The Empty Kennel
There is a note near the end of Heart of the Beast, the Brad Pitt film that opened in cinemas late last month, and it is the most serious thing in the picture.
James Belmont, a retired Special Forces officer, has crashed his seaplane in the Alaskan wilderness after a heart attack at the controls. He has set out on a trek of 58 miles with Odin, the German Shepherd who served beside him in combat. They have faced down a grizzly, a river and a pack of wolves. Now Belmont is dying and he knows it. So he writes down what happened, records his last wishes for the dog, and leaves what money he has for whoever takes Odin in. Then the dog walks on alone.
Critics have been kind. Some 86 per cent of the reviews collected by Rotten Tomatoes are positive, and many agree that the dog steals the film. It is a tear jerker and it means to be. But the tears come easily because the film asks only whether the dog will be loyal, and of course he will. That is what the dog is for. The harder question is the one in the note. What does a man owe the animal he took to war?
Israel has been living with that question since before it was a state.
Rudolphina Menzel was born in Vienna in 1891 and took a doctorate in chemistry before she bought her first dog. She taught her dogs to obey commands in Hebrew and became one of the best known trainers of police dogs in Europe. Until the Nazis took power in 1933 she was a consultant at Kummersdorf, the German military dog training institute near Berlin. In 1938 she escaped from Austria to Palestine, where she organised dog handling courses for the Haganah. Hundreds of her dogs served in the war of 1948, carrying messages and detecting mines. In the 1950s she founded a guide dog institute for the blind. Towards the end of her life she acknowledged that the techniques she had pioneered were also used by the Nazis to commit atrocities.
That biography is the whole argument. The same methods and the same devotion served the Haganah, served the Nazis and led the blind across the road. A dog’s loyalty is not a moral credential. It tells you nothing about the cause. Everything that matters happens at the other end of the leash.
The army’s canine unit, which traces its lineage to the Haganah dog unit she helped to build, is called Oketz, the sting. Its motto means, roughly, those who go first, and it is meant literally: the dog enters the building before the soldier does. By the start of 2025 the unit had lost 42 dogs and three soldiers in the war that began on 7 October 2023, according to the Modern War Institute at West Point, and the list has grown since. One was sent into a building in Jabaliya and did not come back. By the unit’s account, the soldiers who retrieved the body found that it had been rigged with explosives. In April this year, during the truce in Lebanon, the army said a dog was killed after revealing a Hezbollah cell in Bint Jbeil. A handler who loses a dog is given another. The kennel does not stay empty for long.
The leash has two ends in Gaza as well. In June 2024 the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor alleged that army dogs were being used systematically against Palestinian civilians. The following month Muhammed Bhar, a man of 24 with Down’s syndrome and autism, was bitten by an army dog during a raid on his family home in Gaza City. His mother told the BBC that the family was ordered out, that he was left behind, and that he was found dead a week later. The army did not dispute the attack or that he was left alone, and said its troops had been called away to help wounded soldiers. A country that buries its dogs with ceremony cannot treat that as someone else’s story. The dog went where it was sent. The dog is never the one who answers.
Wednesday marks three years since 7 October, and an election is weeks away. Israel will count its dead, as it must, and resume the long argument about who answers for what. Belmont’s note is a useful template for that argument, because it does three plain things. It gives an honest account. It names a debt. It makes provision that will outlast the writer. Those are what a state owes to everyone it sends through the door first, the conscript and the reservist as much as the animal. The first of them, the honest account, it also owes to whoever was on the other side of the door.
The film can stop at the note, because bears and wolves do not hold inquiries. Israel cannot.
Near the Adam facility there is a cemetery for the dogs of Oketz, with some 200 names. At its centre stands a monument to those whose burial places are unknown, with a statue of a handler and his dog Oscar, lost in Hebron in 2003. In July 2024 the unit added ten names to it: Mido, Gandhi, Eddie, Koda, Ziva, Rico, Charlie, Toy, Juki and Max. There is nothing beneath the stone. The kennels have been filled again. The note is still owed.