How Israel’s millennials surprised everyone by stepping up to the fight
In 2023, Israel’s elders were scoffing at Gen Z’s vanity and self-absorption, deriding them as ‘Generation TikTok’ and wondering if they were capable of loyalty to anything bigger than themselves, let alone the country. Well, boy were the old-timers wrong.
More than any screeching missile, more than the sight of any crumpled building, it’s the air-raid siren that has scored the deepest trench in the mind of most Israelis – the low-wailing cry still audible, faintly, even now that the war is over.
You’ll see a guy walking along a Tel Aviv boulevard and suddenly stiffen up and listen out for something in the air, only to shake it off a moment later and keep moving. No, not a siren – just the rising hum of an electric scooter.
A young woman in a cafe shudders at the beeping spasm from our food buzzer going off, so much like the rocket alerts that flooded our phones. “Please,” she says, “can you please turn that off?”
It’s a glimpse of today’s Israel. Battered by two years of regional war, a fortnight of Iranian missile barrages and lately the odd rocket taunt from the Houthis in Yemen, the country is shell-shocked, strung out, and its people are exhausted.
Sure, there is still plenty to marvel at here, that famed resilience so proudly flaunted to the world. What other society crowds the beaches and keeps playing volleyball after its third dash to the bomb shelters for the day? This impossible fortitude – panic, relax, repeat – is really true. But it’s not the full story.
Because it is also true that being hardy is a way to cope, a salve for a deeper psychic wound that Israelis, in their unguarded moments, are voluble about.
“The government was expecting us to go back to normal, like nothing happened,” says Hadas Teichtal, an entrepreneur living in the heart of Tel Aviv, a week after the Iranian ceasefire is called.
“I kind of feel like I’m done with this place. I was born here but I feel like maybe I can give my kids a different future, raise them somewhere you don’t have wars, an army. It’s a real feeling. I feel like I don’t want to be part of it. I do have second thoughts.”
Or as Karen Kidron-Mevorach, aged in her 30s, tells us: “We just try to keep on, but it’s not easy inside.”
Teichtal is young, aged 30, and it has fallen on to people far younger to shoulder Israel’s battles and burdens. And they do so willingly, these kids aged 18 to 21, giving their lives despite a government they may dislike and which, as of Friday, appears to be closer to broking another ceasefire that could even permanently end the war, provided that Hamas, as always, lays down its arms and relinquishes all control of Gaza.
But back in 2023, Israel’s elders scoffed at Gen Z’s vanity and self-absorption, deriding them as “Generation TikTok” and wondering if they were really capable of loyalty to anything bigger than themselves, let alone the country. Israel’s fate in the hands of these kids? The same hands fiddling about with an Xbox controller?
Well, boy were the old-timers wrong. And here’s something else: Israel’s Carmel tank is manoeuvred with a controller – and it’s designed to look like that of an Xbox.
“We need to kiss the land that they are walking on,” Zohar, a Israel Defence Forces reservist in his 30s, says of the youngsters he has worked alongside since October 7 (he asks that his surname be withheld because he remains on active duty). “Most of the citizens of Israel cannot even imagine what they’ve been through and we need to honour them and do whatever we can to support them.”
Guy Poreh, 53, a tech investor injured in Gaza 30 years ago, shakes his head in astonishment when we askif the young people have shown up for their country.
“The younger kids here, like the 20-year-olds? Just f--king amazing. They put everything aside in terms of comfort, in terms of regular life. And they did something you do not expect from 20-year-olds, especially nowadays: put down your phone, don’t go to parties … enlist and help out your friends. Nobody asked them to do it, but they did it.” And they’ve seen more horror and battle than any war room decision-maker or arrogant general directing combat from a map room.
Volumes could be written about the conspicuous gallantry shown by these kids, but it’s exemplified, perhaps, this unbelievable bravery and balls, by the story of Tomer Nagar, a 21-year-old who was stationed just outside of Kibbutz Kissufim, in southern Israel, right on the Gaza border, at 6.30am on October 7, 2023.
The Nagar family were never much of a beer-drinking household, but Tomer was a beer enthusiast with a fondness for Guinness, so their home since his death has become a veritable packing and distribution centre for a beverage carrying his name here in Israel and that comes in four varieties – a reddish ale, a fruity blond, a stout reminiscent of the Guinness he adored and a wheat beer called 675, which has a higher-than-usual alcohol content of 6.75 per cent and is named for the 675 bullets that Tomer fired from his lookout post, alone, during a 42-minute battle against dozens of Hamas terrorists.
Generation TikTok? Just imagine yourself at 21, a few months out of basic training, stationed at a guard post with no back-up facing the sight of about 150 grown men armed with Kalashnikovs and rocket-propelled grenades coming for you.
Would you, too, ignore every one of your survival instincts to fall back and seek cover, as Tomer had been instructed to do by a commander, which might have saved his life but would have led to the kibbutz he was guarding being completely overwhelmed?
