Analysis

Zachary Baumel won’t be the last missing IDF soldier to be found

For good or for ill, the dedication of Israel to its captive and missing troops is a fundamental aspect of its ethos, and a goal to which it devotes considerable resources

Judah Ari Gross

Judah Ari Gross is The Times of Israel's religions and Diaspora affairs correspondent.

Soldiers stand at attention during the annual ceremony for soldiers whose burial places are unknown on Jerusalem's Mount Herzl military cemetery on March 17, 2016. (Judah Ari Gross/Times of Israel)
Soldiers stand at attention during the annual ceremony for soldiers whose burial places are unknown on Jerusalem's Mount Herzl military cemetery on March 17, 2016. (Judah Ari Gross/Times of Israel)

With the repatriation and burial of Sgt. First Class Zachary Baumel’s remains this week after nearly four decades, the number of fallen Israeli soldiers whose burial place is unknown stands at 175.

That number will go down.

Besides Baumel, in the past year alone the military has found the remains of two other once-missing Israeli soldiers: Pvt. Livka Shefer, who had been missing since 1948, and Lt. Yakir Naveh, a pilot whose plane crashed into the Sea of Galilee in 1962.

In the past decade, 24 other soldiers whose burial places were unknown have been found, identified and given a Jewish burial.

Israeli soldiers salute near the fresh grave of Zachary Baumel, during his funeral at the Mount Herzl military cemetery in Jerusalem, April 4, 2019. (Hadas Parush/Flash90)

Though the conspicuous timing of the return of Baumel’s remains to Israel — days before a heated national election — raised allegations that the event had been manipulated by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for political purposes, a claim both the premier and the military reject, the decision to search for his remains in the first place cannot seriously be credited to petty electoral concerns but rather stems from a fundamental aspect of the IDF ethos.

Since their founding, the Israel Defense Forces, and the State of Israel in general, have gone far beyond what other militaries and nations would seriously consider doing in order to bring back living prisoners of war or the bodies of fallen soldiers.

Israel is certainly not the only country to work hard to repatriate the bodies of its fallen soldiers. The US, for example, recently got the remains of servicemen back from North Korea after decades of negotiations. But overall the extent to which the Jewish state is willing to go is unmatched around the world.

Released Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit (second right), walks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (second left), then-defense minister Ehud Barak (left), and ex-chief of staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz (right), at the Tel Nof air base in southern Israel, October 18, 2011. (Ariel Hermoni/Defense Ministry/Flash90)

This can mean pouring large amounts of time and effort into locating the body of a soldier killed decades ago. More contentiously, it can also mean deeply lopsided prisoner exchanges like the more than 1,000-to-1 swap in 2011 to secure the release of captured IDF soldier Gilad Shalit.

“We want all IDF soldiers to know that when they enlist, the State of Israel will do everything it takes, if they — heaven forbid — fall captive or go missing, in order to bring them home,” Lt. Col. Nir Israeli, the head of the Israel Defense Forces’ missing soldiers unit, told The Times of Israel Wednesday.

This dedication can be traced to two main sources: the compulsory draft and the tight-knit nature of Israeli society.

With few exceptions, Israeli soldiers are not volunteers, they did not choose to enlist in the army, but were forced to by the government. They do not go to war, but are sent to it. This fact requires the state to accept a far greater degree of responsibility for its soldiers.

Though surveys show the country is increasingly splintering into factions — secular, national-religious, ultra-Orthodox and Arab — Israeli society remains a deeply interconnected one overall, a situation often described by the Hebrew saying “Kol Yisrael arevim zeh b’zeh,” or in English, “All of Israel is responsible for one another.”

This combination of a near-universal draft and a deeply intertwined culture is why a soldier being lightly injured in a training accident garners push notifications from every news outlet, why strangers deliver home-cooked food to soldiers during wars and operations, and why all of Israel’s media put election coverage on hold this week to focus on the return of the remains of a soldier missing for nearly 37 years.

“The IDF is dedicated to returning all soldiers who are missing or whose burial place is not known. We put a lot of effort and a lot of resources into this,” Israeli said.

IDF Deputy Chief of Staff Maj.-Gen. Yair Golan salutes a memorial set up for soldiers whose burial places are unknown on Jerusalem’s Mount Herzl military cemetery during a ceremony in their honor on March 17, 2016. (Judah Ari Gross/Times of Israel)

Israeli’s unit, known by its Hebrew acronym EITAN, is largely made up of reservists, people who dedicate their free time to searching for long-dead soldiers in order to give some form of comfort to their families or, for those with no living relatives, simply for the sake of honoring the fallen.

Some of these search efforts took months to complete, others years and some decades.

“Every case is its own story. There are some things that take more time, some things that are faster. Plus, we’re reservists so we’re not working on this every day, but we do put in the effort in our free time,” Cpt. Yaoz Rizenzon, a researcher in the EITAN unit, told The Times of Israel recently.

In the case of Shefer, whose body was found last May, this meant 70 years of dogged research to track down what became of the 34-year-old private who was killed in an Egyptian shelling in the 1948 war, finding that she had been buried in a mass grave in Kibbutz Nitzanim. Her name was added to the grave’s monument.

Pvt. Livka Shefer, whose remains were located by the Israeli military nearly 70 years after she was killed in the 1948 War of Independence. (Israel Defense Forces)

Rizenzon, who led a seven-year investigation that in 2009 located a pair of Canadian cousins who were also killed in 1948 having moved to Israel just before the founding of the state, said this type of research is grinding and slow.

“Each interview leads to the next. Some people don’t remember, some have died,” he said.

“People never remember, but then we find a string we pull on,” Rizenzon said, which leads to “another detail and another detail and another detail” before investigators can confidently conclude where a missing soldier is buried.

In other cases, it’s not a matter of historical research and interviews, but of hard labor.

With Naveh, whose Fouga Magister crashed into the Sea of Galilee some 56 years ago, the Israeli Navy’s diving unit had to search the murky, muddy depths of the lake year after year in conditions described as “hellish” before his remains were found last October.

And with Baumel, a 21-year-old American-born tank commander who went missing in the 1982 First Lebanon War’s Battle of Sultan Yacoub, this required a decades-long, multi-national effort to pinpoint the location of his suspected remains in order to direct Russian troops to the burial site, reportedly in the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp outside Damascus, last September.

Zachary Baumel. (JTA/Courtesy Miriam Baumel)

“It’s Sisyphean work, sorting out the correct information, zeroing in on the information that can be corroborated — until the picture clears and you find yourself directed to the specific place in the particular country where he is located,” Col. (res.) Yaakov, the IDF intelligence officer who led the two-man team that searched for Baumel, told Channel 12 news on Wednesday night. (For security reasons, his full name cannot be published.)

But Baumel was not the only IDF soldier to go missing in the Battle of Sultan Yacoub. The burial places of another soldier in Baumel’s tank, Zvi Feldman, and of Yehuda Katz, who served in a tank that was hit some two kilometers away, remain unknown.

According to the Israeli military, the discovery of Baumel’s remains has advanced the search effort, and a senior Israeli diplomatic officials told reporters on Thursday that Russian forces were continuing to look for the missing soldiers.

While the families of Katz and Feldman have new cause to hope for the return of their loved ones, not all IDF soldiers whose burial places are unknown will likely be recovered. For instance, the remains of the sailors who were killed when the Dakar submarine sank in 1968 will likely never be retrieved.

But through painstakingly slow and meticulous research, other Israeli soldiers who went missing will likely be brought back from the wars and missions that they were sent to — and from which they never returned.

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