My readership is split into two main groups: those to whom this week’s title will seem intriguing, and those who knew as soon as they read the first figure in the equation above what I am writing about today. I am writing on Tuesday morning, a little after 11AM, which means that the 2-minute siren sounded throughout Israel has not long died away. This is not a rising and falling siren, the kind that sends us immediately to our safe rooms and shelters, but the one that quickly rises to a steady pitch, and stays there, unwavering, for 120 seconds, to mark the daytime observance of silence for Israel’s fallen, both military and security forces and civilian victims of terror, who have been killed defending Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel since 1860.

Today is not the day to point out that the start of the modern assault on Jews in the Land of Israel began not in 1967 but in 1860. Today is the day to reflect on the 30,961 members of the Yishuv (the Jewish settlement before the state was established in 1948) and Israelis (since 1948) who have made the ultimate sacrifice for the Zionist ideal. This year, for the first time, each second of the two-minute siren carries the weight of 250 lives, and each life, as Jewish tradition holds, carries the weight of an entire world.

Listening to the state radio broadcaster’s treatment of Memorial Day this morning, I found myself wondering how to characterise it in today’s blog post. The first thing that struck me was to test our national feeling of the disproportionate enormity of the numbers against the experience of the only other nation I know at all. Taking the yardstick of deaths due to conflict since 1860, Israel has lost the equivalent of 0.33% of its current population. Britain, over the same period, has lost 1.86% of its current population, over five times as large a proportion.

Again, on October 7, 2023, on the day of the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust, just over a quarter of one per cent of the population was killed. On July 1, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme in World War 1, over two-fifths of a percent of the British population was killed. The Israelis were mostly civilians, massacred in their homes and at a dance party, while the Britons were conscripts, massacred in the Flanders mud. Nevertheless, as a proportion of the nation’s population, over one and a half times as many died on July 1, 1916 as on October 7, 2023.

Of course, the impact of that first day of the Battle of the Somme was not felt as immediately, as nationally, as graphically in 1916 as October 7 was felt in Israel. The world and its inter-connectivity are of course so different today from a century ago.

However, there is another difference. To illustrate it, I want to draw on the finest work of the finest of the poets forged in the furnace of the First World War: Wilfred Owen.

Anthem for Doomed Youth

By Wilfred Owen

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
 And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

What sings through Owen’s verse is the futility of the war and the meaninglessness of the loss. He views the dying soldiers as passive and powerless victims. Unsurprisingly, he does not for a moment see them as individuals.

None of this, I hasten to add, is intended as a criticism of the poem, or a suggestion that Owen was unfeeling. However, it is difficult to imagine a ‘treatment’ of soldiers’ deaths that is more different from what happens on Israel’s Memorial Day, in the public arena of newspaper features and radio interviews, just as much as in the private space of a mourning family. In Israel, every year, the unique path of each one of a host of individual soldiers is, with love and appreciation, traced by family and friends. This may seem like hagiography, but the hard evidence confirms that it is, rather, a celebration of an extraordinary group of individuals. 

Time after time after time, the stories illustrate the truth: a disproportionate number of the fallen are officers, leading their troops by personal example; a disproportionate number of those who volunteer or are selected for the kind of combat roles that bear the heaviest losses are the natural leaders, the idealists, the visionaries of their generation. So many of the fallen leave behind them diaries, journals, poems, songs, ethical wills that are inspiring. So many of them drank as fully as they could of the deepest joys that life holds: whether a closeness to nature, a tireless desire to help others, a deep love for another human being, a deep well of creativity: and, for so many of them, a simple, unbendable, recognition that they must serve their country.

Every year, Memorial Day uncovers more and more stories not only of bravery on the battlefield, of sacrifice for others, but also of lives, however brief, lived as fully and as well as they could be. Every year, we weep for the potential that has been lost, and wonder that there is so much potential and even, despite their youth, achievement, in the present generation of young soldiers. Every year, we wearily ask how long we need to ask our youth to make this sacrifice, and, at the same time, marvel at their readiness, if needed, to do so.

And, of course, alongside the commitment of youth, every year we measure, in astonishment and gratitude, the untiring readiness to serve of the reservists from previous generations. Who can weigh in the scale the sacrifice of a twenty-year-old with their whole life before them against the sacrifice of a parent in their forties with a young family? As, indeed, who can weigh in the scale the grief of a parent burying a young adult child against the grief of a young child burying a parent?

Which brings me to my last observation. On Memorial Day, the vessel in which the memory of the fallen is offered to us is the bereft family. Two voices stood out for me this morning. The first was that of a woman in her nineties, retelling the story of her father’s heroism in one of the key battles of the War of Independence, and of his death in action in 1948, when she was 14. This same woman was packing emergency supplies for the people of the Gaza envelope on October 9, 2023, when she was almost 90, when she was told that her grandson had fallen in action in the Gaza envelope. She fought successfully to have him buried next to his great-grandfather in the military ceremony on Mount Herzl, and she now visits the graves of her father and grandson together.

At 10 this morning, Liat Regev, the presenter of a daily interview programme, began by saying, with no introduction: “I visited the military cemetery on Mount Herzl with my father the other day. He is now in his eighties, and he can’t cope with the crowds of bereft families on Memorial Day itself, so a couple of years ago I starting taking him a few days before.” It wasn’t initially clear to me whether she was reading an account by someone else, but it soon became clear that she was telling her own family’s story, of her father’s own father falling in the early years of the state, leaving a widow and two sons, the younger of whom, Liat’s father, had hardly any memories of his father. All Liat has is two black and white photographs, and her grandmother’s and uncle’s stories.

This is Israel’s Memorial Day, when, it seems, almost everyone has an individual, deeply personal, national story to tell, even the radio presenter, and everyone listens. By the time you read these words, we will have transitioned, not, as I wrote last week, jarringly, but, rather, naturally sand inevitably, into the celebrations of Independence Day. If their journals, last letters, and ethical wills are anything to go by, this is only what those who paid the ultimate sacrifice would want. They leave behind them a collective message, urging us to embrace life.

I leave you with the wish, even though I am not foolhardy enough to think for a moment that it is a realistic wish, that next year, as this year, we will mourn 30,963 again, and not one unique life more.