There is a phrase that has become almost a battle cry among the far-left anti-Israel base. You have heard it on the street at protests and read it on placards: ‘from the river to the sea.’

Now, what river and what sea, they couldn’t tell you. But between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, there are people living lives: people who get up in the morning, go to work, and raise children. This is about some of them.

In 1995, Dr Ami Cohen, a cardiac surgeon at the Wolfson Medical Centre in Holon, began bringing children to Israel for heart surgery. These were children from Gaza, from Iraq, from countries that to this day do not recognise the very existence of the State of Israel, from places where Israel is the enemy. He called his organisation Save a Child’s Heart. Since then, it has treated over 6,000 children from over 65 countries.

Cohen’s operating theatre is perhaps the most radical room in the Middle East. There, a child’s nationality, beyond certain necessities, is medically irrelevant. The heart either beats or it doesn’t.

There will be an instinct to call this apolitical, but that would miss the point. This is intensely political in the deepest sense. This is about wat human beings owe one another when the petty ideologies fall away.

Yotam Polizer went to Japan for three weeks after the 2011 tsunami. He stayed for three years. When he eventually returned to Israel, he joined a small humanitarian organisation called IsraAID as its second employee. He has led it ever since, and now has 320 staff working across roughly 50 countries: Ukraine, South Sudan, Greece, Mozambique and beyond.

Morris Kahn arrived in Israel from South Africa in 1956. He co-founded Amdocs and Golden Pages, helped fund Save a Child’s Heart, and in 2019 launched the Bereshit spacecraft. It crashed on approach, and he announced a second mission almost immediately.

Then came 7 October, and Kahn cancelled the moon: ‘it’s a luxury to pursue a project like this now when the country has other, more urgent needs.’

On a more ordinary note, Ariella Cohen made Aliyah six weeks before 7 October. Her husband was called up to fight in Gaza, and she went ten days without word from him. ‘What does it mean to be Israeli?’ she wrote publicly afterwards. ‘Having… an Israeli driver’s license? I think being Israeli is more of a feeling than a physical reality.’

These are six people: a surgeon who heals strangers’ children; a humanitarian who went to the other side of the world; a billionaire who cancelled the moon; a woman who became Israeli through crisis. Perhaps the most honest thing you can say about any of them, beyond the antisemitism and anti-Zionism and so on, is that they are here, and they are trying.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)