opinion
Yehuda Meshi Zahav:
A life lived in Jerusalem’s bright light
ended in darkness
RON KAMPEAS | JTA
Y 14
JULY 14, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
Yehuda Meshi Zahav, the chairman of Israel’s Zaka rescue unit poses in Mea Shearim, Jerusalem, Jan. 19, 2021.

whose name was a Hebrew poem, gold wrapped
in silk.

You knew Yehuda Meshi Zahav when he
founded Zaka, an acronym for “identifying victims
of catastrophe” in 1989 after a Palestinian terrorist
forced a bus over a hill and people died, and he
extended his intimacies to the splattered remains
of the dead.

Just when you were transitioning from your 20s
to the 30s, so was he, and just when you were
leaving behind the hatreds of your youth he was
attaching to the name, Zaka, Hesed shel Emet,
the kindness found in truth.

Because this is how we like to think we evolve,
from driven to kind, from beasts to humans, as
Yehuda Meshi Zahav put it in 2003, when he
described the sufferings of the 900 or so volun-
teers who belonged to Zaka and who needed
treatment for post traumatic stress: “You’re talking
about humans, not angels.”
Angels, in Jewish lore, can be monsters, thieves
of agency.

You knew Yehuda Meshi Zahav when the pro-
tester who once shared with you the heat and
streets of Jerusalem proudly sent his son into
an army he had reviled, and accepted the Israel
Prize, the country’s most prestigious, named for
an entity he once did not recognize. Because this
is how we like to think we evolve from purists
unsullied by wisdom to wise men unsullied by
purity. You never knew Yehuda Meshi Zahav. Boys and
girls who knew him said he was a monster, a thief
of agency, a smasher of intimacies who forced
them into horrors no one should ever know. He
was never indicted, and he denied the allega-
tions. We may never know him. He died last week,
more than a year after he attempted suicide. He
left seven children and his grandchildren.

Yehuda Meshi Zahav hid in Jerusalem’s plain
light. “There are people who saw one awful
image and became traumatized for the rest of
their lives,” he said in 2003. We will never know if
he was the image, or the victim, or both.

When you read an obituary, you want an arc, a
life well-lived. You want anger to melt into kind-
ness, but some furies are resistant to kindness;
they will not dissolve.

My editor wonders why I turn obituaries around
so much faster than profiles. Because the dead
are less likely to betray us with revelations that
bend the arc until it shatters. JE
asiandelight / iStock / Getty Images Plus
ou knew Yehuda Meshi Zahav, or you knew
of him. But really, it seemed as if you knew
him, because he interacted with everyone he
encountered with an immediate intimacy, a shared
purpose, however much his cause ultimately meant
your disappearance.

You knew him in the dry white heat of Jerusalem
summers because he protested, he protested the
very pavement you trod, because he hated the
state, the Zionist state, the state you had made
your own.

You knew him because you were a student and
students protested, sometimes on the same day
as haredim, or because you were a secular Jew,
and your girlfriend next to you at the bus stop was
an abomination, or her spaghetti strap top was an
abomination, or because you became a reporter and
you covered protests, and he sought out reporters.

And whoever you were, he would rush up to
you and share an insight about the police on
the horses, he would explain how best to avoid
them like he was sharing an intimacy, and then
he would rush away. In Jerusalem’s plain light, he
never seemed angry, just determined.

Because this was Jerusalem, a small town pop-
ulated by legions of hatreds and no solitudes, but
also by men and women who shared its streets
and heat and somehow got along. The thick squat
buildings in Meah Shearim bled into the British
Mandate behemoths downtown bled into the
arched Ottoman palaces in Sheikh Jarrah and the
people who hated the idea of you were also your
companions in arms.

You were not the enemy, not you, running for
awnings in winter rains and in summer heat, next
to me at the bus stop, jostling alongside me on
Yafo, in front of me while I waited my turn to pay a
bill at the post office.

The idea of you was the enemy, and that’s what
Yehuda Meshi-Zahav seemed to embody, the
hatred of an idea, a boy in thick black cloth who
moved like a horse in Jerusalem’s dry white heat,
who leapt from the haredim hurling epithets and
gravel at the police, to the reporters whispering
curses, to the police, thrusting forward his boxy
chin bathed in soft red wisps of hair.

He was an anomaly, a soldier who despised
the military, a pre-state relic who was fluent in
post-state slang, a man born to Yiddish speakers



opinion
There’s uncertainty in Israel and within
the Palestinian Authority. The US’s
stabilizing role is critical more than ever.

KSENIA SVETLOVA
J ust months ago, it seemed that the Joe Biden
administration’s global priorities were all set — from
strategic competition with China to addressing Putin’s
emboldened Russia. However, the Middle East, with its
many “forever conflicts,” didn’t make the cut to the top
of the to-do list. Now, amid the war in Ukraine and a
looming global food and energy crisis, US President
Biden has been forced to reengage with the region
and even lean on some political actors, who up until
now, weren’t even eligible for a face-to-face meeting.

The scorching summer of 2022 probably isn’t the
best time to tour the region. A popular Israeli joke has
it that there are only two seasons in the Middle East:
the hot sandy winds and elections — and now both
are occurring together. All three of Biden’s stops in his
regional tour are currently experiencing some degree
of turmoil: Israel’s government just fell; the Palestinian
Authority (PA) faces the heavy atmosphere of an
impending leadership transition; and Saudi Arabia
is reinventing itself and reshaping its foreign policy,
while preparing for the inevitable transition of power
from ailing King Salman to his energetic son, Crown
Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

The current regional turbulence might seem to be
an inhospitable backdrop for a US presidential visit.

