Will Israel look in the mirror on its 77th birthday? (Dina Kraft- April 28, 2025)
Dina Kraft is a journalist, podcaster and the co-author of the New York Times bestseller, My Friend Anne Frank, together with Hannah Pick-Goslar. She lives in Tel Aviv where she's the Israel Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor and a creator of the podcast Groundwork, about activists working in Israel and Palestine. She was formerly opinion editor of Haaretz English. Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent NJN's views and policy positions.
Israel is in the midst of the country’s annual trio of “national days”. They kicked off with Holocaust Remembrance Day last week and Tuesday night begins the back-to-back commemoration of Memorial and Independence. This revered, even sacred, time in the Hebrew calendar typically signals not just a time of mourning and remembrance followed by a jarring shift towards celebration, but also introspection. Or to borrow a Hebrew term, a time of “cheshbon nefesh,” translated imperfectly an accounting of the soul.
Since the Hamas-led October 7 attack on Israel, the notion that time has stopped, that the country has still not psychically exited the shock and grief stage of the deadliest day in Israel’s history is a common one. The ongoing hostage crisis in particular and the way the Israeli media has focused almost entirely on Israel’s ongoing trauma in its coverage of the Gaza War has helped maintain this sense of living in suspended animation.
But close to 600 days into the crisis, time of course has done anything but stop. Israel careens forward, war footing and all, digesting new losses, tragedies, a government at war with its own security establishment, and a creeping brain drain along the way. Some look across the border at the destruction of Gaza and the civilian death toll and suffering there in growing awareness and horror. Some do not.
Headlines now trumpet news of certain Hamas commanders or operatives killed, but there’s little dwelling on the civilians, among them children, who have been killed alongside them – so many that since the second ceasefire ended in March the number of dead children now surpasses the 1,200 killed in Israel on Oct. 7th.
For me, the large number of civilians killed during these strikes – and the relative lack of news it makes in Israeli media — recalls the 17-year-old Palestinian boy named Ibrahim Bagdadi I met in Gaza City in 2005, shortly before Israel’s withdrawal of troops and settlers from the enclave. He told me how he was still haunted by the memory of a woman’s head and other body parts rolling into his bedroom on a sweltering July night three years earlier when an Israeli missile apparently aimed at Sheik Salah Shehade, a founder of Hamas's military wing, hit the building next to his family’s home. At the time the bombing sparked controversy in Israel because it killed not only Shehade and his wife, but 13 others, including nine children.
He would be 37 now. Is he still alive? If he has children, are they?
In recent weeks, and especially the last week, including on Yom HaShoah last Wednesday, Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Day, photos of children killed in Gaza are cropping up more in public view. At a rally calling for an end to the war held last Thursday in Tel Aviv, a row of oversized posters were held high in the night sky – a mix of both hostage portraits and pictures of children killed recently in Gaza.
The combination was a striking statement: it was the first time since the war broke out I had ever seen the images of the hostages and the Palestinian victims side-by-side. On Saturday night, a silent vigil of Israeli activists holding the photos of children killed in Gaza had mushroomed from a handful of people to about 500 in recent weeks. Still, these voices exist mostly on the edges of the conversation, although they are beginning to merge with those who have been protesting daily and weekly in the streets since soon after the war began, calling for an immediate hostage release.
Since early March when the second ceasefire ended, putting an abrupt halt to the deeply emotional return of hostages, most of them alive, some of them not, the ongoing cries from the public for a hostage deal and an end the war have intensified.
The impact of seeing women and men emerging alive from behind the curtain of Gaza captivity during the second truce cannot be overstated. Among those who returned alive was Yarden Bibas, father of the red-headed boys Kfir and Ariel and husband to Shiri, forever seared into Israel’s book of tragedy, who came back instead in caskets. A photo of Yarden holding a hand-written sign that states, “There’s no independence as long as they are still there,” referring to the remaining hostages, is making the rounds on social media.
The polls remain consistent: a majority of Israelis seek a deal that would win the release of all the remaining 59 hostages, 24 of whom are thought to be alive, in return for an end to the war in Gaza. On Monday, it was reported that Israel had rejected Hamas’ offer of a five-year truce.
As Israel prepares to mark Memorial Day and Independence Day families and friends are grieving the most recent soldiers to die in Gaza – including two killed Friday and another, reservist Master Sgt. Asaf Cafri, killed Wednesday on Holocaust Remembrance Day. That same day Magda Baratz, his great-grandmother (a survivor of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen), and his father received the news when they were in Germany at Bergen-Belsen marking 80 years since the notorious concentration camp was liberated.
During this time of fracture and pain six families who are among those who lost the most in the aftermath of October 7 and the Gaza war that has ensued asked the Israeli public to imagine what unity and healing could look like. They include Jonathan Polin and Rachel Goldberg, the parents of Hersh Goldberg Polin, along with five other families of the “Beautiful Six” who were executed together in a narrow, cramped tunnel by Hamas last summer. They billed it as a rare, “politics-free event” bringing together left and right, secular and religious, and even Jerusalem’s rival soccer teams.
Together thousands gathered in a Jerusalem square for an evening of song for the return of the hostages. Rachel Goldberg told the crowd, “Come together our family, our city, our country, our nation, our hostages. Together let’s sing and pray. Come!”
The crowd sang as one, reading along from lyrics of classic Israeli songs on a large screen. Music can be a balm, making people feel more deeply, but also think more deeply. The example of togetherness and common cause Sunday night from across Israel’s societal spectrum might also help lead those there and those who saw it to reflect on what the country could look like as it turns 77 years old. It’s a painful time to look in the mirror. But it’s never been a more urgent mission.