Wars create heroes. People who show staggering courage in battle, who make unfathomable sacrifices for their comrades in arms, who display uncommon grace in the face of unimaginable loss.
Yechiel Leiter, whose son Maj. (res.) Moshe Yedidya Leiter fell in battle in northern Gaza on November 10, wants to ensure that those heroes become the nation’s new leaders.
The catastrophe of October 7 and the toxic domestic divisions that preceded it demonstrate clearly that the country needs to change.
“We need a restart,” Leiter said in an interview on Monday. “We are the Start-Up Nation; we need now to become the re-start-up nation. And for a restart, you need new faces.”
Those new faces, Leiter predicted, will come from among the ranks of the soldiers and the bereaved parents and siblings who are determined that the destructive pre-October 7 politics and discourse do not return. It will be people who, until now, have not been on the public’s radar screen.
“It is the people who are not eager and anxious to run into politics who you now want to go into it,” Leiter said. “If anyone is hungry to get in, they are suspect.”
Losing a son in Gaza amid Israel-Hamas war
LEITER’S SON, the company commander of the 551st Brigade’s 697th Battalion, was killed on November 10 along with three other soldiers from his unit when a bomb exploded from a booby-trapped tunnel shaft near Beit Hanoun. His unit was among the first to enter Gaza when the ground maneuver began on October 27.
Leiter was 39 and the father of six children, aged 14 to five months; a 15-year veteran of the elite Shaldag Unit; and a recent graduate from Ariel University medical school who, on October 8, was slated to begin his hospital rounds
Since his death, Leiter’s father has been active publicly – including penning open letters to the Israeli public and to US President Joe Biden and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken – focusing on two themes.
To the Israeli public, his message is this: For God’s sake, don’t return to the divisiveness and contentiousness of October 6.
To the US leaders, this is his message: For Western civilization’s sake, don’t hold Israel back from completely destroying Hamas. Both those objectives – eradicating Hamas and forging unity within Israel – are what make the sacrifice of the soldiers consolable, he said.
“We need to solidify the Center; there is no reason in the world why we should have this factious attitude and sense of division that is creeping back into the public square,” Leiter said.
“You know, our boys have now been fighting for three months shoulder to shoulder, they put all differences aside, and frankly, they are going to come back and not tolerate what went on here before Oct. 7. They won’t tolerate it, and we have to create a basis and foundation that is deserving of the sacrifices they’ve made.”
Leiter has a long career of public service that began as the mayor of the Jewish settlement in Hebron and included stints as chairman of the Yesha Council’s foreign desk; deputy director of the Education Ministry under Limor Livnat; director-general of the Finance Ministry under Benjamin Netanyahu; and chairman of the Israel Ports Authority. Likewise, he has run election campaigns for politicians abroad and consulted on public policy.
“When they come out, they won’t want to hear from acrimony,” Leiter said of reservists now beginning to return after three months of fighting.
“They have experienced such pristine unity inside their units – they simply want something better than what they left on October 6, and they will demand it. And we, the parents, have to prepare it for them.”
He said this means creating conditions that will allow new leaders to surface. And those new conditions, he maintained, will not be found in the existing parties.
“I think the existing parties are spent. There is too much cynicism, too much distrust, too much fatigue,” he said.
“That’s why I think there will have to be not only new faces but also new structures for those faces. We are going into a restart mode. I spoke to a brigade commander who said he doesn’t want to send his soldiers home [on leave] and instead brings the parents to the staging ground because once they go home, they hear all this [party] acrimony and come back disenchanted.”
“We need new faces,” he continued.
“The country wants new faces. People who are not stained with political intrigues, political gains, and cutthroat politics. People [Israelis] want integrity, the same integrity that has enabled soldiers to fight together – shoulder to shoulder – with people who come from other places and perhaps with whom they don’t agree with religiously and politically and socially. But they were able to fight together because of commitment, a sense of integrity, a love of the country and the land. That is where we have to go.”
Leiter, who ran unsuccessfully for a seat on the Likud slate in the party’s primaries in 2008, said he is unsure how this new cadre of leaders will emerge, when it will happen, or who these people will be. The only thing he is sure of is that it will happen.
“There is no question that everyone is tired of those who appear nightly on the news and have only unkind things to say about their colleagues and are constantly bickering. It is one night of long knives after the other. It is dishonesty – we have politicians who blush when they tell the truth. Everybody is tired of it. We have to use the lives that have been given for this country to make it better. And we can do that.”
Leiter said the war has uncovered people with tremendous integrity whose only concern is dedication to the country, not job security, “and they are the people who will have to take over.”
“We have to help them come to the surface,” he said. “It is going to be brigade commanders today running the fighting, battalion and company commanders; it could be doctors who left their hospitals to go treat soldiers in the field.”
Then he mentioned names, people like Brig.-Gen. (res) Dedi Simchi, who lost his son on the first day of the war and with whom Leiter co-wrote a couple of recent letters. Or Iris Haim, whose son was one of the three hostages tragically shot mistakenly by IDF soldiers, who reached out with amazing grace to the soldiers involved. Or Sarit Zusman, whose son Ben was killed, and who spoke powerfully and with great passion at his funeral.
“I am not saying that any of them are ready to go to the Knesset or become involved in politics, but these are the types of people we need, who the country is hungry for,” Leiter said.