However, the importance of the United States assert-
ing its regional leadership role and driving its strategic
interests cannot be underestimated. During periods
of regional and global instability, it is critical that the
US indicate to its regional allies that they matter
and their needs are being taken into consideration.

Transitions might be messy, but they also present an
opportunity to start afresh and to reboot lagging ties
or to develop new relationships.

Israelis and Palestinians know well that, while
they will be getting their share of attention, the most
important and perhaps most difficult part of Biden’s
Middle East tour will take place in Saudi Arabia. The
kingdom is important, not only because of its ability
to provide some stability to global oil markets, but
also due to its rising regional influence. In the after-
math of the 2011 Arab Spring, Saudi Arabia, along
with the United Arab Emirates, not only survived the
turmoil, but also emerged as one of the Middle East’s
leading countries. Saudi Arabia’s divorce from radical
Wahhabi ideology, support for the 2020 Abraham
Accords, and buttressing of moderate Arab regimes
in the region are all extremely important.

The rise in Saudi Arabia’s regional influence coin-
cided with sharp ups and downs in its relations with
the United States. Saudi Arabia provides Egypt with
financial aid that helps Cairo stay afloat, but, at the
same time, it is unable to protect its oil installations
and airports from foreign aggression. Emboldened
Saudi enemies, such as Iran and their Houthi proxies
in Yemen, triggered a chain reaction in Riyadh. When
the Saudis felt that they didn’t get sufficient reassur-
ances from Washington, they began looking at diver-
sifying their foreign relations and weapons purchases,
with particular focus on Moscow and Beijing.

Israelis share the same fear of US disengagement
from the region as the Saudis. This sentiment — con-
cerns of further security destabilization in the Middle
East while the Americans pull out from Syria, Iraq,
and Afghanistan — also shapes Jerusalem’s current
policy on Russia, including its efforts to seek a middle
ground on the war in Ukraine.

In addition to the Saudis, the Palestinians have
been suffering from extreme ups and downs in their
relations with the White House over the years. This
began with the deep involvement in peace talks
between Ramallah and Jerusalem during the Barack
Obama administration — only for an unofficial boycott
during the Donald Trump era. Now, under the Biden
administration, there appears to be an atmosphere
of indifference and stalemate. The guideposts in
Palestinian relations with Washington were lost, with
the constant reference point having disappeared.

The situations in Israel and the Palestinian Authority
are, of course, very different. Despite all its fears and
insecurities, Jerusalem is a staunch U.S. ally. At the same
time, Ramallah openly wishes for a different broker that
is less sympathetic to Israel. In November, Israel will go
through its fifth election in three years after the Naftali
Bennett-Yair Lapid government collapsed on June 20.

Meanwhile, Palestinians yearn for elections that haven’t
happened since 2006, when Hamas won a legislative
majority in an upset victory against Mahmoud Abbas’s
Fatah party. Even so, the current endgame is similar, as
both sides go through an undefined period of political
instability and a power vacuum that prevents any possi-
bility of serious dialogue or negotiations.

Precisely due to this precarious situation, the
United States needs to reaffirm its commitment to
the two-state solution, as there is no other proposed
alternative. This commitment should be reinforced
not only by statements — although they are, of
course, important — but by concrete positive steps
designed to stabilize the situation and inspire hope.

Some of these steps involve fulfilling earlier promises
to the Palestinians regarding reestablishing a U.S.

consulate in Jerusalem, which closed in 2019. Others
require conveying a clear message to Israel that mass
evictions of Palestinians from their homes or home
demolitions are counterproductive, dangerous, and
generally unacceptable.

While it’s clear that the path to the negotiation
table is currently blocked due to the unstable political
situation in Ramallah and Jerusalem, much more can
be done to prevent the collapse of the PA and what
is left of the Oslo Accords through regional initia-
tives. After initial hesitancy about how to respond to
the Abraham Accords, the Biden administration has
rightly embraced them as the only ray of light in an
otherwise troubled region. Biden himself said there
are “much larger issues than just energy” motivating
his upcoming trip on July 16 and indicated that he is
going to Saudi Arabia to discuss normalization efforts,
as well as regional security challenges.

There is no doubt that, today, the most pressing
regional concern to U.S. allies — Israel and Saudi Arabia
— is Iran and the possibility that it might soon become
a nuclear threshold country. Yet, despite being side-
lined for the last decade, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
hasn’t faded into thin air. It remains a major strategic
challenge to Israel’s national security and regional sta-
bility. Both the previous inflation of its centrality and the
current underestimation of its graveness is dangerous
to Israel and the Palestinians, as well as for their closest
neighbors, Jordan and Egypt. The United States and
its Middle Eastern allies cannot allow inertia to dictate
the course of events, as the outcome it will produce
might be too grave. To influence the course of events
and prevent escalation, the United States must act as a
stabilizing force, presenting its regional approach and
involvement with clarity and consistency.

When China and Russia are keen to deepen their
influence in the Middle East and American allies in
the region are doubtful about the future, it is up to the
United States to connect the dots and provide the stabil-
ity and firmness that is lacking in today’s regional land-
scape. Biden’s visit to the Middle East must not be an
isolated event, a band-aid for other people’s problems.

Instead, it should powerfully relaunch relations between
the United States and its long-term allies and partners in
the Middle East. If stability cannot be derived from the
inside, it might be injected from the outside. JE
Ksenia Svetlova is a nonresident senior fellow
with the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs,
and is the director of the Israel-Middle East
Relations Program at Mitvim. This article originally
appeared at atlanticcouncil.org/category/blogs/
menasource and is reprinted with permission.

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