Imagine standing there knowing you have a finite number of bullets available for your only weapon, a Negev light machinegun, and knowing you are probably going to be killed, and knowing this particular gun is so prone to overheating that the manufacturer recommends changing the barrel every 150 rounds to prevent it physically melting from the build-up of heat friction – and knowing you have no replacement barrel and no one to bring it to you. You are completely alone.
But Tomer doesn’t abandon his station. He stands there picking off gunmen, squeezing the trigger carefully to avoid wasting bullets and doing it with incredible composure – we know because Tomer not only fired more bullets than the Negev’s barrel was designed for but because his parents downloaded the data from the smartwatch he was wearing and learned that his pulse throughout this 42 minutes of combat hovered between 60 and 100 beats per minute, peaking at no higher than 120bpm, or what most people would achieve at an elevated walking pace.
“Out of the dozens of terrorists who arrived there, only 12 terrorists entered the outpost. Do you understand how much Tomer fought?” says Ezra, his father, who served in the same combat brigade as Tomer – the Golani Brigade – and whose name is stitched into a brigade flag that can be found in Tomer’s old bedroom and that he wrapped around himself on the day he finished an enormous march through the desert that cadet soldiers have to complete to formally qualify for this unit; and stitched into the same flag are the names of not just his father but his grandfather, five uncles and two cousins who currently are serving.
In other words, a long line of Golani soldiers come from this family – a common story in a country where mandatory service isn’t just a rite of passage but where bloodlines are traceable through the infantry brigades, or the armoured corps, or the special forces.
It is no coincidence that the three Netanyahu brothers, including the Prime Minister himself, all served in the same elite reconnaissance unit, Sayeret Matkal. And it may be for this reason that Ezra is no pacifist and why he speaks so iron-fistedly of peace through strength – even now, perhaps to a greater degree, since the death of his son.
“You can’t do anything else,” he says. “It’s true that soldiers are killed, but in war soldiers are killed to defend their country. And here I paid with my son’s life and I understand that there is no choice because otherwise my grandson will continue to be afraid and my great-grandson the same. Why? Why? We need to end it once and for all.”
And when he is through, Tomer’s mother, Chana, lets out a sigh. “And as a mother I feel differently. I feel that enough is enough. I don’t have the heart; we don’t have the strength. Every family that enters this circle, I simply understand what they are going through. We can’t do it any more. The heart cannot hear another soldier killed; more children killed. I am not political. As a mother, I simply know what they are going through.”
This vision – of baby-faced teenagers being fed into a voracious war machine, names and pictures published almost daily in the casualty notices (the IDF’s death toll from its war in Gaza and Lebanon stands at 525) – brings to mind the immortal poetry of Wilfred Owen, the English World War I poet and soldier who, before his death at 25 from a German machine-gunner, wrote of “these who die as cattle”, in Anthem for Doomed Youth, and of “children ardent for some desperate glory” in Dulce et Decorum Est: “the old lie” that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.
But it was perfectly fitting for Tomer to die for his country, awake as he was to its fragility, which he often spoke about, and awed as he was by the valour of his military forebears, soldiers such as Roi Klein, a Golani soldier who thought nothing of jumping on a grenade in 2006 to save his compatriots.
When Tomer’s mother once chided him, in the middle of retelling the Klein story, that dead sons leave behind dead, broken families, Tomer looked at her, she recalls, and he said: “If all mothers spoke like you, we wouldn’t have a country.”
Military service is divorced from politics here, unaligned to any government or political persuasion – it is a duty, and the embrace of this social contract by Israel’s conscripts and reservists is taken up for three main reasons.
The first is the survival of the state. Israel faces threats that are wholly unfamiliar to any democracy on the planet, save perhaps Ukraine, and citizens of both nations know, with absolute clarity, that their safety can be assured only through the security of their borders – land, sea and skies.
These unequivocal threats are what young people in Australia, and perhaps a few members of government, fail to fully appreciate because they have never had to reckon with a credible risk to Australia’s existence. Neither have they had to reckon with the prospect of taking up arms in defence of their nation.
As Golda Meir once said to an up-and-coming senator named Joe Biden: “We Israelis have a secret weapon. We have nowhere else to go.”
And it’s for this reason that many Israelis are so livid with the ultra-Orthodox community, which in large part doesn’t serve because of a belief that its Talmudic scholarship provides its own divine security blanket for the state.
We speak about this with Ofek Kessing, 26, and while he isn’t quite livid with the Haredi community, he believes they should play an active role in the military, if only to ease the burden faced by everyone else.
“They’re tired,” he says of those in uniform. “They want to live their life, they don’t want to hold a weapon and kill people and destroy buildings – whatever they have to do. They do it only because they have to do it – almost two years, it’s too much.”
A second concern is fraternal. On October 7, Israelis grabbed handguns and body armour, or nothing at all, and drove south as fast as they could to save as many people as possible from the Hamas infiltration. That meant Jews, but it also meant any of the one in three people here who identify with other faiths – and who serve in uniform just like everyone else.
“We all join the army at the age of 18 and it doesn’t matter where you come from,” says Ezra.
