It Is Heroes We Need: Israel’s Lesson for Europe

Every Jewish year, on the 4th of the Jewish month of Iyar, Israel remembers the fallen heroes of the IDF and the victims of terrorism. This special day is called Yom Ha’zikaron, Remembrance Day, and this year, according to the Christian calendar, it falls on April 29th. 

This memorial day immediately precedes Independence Day (Yom Ha’atzmaut), establishing a direct connection between the resurrection of the ancient Jewish state after two thousand years of dispersion, and the sacrifices of the soldiers fallen in Israel’s wars. 

The fallen whom Israel remembers are not nameless, faceless individuals, but the grandparents, parents, siblings, or children of today’s Israelis. In Israel, history—and the Bible—are living realities; the Jewish state has never succumbed to Fukuyama’s illusion that ‘history has ended.’ Indeed: how could anyone feel that history has ended while waging war in Gaza, following in the footsteps of their biblical ancestors—in the very same Gaza about which the prophet Amos wrote: “I will send fire upon the walls of Gaza, to consume its citadels”?

All of this may seem strange to us Europeans, as our wars of independence happened much longer ago. My own country, Hungary, has not seen a significant war since 1956. Today’s generations have grown up in comfort, prosperity, and democracy, and perhaps believe these things are a given. Yes, we still commemorate the Hungarian freedom fighters of 1848 and the barricade fighters of the 1956 revolution. But this belongs to a distant, romantic, intangible history. 

In addition, today is an era when European children are taught that everything is relative, every concept can and should be deconstructed, and that ‘heroes’ don’t really exist. There’s no need for them; such concepts only serve to uphold outdated, reactionary social structures. As a historian and a thinking European citizen, I feel compelled to ask: Do heroes exist at all?

For Israelis, this is not even a question. Not only do they have a long line of both biblical and 20th-century heroes—from David, Samson, and Esther to Yoseph Trumpeldor and Hannah Szenes—standing before them as examples, but also the countless soldiers and civilians who gave their lives for Israeli freedom over the past 76 years. 

And the newest heroes are being born now: 19-year-old, or only slightly older, Israeli soldiers who, after October 7th, 2023, without hesitation, laced up their boots, donned military uniforms, and took up arms—to then sacrifice their most precious possession, their young lives, for people they may not even know, or who might not even care about their sacrifice. They, like Yoseph Trumpeldor, paraphrase what Horace said in ancient Rome: ”Tov lamut be’ad artzeinu,”, that is, ”It is good to die for our country.”

Of course, no one could have meant this entirely seriously—perhaps not even Horace. Naturally, no one intends to die for their country; everyone would prefer to live for and in it, in peace, to study, to work, to marry, and to raise children. Or, like the young people at the Nova music festival, to dance. 

But what Israel’s youth have understood is that sometimes, unfortunately, people are not left in peace to study, to raise children, or to dance. There are forces in the world that seek to take away our personal freedom, our happiness, our resources, our land—and ultimately, our lives. And most Israelis have no other homeland. It is this realization that may explain the fact that, after October 7th, there was a surge of volunteers for the Israeli army, with young people flocking to the military, wishing to fight for their country.

It should also be noted that in 2024, 32,000 Jews immigrated to Israel from around the world. Meanwhile—to cite a European counterexample—7 million refugees have left Ukraine, among them many men of military age. The readers should ask themselves: in their own country, which path would young people choose? Would they line up to sacrifice their lives, understanding that sometimes we have to fight for ourselves because no one else will, or would they board the first outbound plane?

Naturally, one could rightly argue that historiography focuses too much on individual heroism, with legendary figures that may have never existed being exalted in history teaching. But does that mean that we no longer need heroes, and that, in the end, every brave act is to be viewed with suspicion and relativized? 

The question can also be approached from the opposite direction. If there are no heroes, then are there traitors, cowards, or passive bystanders? If there’s no proper, admirable, and exemplary form of behavior in exceptional circumstances, then can other forms of behavior be measured against anything at all? Surely every reader would agree that a firefighter who runs back into a burning building to rescue a small child is acting heroically. Wouldn’t we want to teach future firefighters to follow his example? And wouldn’t we condemn the firefighter who, at the sight of the fire, runs away—or worse, pours oil onto the flames? I guess it is a no-brainer that we would.  And yet, a significant part of modern society perceives the Israeli soldier fighting Islamist terrorists as a ‘bad’ person, and the terrorist who deliberately and systematically slaughters children as a ‘freedom fighter’—a striking example of the human mind’s susceptibility to manipulation, and of the power of narratives and deconstruction.

I am ready to concede that everything can be broken down into its component parts, everything can be examined from a thousand angles. The question is whether we must—and whether we are able to—reassemble what we’ve already taken apart. The love a parent feels for their child is, in the strict and scientific sense, nothing more than chemical reactions in the brain. But does this affect the parent who, without hesitation, would give their life for their child if it came to that? Of course not. If science becomes entirely detached from life and from the human being, there will be nothing left. The modern person, stripped of great things, emotions, goals, and— if you will— myths, shivers in lonely, vulnerable isolation in the barren desert of rationality, technology, and science. It’s a bleak image, that of Nietzsche’s ‘last men,’ who are no longer capable of great deeds, living only for comfort and fleeting pleasures. Opposed to them stands Aristotle’s megalopsychos, the ‘great-souled man’ who still believes he is capable of great acts, and who possesses what Aristotle elsewhere called andreia, the courage to face death for a noble cause in spite of fear.

Israel’s example teaches us that we need heroes: real, everyday heroes. Our European civilization and fundamental freedoms are under attack, and they will continue to be. It will take heroes to defend our future, the future of our children. And we all may need to become those heroes.