Ruthie Blum
I land at Ben-Gurion International Airport after a week in New York City that feels like a lifetime. The wheels hit the tarmac with a dull thud that spurs customary applause from passengers. They’re either relieved after the long journey or clapping upon arriving in the Jewish state.
Before passengers are permitted to unbuckle, the pilot takes to the loudspeaker.
“Welcome home,” he says in Hebrew, proceeding to highlight the bravery of the Israel Defense Forces and express hope for the swift return of the body of Ron Gvili, the last remaining hostage held by Hamas in Gaza.
His tone is steady, yet cheerful. He doesn’t hedge or sermonize. He’s unapologetically patriotic.
I am instantly reminded of a different El Al pilot, who chose Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah) in April 2023 — a mere six months before the Oct. 7 massacre — to bash the government in Jerusalem for its plans to reform the judiciary.
As he prepared for takeoff from Tel Aviv to the Big Apple, he announced, “[T]hings like the Holocaust are potentially to be occurring in a dictatorship, and we are fighting in Israel to remain a democratic country. Thank you all and have a nice flight.”
By the time the plane landed 12 hours later, his statements had gone viral on social media, causing outrage and leading El Al to threaten him with disciplinary action or dismissal. His response, upon hitting the ground at John F. Kennedy Airport, was to issue a weak apology.
This he did by invoking his status as a second-generation survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp. As though this gave him moral authority over the majority of the Israeli public who weren’t sufficiently enlightened to hold with his views.
The pilot on my flight, in contrast, speaks not as an activist but as a citizen. This is especially uplifting for me at the moment, as I have come from burying my father.
At his funeral and shiva — the seven-day Jewish mourning period — the conversations focus mainly on his contribution to the battle of ideas. He was a public intellectual, after all, whose death naturally has been noted with a series of articles by admirers and critics.
I peruse the obituaries with a mixture of pride and ill ease. For me, he is not an author or editor or controversial pundit. He is a parent.
Though he and I discussed politics ad nauseam, his ideas about the world weren’t what mattered most to me as his daughter. Not because they weren’t important, but because they constituted only a fraction of our deep, sometimes fraught, always tight, personal connection.
The same applies to my relationship with Israel. It’s not an abstract concept. Not a cause. Not a problem to be solved or reimagined.
So many of those who don’t live in Israel — whatever side of the spectrum they occupy — view it as a project to be dissected, judged and analyzed, either for its betterment or for its destruction.
For me, it’s more personal than political. When the pilot lauds the IDF, I hear names and see faces, including those of my own kids. When he mentions Gvili, I envision the ache of a family yearning for closure.
And when he says, “Welcome home,” it’s not rhetorical. It’s real.
As I walk through the terminal, carrying the weight of the shiva along with my luggage, I suddenly understand the traditional Jewish condolence phrase, “May you be comforted among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.”
I want to phone my father to report this revelation to him, since I know he’ll be amused. And then I’m struck by the realization that such a call is no longer possible.
Ruthie Blum, a former adviser at the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is an award-winning columnist and a senior contributing editor at JNS.
