The last time I saw Lt. Uri Binamo was last May, in a house in Carmel. He was spending a day off from the army by accompanying his parents - old and dear friends of my own - as they paid a shiva call to my family. Although his parents have three beautiful daughters, he was their only son and so he came along to provide strength and support. His head was shaved and he was wearing a simple white t-shirt with a Magen David Adom emblem printed on it. I remember thinking him warm and friendly - later I would learn that he often spent his furloughs in hospitals visiting sick and wounded soldiers. My memory of his visit is poignant and pointed - for the last week and through today, his family has been sitting shiva in memory of him.
Uri was buried last Friday at the Beit Almin military cemetery in Haifa, after being murdered at a checkpoint that the army had set up outside Tul Karm. Army intelligence had received a tip that the Islamic Jihad was dispatching a suicide bomber from the northern West Bank into Israel, and had heightened security measures accordingly. At 9:15am on Thursday, a taxi approached the checkpoint that Uri's unit was guarding. Since he was the platoon commander, Uri approached the taxi to inspect it. He immediately noticed something suspicious about one of the passengers, and ordered the men in the taxi to step out. He then ordered the Palestinian who had aroused his suspicion to remove the overcoat that the occupant was wearing. When the Palestinian refused, Uri took a step towards the taxi. Then the terrorist detonated the belt he was wearing, killing Uri instantly.

Some years before, almost from the beginning of his army service, the IDF had begun working to sell Uri on a military career. The evening before his death, a superior had urged that he become a company commander - there was no doubt that such a position would mark the beginning of a meteoric rise through army ranks. Even so, the IDF knew that they were going to have a tough time holding on to Uri – he was looking forward to a life in medicine. Already, he was spending his spare time as an ambulance driver. He talked a little about medical school. His life was going to be spent saving lives.
But no one ever thought that saving lives would require him to make the ultimate sacrifice. The bomber that Uri stopped was a 19 year old Palestinian boy. Strapped to the terrorist was more than 10 kilograms of explosives, packed into a belt filled with nails and iron scraps. He intended to blow himself up at a Hanukkah party that the Islamic Jihad had picked out - a tight, enclosed hall filled with running children, where the mangled shrapnel would inflict the most destruction. With his body - at the expense of his own devastated family - Uri saved the lives and the innocence of hundreds of children and tens of families.

Children's lives and children's innocence. We must not lose sight of either of these, because in them we find the true scope of what Uri was protecting and what he left us. Both are precious in themselves, but each represents something larger that the Arab war against Israel seeks to annihilate.
Survival and culture. The gun and the theater.
Life and humanity. The body and the soul.
Existence and a worthy existence.

The angry secret no one will say out loud is that Uri did not have to die to save those children. There are alternatives - alternatives which countless other armies have not eschewed. The IDF could place the West Bank under permanent curfew, with Palestinian towns indefinitely locked down except for supplies deposited at the gates. The army could exact collective retribution for the murder of Israeli civilians, with Palestinian villages invaded and demolished because of the terrorists they nurture, dispatch, and celebrate. Virtually any other country would have crossed those lines long ago. Israel never will. Not only by virtue of grandiose ethical obligations or by recourse to inherent systems of ethics. Simply because doing so would betray the legacy of Uri Binamo and soldiers like him. He and they were taken from us while they fought to secure Israel for life and for lives worth living. For children’s' lives and for children’s' innocence - what that Palestinian terrorist was trying to destroy and what Uri died protecting.
But the indignation and the injustice of it all refuses to go away. No other nation would risk a precious boy by sending him to inspect a taxi very probably filled with murderers, on the off chance that they're shoppers going to a distant market. No other army would risk such a wonderful son by demanding that he check a car very probably filled with terrorists, on the slim possibility that they're a family going to relatives. No other culture would do so much - day after day, year after year - to spare the innocent among their enemies only to watch as their mercy was answered with barbaric savagery.

You have to understand - Israeli culture refuses horror. Though soldiers are killed on borders, children still walk to school and couples still go to parks. Though malls are attacked, shops are still crowded and theaters are still filled. Though busses are destroyed, taxis are still hailed and subways are still boarded. Constantly assaulted by death, Israelis continue to live a life of joy. Many see in this a cultural defiance - a conscious strike against terrorism - where Israelis laugh and sing and date and marry as a refusal to accept their enemies' terms. In a way that's true, but there is something far more basic going on. Israelis live joyfully simply because they've never lived any other way - because it would not occur to them to live any other way. Born and raised in war, the country has never really grown up. Under a fragile and incomplete veneer of cynicism, there is a warm and charming immaturity.

In spite of everything, Israel is a country that has never lost its innocence.

