Days When I Hate Being Israeli

On the television, a shaky, phone-filmed video shows a young blond man goofing around with friends. He jumps from some rocks into the water. He rides by on a bike with a heavy box on the back and keels over into the grass as his friend laughs uproariously.

Now there’s another young man, with dark hair. He’s scuba diving, making the peace sign under the water. He throws back his head and laughs as he dances at somebody’s wedding, perhaps suddenly self-conscious.

Now there are photos of a family on a hiking trip in Northern Israel. Their son is taller than the rest of the family, with the lanky, still-growing build of a man who hasn’t quite entered his 20s.

These young men are all dead now.

They were IDF soldiers, and it’s Yom HaZikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day. The holiday, as all holidays in Israel do, takes place from sundown to sundown. At 8 p.m., a nationwide siren blares, the same one we hear on Yom HaShoah, a week earlier. Everybody stands up and bows their heads.

Then the television coverage commences.

The next day, after the siren blows a second time, in an act of ritualized national mourning, there will be ceremonies at cemeteries all over the country. People will light memorial candles, and flags will fly at half-mast.

I feel compelled to watch every video of every ceremony, and every broadcast photo or video. I feel I must watch and listen to these broken families describe the beautiful, promising lives that were so brutally interrupted.

For Israel.

How would I feel if my son were among these young men? Had he died for a purpose? A reason?

At sundown, when Yom HaZikaron ends, immediately, another, much happier holiday begins: Yom Ha’atzmaut - Israeli Independence Day.

It gives me whiplash every single year. From yahrtzeit candles and crying families to fireworks and barbecues. A deliberate orchestration of national feeling designed to remind Israelis that we owe our very existence, still, to those who died defending us.

There is no joy without mourning first, the annual ritual seems to say.

Yearly, I absorb the solemnity, grief, and loss, spoon-fed to me and everyone else because it’s customary. There must be a wisdom to this annual ritual, I think to myself, like sitting shiva to fully acknowledge the fact of death.

But this year, for me, another emotion arrived alongside the sadness.

The previous week, on Yom HaShoah, our Prime Minister declared that he had prevented a second Holocaust by defeating Iran.

Then, at a Yom HaZikaron ceremony, he said:

“The people remember. The people salute. The people are deeply grateful to the sons and daughters, thanks to whom our existence is assured.”

Rage for the bottomless grief of the newly bereaved families since October 7, families of soldiers, festival-goers and kibbutzniks.

And rage at the fact that the son of our Prime Minister lives in Miami and has not returned to Israel to serve in the reserves at any point since October 7.

I wonder, for the millionth time, who is paying for the security of this obnoxious brat.

Benjamin Netanyahu, never one to miss an opportunity to reference his heroic brother Yonatan, who died during the Entebbe raid in 1976, can certainly relate to the pain of bereavement. Yet, as one who also lost a brother, I have to say:

Where is your son?

And where were you on October 7?

Why did he and his government tell Israelis in 2024 that Hezbollah had been thoroughly defeated?

Why did he and his government tell Israelis in June 2025 that we had removed an existential threat in Iran, calling the 12 Day War a “historic victory”?

And this man has the gall to make speeches at Yom HaZikaron ceremonies?

The deliberate placement of Yom HaShoah, then a week later Yom HaZikaron, then a day later Yom HaAtzmaut, a terrible cataclysmic event in Jewish history, the sacrifice and responsibility of later having a state, then the joy of the fact that we are still here, is meant to create a nationally felt moral and emotional progression.

They tried to kill all of us.

Many of us died to protect this state.

And yes, despite everything, we have a state.

But as we would say in Hebrew: eize medina - what a country.

This?

It seems almost daily that I read yet another report of settler violence in the West Bank, but I do not see a follow-up headline saying those settlers have been apprehended and roundly punished.

Rather, I see a news item about four Border Police officers sent to a military jail for having a barbecue on Shabbat.

I see another about three female soldiers court-martialed and fined for showing up to be discharged in tank tops and a short skirt.

At what was, for me, an incongruent Yom Ha’atzmaut barbecue today, a friend struggled to express herself in English.

This country, she hesitated, is… how do you say?

She turned to her husband.

Going down the toilet.

On TV, the hiking family stands near a photograph of their dead son and brother, and tells the newscaster that this was his favorite view. The mother is wearing all white. She struggles through her words, but she tries to be brave.

Her son loved it here, she says, gesturing behind her at green, rolling hills.