I serve IDF soldiers every day. They look like homesick teenagers

I serve IDF (Israel Defense Forces) soldiers in a canteen in southern Israel, on the border with Gaza. The canteen is under a large tent that they call the Station. It gets its name from a nearby gas station because soldiers come to fill up with a hot meal and a warm welcome from the volunteers who run it.

Work at the Station can be hard: cleaning pots, clearing tables, unloading pallets of food, peeling huge bags of onions and serving hundreds of meals.

But for me, the hardest part is keeping my cool when meeting the women and men who serve Israel. These encounters are sometimes joyful, sometimes devastating, but they are always deeply moving, as when a group arrives at the Station wearing the insignia of the Israel Antiquities Authority on their shirts.

It only takes one glance to see that they are exhausted, physically and emotionally. I approach one of them who tells me that their team has been mobilized to search for the bodies. “Before October 7, I was an archaeologist, my job was to search for bones that were 2,000 years old.” She hesitates, catches her breath and continues. “Who better to collect the bones of our children?” she asks.

For her, a fulfilling scientific career turned in an instant into a battlefield nightmare where Israeli sons were tortured and daughters raped before being murdered by Hamas.

I wonder what will sustain her and where she will find the strength to go on for another day. Turning away, I find myself face to face with a giant man who, unknowingly, answers my question. A reservist, he is tall and imposing with a machine gun slung over his shoulder.

When my eyes lift to meet his, I'm surprised. He is 82 years old. His father, he tells me, fought in Sinai in the 1960s, when Egypt was determined to destroy Israel.

He tells the rest of his story through his sole presence in the tent. This is the story of Israel. Decades after reaching military service age, he was not drafted, but like thousands of others who make up the Israeli Citizen Army, he reported for duty anyway.

I ask him what happened when he showed up at his base. “They told me to go home,” he laughs. He has remained and been part of his unit since mid-October. I was not surprised because the Israeli army is not an ordinary army. It is an army of citizens, neighbors and family members – an army where fathers and sons serve, where lower-ranking soldiers address colonels by their first names.

It's an army where parents call their children's commanders. Where stories abound, like that of a mother who told me that she bugged her son's commander because he was coming home on leave after losing weight. When I ask what the commander's response was, she replies: “What do you think?” He of course apologized and promised to make sure my son eats properly. »

It is the mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts and grandparents who run the Station. Almost every time I look up from what I'm doing, I see one of them hugging a soldier who has come for a hot meal or a few minutes of rest.

When a group of boys enter together, a volunteer, a middle-aged woman, runs to greet them, hugging each of them in turn. After they leave, I ask her how she knows them. “They are in my son’s unit, they grew up together, I raised these boys,” she tells me with both pride and melancholy in her voice. When I pass another woman who has just kissed a lieutenant colonel as one would a family member, she sees the curiosity in my face and without me asking, she says that my son is in his battalion .

The station is very busy at lunchtime but for a few seconds everything seems to stop when half a dozen beautiful young girls enter together. I do a double take. They could be models or movie stars, but the slung guns and dark uniforms tell a different story. They are combat soldiers, like those who recently saved four hostages.

Combat soldier uniforms are easily recognizable because they are flame retardant. These soldiers are very different from the mechanics and truck drivers sitting next to them, both in their uniforms and their long, flowing blonde hair or braided ponytails.

One of them approaches and asks if there are gluten-free meals. I could have sworn I saw her walking down fashionable Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv a few weeks ago. I show him a selection of gluten-free dishes. It sits in the serving area next to vegan dishes popular in Israel, a country known as one of the most vegan-friendly places in the world.

A soldier who looks more like a nostalgic teenager than a warrior asks me if there is any fresh mint for his tea. Drinking mint tea is a long tradition among the nearly one million Mizrachi Jews who were massacred or escaped pogroms in Middle Eastern countries and traveled to Israel in the 1940s.

To them and their descendants, the idea of ​​drinking tea without mint is as strange as drinking a hot Coca-Cola. I'm going to search the kitchen. I cannot disappoint this boy for whom a simple cup of mint leaf tea is a connection to his home, his parents and his heritage. When I return a few minutes later, mint in hand, he is waiting patiently. His expression is both grateful and relieved.

As lunch time ends, the cook, who despite his advanced age, is an unstoppable ball of energy. She hands me a huge bag of carrots and asks me to peel them. As I speak to him, a soldier sitting nearby approaches and, without a word, pulls out the carrots and turns away.

The next thing I know, he's methodically peeling them with the efficiency of a seasoned prepper. “Give me back those carrots,” I ask plaintively, “aren’t you making enough already?” As I speak, I imagine him fighting for his life in this hellish war zone infested by Hamas. He answers my question by not looking up or returning the carrots. Apparently he decided he wasn't doing enough. This, in a word, is the character of the IDF soldier.

I can't help but wonder if the hundreds of Soldiers who come to the Station are preoccupied with daily concerns about parents, children, sick loved ones, paying bills, birthdays or past due mortgages.

If they are preoccupied with these things, it is somehow not enough to distract each of them, as well as the person, from removing their dirty dishes from the tables where they are eating and s stop on the way out to thank me for serving them. .

How can they thank me, I wonder? They are risking their lives fighting what I consider to be the most brutal and amoral people humanity has ever known. I guess that's why every time I hear this thank you, my knees wobble and I want to fall at the feet of these heroic men and women.

But falling at their feet would be pointless because no matter where I look, there is not a single inflated ego, praise seeker, or soldier sufficient to receive my prostrations.

When I want nothing more than to express my gratitude, a soldier on his way to the front stops in front of me and delivers the final blow of humility. “Your name,” he told me, “will be written forever in the book of the history of the nation of Israel. » I recognized it immediately. A gun in one hand, a perfectly peeled carrot in the other, he nods slightly then disappears before I can say a word.

Ron Katz works at the Tel Aviv Institute and fights anti-Semitism and hate speech online. He can be contacted at [email protected].

All views expressed are those of the author.

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