On July 26, 2006, I was in Kibbutz Malkiya along the Lebanese border. Israel was two weeks into the Second Lebanon War – the largest war in decades - and a fierce battle was being fought inside a Hezbollah stronghold in a village called Bint Jbeil, just over the border.
The IDF had taken up positions in the village in the preceding days and had assumed that the place was mostly empty of enemy forces. Dozens, though, were still there, and a company of soldiers from the Golani Brigade’s 51st Battalion walked right into a well-planned Hezbollah ambush. Eight soldiers were killed.
The battle of Bint Jbeil would go down in IDF history because of the bravery of the Golani soldiers that day. There was Maj. Roi Klein who jumped on a grenade to save his troops and others who ran straight into the line of fire to rescue their injured comrades.
Alongside the bravery, though, Bint Jbeil would be remembered for something else. As the soldiers were fighting inside Lebanon, back in Israel – in the Golani command post that had been set up in a bomb shelter in Kibbutz Malkiya – were the senior commanders. The brigade commander, the division commander, and some of the other Golani officers were there, inside Israel, watching on computer screens the battle that was taking place just a few kilometers away.
It was a pivotal moment for the IDF and one that, in the years after, would be taught in command courses as an example of what not to do. Commanders, the IDF top brass would repeat, again and again, the need to lead from the front, not from behind plasma screens.
I was reminded of Bint Jbeil this week after the battle on Tuesday in Shujaiya in the northern Gaza Strip, where 10 soldiers were killed, and the country again learned of the courage of the Golani Brigade. The difference this time, in the 17 years that have passed since Israel’s last big war, is that the commanders are today undeniably at the front. Being in the rear is not even an option.
IT IS something that was obvious already on October 7, when the Hamas invasion and massacre took place.
The IDF commanders killed fighting Hamas in Gaza and on October 7
Col. Jonathan Steinberg, commander of the Nahal Brigade, was killed leading troops in a firefight against Hamas terrorists in Kerem Shalom; Col. Ro’i Levi, commander of the IDF’s Ghost Unit, who was critically wounded in Gaza in 2014 and fought to return to command, was killed fighting terrorists in the community of Reim; Col. Asaf Hamami, commander of the Gaza Division’s Southern Brigade, was killed fighting terrorists in Kibbutz Nirim; and retired Col. Leon Bar was at home when he drove down to the border to rescue Israelis under fire and was ambushed.
On Tuesday, in the battle in Shujaiya, a fifth IDF colonel was killed. Itzhak Ben Basat, who had just retired from service, put his uniform back on to fight alongside his former soldiers. Ben Basat was killed when he ran into a building to save the first soldiers who were caught in the Hamas ambush.
Alongside the five colonels who have been killed in the war, there are also two battalion commanders.
Lt.-Col. Tomer Grinberg, commander of Golani’s 13th Battalion, was killed in Shujaiya this week. His battalion had been deployed along the border with Gaza on October 7 when the surprise Hamas attack took place – 41 of his soldiers were killed that day and several others were taken hostage.
Despite the unbearable loss, Grinberg kept leading his soldiers during fierce fighting in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, where he heroically saved a pair of twin babies – Guy and Roi Berdichevsky – whose parents had been murdered. The twins celebrated their first birthday Tuesday, on the same day as their rescuer, Grinberg, was killed.
On October 11, four days after the Hamas attack, Grinberg turned to his Golani fighters and said: “Battalion 13, you are heroes. In another 10 years, there will be another commander for Battalion 13, with hero fighters like you. Some of you will already be parents. He will scramble the battalion and talk about you and what you did, and he will show pictures of our fallen.
“In the end, we have learned that you are apparently not as spoiled as some thought and you are no less heroic than those who came before you. You are not the iPhone generation as some people said. Congratulations to each and every one of you, I am proud of each of you standing here, but this is just the beginning.”
And then there was Lt. Col. Salman Habaka, commander of the 188th Armored Brigade’s 53rd Battalion, who was killed on November 2 during the ground operation in northern Gaza.
A Druze officer from the village of Yanuh-Jat, Habaka was one of the first soldiers to enter Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7, rescuing numerous residents while engaging in fierce battles with the terrorists still there. In a video he sent from the field, Habaka described his unit’s first encounters with Hamas, declaring, “To victory! We have no other choice but victory.”
WHAT ALL of these senior officers have in common is a strict adherence to the value best expressed in the Hebrew word Aharai! meaning “after me” or “follow me”. It is a value that dates back to the days of Israel’s War of Independence in 1948 and can be seen throughout the centuries of Jewish valor. It is a way to explain how commanders lead by example – showing the way forward so others can follow.
It is not by chance that so many commanders are in the field right now, fighting according to this Aharai value. The attacks on October 7 are still – more than two months later – a shock to the Israeli system and a painful reminder that there is no war more justified than this.
It is why so many reservists are among the casualties of this war, making up almost 50% of the soldiers killed since the ground operation commenced.
People like Elisha Loewenstern, a father of six who did not have to serve in this war and was killed on Wednesday, or Yossi Herskovitz, principal of the Pelech boys high school in Jerusalem and father of five, who was killed last month. In a letter Hershkovitz sent his parents just a few days before he was killed, he wrote, “How much slander was said about this nation over the past year. It was all a lie. We are all here fighting shoulder to shoulder, as one people with one heart.”
Both Loewenstern and Hershkovitz were exempt from service but they still enlisted despite the risk. They understood what Grinberg, Habaka, Hamami, Ben-Basat, Steinberg, Levi, and Bar also understood: there is no sitting on the sidelines, there is no sitting behind a plasma screen, and there is no leading from behind.
In this battle for Israel’s survival, there is only one option: to lead, to fight, and to preserve what the people who came before them created, while trying to secure a better future for the generations that will follow them.
Their legacy is loud and clear and it is one word: Aharai!
The writer is a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute and a former editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post.