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Americans grow up on the Lone Ranger, on Superman and his fortress of Solitude. Israelis grow up with the “hevre,” the gang. Israelis fight valiantly for the “tzevet,” the unit.
By GIL TROY DECEMBER 25, 2024 02:21
IDF TROOPS in Cyprus this week simulate a military campaign deep inside Lebanese territory against Hezbollah.
(photo credit: IDF SPOKESMAN’S UNIT)
This Hanukkah, the Jewish world is reshaping the world thanks to impressive displays of courage, physical and spiritual. As Israelis defend their homeland while resetting the Middle East, many Jewish students resist the anti-Zionist mob. Awash in heroes, it’s worth asking: What makes a modern Maccabee?
Last week, the youth panel at my Begin Center book launch explored the question, as we discussed Zionist identity, post-October 7. As an emissary in Seattle last year, May Brown witnessed an initial surge of interest in Israel. But, “as time passed, and the IDF started to have the upper hand in the war,” some within “the Jewish community started drifting away from siding with Israel.” Certain “Jewish organizations” deemed Israel “problematic,” “triggering,” divisive. Hosting her, a representative of Israel, might “cause them to look Zionist, God forbid,” she sighed.
She and the next speaker, Nora, a Northwestern University student, described absorbing what Brown called “antisemitic comments made in a very American, polite, yet heart-twitching way....” Nora described an often-menacing campus atmosphere, which left Zionist students feeling isolated, targeted, “dreading” certain classes. Nora thought, logically, “I’m here to learn.” Yet some students and professors kept “making comments about my Judaism, about Hillel,” and “it became a very uncomfortable environment.”
The third speaker, my son Aviv Troy, still doing revolving-door reserve duty, acknowledged that the war in America “may have been a different struggle, but the struggle was just as real there,” requiring “different types of heroes and different types of courage.” But he articulated one secret to the wave of Israeli heroism: “I was lucky enough to never feel alone from the ninth of October, the day that I landed back in Israel.” He added: “I can’t imagine what it must have felt like to be completely alone on a campus and not quite sure who has your back.”
Aviv described rushing home to Israel from Sri Lanka, having finished his military service two months earlier. Changing planes in Dubai, waiting at the luggage carousel, he checked his messages. One voice mail reported that six good friends had died fighting in Kfar Aza alone. Two others, who had been at the Supernova music festival, were missing.
After landing, he scrambled to base, despairing with everyone else. But “once I got my weapon, once I got my vest back, there was something that made me say ‘okay, we got this....’ I knew what I was doing, and I didn’t feel alone. I felt like I had my unit’s support and my country’s support, and I found that very inspiring.”
Some might call that Israeli patriotism. It’s actually called Zionism.
Zionism: No longer old-fashioned
May, who now directs Tel Aviv University Hillel, reports that many friends and students who once distanced themselves from “Zionism” as “old-fashioned” now embrace the label, and are redefining it. Nora’s Zionist passion has only intensified.
IN THEIR moving bestseller, published in English by Toby Press, One Day in October: Forty Heroes, Forty Stories, Yair Agmon and Oriya Mevorach describe the “mass heroism” that saved Israel. Detailing 40 stories, they see, Hanukkah-style, “the good that emerged within the torment,” and hope “to rejoice in the sweetness of the light.”
With three Ms – Motivation, Means, and a sense of Mission – heroes find meaning in life and a superhuman strength. Vicious attacks by enemies, in Israel’s seven-front war and on the eighth, delegitimizing front, too, motivated many to fight for their lives and for others. Zionism blessed many Jews with the backbone, the skills, and the commitment to resist enemies threatening to destroy us and the West.
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Israeli Zionism added two other elements. First is sheer physicality. We’ve raised generations of warriors, not wimps. They’re giborim, heroes, from the word “gever,” man. To win, militarily and diplomatically, you need the traditional, now politically incorrect masculine virtues – vir is Latin for “man.” You need guts, grit, sweat, determination, daring, power, persistence, and infinite bullheadedness. You must be able to put civilian life, sensibilities, and niceties on hold.
You also need “gevura” – same root, but a quality mystics say mixes power with restraint. Our soldiers must resist becoming haters and act as ethically as possible within the rules of war, while confronting ugly realities. They also must defy the siren songs of our own doubters pressuring us to give up too soon, to defer to world opinion, to define our righteous fight by unfortunate mistakes made and the horrors we never wanted to unleash but had to in battle. Never forget the big picture: unless you defeat totalitarians thoroughly, convincingly, and comprehensively, they rise.
There’s another peculiarly Zionist element – which Aviv emphasized in the panel. We usually speak of Maccabees in the plural, because the five brothers delivered their blows best as a clenched fist.
Americans grow up on the Lone Ranger, on Superman and his fortress of Solitude, on one Wonder Woman, on Gary Cooper or Bruce Willis standing alone. Zionist heroics are togetherness projects. It’s the three beaming soldiers who symbolized the Six Day triumph which restored Jerusalem’s Temple Mount to “our hands.” It’s Moshe Dayan’s call for “galloping horses that need to be reined in” – not herdlike sheep or lone wolves.
Israelis grow up with the “hevre,” the gang. Israelis fight valiantly for the “tzevet,” the unit, not just for high-minded Zionist ideals. And on Hanukkah we sing the 1940s’ kibbutz anthem “Banu Hoshech Legaresh,” in the plural, banishing the darkness. We understand that “each of us is a small little candle, but together... our power is blinding.”
The writer, a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute, is an American presidential historian. His latest book, To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream, was just published.
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