(Or, it has been three days since Yom Hazikaron, and I am still seething).

In the space of one short summer, Yom Hazikaron went from being solemn to sacred, for me. In 1982, I experienced my first Yom Hazikaron in Israel, after making Aliyah on my fledgling kibbutz, Tuval. I had been in Israel barely two months. Standing at the ceremony we held on the freshly planted lawn by our dining room, I remember being more concerned with looking suitably solemn than being able to really immerse myself in the spirit of the event.

That didn’t last long. Because, barely a month later, an army bus arrived on the kibbutz and took all the Israeli men away, as the war in Lebanon began. They called it “Mivtza Shlom HaGalil” (Operation Peace for the Galilee). I never saw two of those young men again. They never came back.

Motti Dahan, a young man with a scraggly beard and a shy smile, who was a member of the Nahal Garin to our kibbutz, whom I first met when I picked him up at the bus station in Karmiel to take up to the kibbutz, was killed on the first day of fighting. He was the first Israeli I knew, albeit fleetingly, who was killed in a war. We had not even managed to digest the news of his death, when a fellow member of his Garin, Hana Mizrahi, was killed in a car accident on the way back from Motti’s funeral. The kibbutz, barely a year old, was devastated.

I got to know Ilan Alexandrovitch personally. He was a member of the first Nahal Garin to Tuval. He organized our Aliyah group’s trip to Sinai during our first month in Israel. During........

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