Day 282 Of The War: Collective War Journal And Kaplan

Sometime last December, about three months after October 7 and the beginning of the war, I came across a call for papers. It was highly unusual: three faculty members from the School of Social Work at Tel Aviv University were looking for personal writings from researchers who had decided to keep a journal during the war. The aim, to my mind,  was to create a manuscript consisting of personal testimonies that, in its entirety, would be greater than the sum of its parts and would reflect the collective experiences of the writers . I was touched by the idea of the project and sent parts of my journal. About a month ago, we received the completed manuscript. Its title was “It Was Cleared For Publication That All Of That Happened To Us, A Collective War Journal”. a quote from one of the journals. The first part of the title is the sad and familiar preface to any announcement of a fallen soldier.  Although the last entry is from January 5, 2024, and the focus is on the immediate trauma of the participants, it presents an authentic and brave document of a nation going through inconsolable grief.

Last week, the three lecturers organized a launch of the manuscript at the university. Several actresses read entries from the diaries, there were a few short presentations, and the most important part of the evening was a discussion with the three lecturers, all of whom are young women. They explained that the project started from their own writing and their need to be part of a collective in order to be able to deal with these unbearable times. This choice of focusing on the individual as part of a collective also proved very successful in the post-October 7 kibbutzim of the Western Negev. Their ability to restore, to a certain extent, their familiar collective way of life in their new locations enabled them to create a routine and achieve a certain degree of normalcy.

Last night in Kaplan, many of the demonstrators were not present, but instead were in Jerusalem at a rally following a four-day march from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, led by the families of the hostages, demanding that Netanyahu agree to the new hostage deal. The main speaker was Tzipi Livni, and she gave an honest and sensible speech, which is so rare in a time when lunacy has taken over our lives with the current government and Knesset. Livni said: “Israel deserves to be a great nation with a different government. We have to stand against those who present a hostage deal as a defeat. This is a very good deal; a rejection of the deal would lead to the death of the hostages and strengthen the Hamas regime. It will be intentional recklessness. A military force is necessary, but it is not a solution.” She said that we all deserve a heart in Jerusalem, meaning a leader with a heart.