That is why Israel has the most moral army in the world. Not because it was designed that way - although it was - and not because the Jewish State will not do to others what has been done to Jews - although it won't. It's because, in its own innocence, Israel can't but trust in and protect the innocence in others. Israelis - long battered and weary, frequently torn and wounded - would comment that they find it anathema to do anything but work to protect the innocent. In another army, Uri would not have walked up to that taxi - either the taxi would never have been on that road, or it would have been shot at from a distance. But Uri did so because he was an Israeli officer, and it would not have occurred to him to do otherwise.
But do not make the mistake of thinking that this is a kind of pacifism or, worse, some base ethic of physical self-sacrifice. Israel will not allow another Holocaust to occur. It will not allow Jewish blood to be spilled with impunity. The great pains taken so that Palestinians can live their lives are not the result of some obscure philosophical calculation balancing survival and humanity: the protection of the Jewish nation is and will always remain the sin qua non of the Jewish state. Full stop. But while discharging that duty, Israeli nature intrudes into and shapes strategy and tactics. Actions that would devastate the innocent are abandoned before they are started - it never occurs to anyone to go down those roads. And so a Palestinian public that nurtures terrorists in the dark of night is allowed to live a life worth living in the light of day.

And yet ferocious thoughts still intrude. On the day that Uri was killed, my mother spoke to Avi Binamo, Uri's father. She could do nothing but express forlorn and inadequate sympathy. But in response, Avi talked to her about Uri and about the family. He entreated her to convey to me and my siblings his and his wife's greetings. And in the final minutes of the conversation he urged her to hold us close, to cherish every minute she spends with us, and to keep us safe. It was a spontaneous outburst of emotion and concern - a passionate and undeniable insistence on friendship and kinship, love and life, in the face of a horror that no parent should face.
At almost the same time, celebrations were underway in the West Bank village of Atil. Loudspeakers atop mosques blared the name of Uri's killer. Tents were erected and feasts were prepared. Sweets in celebration of murder were handed out by Arab children.
This is what Israel is fighting.

The questions will not go away: why does Israel fight this inhumane abyss with such care and hesitation? Was Uri taken from us because his country refuses to answer atrocities with proportionate ferocity?

These questions do not yield answers, but nonetheless they will not suffer themselves to be suppressed. They demand confrontation, struggle, perhaps an uneasy peace - but never resolution. Abstract morals will not provide a buttress for us against the visceral anger of seeing one father losing a beloved son and another father celebrating his child-bomber's suicide. Empty platitudes will not hold as our shield when we are overwhelmed by disgust at seeing one mother torn by gasping sobs and another mother laughing along with well-wishers. There is nothing to guide us in coming to grips with this loss. There is no answer, no cheap slogan, no easy solace to be found in Uri's death.
He saved countless children from savage murder? The terrorists would never have gotten that far but for Israel's leniancy. He sacrificed himself? It's not fair that the best and most selfless are the ones cut down.
There's nothing to be learned here. It's a sick joke to even try to find a reason why a suicide bomber so filled with hate would kill a young man so filled with love. We should refuse to find meaning in Uri's murder. It's vulgar blasphemy to sanctify this violence with significance. What happened at that checkpoint was mindless - a terrorist's savagery is devoid of any deep lesson. Uri fulfilled his duty that day not because his actions can be rationally explained or justified, but because there was a terrorist in a taxi going to kill Israeli boys and girls, and Uri was an Israeli officer who stood in his way. He did not do his duty in deference to some higher purpose, but because it would never have occurred to him to act otherwise. In his solemn innocence, he expresses the bright innocence of his country even as he saves the naive innocence of so many of its children. But because of his enemy's mercilessness, his friends and family have been shattered.

Haunted by questions but finding no answers, all that is left for us to do is mourn. For myself, I recall a confident soldier who lent strength his parents and comfort to my mother. I reflect on a gentle officer who told my siblings how rewarding working for Magen David Adom is. I contemplate a vibrant guitar player who lounged around a campfire and joked with friends. And I see a quintessential Israeli - warm and agile but not without an air gravity.
When Uri was with loved ones, it didn't matter if they were in a cafe or in a hospital. When he was contemplative, it didn't matter whether he was in a living room or on the battlefield. He took no notice of these differences in place and context - life was to be lived regardless of time and place. He did not so much block out the tragic reality of hospitals and battlefields as find them irrelevant - unnecessary details in the task of expressing joy and providing warmth.
And so, mourning Uri Binamo in all these ways, we might begin to realize how and why Israelis cling to their humanity despite unremitting Palestinian atrocities: because that's how Uri fought and how he would have continued fighting. He would not have had his family, his people, or his country protected in any lesser way - not out of appreciation for his enemies, but out of inexorable fidelity to himself. Not because he would have found the alternative unacceptable, but because he would have found it unthinkable.

In anger and in sorrow, we remember a beautiful young man - beloved of his family and friends - who was unjustly taken from us.