‘Today,” said Omri Gvili, the brother of St.-Sgt.-Maj. Ran Gvili, “I can say that our lives can go on, that at last we have come through October 7, 2023.”
It was a sentence rooted in personal grief but laden with national meaning. With the burial of Gvili on Wednesday in Meitar, Israel’s longest day finally came to a close. Israel could, at last, exhale.
“An eye weeps bitterly,” his mother, Talik, said, again speaking as much for the nation as for her family, “and the heart rejoices.”
The eye weeps for all those lost; the heart rejoices that the October 7 nightmare is, at least at some levels, over, and that all the hostages – the living and the dead – have come home. The heart rejoices because no one was left behind.
There are moments in the life of a nation when differences seem trivial, divisions soften, and fault lines blur. Wednesday afternoon was one of those moments – one of those rare pauses that remind us of a shared fate.
Talik Gvili gave voice to that feeling with striking clarity. Recalling a moment before October 7, she spoke of her son coming home from duty as a police officer at a protest and telling her, “Mom, they spat on me. Don’t they understand that I am them, that we are on the same side?”
That sentence, she said, etched itself into her. From that moment on, she told the mourners, she felt it was her mission “to prove to you – and to all of us – that we are one people. A strong people. A people who are here to stay.”
“That we are all,” she added, “on the same side.”
Why does solidarity only emerge during times of loss?
“WHY IS it only in moments of pain – of darkness – that we seemingly discover, all at once, the extraordinary Israelis who are here – the greatness of our sisters and brothers?” President Isaac Herzog asked in his eulogy. “Why only now?”
It is a question so many Israelis ask themselves again and again. Why does the nobility of the nation emerge so clearly only in moments like these? Why does solidarity and a sense of shared destiny reveal itself most powerfully during times of loss and trauma? Why does it take tragedy to bring the nation together?
When such moments of unity do surface, they are often bittersweet, shadowed by the knowledge that they are short-lived – that within days, even hours, they will dissipate, drowned out by angry debate and corrosive rhetoric.
And indeed, within hours of the funeral, that sense of unity began to fade.
The contrast could not have been starker.
Right-wing provocateur Mordechai David, a TikTok presence who garners thousands of likes by filming and posting incidents in which he blocks cars or verbally attacks left-wing protesters and prominent public figures, blocked the car of former Supreme Court president Aharon Barak as Barak was leaving a conference in Tel Aviv.
“Aharon Barak, you’re blocked, you’re blocked, you zero!” David shouted at Barak. “Dictator, Khamenei of our generation.... Your car is blocked.”
Barak had just delivered a speech at the First Liberal Congress organized by the Movement for Quality Government in Israel, in which he declared, “The Declaration of Independence no longer expresses our shared values.”
Democrats Party chairman Yair Golan responded sharply: “When the thug Mordechai David and his friends block a former Supreme Court president, an 89-year-old Holocaust survivor, this is not protest. This is militia violence with full encouragement and backing from the government. We will not be silent in the face of this terror.”
So much for the national kumbaya moment. Confronted with this dissonance, one may ask: Which is the real Israel?
The answer, of course, is both. One does not cancel out the other. The existence of one does not preclude the simultaneous presence of the other – the solidarity and the fissure, the unity and the hate. Just as the human mind can hold conflicting emotions at the same time, so, too, can a nation contain contradictory impulses.
Gvili’s burial does not – magically – erase the passions about the country’s direction, just as the funeral of Shiri Bibas and her two babies last February, also marked by heartfelt calls for unity, did not bring the nation’s divisions to an end.
And yet it is precisely the memory of such moments that matters. It is that memory that needs to surface when the opposite is revealed, that helps sustain the country – keeps it from sliding into despair – when the jarring scenes of disunity return.
Moments like these, even if they don’t last and can’t last, tug at the mystic chords that bind a nation – chords that may seem thin, gossamer even, but that miraculously still exist.
ALONGSIDE THAT fragile unity, another emotion asserted itself at Gvili’s funeral – quieter, more permanent, and no less real: pride.
“I am Talik Gvili, a very, very proud mother,” she said in closing, using the same words with which she introduced herself in interview after interview over the long months since her son was taken – always stressing the pride she felt in him.
Here, too, she seemed to be speaking for a nation.
Irsael's values and spirit represented by Gvili
One reason for the public outpouring on Wednesday – thousands of flag-waving people lined the roads to pay respect as the car with Gvili’s coffin passed – was to salute the values and spirit Gvili represented; values and spirit that Israelis take pride in seeing reflected back at them.
His October 7 story embodies everything the country wants to believe about itself: selflessness, courage, and an individual’s willingness to place himself in harm’s way for the sake of the collective.
Many are the stories of bravery, courage, and selflessness that emerged from October 7. Talik alluded to this in her eulogy.
“During these two years, I heard many eulogies about the heroes, about the War of Rebirth,” she said. “And every eulogy – every single one – reminded me of you. The same values. The same spirit.”
Ran’s story embodied them all. He was on sick leave from the police on October 7, awaiting a scheduled operation two days later for a broken shoulder. When Hamas attacked, he could have stayed home and nursed his injury. Instead, he raced to the Gaza border, rescued Supernova festivalgoers, and defended Kibbutz Alumim, fighting the terrorists at the entrance to the kibbutz until his last bullet.
That is a story that instills pride in a nation, not only in a mother. It is a story that reflects how Israelis want to see themselves, and what gives them hope: that this is a country capable of producing such individuals.
Singer-actor-warrior Idan Amedi – badly wounded in Gaza, who later recuperated and was among the soldiers involved in scouring the cemetery to find Gvili’s body – performed his 2012 song “Nigmar” (“It’s Over”) at the funeral. The song, about returning from fighting in Gaza that year, captures the gap between how soldiers see themselves and how the country sees them.
On the way home from that earlier round, Amedi sang, soldiers stopped at a corner falafel stand. People looked at them, clapped, and called out, “Our heroes.”
“It’s a bit too much for me to be the one who protects,” continues the song. “And between one bite and the next, a thought comes to me: Damn it, how many heroes does this country have.”
Quite a few, it turns out. Not superheroes but ordinary people who, in extraordinary moments, do heroic things. That is what Gvili represents. And that is what gives the pride Talik spoke of its deeper meaning – not just the pride of a mother, but the pride of a nation that recognizes the best version of itself in people like her son.