Adam Mossoff

The Knesset sworn in this afternoon will set a record likely unmatched by any parliament in the world: one in every ten members has buried a loved one lost to terror or war. At the top of the list is a prime candidate for the next prime minister, Gadi Eisenkot, who lost both a son, Gal, and a nephew, Maor, to the fighting in Gaza. No. 10 on his slate, Shira Shapira, lost her son Aner Shapira, the hero of the shelter at Re’im, who threw back grenade after grenade until the eighth killed him. A few minutes up Route 232, Michal Hirsch Negri of Together lost her son Roi, who fell defending Be’eri. Just past it lies Alumim, where Ran Gvili fought his last battle. His body was the last to be returned from Gaza, and his mother, Tali Gvili, enters the Knesset with Likud. Further north, in Kfar Aza, Nira Ronen was murdered, and her grandson Omri Ronen sits with the Democrats. At the end of the road, at the Nahal Oz outpost, fell the son of Rafi Ben Shitrit, Yisrael Beiteinu’s No. 2. Sharon Sharabi, also of Yisrael Beiteinu, lost his brother Yossi Sharabi in Hamas captivity. Religious Zionism chairman Bezalel Smotrich is a cousin of Amishar Ben David, who fell in Gaza, and his No. 2, Moshe Feiglin, is the grandfather of Yair Levin, who fell there as well. Otzma Yehudit’s Limor Son Har-Melech watched her husband, Shuli Har-Melech, murdered before her eyes in a terror attack, two decades before any of this began. Count the bereaved brothers too, Benjamin Netanyahu, whose brother Yoni Netanyahu fell leading the rescue at Entebbe, and Yashar!’s Elisaf Peretz, whose brothers Uriel and Eliraz Peretz fell in Lebanon in 1998 and on the Gaza border in 2010, and it is exactly one in ten. Two more wait just outside the door, should anyone ahead of them on the list step down: Nir Hajbi, whose son Yonatan Hajbi was murdered in the Gaza envelope, and after him Shai Fisher, whose grandmother and uncle were killed by Hezbollah fire in Kfar Yuval, at the other end of the country. Add Zvika Mor, the father of a freed hostage; a wounded war veteran, Elisha Madan; and a host of other contributors to society, and this is exactly the Knesset we supposedly longed for. Forty-seven of the 120-member chamber are new, almost 40 percent, yet we are once again standing in the same dead-end alley. One would think the natural response would be for Israel’s bereaved families to unite. Yet that seems an increasingly slim possibility. After their meeting last night, Eisenkot and Yisrael Beiteinu leader Avigdor Liberman reportedly agreed to exhaust talks with the Haredi parties before turning to the other non-Zionist alternative, the Arab parties. “You need to prepare your party and the bloc for the compromises to come,” Liberman told him, echoing Eisenkot’s own words on “creative approaches” the night before. The first compromise on the table, Channel 12 reports, is a year-long freeze on arresting draft evaders while a new law is negotiated. The last “temporary” arrangement, the Tal Law, lasted a decade. Between parties whose loyalty to the state many Israelis question and parties that will not take up its most basic burden, military service, Liberman’s stubbornness has pushed Eisenkot down the latter route to power. Yet one cannot help thinking there is a third, more natural path: to seek comfort, as the traditional Jewish words of condolence encourage, “among the other mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.” open.substack.com/pub/amitse…