Earlier this summer, I was introduced to a second cousin of mine, Matthew Bielski, who like me is an American Jew in his early twenties and who recently graduated from college.
My father, whose first cousin, Jay, is Matthew’s father, had been at a wedding for the Bielski family. Jay told my father that I should give Matthew a call. We were said to have a lot in common.
Apart from our similar age and family background, Matthew is athletic – he was the only Jewish kid on his high school basketball team – and likes politics, particularly politics relating to Israel.
There was one important difference between us, however. Whereas I have chosen to pursue a career in journalism, he was volunteering for the Israeli army.
Here was a story, I thought.
I gave Matthew a call and we made plans to meet in Union Square Park. When he arrived he was wearing fashionable worn-in jeans and a white shirt. His brownish-blond hair was cut short, military-style, but he kept neatly shaven sideburns that went mid-way down his cheeks.
We began talking about what motivated him to fight for Israel, and whether his family background had anything to do with it.
Zus, his grandfather, was one of the leading fighters in the Bielski partisan group, a brigade of Polish Jews who fended off the Nazis during the Second World War.
Though Zus died almost a decade ago, Matthew grew up with stories of how his grandfather would kill Nazis with nothing but his fists. He saw the photographs of the Nazi uniform Zus often wore for pictures after he took it off the back of a dead German soldier.
And he heard about the S.S. officer who, pleading to be spared, said, “I have a wife and children.”
“Yeah?” Zus responded. “Me too.” He then killed him on the spot, “no questions asked,” Matthew recounted.
These stories instilled in Matthew a certain character – tough, brash – but not a sense of mission. Not a drive to fight for Israel.
“I didn’t join the army to live up to my grandfather’s name,” Matthew said. “He was always a presence, but he didn’t live a life of bragging about his war stories.”
Could it be, then, I wondered, that Matt volunteered for the Israeli army because his father had? Jay Bielski, now a psychologist in New York, volunteered during the Yom Kippur War in 1973, after a few years of service in the United States Marines.
“You think I wanted my son to go into the Israeli army?” Jay would later ask me. “No way.” Jay said he had offered his son enticing gifts for not joining, including a new car – any make that Matthew wanted.
If anything, Jay said, he didn’t want his son to fight because Zus had always expressed the wish that his children and grandchildren would never see another war. That was one of the reasons why Zus left Israel for America in the early 1950’s.
“He knew the wars in Israel wouldn’t stop,” said Jay. “But as it turned out, two of his kids ended up volunteering” for the IDF. (One of Jay’s other brothers also fought for Israel.)
And now another Bielski has become part of that legacy.
***********
Most Americans who volunteer for the Israel Defense Forces do so through a program called MAHAL. Participants must commit to living in Israel for nine months before they begin training. The MAHAL training period for combat units is four and a half months – plus a minimum of nine months of active service. One can, if one desires, opt for more service time. The only requirement is that the volunteers be Jewish.
Matthew, however, did not join through the MAHAL program. Although he was not drafted, which is another means by which Americans with dual citizenship join the IDF, he crafted his application to make it look like he was.
Matthew’s father holds dual American-Israeli citizenship, which makes Matthew eligible for Israeli citizenship. Matthew also has been to Israel seven times, through the Birthright program. (He said he was eligible for the free trips because he recommended many other participants.) The combination of these factors made it seem as though Matthew were making aliyah, which, to American authorities, made his service in the IDF seem compulsory.
I contacted the U.S. State Department to find out about the legality of all this. Spokesperson Angela Aggeler told me that “in many cases we may not be aware of that” – i.e., Americans joining the IDF.
“But,” she continued, “that, in and of itself, is not a depatriating act.”
In 1985, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Wiborg v. U.S., that service in a foreign military, when an individual is drafted, is not cause for losing one’s citizenship unless the country is hostile toward the United States. The ruling, however, has nothing to say about people who volunteer for foreign service. This appears to be a “gray area” of the law, as David Frommer, another volunteer I spoke with, called it.
“This program,” said Frommer, referring to MAHAL, “seems to fly underneath the radar screen.”
Matthew’s service in the IDF is different in other ways too. Most foreign volunteers join the Nahal unit, which is mostly responsible for security at checkpoints and guarding the settlements. Volunteers from abroad are rarely in active combat units.
Matthew is, however. When we met several weeks ago, he had just finished his training for the paratrooper unit, which, he says, “is the most prestigious.”
Paratroopers are responsible for going behind enemy lines and invading terrorist hotspots. “It’s a lot of kavod,” Matthew said. “You know, honor.”
If soldiers pass a series of optional tests, which include physical and psychological examinations, they can qualify for the Special Forces unit within the paratrooper brigade. Special Forces are responsible for leading the paratrooper brigades, and though these units require an extra six months of training, my cousin decided he’d give it a shot.
*************
I asked Matthew whether his thoughts on the Israeli military had changed after one full year of training.
He began by telling me about the closing ceremony, which he had just attended, in which graduates receive their weapons and decide whether to continue with the Special Forces training.
