off the Israel Army Radio website. What song were they playing at that moment?
I imagine that many of the people at the train station listening to the radio on their AirPods were hearing that song. I didn’t see anyone smile, though. Not sure how many people got the Army Radio joke. The radio station tried, though.
SUNDAY (03/31): We began the week spotlighting a column by Kalman Liebskind candidly discussed what has to change for us to get the result we want, the result that the Jewish people needs. As Kalman Liebskind noted, the issue is the toxicity of Israeli political and social life, and says Liebskind, "What was cannot be what will be.”
MONDAY (04/01): We shared yet another rewrite of the classic “The Children of the Winter of ‘73,” written about the children who were conceived by brokenhearted parents in the winter after the Yom Kippur War. The newest version “The families of the Winter of ‘23.”
TUESDAY (04/02): We had planned to look at the recurrent theme in Israeli journalism these days of “who are the Israelis?” but shifted our focus to the protests heating up in Tel Aviv and also Jerusalem. We shared a social media post that had gone somewhat, viral highlighting the cracks already appearing in the protest coalition.
WEDNESDAY (04/03): October 7 is by far the most documented pogrom in the history of the Jewish people. Many organizations are doing what they can to collect material, but behind all of it is the National Library of Israel. In this week’s podcast, Raquel Ukeles and Yaniv Levi-Korem of the NLI told us how the project got started, gave us a sense of its scope, and shared some of the moral and technological challenges.
THURSDAY (04/04): On Thursday we changed up the schedule again in light of the tragic killing of the 7 World Central Kitchen volunteer workers and discussed the war against Israel’s legitimacy.
Since Purim is now in the rear-view mirror, Passover cannot be far away. We’ll provide more details as the holiday grows closer, but for now, a quick note that we’ll be taking most of Passover off.
Despite the fact that this was a sad week, or perhaps because it was a sad week, we thought it worthwhile to remind our collective selves of the extraordinary courage that characterizes this country.
We turn first to a brief video (with NOTHING graphic in it):
Amit Soussana was kidnapped by Hamas on October 7th and held captive for 55 days. Now that she’s out, she has been telling the story of the sexual violence that she (and others) experienced (nothing graphic in this clip). She’s doing it to pressure the government and Israeli society to do everything possible to get the others out. She’s incredibly composed in this clip, which is part of a larger documentary soon to be released, but one can only imagine the courage that it takes to speak this way (there’s a lot more in the interview that you can only imagine)—but she does it for the others.
And we’re sharing it here to help her get the word out.
Today is day 182. It’s unthinkable. But it is very, very real.
And another form of courage altogether. In the last few weeks, the Yedi’ot Ahronot shared the story of 13-year-old Hadar Bachar, who survived. We’re translating a small portion of the article.
The large headline on the right, in red and black, reads:
“I sent the kibbutz a text, ‘we’re all wounded, they’re shooting here, come now, they’re blowing up the house, Mom and Carmel are already dead, I don’t want to die, please come now.’ Someone sent a tank. We could hear the soldiers from inside the house. Dad was already in bad shape, so I yelled at him, ‘Dad, you are not going to leave me alone [in the world].’”
The smaller print, on the left, readsL
It was virtually impossible to survive in the Bachar family’s safe room on Kibbutz Be’eri. The terrorists were attacking in every way possible: gunfire, explosives, setting the house on fire. Hadar, only 13-years-old, acted with indescribable resourcefulness. She stroked her mother, Dana, the kibbutz’s mythological nursery school teacher, in her last moments, the urged her brother, Carmel, to hold on until he died in front of her eyes, and tied tourniquets for her father which saved his life. Then, when she herself was wounded from shrapnel, she gave instructions to the security forces about where they were.
In a monologue that appears in a new book, One Day in October, she tells what happened there, in her own words.
Hadar describes how they started hearing explosions in the kibbutz at 6:30 in the morning. One brother was away in the army, another in India, so she, her brother and her parents holed up, still in their pajamas, in the safe room. At a certain point, one of the siblings needed to use the bathroom, but their father said no one is leaving, you’ll never make it back. But they had some pots and cloth in the safe room.
“So we peed into the pots, and we lined the pots with cloth so our peeing wouldn’t make a sound. We were incredibly quiet in there.”
But keeping quiet didn’t work. Eventually, they heard the terrorists enter the house. The terrorists tried to open the door to the safe room, but her father and brother (Carmel) held onto the door handle and the terrorists couldn’t open it. The terrorists were screaming in Arabic, “open the door,” and her father yelled back, “there are children in here.”
“The moment he said that, they opened fire onto the door and the bullets pierced the door and hit Carmel’s hand. His hand literally flew off because the stream of bullets. Then they fired again, and this time, they hit Dad, and he flew backwards, but they couldn’t open the door. Apparently, they had damaged the mechanism and now it wouldn’t open.
They started to bring everything from the house that would burn—chairs, furniture and they lit a fire near the entrance to the safe room, and every time it would go out, they would light it again. The safe room started to fill up with smoke, so we took the clothes that we had peed on and put them over our faces to filter out the smoke. We stayed that way until about 3:00 in the afternoon.”
Then the terrorists went to the window of the safe room (made of very thick glass), but they someone managed to bust it open.
“They threw in a grenade, but it was so smokey in the room they couldn’t see where we were. The grenade got stuck in the sofa, I got hit by some shrapnel, but it was no big deal.
But then they stuck a gun through the window and started to shoot. One bullet hit Mom in the lung, and she collapsed. All four of us were wounded, but I was in the best shape, so I took everyone’s phones and and started sending messages to everyone that I could. ….. “We need someone to get over here and save us. We really need it, really, Carmel is having trouble breathing, please come.”
… ….
“We moved to a different place in the room, and my father and brother both started fainting. I would say to them all the time, ‘Wake up!’ … At a certain point, Carmel started to make snorting noises, and I said to him, you can’t make those noises in here, they’ll hear you … but his breathing got shallower and shallower, and he died. I tried to lift him up to do CPR, but I didn’t have any strength in my hands.” … Dad said to me, Hadari, mom and Carmel aren’t suffering anymore.’”
Earlier, she says:
I also made myself a tourniquet for my leg, because of the shrapnel. I took off my shirt, I was only in underwear, and I tied it. I also lost a lot of blood, and then they lit more fire ….”
Later:
Eventually, one of my messages got some attention. Someone sent a tank to us. We could hear soldiers from inside the house, and Dad was yelling to them, but he didn’t have any strength left and he fainted. I yelled at him, ‘Abba, you’re not leaving me alone [in the world]. … When the soldiers got to the window and saw all the blood, they were certain we were all dead.
…
We’d been there twelve hours. The soldiers couldn’t open the safe room door from the outside, so we had to squeeze out [through the window]. … I couldn’t put any weight on my leg. The soldiers went to get something to cover me, because I was only in underwear. I told them I needed water. They brought it for me and I drank one and a half liters in one gulp. In half a second.”
She ends her essay:
“I don’t know what to say about this whole story. I don’t know. I don’t have anything to say. I dream of going back to the kibbutz. I still dream of being a baker. I don’t dream a lot now. I don’t really know what I wish for myself. My friend, Alma, who was taken captive to Gaza, was released in the hostage exchange. So now we’re together again, we sit together in the gardens, and we talk. But something has changed. Everything has changed. Even when we laugh, it’s not the same thing anymore.”
Impossible Takes Longer is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and at other booksellers.
This is just so so heartbreaking. The courage this child had— to watch her mother and brother die, and still hold on to help herself and her father. Please, Lord, we need salvation!
Another day. Another heartbreak.