The Toll The War Takes

The war in Gaza is now the longest war Israel has had to fight. And to fight this war, the IDF has had to call up 360,000 reservists. Some of those reservists have been called up more than once. The toll taken on soldiers’ families, their jobs, their businesses, their mental health, their education, has been great. More about the effect on reservists can be found here:

Some 10,000 reservists have asked for mental health support, 1,000 reservist-run businesses have closed, 70,000 reservist students have been affected academically, thousands of reservists have been laid off from their jobs, and many have sought marriage counseling, according to Nifgashim, an organization that works to provide comprehensive support to reservists.

How much should Israel ask of its reservists? When called up, they dutifully appear, but there are serious, and painful consequences to their lives from such a long period of reserve duty, and with no end in sight, given the looming threat of war with Hezbollah after that against Hamas in Gaza has ended. There are family problems for reservists, with their wives (or in the case of female soldiers, husbands) left without their spouses for extended periods, who must take care of children and the household alone. Children miss their parent serving in the reserves. Those reservists who have their own businesses in civilian life often find it impossible to keep them running, unable to find someone to step in and run things in their absence; some of those businesses have only one employee – the reservist himself,who cannot be replaced. It’s no wonder that more than one thousand small businesses owned by reservists have had to close, with more closing every week..

Many of those reservists who in their civilian lives are employed by others have been laid off from work, with no assurance that after they end their reserve duty they will be rehired. Worry about future employment, and thus about family finances, takes its toll on these reservists.

As for the 70,000 reservists over the age of 18 who were students in colleges or graduate schools when called up for reserve duty, that call-up can be hugely disruptive to their academic success. You are plucked out of college, unable while at war to study or continue intellectual work of any kind, and are then expected to return to civilian life, after many months of seeing the horrors of war — the enemy dead and wounded, your own dead and wounded, the bleak landscape where whole neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble — without the slightest damage to your mental equanimity. It can’t be done. Not every reservist has PTSD, but a great many do. And some reservists have been committing suicide, such as Eliran Mizrahi. More than 10 suicides by IDF reservists have been recorded since the war in Gaza began.

Soldiers are no longer answering every call to show up for reserve duty. The author of the article, Eve Young, reports that the head of Nifgashim, David Solomon, reports as an example of this the 18 members of an elite military unit who were called up, but only ten appeared for a second deployment.

This, of course, cannot go on.

The Israeli government can do better in its treatment of reservists. It ought to make recognizing, reporting, and treating cases of mental distress among reservists currently serving a priority. It ought to pay for childcare for children in families where one parent has been called up for reserve duty. It ought to require employers to guarantee to reservists that they will be at once rehired upon completion of their reserve duty, so that they will no longer have any anxieties on that score. It ought to make sure, similarly, that reservists who were students before their call-up will be assured of being automatically readmitted to the academic programs they had been enrolled in, and provided with more financial aid to pay for tuition and living expenses. All that should go a long way to allaying the worries of reservists on duty and raising their morale.