By Joshua Lafazan
SYOSSET, New York — A half hour drive from Jerusalem, Caliber 3 is known to be Israel’s largest training academy for counterterrorism and defense. I visited Caliber 3 with my family on our trip to Israel this April and was deeply moved by my conversation with an army officer.
Before we underwent our tour’s civilian security training, our officer pointed to the IDF flag and asked us to share what we felt it meant. Our answers of history, service, and honor were all technically correct, but his next point stunned the room: the flag represents the first time in our 3,500-year history as Jews that we no longer have to rely on others for our own protection.
He then flashed a montage of pictures from the Holocaust on screen; I immediately thought of my grandfather Boris, a Holocaust refugee who hid in the woods to survive capture.
He shared that during the Holocaust, Jews were defenseless from the Germans, having no country that would stand in harm’s way to protect us from what would become one of humanity’s most gruesome atrocities. He explained that since the IDF’s founding in 1948, sons and daughters of Israel are trained to stand in front of gunfire without hesitation to ensure our collective safety; so that when we say the words Never Again about the Holocaust, we mean it.
That, he said, is what the IDF flag stands for.
Our room sat silent. Reflecting on our history of thousands of years of persecution, of bondage, and of exile after exile, to fully understand this momentous shift brought many of us to tears.
All of this underscores the emotion I felt recently as I watched the footage, taken from the helmet of a soldier, of brave IDF members running through live fire to burst into the home where the hostages were held to rescue them.
When you watch the video you become stunned by the loud sounds of gunfire and fighting ongoing. Later in the video you eventually see the faces of the hostages, and in translated Hebrew into English, you hear the soldiers tell them to “be calm, we’ve come to save you.”
It was at this moment in the video that the words of the Caliber 3 officer truly hit home for me. These hostages were civilians who were captured for the sole crime of being Jewish and Israeli. And after 246 days in captivity, they were now being rescued in a daring day-time mission by their fellow countrymen.
While people of good conscience from all over the world celebrated this heroic feat of historical success, there was unfortunately a loud group of people who somehow were blaming Israel for having the audacity to come rescue its own people. I am a Democrat, and therefore I was both mortified and appalled that this group, as has been consistent since October 7th, was primarily dominated by members of the fringe far-left extreme wing of the party.
I was incredulous to see what happened next. News outlets decried the military operation while saying the hostages had been “released” rather than what had actually happened: they were rescued. Progressive celebrities like Krystal Ball asked her followers to “imagine the outrage” if the tables were turned and Hamas had “committed a bloody massacre” to save four Palestinians, conveniently forgetting that there was a bloody massacre: it happened on October 7th.
Even famous actors like Mark Ruffalo joined the cacophony of lunacy, sharing on X that “4 [hostages] for 274 including kids. It’s a sinful equation that keeps repeating,” ignoring the fact that the majority of those killed were in fact Hamas terrorist fighters harboring hostages purposefully in a densely populated civilian area.
The insanity of this reflexive anti-Zionist garbage – to blame Israel for everything, including rescuing its own citizens who were taken hostage – is unfortunately not new. In fact, after Israel’s daring rescue of its citizens taken hostage by terrorists in Entebbe, rather than celebrating the mission, then Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim called it “a serious violation of the sovereignty of a Member State of the United Nations.”
To put this into perspective, since 1983 the Hostage Rescue Team of the FBI has responded to high-risk incidents in the U.S. and around the world nearly 800 times. Developed nations routinely deploy special forces to fight militants and retrieve hostages in war zones around the world. Almost every incident includes combatant casualties, typically in disproportionate numbers.
Yet Israel is not held to the same standard and is somehow expected to just accept the fact that its citizens are hostages. What’s worse is that Hamas does not distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths, an insane accounting mechanism that the Western world has somehow accepted and regularly uses in publication to admonish Israel further.
At the end of our training at Caliber 3, our officer showed us another video which I still think about often: the video was of a delegation of German citizens, men and women who came to Israel to learn about security and defense.
Ironic that less than a century after the German Nazis nearly wiped out the Jewish population, that their citizens now come to Israel to learn how to defend themselves is stunning.
And in a surprise at the end of the video, these German citizens learned the words to Hatikvah – Israel’s national anthem – and sang it in Hebrew to show their appreciation and solidarity with their IDF trainers. To see this video, one can fully understand just how much the world has changed for Israel and her citizens. This is a stark contrast to the chorus of nonsense being spewed by vile antisemites, reminding us of just how much the world has stayed the same.
To know that Israel – a country roughly the size of New Jersey, and the only Jewish state in the world – has soldiers brave enough to risk their lives to save others is awe-inspiring. I am deeply filled with pride that my cousins serving in the IDF reserves are among them. No matter how loud the voices of dissension get, Israel will not stop until all the hostages are rescued and returned to their homeland.
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Josh Lafazan, 30, is a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania. Lafazan served in elected public office for over a decade, first on the Syosset Board of Education where he was elected at 18 years old, and then in the Nassau County Legislature.