Since October 7, four soldiers from my home town of Moreshet, a hamlet of 400 families in the Western Galilee, have been killed in action. Yakir Levi was killed on October 7, when Hamas terrorists overran his army base on the Gazan Border. A month later, Naaran Eshchar was killed when his tank fell off a cliff in the Northern Galilee. Naaran was a reservist who had to beg to return to his unit because he had recently donated a kidney. He left a pregnant wife and two children. Last month, Daniel Toaff was killed in Southern Gaza when he and his soldiers took shelter in a booby-trapped building, a building that supposedly had been cleared by another unit. Hamas terrorists were watching from a cell-phone, and when Daiel entered the building, they brought the building down.
On Thursday, Ori Borenstein fell in Gaza. Ori was 32 years old. I went to high school with his father, Abe, in Toronto. They live across the street from us. I have known Ori since his birth. He was named ”Ori Moshe.” He received Ori because he was born on Chanukah, the Festival of Lights. He received Moshe after his great-great grandfather who was shot by the Nazis when they overran his village. I taught Ori for his Bar Mitzvah. I always enjoyed talking to him. He had studied engineering and he liked cars. What’s not to like? Like many other Israelis, Ori was recently drafted for emergency reserve duty. His job was to carry supplies from an area immediately north of the Gaza Strip to soldiers who were positioned in Jabalya, about 2 miles north of Gaza City, about 5 miles south of the border. Each day Ori would enter Gaza in a convoy of Hummers, drop off his supplies, and return to Israel. On Thursday, a powerful Improvised Explosive Device (IED) exploded next to the convoy, killing Ori along with another two reservists.
Parents of soldiers live in a state of constant fear. Sleep is a rarity. Sitting at the dining-room table with Ori’s mother, Dahlia, waiting for the army to pass the tragic news to Ori’s siblings, Dahlia said, “Now I understand what [Daniel Toaff’s mother] meant when she said that at least she no longer must worry about her son.” One cannot hear a mother say this about her child without shedding a tear. Many tears.
The first decision that stood before Ori’s parents was where to bury him. The most obvious place would be in the regional cemetery about 5 miles down the road. The problem with this solution was that because of the threat of Hezbollah rocket fire, outdoor gatherings in our part of the country are limited to 50 people. This was a non-starter. The other alternative was to bury him at Mount Herzl military cemetery in Jerusalem. This would remove any limitation on the number of people at the funeral as Jerusalem has not sustained any rocket fire since the first days of the war. The down-side with having the funeral at Mount Herzl would be the distance: Jerusalem is a two-hour drive from Moreshet. As the funeral was scheduled for 11:00 pm, most buses would not be running. This problem was solved by the IDF, who committed to send as many buses as required from Moreshet to Jerusalem. At the end, they sent four. Abe and Dahlia chose to bury Ori on Mount Herzl.
The funeral was jam-packed. There were hundreds of people, maybe more. It was mostly solemn with most people weeping quietly with one exception. Ori was about to become engaged. The day before, he had sent his girlfriend a bouquet of flowers to try to bridge the distance. The next day, she brought flowers from that bouquet to the funeral. At the end of the funeral, wreaths were laid on the fresh grave, she laid her flowers on top of them. Her cries of anguish pierced the hearts of every single person in attendance. Her sense of loss, of tragedy, of what will never be, was just too immense for any human being to contain.
Abe’s eulogy of his son was not what I expected. Abe was angry. He lashed out at the army and at the government, accusing them of managing the war in Gaza and not trying to win it. He accused them of a lack of courage, something that Ori had in spades. He kept on repeating the word “le’nitzachon” – “on to victory.” Abe’s eulogy was far more than the words of a mourning father. His words make tremendous geopolitical sense. How can it be that more than one year after the war in Gaza began that the IDF still cannot secure a major artery that brings daily supplies to the front line? How can it be that Israeli soldiers are still encountering booby-trapped buildings? How can the government announce that Hamas has been militarily defeated if terrorists are returning to areas that were cleaned out months ago? Yes, it is true that Hamas operational leadership has been crippled and their capability to build or import weapons is essentially zero, but for how long will the IDF continue to play whack-a-mole with terrorists?
These questions bear much more weight given the events of the past few weeks on the northern border. When Israel (reportedly) detonated the pagers of the Hezbollah leadership on September 17 in “Operation Grim Beeper,” it set into motion a chain of events that in two short weeks has decapitated Hezbollah leadership, destroyed a large portion of their vaunted arsenal of missiles and launchers, and pushed their fighters miles from the northern border. The IDF has four divisions in Gaza and yet only 50 Hezbollah fighters were killed over the weekend. The reason this number is so small is because most of the Hezbollah fighters have fled from the south to safer areas in the center and north of the country. In the meanwhile, the IDF is dismantling Hezbollah infrastructure, destroying terror tunnels, bombing ordnance warehouses, clearing bush, taking down reconnaissance towers, and making it impossible for Hezbollah to ever return to the south. The IDF is turning the Dahia district in Beirut, Hezbollah’s command and control center and the storehouse of much of its long-range weaponry, into rubble. The southern 3 miles of Lebanon is one big ghost town. Anyone entering the area pays for it with his life. No part of Lebanon is off limits in this war. The IDF is fighting a war in Lebanon with the goal of defeating Hezbollah. There is no Plan B.
Why is Gaza so different? Lest it be said that the population density in Gaza is much greater than that in Southern Lebanon, the IDF has successfully moved large numbers of people out of harm’s way so that the IDF could fight in what once were heavily populated areas without collateral damage. I suggest that the difference between Gaza and Lebanon is that the IDF had always prepared for war in Lebanon. It was just a matter of time. Such that when the order was given, a plan was taken out of the desktop drawer and implemented. Not so with Gaza. The IDF had never planned on capturing Gaza. For twenty years, the government and the IDF were content on “containing “ Hamas. Every so often, they would “mow the lawn” when things got out of hand, but it was always believed that Hamas would administer Gaza. Israel wanted no part of it.
After the October 7 attacks, the IDF had to plan and execute an invasion of Gaza on the fly. There was always going to be a certain amount of “cut-and-try.” The IDF is still playing catch up. Add to this the overhead of pressure from allied countries not to do things that were necessary to win the war, such as entering Rafah and securing the Philadelphia corridor on the Egyptian border. In the war against Hezbollah, the IDF is acting first and responding to questions later.
It all goes back to courage. The “Northern Arrows” war against Hezbollah has shown how a war can be won if the goals are understood, if tactics and strategy are well-planned, and if the army is allowed to execute said strategy, world opinion be damned. If we want to win the war in Gaza, we need to take a page from the Northern Command’s playbook. And we need courage to see things play out until the end.
Abe is giving interviews to anyone who will listen. This morning he spoke on Israeli radio, and this afternoon he is being interviewed together with Benny Gantz and Gadi Eizenkot, two former IDF Chiefs of Staff. Abe knows that this will not bring his son back, but he prays that it may save the lives of the sons of other Israeli parents. It’s the least he can do.
Ori Moshe Borenstein
1991-2024
May his memory be a blessing.
On to victory.
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