The Real Jewish Superpower

Today’s piece is by Delilah Rose and was first published in Ruach, our sister publication on Medium.

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In the nearly 80 years since the UN voted on the partition agreement that would pave the way to Israel’s independence, one can’t help but wonder if the passing of the motion was only done to appease the Jews in full expectation that Jewish independence would ultimately fail against the Arab aggression.

The actions of the UN indicate as such. The endless resolutions against Israel, the many, many condemnations by the Human Rights Council which are of insane proportions relative to Qatar, China, North Korea, Iran, and more. The consistency of the UN’s allegations would certainly lead one to think that they never really intended for Israel to stick around, and now they’re trying to worm their way out of having passed Israel’s right to establish Jewish sovereignty.

If Israel’s birth, against all the odds, wasn’t surprising enough, the subsequent 80 years have defied all belief: a tiny state with a largely weakened refugee population managing to overcome five Arab armies in its war of independence, and going on to survive and defy many more attacks since. All the funding and weapons in the world couldn’t logically bring about such an outcome, so what did?

Simple — Jewish solidarity. We saw it in the fifty years prior to that UN vote, when, miraculously, Jews came together from all over the world, bringing skills of all kinds, and developed agriculture and an economy from nothing. We’ve seen it many, many times since.

The most memorable for Gen X Jews and younger has been the aftermath of October 7th 2023, when we suddenly found ourselves frozen out of our social circles simply for not being ignorant of the truth of Israel’s history. Once again, we sought each other out, told each other’s stories, supported a re-emerging economy to support Jewish artists, writers, and businesses, and created a solid wall of resistance to fend off the rising hatred trying to bring us down.

Once again, the true Jewish superpower emerged.

Not controlling the weather, not Hollywood, or banks, or the media or governments or elections or foreign policy. Not engineering pandemics, capitalism, communism, immigration or climate change. And definitely not all of those at once.

But something far more simple yet powerful: a refusal to give up on each other, or to leave a single member of the tribe to die alone. Solidarity.

There is a Hebrew phrase: Pidyon Shvuyim — the redemption of captives.

For centuries, Jewish communities regarded pidyon shvuyim — the redemption of captives — as one of Judaism’s highest religious obligations. In the writing of the Mishneh Torah, Rabbi Moshe Ben Maimon said, “There is no greater mitzvah than redeeming captives,” arguing that no suffering combines hunger, fear, humiliation and danger to life quite like captivity. But he also noted that the redemption of captives must never reward the kidnappers so much that they will be encouraged to take more.

This has proven itself to be the greatest moral dilemma of all — how does one best save both today’s captive and tomorrow’s.

So the principle may be rooted in the scriptures, but it’s also arguably an instinctive response to the tribal experience, arising as a result of the shared experience of exile itself. Already estranged from the roots of one’s culture and the tribal home for nearly two thousand years, the instinct to hold the tribe together by any means possible became paramount.

And the feeling of exile never ended. Jews were tossed from one country to another, welcomed when they were useful and then betrayed when they weren’t.

The treatment was indiscriminate. There was no concern for the family man, the mother, or the child. Across Europe, children were jeered at, adults spat on and beaten in public. Lithuania murdered 100,000 Jews without any input from Nazi Germany. Poland the same, before the murderous SS occupied the country and took care of the rest.

Across the Middle East, Jews were valued members of the community, as long as they paid the Jizya tax and made no mention of Israel as their home. As soon as any suspicion arose that they were disobeying their rulers, their homes were set on fire, women raped, children murdered.

For those two thousand years, Jews just tried to survive. Every loss was mourned as one’s own.

When history repeatedly teaches you how easily your brothers and sisters can vanish, remembering becomes an act of resistance, and searching becomes an act of love.

But let’s dispense with the romanticised version of the story.

Fast forward to modern Israel and we have an organised society with expert-trained professionals to take care of every modern-day Jewish requirement, including Pidyon Shvuyim.

There’s Mossad, whom everyone has heard of, whether through high-drama TV shows or conspiracy-pushing social media channels. But few know that within Mossad exists an intelligence team with officers whose sole responsibility is to bring home the missing.

Not just living hostages: the dead, the recently returned, even the long-ago nearly forgotten.

