Volunteers with Sar-El in Israel last March. (photo from Marina Sonkina)
Last year, about this time, I was in Israel, volunteering with Sar-El, an organization that connects the Israel Defence Forces with volunteers from more than 30 countries, who provide the army with non-combat support. So many others had wanted to help after Oct. 7 that I had to wait several months for my documents to be processed.
The mood was understandably sombre. Not just the trauma of the Hamas terror attacks, with hostages captive, but also the antisemitism that engulfed the Western world like fire.
I asked some of my fellow volunteers why they had come to Israel during such a dangerous time. The answers I got, especially from non-Jews, both surprised and comforted me. A Christian volunteer from Detroit wanted Israel to know that it did not stand alone. A middle-aged Australian had been sponsored by her church in Sydney to help people of the Holy Land under an attack. Two Romanian girls didn’t speak a word of Hebrew or English, but answered me in Italian: “Aiuto” (“Help”).
“I had a very good life. I had a chance to travel all over the world. But, until now, I’ve been traveling horizontally,” a Parisian Jew of Algerian descent told me. “Now, it’s time to travel vertically,” she said, raising her eyes to the sky. “This land is sacred. I feel it here like nowhere else. And now it’s in peril.”
In spite of rockets being fired into Israel from Lebanon, Gaza and Yemen, the volunteers felt more protected in Israel than they did back home. Many felt relieved that, finally, there was no need to conceal one’s true feelings or to hide one’s Jewishness.
“I don’t feel safe in the US anymore,” said a New York lawyer who had been attacked from behind in the streets of Manhattan, his yarmulke yanked off his head.
A German woman from Munich was on her 10th visit to Israel. “I’m not Jewish, and I can’t explain it,” she said. “All I know is that I love people here. Love their warmth. Chaos? Yes! They talk loud, they are emotional, but I don’t mind that. I plan to spend half a year here once I retire.”
Initially, I wasn’t sure how we, civilians, could help the IDF fight Hamas in Gaza, but my first day at the medical military base near Tel Aviv made it clear. Hundreds of different medications and medical devices that had come from warehouses across the country had to be sorted out, their expiration dates checked. Those who accuse Israel of racism should see these medicines, each labeled in four languages: Hebrew, Arabic, English and Russian. (Thanks to Soviet antisemitism and, lately, to Putin’s war on Ukraine, 15% of Israel’s population comes from Russia.)
On the military base, I saw clearly what is best in Israel: its people. The IDF mirrors the diversity and inclusiveness of a society that, in its short history, has accepted refugees from more than 100 countries.
Without Moshe, for example, we would have had no idea how to sort the truckloads of medications arriving every day. Having come to Israel from Bukhara (in Central Asia) as a child, Moshe kibitzed in three languages, instructing us by means of his hands while talking on his cellphone. From his easy smile, I would never have guessed that his wife had recently died of cancer, that his two sons were fighting in Gaza and that, every day after his work with us, he went to a synagogue to pray. One morning, Moshe directed us to place boxes in long rows on the floor, in an unusual configuration. The next morning, a group of children with autism and down syndrome came to finish the sorting, also helping their people’s army.
Paul, a mathematician who came from France, was in charge of the military base’s math department. Ruth, who had made aliyah from the Netherlands as a teenager, was serving as one of the madrichot (female soldiers tasked with organizing and looking after Sar-El’s volunteers); after the army, she hoped to become a specialist in Japanese culture.
On another military base, about 20 kilometres from Gaza, in the Negev Desert, one of our tasks was to assemble care packages for soldiers spending Passover at the front, away from home. In two days, we filled 15,000 boxes with grape juice, matzah and other traditional items. A soldier with a distinct Californian accent came to help us. He was a “lone soldier,” a soldier who has no family in Israel. Various families take turns welcoming lone soldiers for Shabbat, feeding them and giving them a sense of home.
Once, an officer joined us, helping make up the boxes, which was unusual, given his rank. Later, I saw him in the mess hall speaking in Hebrew to the base commander, who was originally from India. I found out that the officer was Druze. Living mainly in the country’s north, in the Galilee region, the Druze community enjoys all the civil rights of other Israelis, while maintaining their Arabic language and customs. Many Druze reach high echelons in the army, in medicine and other professions. When a Hezbollah rocket struck the Druze town of Majdal Shams, killing 12 children playing soccer, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu went there, addressing community members as “brothers and sisters.” He promised that Hezbollah would “pay a heavy price” for killing their children, and he kept his word.
When I think of the soldiers I met and talked to, one thing sets them apart from young people of their age in North America: a seriousness of purpose, and the burden of responsibility. They know that the survival of Israel lies on their shoulders. They also know that, while defending their country, they may not survive. Death lurks behind every corner in Gaza and Lebanon. It has hidden in an effigy of a child pleading, in Hebrew, for help, but booby-trapped with explosives. It was underground, in the tunnels, some going 50 kilometres deep. It disguised itself in doctors’ scrubs, inside Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza, which was appropriated by Hamas terror operatives.
Every fallen soldier is loved and mourned as one’s own child. Army service acts as a social glue in a country into which millions of refugees, speaking different languages, have poured. The IDF is still the backbone and pride of this society.
At a party for troops just returned from Gaza, I saw a religious Jew in a yarmulke (skullcap) and tzitzit (prayer shawl) hanging from under his uniform, with a baby girl in each arm and an automatic rifle dangling behind his back. I talked to a medic, a corporal who was more outspoken than many – a college history teacher in times of peace, he had three young children at home.
“Is there any possibility of peace between Palestinians and Jews?” I asked him.
“Before Oct. 7, I supported a two-state solution because I wanted peace, but the Palestinians do not want peace,” he responded. “We’ve tried it many times in the past. They want only one state, an Islamic Caliphate with Sharia rule. We, Jews, are in their way and they want us dead…. We have to fight – if we want to survive.”
“What about your children?” I asked. “Will they have to fight, too?”
“Yes, them, too,” he said. “They’ll be left with no other choice.”
I shook my head in distress but said nothing.
“Look,” said the man, “illusions cost us very dearly. We can’t afford them anymore.”
I remembered Golda Meir’s words, spoken in 1957: “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.”
There is a truce in Gaza now. But, while some 20,000 Hamas fighters have been eliminated, 10,000 armed fighters are still at large.
Marina Sonkina is a fiction writer, and teaches in the Liberal Arts Program 55+ at Simon Fraser University.
