It is midday Yom Haatzma’ut 78th (Israel Independence Day) as I sit and write this post. On this 78th Independence Day in Israel, I, personally, am not able to celebrate. Not when the man standing at the helm of our country is a criminally indicted Prime Minister—someone who should be answering charges in a courtroom, not presiding over a nation in mourning. Not when he dares to frame the return of the hostages as his personal success story, as if their abduction was a plot twist and their release a finale. There is no humility in his voice. No acknowledgment that those 251 innocent people—elders, children, young people at a music festival, on kibbutzim, moshavim and army bases—were taken on his watch. His narrative is horribly corrupt because it erases responsibility entirely. It asks us to applaud while ignoring the fact that the disaster happened under his leadership, with his policies, and because of his choices.

His poison machine—the coordinated media outlets, the digital army of trolls, the ministers who parrot every deflection—works overtime to black out the truth. They want us to forget the 1,200 murdered victims of October 7, whose bodies were burned, mutilated, and broken. They want us to forget the 900 soldiers who have fallen since that day—not in a war of necessity, but in a war of negligence. Each name erased from public discourse is a small victory for their propaganda. They replace memory with slogans. They replace grief with nationalism.

We are still in a war with Iran and Hezbollah that Netanyahu brought upon us. Not because they suddenly decided to attack—but because he spent years provoking a multi-front confrontation while neglecting deterrence, bringing his buddy Trump into a war without any strategy, moving objectives, no exit plan and certainly no next day program,  and allowing Hezbollah to amass an arsenal on our northern border that now threatens every home from Metula to Tel Aviv. He has no regard for protecting the home front. No strategy for the north. None of the stated goals have been met. The tens of thousands of evacuees from Kiryat Shmona and other northern towns still cannot return home. Missiles and rockets reach deeper than ever before. The economy, once resilient, is collapsing under the weight of endless mobilization, closed businesses, government corruption, irresponsible and partisan budgets and financial allocations, and foreign investment fleeing uncertainty.

And still, he calls up reservists—fathers,mothers, engineers, teachers, artists—again and again. Hundreds of days of reserve duty. Their bodies are breaking. Their marriages are straining. Their businesses are shuttering. Their mental health is a silent epidemic. But to Netanyahu and his coalition, they are not people. They are political fodder—human shields for his grip on power. Send them in. Keep them there. Let them bleed. As long as he stays in his chair.

This is now a 1,000-day war. That is not a figure of speech. It is a sentence. And while he and his kind celebrate false successes—intercepted missiles called victories, tactical strikes presented as strategic wins—they refuse to look at the wreckage behind them. The children who won’t sleep without nightmares. The families who buried their loved ones in unmarked grief. The soldiers who will never walk the same. The north in ashes. The south a graveyard. The center a pressure cooker of rage and exhaustion.

Last week, I went with my wife to Mount Herzl to find the grave of a student she taught in elementary school, Adi Tzur, who was killed defending Kibbutz Kissufim on October 7. She was bringing her class to his grave the following day and to meet with his mother. All around his grave were the graves of many other young people who were killed in this endless war. Each grave decorated with pictures and mementos from families and friends. I’m not capable of holding back my tears and even now, writing about it, the tears are welling up in my eyes.

Yesterday, on Yom Hazicharon (Memorial Day), we were at the Monument for Combat Engineering Corp for the memorial and siren. My wife’s previous boyfriend was killed years ago, 5 days before he was supposed to finish his service. We go each year either to his grave or to the Monument. We go to the Wall of Remembrance and touch his name, put a flower there and talk about him. We also look at the rest of the wall, at all the names of soldiers killed in all the wars, but this year was different. The expanded wall with the long list of soldiers killed in his 1000 day wall is unbearable. So many of the names jump out at me. For 740 days, I wrote a daily blog on updates of the war, focusing on the hostages. I put the names of every soldier killed that day, his age, town and place and circumstances of his death. I see their names and I am unable to keep back the tears and my heart aches with real pain. During the hostage crisis when I was exclusively wearing shirts in support of the hostages, I was asked several times if I am related to any of them. My answer was always the same, “All of them”, just as every Israeli should feel. I feel the same way about every soldier killed or maimed. They are all my children, my cousins, my family. We are all traumatized and dealing with post-trauma, even though the trauma goes on.

Walking down the stairs of Mount Herzl back to our car, wiping away my tears, I asked my wife if she thought that Netanyahu and his poison machine of defenders shed any tears since October 7. She, like me, of course, had no answer. My gut, however, tells me that it is doubtful that Netanyahu’s eyes have felt the burning of the salty tears in all this time. The hostages, the 1200 killed on October 7, the 900 soldiers killed in the war; for him, they are little more than the necessary price to pay for his remaining in power. Even when he finally went to Kibbutz Nir Oz after two years of war, he was there for publicity and the start of his election campaign; not a tear was shed. Smotrich, who went a month or two earlier, had alligator tears in his eyes, nothing real and his promises of taking the situation and devastation of Nir Oz into consideration when voting and/or supporting hostage deals never emerged.

No, I don’t have a lot to celebrate today.

I love this country. I love its land, its language, its flawed and beautiful people. But love does not mean blind obedience. Love means demanding better. And right now, we are being led by people who have traded statecraft for survival, strategy for spin, and solidarity for division. Until they are held accountable—until the deaths of every one of the victims are truly recognized and mourned, until the fallen soldiers are honored with action not just hashtags, until the reservists are relieved and rebuilt, until our leaders act like they actually care about who lives and who dies—I cannot wave a flag.

“They want us to remember the fallen, but to forget how they were abandoned”: The October Council has launched “Yom HaShikchah” (The Day of Forgetting) in lieu of Memorial and Independence Day.

I will not celebrate survival while the people who failed us pretend to save us.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)