Eleven, thirty and eighty-seven ....
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A brief focus on memory today. Three vignettes:
ELEVEN YEARS
Hadar Goldin z’l has been returned to Israel. More than eleven years after he was killed in the 2014 conflict with Hamas and his body was kidnapped into Gaza, his parents and his family have some sort of closure. Not the closure we wish they had, not the sort of closure we were blessed to celebrate with other families just a few weeks ago, but still, closure.
All our many flaws notwithstanding, I still think that Israel’s unique in many ways, including its being a place where the return of a single body can be an issue that attracts the focus of an entire country. After Shabbat was over a few days ago, when it appeared very likely that Hadar’s body would soon be returned, IDF Chief of Staff, Eyal Zamir, went to see Goldin’s family in their home. That, in itself, is quite something.
The IDF posted a photo of their meeting, with a very brief text, on its FB page.
The Chief of Staff met yesterday with the family of the fallen and abducted soldier, Lieutenant Hadar Goldin, of blessed memory, regarding all the efforts made over the past years for his return. During the conversation, he emphasized the IDF’s commitment to act toward bringing back all the fallen soldiers held captive.
The IDF embraces the bereaved families and will continue to accompany them and act with transparency and sensitivity.
And my friend, Andrew, shared with me a video of the Kaddish being recited at “Abu Kabir,” as the Forensic Institute is known, as soon as the identity of Goldin’s body was confirmed.
Where else?
THIRTY YEARS
Last week, the Jewish world marked the thirtieth anniversary of the assassination of Yitzchak Rabin, z’l. My sister-in-law had signed up to watch a ceremony (in the States) online, and asked me to watch with her. So I did.
It was, of course, dignified. The speakers were all very articulate. And the evening was appropriately thoughtful, somber and sad.
Yet the shared basic claim was simply silly and wrong. Essentially, all the speakers said the same thing: had Yigal Amir not murdered Yitzchak Rabin, we’d have had peace by now.
That, tragically, is myopic. After all we’ve seen over the past two years, after all we’ve learned about Palestinian attitudes to Israel (“from the river to the sea,” we should recall, does not mean “two states”), one can imagine that had Rabin not been killed, Oslo would have led us to peace?
It’s ludicrous. And it saddened me that such obviously intelligent people would harp on something so obviously mistaken.
What’s not all that well known is the fact that it’s not even obvious that Rabin himself thought that Oslo would bring peace. As I note in my ISRAEL: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn (pp. 367-368),
According to some sources, even Rabin was privately beginning to give up on Oslo due to the terror it had unleashed. Former defense minister Moshe “Bogie” Ya’alon wrote years later, in 2008, that Rabin had told him that the prime minister “was going to ‘set things straight’ with the Oslo process, because Arafat could no longer be trusted.”1 And in an interview with one of Israel’s leading newspapers, Dalia Rabin, the prime minister’s daughter, said in 2010, “many people who were close to Father told me that on the eve of the murder he considered stopping the Oslo process because of the terror that was running rampant in the streets, and because he felt that Yasser Arafat was not delivering on his promises.”
Ya’alon’s and Dalia Rabin’s accounts might or might not be accurate. Even if they’re wrong, and even if Rabin himself had not despaired of Oslo, thirty years later it’s, very, very hard to imagine that that agreement was going to lead to peace.
Jews cannot afford myopia.
That said, though, Rabin’s assassination was one of the most horrific events in all of Israel’s history, and one would thus have hoped that commemorating and honoring Rabin’s memory—whether or not one agreed with him—would evoke wall to wall participation.
Alas, not. As you might note in the above video featuring MK Gilad Kariv on the occasion of the Knesset’s gathering to honor Rabin, Prime Minister Netanyahu chose not to be present.
Really? Is there really nothing at all that is just sufficiently sacred to warrant setting aside all differences for an hour or two of memory?
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EIGHTY-SEVEN YEARS
Last week, on the subject of the New York City elections, I shared (without comment) an article from the New York Times in 1934 about a group of German Jews who voted for Hitler (I am not in any way comparing Mamdani to Hitler, obviously). Many readers were rather stunned by the NYT article, but one, a historian, kindly wrote me to share a bit of followup to that story, of which I was not aware. I’m very grateful to my friend, the talented author, Professor Rick Richman for having taught me this little bit of history.
For those who did not see the original Times story, I’ll post it here once again, and then the subsequent followup.
United States