In an interview with Ynet in May 2025, Col. (res.) “Moshe”, the former IDF officer responsible for captives and missing personnel and now an operations intelligence officer in the IDF Captives and Missing Command, described the job unlike almost any other in intelligence. “Captives and missing is 95 per cent failures and 5 per cent successes,” he said. “It is living with ongoing failure and ongoing frustration, and you have no privilege to give up.”

On October 7th, 2023, 251 hostages were taken. Most were alive at the time, a few already dead. The team’s work would be endless for the next 843 days, after which time all 251, and four captured in 2014 and 2015, finally made it back to Israeli soil. Many were dead, but gratefully the majority were alive.

The ones who had been there the longest — over ten years — had never been forgotten. Two — Hisham al-Sayed, a Muslim Bedouin Arab Israeli, and Avera Mengistu, an Ethiopian Israeli — were released alive. The other two, Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul, were known to have been killed during the 2014 Gaza war and their bodies held by Hamas. The Captives and Missing Command unit had spent over ten years following a trail to Oron’s body, which the IDF recovered during a rescue operation in January 2025. Hadar’s was returned in November as part of the ceasefire deal.

Only last week, Oron Shaul’s mother, who had waited over ten years to lay her son to rest, passed away.

The stories of Hisham, Avera, Hadar and Oron, along with the 251 hostages taken on October 7th 2023,are only a taste of the kind of persistence and finely-tuned attention with which Mossad has sought out its captives, dead and alive.

Other stories include that of Zachary Baumen, who disappeared during the Battle of Sultan Yacoub in 1982. For 37 years Israeli intelligence continued searching. Eventually, in cooperation with Russia and through years of intelligence work inside Syria, his remains were recovered and returned to Israel for burial. The operation reportedly involved years of intelligence gathering, covert relationships, satellite imagery, historical battlefield reconstruction and forensic identification.

There was the massive intelligence effort and finally the willingness to hand over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners including convicted murders and the notorious Yahya Sinwar in return for one single, treasured soldier, Gilad Shalit. Israeli intelligence agencies spent five years identifying who was guarding him, verifying he was alive, gathering information on his location, and supporting negotiations.

There’s the story of the wristwatch of legendary Israeli spy Eli Cohen.

Over fifty years after Cohen’s execution in Damascus, Mossad reportedly obtained his watch in a clandestine operation inside Syria. Although not a rescue mission, it demonstrated the agency’s long-term commitment to recovering items of profound importance to Israeli families and national memory.

And one can’t forget Ron Arad. The navigator Ron Arad became one of Israel’s greatest intelligence priorities.

Although he has never been recovered, Israel devoted enormous intelligence resources over decades to finding him.

According to public reporting, Mossad and other agencies conducted operations across Lebanon, Iran and elsewhere in attempts to establish his fate.

His case shaped much of Israel’s later doctrine that no soldier should ever be abandoned.

Aside from these rescue missions and negotiations, Israel’s short history is filled with stories of working tirelessly in negotiations and spy missions to enable Jewish communities to relocate from places such as war-torn Ethiopia and the regime of the Soviet Union, and offered refuge to others fleeing violence and authoritarian regimes, including the Vietnamese boat people in the late ’70s and non-Jewish Ukrainian refugees fleeing the current war.

The government has also offered asylum to many Palestinian members of the LGBTQ+ community, whose lives are in danger from their own governments.

These days, Israel is a rich mix of different cultures and ethnicities. It is far from perfect, but Jewish principles that value life still reign, giving refuge to those in need, especially those held captive and made to suffer by an oppressive regime, because Israel knows how that feels.

It’s not about heroism, it’s just doing what we have to do.

Perhaps that is the only real Jewish superpower that has ever really existed.

Not controlling newspapers.

Not controlling governments.

Not controlling the weather.

Simply refusing to accept that one person can disappear into history without somebody still trying to bring them home.

After all, this is a people who have spent thousands of years preserving the names of forgotten ancestors, reciting memorial prayers for the dead, rebuilding shattered communities and carrying memory across continents. The intelligence officers searching for hostages and fallen soldiers are not inventing something new. They are the latest custodians of a very old promise.

A promise that every life matters.

That every family deserves answers.

That every missing person remains someone’s entire world.

For two thousand years, antisemites have insisted that Jews possess extraordinary powers.

Perhaps, in one respect, they were right.

Not the power to control the world.

The power to refuse to abandon one another.

And in a world that so often moves on, forgets and looks away, perhaps that is the most extraordinary power of all.

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