By Hillel Kuttler

Tonight through Monday, Israelis commemorate Yom HaZikaron, the annual Memorial Day for soldiers killed in the country’s defense. Traditionally, soldiers’ parents, spouses, siblings, children, grandchildren and friends attend somber ceremonies in their towns and sit graveside to mourn and reflect. They recite prayers and lamentations for the 22,867 lives extinguished and potential unrealized, but also for their own loves lost, smiles banished and hearts punctured.

It is a day whose immense suffering cannot be avoided, even by plugging one’s ears when sirens sound this evening and then again in the morning. A quarter-century later, my mind can readily conjure the image of the sobbing mother who prostrated herself on her son’s grave in Jerusalem’s Mount Herzl Military Cemetery. The faces of parents interviewed each year on commemorative programs and documentaries project deep pain and agony.

Worse yet is the surety that some Israeli television spectators will themselves become the grieving interviewees and cemetery visitors of Memorial Day 2012 and beyond. The country loses its best and brightest year after year, decade upon decade, to enemies who continue to challenge the Jewish state’s existence.

It is said that every Jewish household in Israel either mourns a loved one or knows someone who suffered a loss. But those in uniform are hardly the only lives cut down. Memorial Day also commemorates the civilians killed in terrorism attacks: more than 1,500 Israelis since the era of peace supposedly began with the signing of the Oslo Accord with the PLO in 1993. Like the soldiers killed, the murder of Israeli civilians shows no sign of abating. Those who hate Jews enough to kill them — to kill us — care little for civilization’s rules of engagement or for the formality of uniforms and battlefields. Israelis wearing jeans and shopping for hummus in Haifa are equally worthy targets to homicidal Jew-haters.

And that’s what the hatred and delegitimization of Israel, the stabbing and exploding of Israelis, is all about. It’s not about Israelis’ laundry (fatigues as opposed to t-shirts) or precisely where they walk when the end comes (Israel proper as opposed to the West Bank). It’s about Israel’s and Israelis’ very existence. Every Israeli has a red circle painted on his or her back. Thus, the day’s all-encompassing nature.

The circles on the calendar are as intimately connected as Israelis are to each other. Precisely one week ago was the annual observation of Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes’ Remembrance Day) to mark the ultimate catastrophe to befall the Jewish people, a nightmare that should have settled once and for all the need for a safe, secure, sovereign and recognized state in the Jews’ ancestral homeland. In the eyes of Israel’s enemies, though, it has not. The Shoah continues to be denied, minimized or relegated to the rear-view mirror by much of even the civilized world. Were its lessons sufficiently absorbed, Israel would be infinitely safer and the numbers of victims mourned each Memorial Day would not be increasing.

The thing is, though, that even Israel’s friends don’t effectively grasp the connection between the two commemorations.

If they did, they — England, France, Germany, the United States and others — would reflexively and intuitively (rather than conditionally and inconsistently) back Israel and its laudatory society in its continued struggle for security and peace.   They would follow the moral lead of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who last November told the Ottawa Conference on Combating Anti-Semitism: "[W]hen Israel, the only country in the world whose very existence is under attack, is consistently and conspicuously singled out for condemnation, I believe we are morally obligated to take a stand. Demonization, double standards, delegitimization, the three D’s — it is the responsibility of us all to stand up to them. ... [A]s long as I am Prime Minister, whether it is at the UN or the Francophonie or anywhere else, Canada will take that stand, whatever the cost." 

If they did, perhaps Palestinian terrorists would question their assumptions (similar to Hitler’s assumptions) that Jewish blood is cheap.

If they did, such united, sustained support would project to Israel’s enemies that the West and the Jewish state are in this together: that the July 7, 2005, London subway attack and the August 9, 2001, bombing of Jerusalem’s Sbarro restaurant (to cite just two examples) were equally reprehensible Islamic attacks on the West rather than distinguishable by the excuses made to explain and justify terrorists’ murder of Israelis.

If they did, such obscenities as the 2009 Goldstone Report would gain no diplomatic traction, and the provocateurs behind last May’s blatantly anti-Israel Turkish flotilla stunt (again, to cite just two of many examples) would have been condemned.

“Today in the West there is a faulty conscience — indifferent to the parade of young Palestinians putting on explosive belts, the daily demonization inflicted on Jews in the Arab world, the crowds delirious over the lynching of two Jewish soldiers who had lost their way and whose dismembered bodies were displayed as trophies,” Italian journalist Giulio Meotti writes so powerfully in his heartbreaking and very necessary book, A New Shoah: The Untold Stories of Israel’s Victims of Terrorism. “This faulty conscience has obliterated the fate of thousands of Israelis murdered because they were Jews; it has erased one of the reasons for Israel’s existence.”

As Memorial Day begins in Israel, I believe that the rest of the civilized world must project solidarity by issuing a clear, unwavering and very firm message to the country’s detractors and enemies: “It took us far too long, but we are onto you. This is a black-and-white issue of conscience: Attacks against Israelis are as vile and intolerable as attacks against our own people. We unconditionally support Israel’s steps to prevent further murders, because we concur with her that Jewish blood is not cheap. You have not intimidated Israel, and you will not intimidate us in our defense of a fellow democracy. We will not cower before you.”

Better yet would be the more succinct: “Today, and every day, we are all Israelis.”

Hillel Kuttler is an American freelance writer-editor. He may be reached at hk@hillelthescribecommunications.com.