On October 7, my youngest twin who was then a reserve paratrooper in the IDF was called up to fly down to Gaza from his base in Blackhawk helicopter that landed just outside Kibbutz Kfar Aza at two in the afternoon. His unit was the 3rd to enter that community right after a crack Sayeret team and Duvdevan, an elite special forces unit, known for undercover operations in urban environments. What greeted them was horror.
Kfar Aza was one of the hardest-hit communities during the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks. Dozens of residents were killed, homes were destroyed, and many others were taken hostage or injured. The kibbutz became a major symbol of the brutality of that day.
As my son later related to me, his unit came upon scores of torched cars with charred human inhabitants and melted human remains adhering to the vinyl and leather of the vehicles. They came upon at least 100 Jewish kibbutz civilians shot at point-blank range in the head, their bodies strewn haphazardly where they fell.
Their commander instructed three-man teams to search every home in the kibbutz. My son’s unit was lucky to find a mostly empty house, a small relief amidst the horror. His friend’s assignment was far worse: a single home where three generations of a family — grandparents, adult children, and grandchildren — had been slaughtered. Among the victims was a pregnant woman – her belly ripped open, and the unborn baby found with a knife in its head.
That same day, my son’s unit also discovered over fifty Jewish civilians who had survived by hiding in reinforced shelters within their homes. These rooms, with thick concrete walls, steel airtight doors, and blast-proof windows with iron shutters, had shielded them from the terror outside. For my son, each discovery was a mixture of relief, shock, and disbelief — the fragile line between life and death made painfully clear in every doorway they entered.
My son and his unit were sent to war without bulletproof vests and with guns that were not zeroed. This meant that either the sights or optics were not properly aligned with the point of impact of the bullet, causing the soldier to miss the target entirely, even with perfect aim – because the bullet emerges sideways. His unit was deployed by the so-called professional Israeli army to battle – completely unprepared or exposed – “with their pants down,” – without the necessary equipment, intelligence, or readiness to face the enemy.
Cathartically related this to me several days later, my son described near-bullet misses whizzing beside his head as visible and audible “tracer fire” as air displaced by bullets passing nearby, and how for hours they were pinned down on a roof building where mortars from the enemy exploded, some only twenty feet away with metal casings that shattered into deadly shrapnel, landing around them and passing through metal ‘as if it were butters’ but miraculously avoiding them from cuts or fatal injuries.
After my initial reaction, shock and processing I sprang to action. I’d only been in the country for two years when I was thrown into action: I created a nonprofit that raised enough to buy a paramedic ambulance for our community and support local defense, and delivered more than 100 ceramic bulletproof vests and helmets to my wife’s son’s unit up on the Lebanese frontier — sometimes – both my wife and I driving into zones where GPS stopped working and rockets were detonating all around in the Mount Bental area of the Golan Heights.
The enemy had orchestrated the October 7, 2023, assault with chilling precision, striking both the Israeli public and military completely off guard. In an instant, the world I thought I understood erupted into chaos. Nothing in my years of experience could have prepared me for living in a country at war on multiple fronts simultaneously.
Over the following two years we lived under a sky of rockets — some striking and exploding above our home deck while others were intercepted by the Iron Dome, scenes we often watched unless the sirens drove us into the safety of our sheltered room. To my own surprise, a civilian with no army training, I — with my wife — began sourcing and supplying equipment for an elite tracking unit operating across Gaza, Judea and Samaria, Syria, and Lebanon.
I struggled, as a man in my sixties—yet still feeling the strength and resilience of the youth I once had—to process and make sense of all that was happening around me. Before October 7th, I had been enjoying life with my wife in Kfar Adumim, felt like a quiet paradise. I had planted over a hundred trees in my wadi, tended my bees and harvested honey, and watched the sun rise and set over the stunning vistas of Mount Nebo. Those days were filled with rhythm, beauty, and calm—an existence suddenly shattered by a violence I could hardly comprehend.
From this vantage point, biblical Moses gazed longingly at the Promised Land, where I now live, yet he would never enter. And there I was, living amidst my own slice of paradise. Kfar Adumim, or “Red Village,” truly earned its name because the red rocks get their color from iron oxide (rust) that coats the sandstone and limestone, just like in Sedona, Arizona. The red-rock landscapes stretched like a natural cathedral around me, while the Jordan Valley, the shimmering Dead Sea, and muscular mountains unfolded in breathtaking panoramas. The light here sweeps across the wind-scoured landscape, stripping away mental clutter and leaving only wonder, a constant, visceral reminder that some vistas, some moments of wonder, never grow old.
