Loss and Rage

One of the surprises Jerusalem offered up to us shortly after we bought our apartment and began to explore the neighborhood was a peaceful cemetery just a few blocks from our street in which are interred 79 Indian soldiers who served with the Egyptian Expeditionary Force during the First World War, as well as the bodies of 290 Turkish prisoners-of-war who died while in British captivity. So it is a strange place, that cemetery: a Hindu burial ground in which are also buried hundreds of Muslims who fell far from home and who had to be buried somewhere. There are no individual graves; the British apparently decided to bury the dead in two mass graves, one for the Hindus and one for the Muslims. Facing stone monuments record the names of the dead.

We’ve walked by many times; Joan’s cousin Rina used to live just down the road. It’s a peaceful place, a quiet place. But it never fails to strike me how strange the whole concept is: hundreds and hundreds of young men who died in a war fought basically over nothing at all in a distant place and who were then shoveled into a common pit (why do I think white soldiers would have been buried in separate graves?) and left to sleep in the earth in a place that none of them would ever have thought to call home.

Walking by that place never fails to re-awaken in me my recollection of Joan’s and my visit to the Beersheva War Cemetery, the resting place of more than 1200 soldiers from the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and India. It’s also a peaceful place, well-tended, verdant, and well watched over by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. But what is shocking about the place are the stones themselves: row after row after row featuring the graves of young men, some just teenagers, who died on the same horrific day in 1917. It was a terrible day, too. By the beginning of October in 1917, the British forces under the leadership of General Edmund Allenby were well entrenched along the Gaza-Beersheba road with the intention of seizing Beersheva from the Turks. By the end of the month, all was ready. And on October 31, the battle was joined. The attack was led by the 800 men of the 4^th Australian Light Horse Brigade, brave souls who leapt on horseback over the Turkish trenches and continued on into Beersheva, while other branches of the army attacked the Turkish legions from the side. In the end, the attack was successful and the Turks were soundly defeated. In many ways, in fact, the tide of war turned against the Ottoman Turks at Beersheva. And, indeed, before a year passed, the war was over and Turkish Palestine, wrested from the Ottomans, was handed over by the League of Nations to the British.

But the cemetery has its own story to tell. Now shady and peaceful, the silence is more ominous than calming as you enter through the shady gate and come across row after row after row of young men who died, all of them, on October 31, 1917. The place is well worth visiting, but what the experience yields, or at least what it yielded in me, was a deep sense of sorrow, of loss, of the true tragedy of war. Young men who should have been planning their lives, their weddings, their careers, their futures…instead dead as part of the incomprehensible madness that was the First World War and planning nothing at all other than an eternity of moldering far from home in someone else’s soil.

That many of the dead at Beersheva were veterans of Gallipoli only makes the story even more tragic and more poignant. (I saw Peter Weir’s film, Gallipoli, when it came out in 1981 and still remember the harrowing effect it had on me. If any readers are still laboring under the delusion that war can be glorious, Gallipoli really is a must-see.)

And that brings me to Gaza. To most, Gaza is a strip of land that has been ruled over by too many different foreigners since its glory days as ancient Philistia. The Romans, the Crusaders, the Mamelukes, the Turks, the Egyptians, and the Israelis all tried their hand at governing the place; I get the sense from my reading that all of the above couldn’t leave fast enough once the opportunity presented itself. (And, yes, I know there are people in Israel now demonstrating in the streets in an attempt to provoke the government into re-establishing Jewish settlements in Gaza. Those people, with all respect, are living in a self-generated dream state fully divorced from reality.)

But Gaza has its own Jewish dead to consider. And I do not mean by that to reference the fallen of the current IDF campaign.

There was a very touching piece in the paper the other day about Israeli troops coming across Jewish graves in Gaza. And, indeed, the Gaza War Cemetery, established in 1920, contains the graves of over 3000 British and Commonwealth soldiers who died in the First, Second, and Third Battles of Gaza. And some of those soldiers were Jewish, which fact was duly recorded on their tombstones. I suppose the idea was that the IDF soldiers felt a sense of kinship with the Jewish soldiers buried in that place, which is almost an ordinary thought, but somehow the story—by Troy O. Fritzhand, which I read in the Algemeiner (click here)—affected me in a less expected way as well.

I understand the logic behind the Israeli war against Hamas. I have no trouble with Israel going to war with the forces of evil, with people whose hatred of Israel and its Jews expressed itself on October 7 with almost unimaginable barbarism and Nazi-style brutality. Nor do I have any trouble with the notion that, when fighting a war against evil, the only true sin is to lose. I hate the thought of civilian casualties. But I also understand that the fact that the hostages have been held now for more than 120 days means that time is running out. All that, I get. But part of me feels the weight of tragedy pressing down as I read the news day after day.

I hate Hamas for having started this war. I grieve daily for the 1200 Israelis murdered, maimed, and raped on October 7. I can’t stop thinking about the 225 IDF soldiers who have died so far in this terrible war. And I think about the Hamas soldiers too—each a victim of his own fanaticism and willingness to die as part of an army of terror, but each also once an innocent babe who could have grown up to live a peaceful, productive life, who could have brought joy instead of unimaginable misery to the world. And, of course, I think also of the civilians of Gaza, people who, yes, put Hamas into power and who are now paying the awful price for that colossal error of judgment, but the large majority of whom could surely not have imagined October 7 and its aftermath.

To know with certainty that you are on the right side of a war does not make the war less tragic. Nor does it make it any less crucial that you win. But the tragedy feels overwhelming. I wasn’t alive when the Allies carpet-bombed Germany, but I think I would have felt the same way about the 600,000+ civilians who died during those bombing campaigns, which number includes about 76,000 children. The Allied leadership did what they perceived to be necessary to win the war, which they did. But my response to the civilian death toll is not censorious outrage, but deep sadness. How can the Germans have made us do that to them? How can the Japanese have created a situation in which Hiroshima was imaginable, let alone actually doable? And how can Hamas have created this situation in which the only way to rescue our hostages is to go in on foot to find them and liberate them from their captors’ control? The civilian deaths in Gaza are, in my opinion, all on Hamas. But that doesn’t make them less tragic.

And those are my emotions this week: weariness (because I am so tired of this burden of worry and anxiety), outrage (because what kind of people can have thrust this upon us?), terrible sadness (because of the children of Gaza, all innocents, who are paying the terrible price for their parents’ bad decisions), resolve (because if not me, then who?), and, despite everything, hope (because the God of Israel neither slumbereth nor sleepeth, and surely, at least eventually, light always wins out over darkness).  I continue to pray, even more fervently than in the past months, for peace, for resolution, and for victory. I’m feeling the burden of it all. I suppose we all are. But the mitzvah of pidyon shvuyim, of redeeming those held in captivity, is key here: defeating evil is the means, but bringing the captives home is the goal. And that’s what I’m praying for, day in and day out.