A Young Soldier Prepares For A Different Kind Of Battle
'I can't be a warrior anymore, which is what I am. This is what I do. But there might still be hope ...'
Dear Reader,
A journalist from one of the smallest Jewish publications in America has produced what I consider to be one of the finest pieces of American reporting on Israel post-October 7.
Steven A. Rosenberg, a former Boston Globe staff reporter and network TV producer, is the editor and publisher of The Jewish Journal of Greater Boston
For several weeks in January, he visited Israel from the Hostage Center in Tel Aviv to the southern kibbutzim destroyed by Hamas, and spoke to a former prime minister, Ehud Olmert, as well as leaders of the valiant volunteer effort that helped unite the country.
Rosenberg’s 5,500-word Reporter’s Notebook, “In the Land of War and Hope,” is well worth the read and is available HERE.
I am grateful to him for allowing me to post this excerpt of his conversation with a seriously wounded soldier who is facing a long recovery with the kind of resilience and optimism that is representative of Israeli society today.
A Young Soldier Prepares for a Different Kind of Battle
Yoav, 30, lost part of his left leg after Hamas fired an RPG missile at his patrol.
By Steven A. Rosenberg
In the amputee wing of Tel HaShomer Hospital outside of Tel Aviv, the hallways are jammed with visitors bringing sandwiches, cakes and cookies to injured soldiers and their families. When the man in the wheelchair learns that there is a reporter from Boston, he flashes a bright smile.
“I love Boston,” he tells me.
“You know Boston?” I ask.
“I spent 16 summers as a camper at Camp Ramah in Palmer. My mother worked for the Jewish Agency and would take me every year,” he says, and then introduces himself as Yoav.
Four days after he turned 30, Yoav was watching the sunrise with his girlfriend in Nueba, an Egyptian beach on the Red Sea that’s been popular with Israelis since the 1970s. It was October 7, and as he sipped his morning coffee, a jogger mentioned to him that Israel was being hit with a barrage of missiles. Yoav looked at his phone and saw that southern Israel was under attack. In a matter of minutes, he paid the hotel bill, summoned a taxi, and by 9 a.m., the couple had crossed the border at Eilat. By 8 p.m. that night he was in uniform at an army base.
Over the years, Yoav has worked as a flight attendant and most recently as a security guard. But he has always seen himself as a soldier, first. Trained as a combat medic, and a sharpshooter, he has been part of the same commando unit since 2013. “I am part of a team of around 18 men that I consider my family. They are like my brothers,” he said.
He had taken part of Operation Protective Edge in 2014, and by the time his unit entered Gaza in early November this year, he began to recognize the terrain. On November 20, he and his squad were in Southern Gaza when they noticed heavily armed Hamas soldiers.
“Me and my team were chasing these terrorists down the street. And we entered a very narrow street. There were five of them. We managed to kill three. They were running around with AK-47s and RPGs; there was no way that you could mistake them for civilians. So they were trying to hit our tank. We wanted to catch the other two. And they went into a house that had like a big garden around it,” he said.
Meanwhile, Yoav and his friend, Tzvika, waited outside for their group to clear the building. “And then someone shot an RPG missile that hit right between us. And I remember flying in the air, and I landed on my back. And I saw that my leg was, you know, crooked. I saw a bone and I saw my foot in a crooked position. And the first thing that I think about is the next hit because the natural response to an RPG is another RPG a couple of seconds later,” he said.
A medic from his squad immediately performed a tracheotomy so Yoav could breathe, and also opened a hole in his lungs to clear out all of the air and blood.
As he was airlifted in a helicopter, Yoav lost his pulse and a doctor thought he had died. The pulse came back, and that’s when Yoav realized that he had lost part of his leg. Since the RPG attack, he’s had 30 surgeries and he has months of rehabilitation to go.
“I lost my leg. I lost my hearing in my left ear. My vocal chords were damaged. I broke my elbow. My lungs are better now but they don’t have the same capacity as they used to have,” he tells me.
I ask how he is processing all of this.
“I was lucky because I’m an optimist. The glass is half full. I took the lemons and I made lemonade. I really think that things happen to us in life, and it is our decision on how to take them and how to approach them. You know, I might have lost my leg, but hey, I’ m still alive. I wasn’t supposed to be alive after that. Some doctors told me that they looked at my situation in the field and thought I wouldn’t make it to the hospital.
“Now, I’m processing an event like this and it’s going to sound weird what I’m about to say: It’s very hard but very easy at the same time. It’s very easy because that’s what you have. This is it. This is the hand that you were dealt with. And this is the hand you’re going to play with – this is it, it’s not going to change.
“So that determination helps you realize it. You know, it was a punch in the face, but that’s it, you know, it’s like, alright, this is what I have to deal with now. And this is what I’m going to do. And the difficult part is thinking about the things that you can’t do anymore, right? The main one is the fact that I can’t fight anymore. I can’t be a warrior anymore, which is who I am. This is what I do. So I feel like a big part of my personality was taken away from me. But there might still be hope because I’ve seen people that are fighting and they have a prosthetic leg.”
Yoav strongly supports the war, and believes Israel’s response was necessary. He said that during the house-to-house combat, he regularly discovered weapons hidden under children’s beds. “I found AK-47s, RPGs, pistols, submachine guns, heavy machine guns, M-16s, grenades and other explosives. We found tunnels that connected to the houses – a lot of tunnels,” he said. “You think to yourself, like, how badly do these guys hate us? Like how poisoned are they against us?”
Yoav doesn’t think that it’s possible to eradicate Hamas because its ideology can’t be destroyed. But he believes Palestinians should have the option to live in a democracy if offered that opportunity.
He also thinks a lot about the Israeli hostages.
“I think that the first thing we need to think about is to bring the people that are kidnapped back home, no matter what. Even if we have to appear as the losing side for once,” he said. “We need to bring them back. This is what we need to do. There’s no other choice. All the rest is just water under the bridge.”
Steven A. Rosenberg is the editor and publisher of The Jewish Journal of Greater Boston. Email him at rosenberg@jewishjournal.org