Yonatan Baba at a surfing school where he works in Bat Yam, Israel. The 18-year-old, who has just graduated from high school, hopes to land in a combat unit during his compulsory service in the Israel Defence Forces. Photo / Heidi Levine, for the Washington Post
TEL AVIV - Yonatan Baba started his junior year of high school taking classes on Zoom as a security precaution after Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.
Over the course of the war that followed, he said, friends of his have been killed or injured while fighting in Gaza.
Last month, on the eve of what was supposed to be his graduation ceremony, Baba huddled in a bomb shelter, comforting a neighbour having a panic attack amid a barrage of Iranian missiles.
Across Israel, where military service is compulsory for most Jewish citizens above 18, a cohort of high school students who graduated last month will be among the next wave of conscripts entering the Israel Defence Forces.
Many, like Baba, have had their final years of school overshadowed by conflict and funerals, their rites of passage such as final exams and proms postponed or cancelled, their views on Israel’s place in the world shaped by fire.
And now many say they are determined to fight.
Baba, 18, a quick-talking surfer with wire-rim glasses, said he and his peers have grown up faster amid war.
Before, he had postponed responding to the draft notice for the Israeli military, thinking he’d prefer to devote himself to religious study. Now, he dreams of landing in a combat unit.
“We need to be ready to sacrifice ourselves and to protect our country,” said Baba, who is from a city south of Tel Aviv.
While he has seen friends come home from Gaza physically wounded and withdrawn, he has only grown more resolved, he said, because “I don’t want my kids to grow up in a place with rockets and kidnappings”.
Many young Israelis across the political spectrum saw their sense of security shattered in the wake of October 7 and as a result have grown more hawkish, said Tamar Hermann, director of the Viterbi Centre for Public Opinion at the Israel Democracy Institute, which conducts regular surveys of Israeli public opinion.
“Young people, and especially young men, see themselves as part of the national war effort,” she said, adding that she has heard from the IDF that it is getting more requests to join elite combat units.
“They see the war as meant to guarantee Israel’s security in the future.”
Discussion about the toll of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, where more than 57,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, has been virtually non-existent in high schools, teenagers said.
Some said they were nervous talking about Gaza in school because of the possible backlash. About 1200 people were killed in Israel in the October 7 attack.
“People my age feel very angry, and they want revenge. It sounds childish, but in a way, I understand,” said Alma, 19, who is from a town in southern Israel close to Gaza and spoke on the condition that her last name not be published because of the sensitivity of the IDF unit she is joining.
In recent months, she said she has seen conversations about the morality of Israel’s war - in particular, the toll it has taken on Palestinian civilians - shut down by some who have already served.
They have said the reality on the ground is complex and that they cannot afford to think too much about the costs of the war while they are still fighting, she recalled.
Alma said she has not always been proud of how Israel has fought the war, even though she deeply loves the country and its people.
She said there are two voices competing in her head, “one saying to fight and the other saying to fly”.
“I decided to stay and to fight,” she said, instead of trying to leave Israel. “I know it might sound naive, but I believe the only way we can fix things is from within.”
In Israel, military service is woven deeply into the social fabric, said Alon Yakter, a senior political science lecturer at Tel Aviv University.
Years later, job applicants are often asked what unit they served in.
Elite units are highly competitive, with top students vying for front-line positions.
Physical and mental tests start years before draft day.
“Everything builds to this moment you join the military,” Yakter said, comparing it to the way people talk about university in the United States.
“The military is and the military will be - service isn’t questioned.”
He said, however, that among some of his university students, who have finished their active-duty service but have been called up repeatedly as reserves, there appears to be a growing fatigue with the war.
Over the course of nearly two years, the military has called up more than 400,000 reservists, and thousands of them have called in public letters for an end to the fighting in Gaza and a return of the hostages still held by Hamas.
Shahaf Davidovich, 18, whose family evacuated from their home in northern Israel in the weeks after October 7, when the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah began firing rockets into Israel, said he started doing pre-IDF combat training during his senior year of high school, determined to join a top unit.
“I had this drive - like everyone else is doing something, and I knew that I wanted to,” he said. In August, he will join a unit of paratroopers.
“Everyone knows that we are surrounded by people who don’t want us here,” Davidovich said.
“We know that we want to contribute as much as we can to defend the only Jewish country that we have.”
For Gali Zadikevitch, an 18-year-old from the Kfar Aza kibbutz near the Gaza Strip, serving in the IDF took on even more urgency after community was overrun by Hamas militants on October 7.
Her father, Omer - who once dreamed of setting up a surfing camp for Israeli and Palestinian children in Gaza - was killed outside his home.
“We are just normal people, and this is our home,” said Zadikevitch, who was sleeping at her boyfriend’s house on the night of the attack.
“I wish we didn’t have to do it, that we could go to college like the rest of the world. But we want to do it, because we can. It’s about respect for our country.”
Zadikevitch now lives in a nearby kibbutz, where many from her community relocated. The walls of the house often shake from the shelling in Gaza, she said. She said she dreams of peace, but she is not sure now what that looks like.
Even in her liberal high school near Tel Aviv, discussion about the situation in Gaza was largely taboo, recounted Michal Zadunaisky, 18, who described herself as a left-wing activist.
When a friend posted a photo on social media showing Israeli settlers blocking a Palestinian man from accessing his land in the West Bank, the teenager was chased by two other students through the hallway of their school, Zadunaisky said, and threatened online.
And when Zadunaisky highlighted the suffering in Gaza in her art at the senior show, several other students gave her nasty looks and one muttered, “There are no innocent babies in Gaza”.
“It is people [like these] who are behind the guns, who are flying the warplanes,” Zadunaisky said of her fellow students. “We are children. I don’t want to say we are doomed, but I am very, very concerned.”
So many young people in Israel live in a bubble, she said, only reading Israeli news and rarely interacting with Palestinians.
It was only during a Covid lockdown that she had time to read deeply about the conflict and come to understand the international criticism of Israel.
Zadunaisky, who is from Kfar Saba in central Israel, said she has decided not to enter the IDF. She will do a year of community service in Jerusalem and then expects to be sent to military prison for refusing to serve.
During his final years in school, the Gaza war provoked discussions about Zionism, Israel’s role in the region, and anti-Semitism, said Sagie Feldman, 19, who graduated last year.
“People started asking themselves, why am I here?” said Feldman, who is from a city in northern Israel near Haifa.
“Some people say, ‘I shouldn’t be here.’ And some people say, ‘This is a time for me to renew my focus on Zionism and its historical role.’”
Feldman, whose parents emigrated to Israel from the Soviet Union, said the answer has always been clear to him.
“The Jewish people have suffered a lot, and Israel is the place where we are safest ... and where we can build a better future,” he said.
Asked about the death toll in Gaza, he said he does not know if the Government “has done everything right” but believes “that we need to defend our country”.
He said he does not follow the news too much, spending most of his days reading Jewish religious texts, and plans to join the IDF next year.
If a ceasefire is achieved, he said, he still fears that his generation is “less likely to want peace - or to believe that peace is even possible”.