I was the prodigal son of the Saidoff Tower Complex, returning to Jerusalem after a lifetime away. The 24-story tower, encircled by a circular stone structure on Jaffa Street, had its cornerstone laid by my great-grandfather in the 1890s. My father, of blessed memory, had fought in the pre-1948 underground alongside Menachem Begin, briefly imprisoned in Acre Prison during the British Mandate for smuggling guns from Lebanon into then-Palestine, and later fought in the 1948 war. How ironic, then, that I too was following a family path—though in a very different era— bringing gunsights from the United States, a modern echo of the clandestine and perilous work my father once undertook.
Western-trained and educated in American universities, holding several degrees and having raised my children in the comfort and security of the United States, I could never have imagined the upheaval that war would bring—or the awakening it would ignite within me. It was a transformation at once spiritual, political, and existential, forcing me to confront a timeless question: What does it mean to be a Jew today?
Living in Israel at this pivotal moment in history, I felt an extraordinary privilege: no longer a spectator to Jewish destiny, as I had been in my previous life abroad, but an active participant in its unfolding. This was no longer about observing from a comfortable distance—it was not merely holding VIP seats to what seemed like the grand finale of Jewish history—but actually being protagonists on the stage of Jewish history as the curtain rose on this momentous chapter of Israeli life, perhaps comparable in significance to the Six-Day War or the Yom Kippur War. And through it all, one feeling endured—what a privilege it was to be here, to live this moment, to be part of something so much greater than ourselves.
What will the future hold? How long will this war continue? Will we prevail, as we have in every conflict before, against all odds? What will be the price—in tears, in wounded soldiers, in casualties, in kidnapped Israelis? Against every prediction, we not only stubborn survived, but remain ascendingly thriving – however unbelievable that may be. How is this possible and in what context? Who and what are we as a nation? The questions beg for an answer: Is Israel a black swan phenomenon or something rarer?
The chapters ahead are my personal meditations, attempts to make sense of life as a Jew living in Israel since the war – a conflict considered by Israel’s military as worse than the Yom Kippur War because, in addition to civilian massacres, there was little if any strategic depth to the Gaza War: Gaza to Jerusalem was a mere 80 km (or 49 miles). I had no answers—only questions, fears, and the urgent need to understand what it means to live in a moment so fraught with history and consequence.
Chapter 4
The Will to Live: Hannah Senesh vs. the Cult of Death
There is one thing stronger than death — the will to live.
— Hannah Senesh, Diary, 1944
When I hide with my grandchildren, my children, and my wife in the sheltered security room of our home — listening to the sirens, feeling the walls tremble, and peeping through the small safe-room window as rockets explode in the night sky, intercepted by Iron Dome batteries above the Judean desert — I think of Hannah Senesh.
Her courage, her faith, and her unyielding belief in life come to me not as distant history, but as living presence. In those moments, when death arcs across the sky, I remember the words of the most famous line in her diary and their truth kindles hope inside me: “There is one thing stronger than death — the will to live.”
What she wrote in another time of terror becomes, for me, an act of hope in this one. Her story reminds me that even when surrounded by destruction, we are still capable of choosing life — not only in survival, but in spirit. In her defiance I find calm, in her faith I find strength, and in her light I find the quiet certainty that the flame of life, once lit, can never be extinguished — not by rockets, nor hatred, nor any ideology that turns destruction into worship.
Hannah Senesh: Poet and Paratrooper
Born in Budapest in 1921, Hannah grew up in a cultured but assimilated Jewish family. In 1939, at the age of eighteen, she immigrated to British Mandatory Palestine — an aliyah born from deep Zionist conviction and a desire to help build a renewed Jewish homeland. She joined Kibbutz Sdot Yam near Caesarea, where she wrote the poetry and diaries that would later make her a moral and cultural icon.
In 1943, as part of a mission to help rescue Hungarian Jews from the Nazis before they were deported to Auschwitz, Senesh volunteered for a British Army paratrooper unit formed in Palestine under the Special Operations Executive (SOE). In March 1944, she parachuted into Yugoslavia and joined local partisan fighters. By June 1944, she crossed the border into Hungary — but was captured almost immediately by Hungarian gendarmes and imprisoned in Budapest’s Gestapo prison.
