Anyone who was in Israel on Saturday, October seventh, twenty twenty-three, and in the days that followed carries a memory that the quarrels of the years since have not managed to discredit, that of an entire country answering a call-up that in many cases had not yet arrived, with fifty-year-old men grabbing their packs before their phones rang, restaurants shutting their doors to diners in order to cook for battalions, and strangers offering rides to the bases without asking their passengers whom they had voted for. Within a few days the army had called up more than three hundred thousand reservists, and civil society, which nobody had summoned, showed up alongside them, so that for a few weeks we discovered, to our astonishment, that we were capable of acting together with a speed none of us would have predicted the previous summer, when the country was divided over the judicial overhaul.

The emergency call-up order even has a name of its own, tzav shmone, Order Eight, and there is no Israeli who does not know what it means, although no one has yet invented an equivalent order for the return home, one that would summon neighbors, relatives, and friends to receive the reservist who hands back his gear after months away and tries to relearn how to sleep in a room where silence is not a sign of danger. On Monday, September fourteenth, one of those reservists took his own life at his home in Tel Aviv, and, according to a Haaretz tally, at least twenty active-duty soldiers have died by suicide since January, a figure that leaves out at least twelve other Israelis who served in this war and died after returning to civilian life, as if the pain they carried had been discharged along with them.

In the decade before the war, an average of twelve active-duty soldiers died by suicide each year, and then came seven in the final months of twenty twenty-three, twenty-one the following year, and twenty-two last year, the highest total in fifteen years. One of those soldiers, Eliran Mizrahi, a father of four, became known throughout the country because of the fight over his burial.

Mizrahi fought in the communities........

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