He said that in each training unit, which includes about 100 soldiers, one person receives the award for “Soldier of Excellence.” No one is told who the soldier is until the final ceremony. One of the military captains gives his red beret to the recipient of the award. The awardee also receives the biggest gun in his brigade.
Two days before he arrived home for his sister’s wedding in June, Matthew learned that he won the award. He was thrilled, but not boastful. (In fact, he didn’t mention it until I prompted him. A friend of his, whom I’d interviewed separately, told me about the award and I brought it up when I met with Matthew.)
Since Matthew also passed the tests for the Specil Forces unit, he decided he would continue with the extra six months of training. But he was wrestling with one of the other responsibilities that come with joining the elite unit: he must serve another year, which would extend his total time in the army from 14 and a half months to two years.
“I eventually want to come back to America and get an M.B.A.,” Matthew said. But he was enamored with the idea of a military career. And the IDF, he said, was trying to persuade him to stay in the service as long as he could.
Undecided about what to do next, especially since he has not yet seen combat, he said his attitude is “one step at a time, one step at a time.”
The most recent estimate of the number of foreign fighters in the IDF is 115, according to a Jerusalem Post story published in 2005. Matthew and the other American volunteers I spoke with said they rarely come in contact with the other foreign volunteers.
Matthew said this doesn’t bother him, since he made fast friends with many native Israelis.
Aside from the more obvious cultural differences, I wondered how he communicated with his Israeli friends and comrades in arms.
Matthew spoke broken Hebrew when he arrived in Israel a year ago but chose not to enroll in Ulpan courses when he arrived. (For MAHAL volunteers, this is a requirement.)
“I figured I’d learn Hebrew the hard way,” he said. He would learn commands by following what every other soldier did, take note of the word that transpired the action, and pick up the everyday slang along the way.
“When they said run, I ran. I just did what everyone else did,” he said, laughing.
Matthew and I are both strong supporters of Israel – yet another thing we have in common. But Matthew tends to be considerably more outspoken about it.
He recounted a story regarding a class he enrolled in at CUNY Binghamton about the Arab-Israeli conflict. This was back in 2003, during his freshman year, and he said that the way Israeli politics were taught at his school was a strong impetus for his becoming an active supporter of Israel.
The fact that his professor repeatedly referred to Palestinian suicide bombers as “freedom fighters” was particularly irksome.
So the day that it was his turn to give a presentation on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he presented various facts about the security border. It caused starvation for those entrapped by it, he said. Many have died trying to get across it, he acknowledged. It only fomented more hatred among the people who live on either side, he insisted.
“The professor was very happy,” Matthew told me. Until, that is, he closed the presentation by saying that the border he was referring to was the U.S.-Mexican security fence, not the Israeli one.
After almost two hours of sitting and talking, Matthew and I decided to take a walk. We passed many of the stores and shops near Union Square – an American Eagles Outfitters, a Barnes and Noble, a McDonald’s – and then I realized I’d forgotten to ask one important question: Why not fight for America?
Earlier, Matthew had suggested that one of the reasons he wanted to fight for Israel was that he believed it stood at the forefront of the West’s fight against terror. “But,” I asked him, “isn’t the U.S., with its invasion and occupation of Iraq, also on the front line of terror?”
“Yes,” he said. “But the Israelis need our help more.” By “our” he meant Diaspora Jews.
I had spoken to several other volunteers, and many had given me a similar answer: Israel needed the help, and its battle against terrorism was more pressing than America’s.
********
An estimated 3,500 overseas volunteers joined the nascent Israeli forces in the 1948 War for Independence, and while the number of foreign volunteers generally declined once conscription became the law and Israel’s Jewish population bloomed, there was a urge in foreign volunteers after the Six-Day War of 1967.
American Jews have been drawn by a sense of idealism to other foreign battles – most notably the Spanish Civil War, in which a disproportionate number of foreign volunteers in the anti-fascist Abraham Lincoln Brigade were American Jews.
Matthew certainly fits the mold of the idealist, though perhaps not explicitly so. He made all those trips to Israel mentioned earlier. He spoke passionately about the country. He was proud of his father’s and grandfather’s military service for the Jewish state. And when I met him, he was excited to show me pictures of himself in uniform – with Israelis, with face paint, with guns.
Still, I cannot say that I completely grasped why Matthew had joined the IDF and not the American military, or even none at all.
Moreover, it seemed, after speaking to him about his experiences, that I was not the only one unable to completely articulate why he chose to fight for a foreign country, particularly one where armed conflict was the norm.
I am sure, though, that his upbringing has something to do with it. So, too, his concept of kavod, his desire to connect with his religious homeland, and his admiration for Israeli soldiers.
As we continued to talk, I realized that Matthew and I differed quite a bit – perhaps more than our parents had realized.
After a couple of hours spent talking under the hot sun, we were both pretty tired. We said we would keep in touch, and we went our separate ways – he to get ready to return to Israel, I to continue writing.
But now, with Israel again at war, I find myself wondering how Matthew is doing. And as I wonder, I can only hope that our paths will cross again.