“People who understand government, who understand the public sector, who have contributed to the country, who have a track record, who also may be bereaved parents or family members who are ready to dedicate their lives to a new kind of public sector. We need professionals in the public sector, people coming to government who are ready to contribute all their time and efforts – and are not coming looking for job placement.”
Leiter said it could also be people like himself “who understand politics, have been around politics, know how government works but are not involved in party politics and have not been tainted by it.”
IF LEITER does create a platform for others to jump into politics or dives into it himself, he will come with a clear and well thought-out worldview, one which came out in his letter to Biden, which he read at his son’s funeral. Leiter, originally from Scranton, Pennsylvania, addressed Biden, from the same city, as “one plain-speaking Scrantonian to another” and urged the president not to put pressure on Israel to cease its offensive against Hamas.
“Stand back, Mr. President: Don’t pressure us. Let us do what we know how to do, indeed what we must do, to defeat evil. This is a war of light against darkness, of truth against lies, of civility against murderous barbarism.”
Last week, Leiter and Simchi sent a letter with a similar message to Blinken, asking to meet with him during his visit here this week (Blinken’s team said there was insufficient time).
“We are very concerned that the United States is putting its interests before those of Israel,” Leiter said. “While that is understandable, we believe that Israel has to put its interests first.”
Leiter argued that America is interested in drawing down the war in Gaza because it is an election year in the US and because of a concern that this would trigger a wider regional conflagration.
But this is no reason “for us to let Hamas off the hook at this stage,” he said.
Leiter’s request with Simchi to meet Blinken came about because, as parents who lost their sons fighting Hamas, “we wanted to make our voices heard and emphasize the need to make sure that Hamas is entirely destroyed.”
Leiter said there were a lot of different groups making their voices heard these days – a possible allusion to the families of hostages – and that he wanted to ensure that the perspective of parents who lost children fighting Hamas was heard as well. His view is that the current war is a “civilizational battle” that has as much to do with Iran and its satellites as it does with Hamas.
“The world is once again being divided into a bloc of America and its satellites, and anti-Americanism and its satellites. Whereas in the past, it was the capitalist democratic world against the Communist autocratic world, today it is much less ideological. Today, it is an America that has been weakened, facing off against an anti-Americanism that has been gaining strength, led by Iran but backed by Russia and China.”
Leiter, who in 2018 wrote a book, published by Cambridge University Press titled John Locke’s Political Philosophy and the Hebrew Bible, said that US pressure on Israel to scale down the war in Gaza is a result of the US administration preferring to, in an election year, “kick the can down the road and let the next president deal with the oncoming conflict between the two blocs.”
But, he said, “Israel can’t afford to wait that amount of time and endanger itself by allowing Oct. 7 to go without the complete eradication of Hamas.”
Leiter rejects the argument that Hamas cannot be destroyed because it is as much an idea as an organization.
“That is nonsense,” he said. “The way you destroy an idea is you eviscerate it, you remove military and political power from the idea. You separate political power and military power from the idea, and in that respect you destroy the idea.”
This is precisely how Nazism was defeated, he maintained. Granted, there are pockets of Nazis, but they don’t have political or military power. He argued that the same is true of ISIS, and the same needs to be true of Hamas.
Israel, he said, is the tip of the sword in the current civilizational clash, just as his son – a squadron leader – was the “point squadron” of the first IDF division that went into Gaza when the ground maneuver began in late October.
“Moshe basically led the entire division, with eight brigades, into Beit Hanoun. He was an experienced field officer, he knew the battlefield very well, was very smart, very able, and was fearless. He was a microcosm of Israel.
“Israel is the point squadron for Western civilization right now,” he continued. “It has to lead – it has to tell the US that we are leading their battle – therefore, no other consideration matters, whether an election year or progressive domination on university campuses; we have to persist and turn Hamas into the terminated organization that ISIS is and the Nazis are. And it takes time.”
Leiter also rejects the argument that one of the prices Israel needs to pay for US military and diplomatic support during the war is to heed its call to lower the intensity of the fighting.
“I think it is a really big mistake to assume it is a zero-sum game – that we are either in this together or are going to go it alone,” he said.
“The question is how strong we are in our position vis-à-vis our closest ally. There have been many times in the past – starting with [David] Ben-Gurion, through Golda [Meir] and [Menachem] Begin and [Yitzhak] Shamir – when we had to say, at certain times, ‘No’ to the American administration who wanted to hear ‘Yes.’”
According to Leiter, Israel needs to explain to the US that it is in America’s interest that Israel has a decisive victory over Hamas and that this will ultimately aid the US in an inevitable confrontation it will have with Iran and its supporters.
“As I said before, we are the point squadron,” he said. “If the US is the division, we are the point squadron. And if we are successful in defeating this representative of Iran, America’s job is going to be easier.”
Leiter said he believes that the majority of Congress understands this as well, which is why they continue supplying Israel with the ammunition to help it conduct the war.
“This is in America’s interests,” he said. “They are not doing it just because we are nice guys. And we have to explain why it continues to be in America’s interest to see this through to the end. The sooner we have Hamas completely destroyed, the better it is for America’s leadership position against this axis of terror, this Axis of Evil.”
It is in this battle against the axis of terror that Leiter lost a son, his firstborn of eight children.
And it is to honor his son’s sacrifice that Leiter is engaged in the dual efforts of resisting US pressure to scale back the war and encouraging the emergence of a cadre of new Israeli leaders.
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