Subjected to brutal Nazi interrogation and severe torture for months, she refused to betray her comrades or reveal her radio codes, even when her captors brought in her mother and threatened to torture her in front of Hannah to force cooperation and break Hannah’s resolve. Other prisoners later testified that she would sing to herself and pray to stay strong.
Tried for treason, she was executed by firing squad on November 7, 1944, at just 23 years old. Witnesses recount that she refused a blindfold and faced her executioners calmly, eyes open — the image of unbroken dignity. Her final letter to her mother, written in prison, reflects her resolve: “I am going to meet my fate with my head held high, proud to have been a part of the struggle for our people’s future.”
The Cult of Death: Hamas as Historical Outlier
Throughout history, humanity has witnessed movements steeped in fanaticism, cruelty, and apocalyptic rage. Yet very few have ever enshrined death itself — not merely the killing of others, but dying — as a positive moral end in the way Hamas has.
Most violent ideologies claim to destroy in order to build — to purify, to restore, to avenge. Hamas offers no redemptive creation, no vision of a moral or spiritual world beyond the ashes. It glorifies dying and killing as the same act of sacred self-erasure. That is why it feels not only barbaric, but metaphysically inverted: it worships nothingness, dresses it in holiness, and calls it victory.
Some ancient warrior cultures glorified death in battle or ritual sacrifice. But their purpose was cosmic balance, not annihilation for its own sake. Nazi Germany exalted a racial ideal that justified genocide, yet even the Nazis claimed to be serving life — the “purification” and perpetuation of their race. Imperial Japan developed the kamikaze ethos, where dying for the emperor was glorified. Yet even this was tied to national survival and honor — not death as a moral good in itself. The Khmer Rouge embraced a radical negation of human life, murdering millions to create a “pure” agrarian utopia — but again, the destruction was instrumental, not sacred.
By contrast, Hamas’s ideological foundation was born of theological death worship. Its Charter borrows antisemitic conspiracy tropes from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, portraying Jews as a demonic force behind world corruption, while calling for Israel’s destruction and framing the conflict in religious-apocalyptic terms — a cosmic struggle between Islam and the Jews.
This worldview expresses a complete reversal of moral value. Whereas most human ethics, whether religious or secular, treat death as tragedy and life as sacred, Hamas treats death in “holy war” as victory and transcendence. This is not tactical martyrdom; it is a spiritualization of annihilation — the belief that to die in the act of killing the enemy is the highest form of existence.
The Death Cult at the Gates
To those in the West who still call this merely “resistance,” or who insist on moral equivalence while sipping lattes in safety: Hamas is not a political movement with extreme tactics. It is a death cult — a real-world Game of Thrones White Walkers army whose highest religious act is to die while murdering Jews, and whose paradise is built on the annihilation of light.
And before anyone claims this is only Israel’s problem, remember: the same networks that fund, glorify, and recruit for Hamas operate legally inside the United States today — raising millions through fake charities, spreading their poison on campuses, and inspiring lone wolves who dream of repeating October 7 on American soil. U.S. intelligence has warned for years that Hamas and its allies “could inspire attacks against U.S. interests.” They are not coming with tanks — yet. They are already here, cloaked in the language of “justice,” waiting for the long night to fall.
I love the America I grew up in — the one of open hearts and unbreakable ideals. The United States stands out to me as the greatest democratic success in history — I was privileged to be born and live my life there. That is why I sound this alarm with everything I have: wake up before the night comes for you too.
The Living Flame: Hannah Senesh and the Sanctity of Life
When we juxtapose Hannah Senesh’s most famous diary lines — “There is one thing stronger than death — the will to live” — with the Hamas charter and its public rhetoric — “We love death as much as the Jews love life” — few statements so perfectly expose the moral chasm between two civilizations.
In the end, the moral distance between these two statements — spoken eighty years apart — is unbridgeable. One chooses life even when staring at death; the other chooses death and calls it holiness. In every rocket alert, in every night spent in the safe room, I know which side I stand on — and which side will prevail.
Her life and sacrifice stand as a stark and enduring testimony that there exist appropriate — and indeed triumphant — responses to the horror and convulsive, death-celebrating creed of the Hamas worldview. Where Hamas exalts destruction as destiny, Senesh sanctified sacrifice as love — the giving of life so that others might live. Against the cult of death, she remains what she always was: an eternal living flame.