“You are rich or poor, you are Ashkenazi or Mizrahi, Arab or Druze. We all come to the army and actually connect and get to know each other. And in fact what is created in the army is the mosaic of all the Israeli friends. Everyone comes and helps no matter what.”
Fractured as this society can seem, on October 7 no one gave a damn about anyone’s ethnicity or beliefs. They did it for each other, for their mates. We have a word for that in Australia, but we don’t use it much any more.
Elias Gibson, 26, a paratrooper, puts it this way: “I like feeling like I’m helping, contributing, because at the end of the day I’m living here … and without people like me that are happy to help, (Israel) wouldn’t be as safe.”
The third reason, according to Poreh, the Gaza veteran, is a broader defence of western values.
The mere sight of Teichtal, dressed for gym class, hair out, takeaway coffee clutched in hand, would be inconceivable in Gaza while Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad remain in the picture. Merely riding a bike in Gaza had been frowned on for women. To be gay in Gaza attracts its own rococo forms of punishment – prison or far worse under Hamas’s enforcement of sharia law. Meanwhile, one of the largest gay pride parades in the world completely subsumes Tel Aviv each year, although it was cancelled this year because of the Iranian missile strikes.
But it’s why Israelis remain so profoundly aghast at the moral confusion of keffiyeh-clad women and university students, on television and social media – in Sydney, London, or elsewhere – who cheer so rapturously for Hamas and the Houthis.
“Nobody here on the 6th of October would have ever thought that would be possible,” says Poreh. “Because we share the same Western liberal values – or we thought we shared the same values. But they’re rallying for a value system which is not only different from theirs but is completely detrimental to them. For instance, the whole Queers for Palestine thing – you’re rallying for the people who would kill you on sight if you were in their territory. That was shocking to us.”
Poreh arrives on this topic while speaking about another curiosity: the Israeli pig-headedness of getting on with life amid the shadow of war and its concomitant disruptions. We are eager to know whether repeated exposure to risk, to one’s mortality, has hardened the population to lead lives more intense, less self-conscious, once they’re home from the battle zone.
“You’re talking to someone who was blinded from a hand grenade for a year, so I can tell you from my own experience: absolutely,” he says, letting out a tremendous laugh.
Poreh was stationed in Gaza as a young lieutenant in the 1990s, when he and his soldiers were drawn into an ambush by Mohammed Deif, a militant who would later become Hamas’s military chief and a mastermind of the October 7 attacks. A survivor of numerous attempts on his life, Deif was assassinated in an Israeli airstrike in 2024, his death confirmed by Hamas in January.
“You have the choice,” Poreh says. “You can either go into a deep, deep depression and say, woe is me, I’ve only got one eye left, the other one isn’t really functioning either. Or I can say, and excuse my French, ‘F--k it, I’m gonna live my life to the fullest and enjoy what I have right now, because I’ve seen what the other side is’, and that’s what I did.”
The next day, we travel 40 minutes south of Tel Aviv to speak with Zohar, the IDF reservist, and his Australian-born wife, Hayley, living in a small, quiet community. Since October 7, Zohar has served about 400 days in Gaza and Lebanon attached to a special forces unit – far more time served than the average soldier. And the wear is starting to show.
As he explains, the Israeli decision to live and flourish despite the wars, so central to the Israeli mindset, is more like a survival necessity than any marker of resilience. It’s a distraction, a means of trying to vacate the churning mind.
“You just try to run away from whatever’s going on inside your brain,” he says. “You have to go to the beach. You have to drink beer. You have to play games with your friends. You have to do it because if you will not do it you’ll sit at home and you’ll start to process on your own.”
And even at the beach, grief will find its way to you; it’s there, says Zohar, in the overheard chatter of reservists fresh out of Gaza, plonked in the sand, maybe days after their discharge.
“There are a lot of people that are unfortunately traumatised because of the things they did, things they had to do, things that they saw, things that have been done to them. So you will hear someone speaking, someone playing, and you will not understand that he’s been through a lot – but what he needs to do right now is exactly what he’s doing.”
A sentiment echoed by another special forces reservist, Daniel, aged 38, who said: “Unfortunately, our politicians are shit. And they send these beautiful people out to sometimes wars that we don’t need to even fight. It’s a lost cause. It’s just for political survival.”
Later on, we head to Dizengoff Fountain, a landmark of Tel Aviv turned into a shrine for the many dead, killed on October 7 or in the wars that have followed, its rim crowded with mementos: photographs and flowers, weather-beaten teddy bears, votive candles and poetry.
Around us, the cafes are full, as are the beaches; those spectres of enjoyment that persist. And soon the violet hour nears, the drawing-down of blinds, as Owen called it. The fallen stare out from their framed portraits ("in their eyes/ shall shine the holy glimmer of goodbyes”); and somewhere on the beach a broken man sits in the sand, or returns serve on a ball, trying to put off an abysmal suffering.
Because beneath the bravado, what’s left is a people yet to even reach post-trauma; unable to stop moving, not yet able to sit still.
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