Avi Gamulka: We Are Israel's Greatest Generation

From 'Young Zionist Voices': Where Did All That 10/7 Heroism Come From?

David H.—In the horror of 10/7 and the weeks that followed, young Israelis threw themselves into the battle. Spontaneously and almost universally, young Israelis showed up for reserve duty, volunteered to help evacuees and victims, and poured their energy into supporting their country in any way possible. But where did this energy come from? In this passionate essay, Avi Gamulka offers a moving profile of a generation of young Jews in Israel and beyond.

Avi Gamulka studies History and Geography at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and serves as an advisor to the president of the World Zionist Organization. He has previously served as a policy advisor for the director-general of the Prime Minister’s Office, as spokesman for the minister of tourism, and as a Foreign Affairs correspondent and senior news anchor for GLZ—Israel’s Army Radio.

The following is an exclusive reprint from the anthology Young Zionist Voices: A New Generation Speaks Out, edited by David Hazony. Copyright © 2024 Wicked Son. Reprinted with permission.

We Are Israel’s Greatest Generation

How the ‘TikTok’ generation rallied together to fight for Israel’s future in its darkest hour.

Avi Gamulka

“The forces of courage within our midst have erupted in an inspirational manner,” declared Israel’s President Isaac Herzog in January 2024, in a letter marking the one hundredth day of war since October 7. “We saw how the ‘TikTok Generation’ emerged as a generation of historic strength, whose bravery will be etched in the annals of Israeli history. I met with the fighters and commanders, the leaders on the front—made of steel, eager to engage the enemy, with the oath of ‘never again.’”

Herzog’s words captured a sentiment felt all across Israel during the early months of the war: an intense admiration for Israel’s younger generation, inevitably accompanied by a note of surprise. And in fact, young Jews, both in Israel and around the world, “stepped up” beyond anyone’s expectations. In the process, they offered the hardest commodity to come by during those awful months: hope.

Young people, of course, have been disparaged for thousands of years. Plato and Aristotle each took potshots at the youth, with their “decaying morals” and “wild notions.” Yet, this being an ancient phenomenon has not made the criticism easier to swallow for Gen-Z. Herzog’s “TikTok Generation” label captures the essence of it—we have stood accused of preferring “quiet quitting” to an honest day’s work, as if growing up online somehow made us lazier and more entitled than those who came of age watching Happy Days and Full House.

For our generation, however, the problem was not just one of image, but of an objective sense of crisis that previous generations never faced. Ours is the first generation to experience the world as consistently getting worse. We’re poorer than our parents, more depressed, more anxious, less likely to own homes, and enjoy less job security, all while being told stories by Baby Boomers about buying houses for seventeen dollars through hard work and determination. Even before we lived through the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust, we had already dealt with unprecedented lockdowns courtesy of a deadly pandemic, and have watched with despair as temperatures rise, glaciers melt, and our only planet burns.

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In other words, the enemies of the Jewish people had every reason to believe that when mounting their horrific attack on October 7, they’d meet minimal resistance. They thought they’d meet a generation of Jews—in Israel, the U.S., and worldwide—who would collapse like a house of cards.

How wrong they were.

Within hours, and long before any official order had been given, hundreds of thousands of fighting-aged reservists had already reported for duty. Driving south and north independently from all over the country, some with no gear or weapons at all, they answered a call to save Jews from peril. They did not think twice before leaving their families and holiday tables. They thought of nothing other than what they could do to help.

The individual stories of heroism are almost too many to comprehend. There was Aner Shapira, 22, who was at the Nova music festival. When the attack began, he and his friends took cover in a small public shelter with no door. With terrorists closing in, he assured the more than twenty people in the shelter that if grenades were thrown into the tight enclosure, he’d catch them and throw them back out. Unarmed, he protected the small opening with his body, throwing back no fewer than seven grenades with his bare hands before one took his life. His courage and sacrifice bought invaluable time for those hiding inside.

There was Ben Shimoni, 31, who fled the Nova massacre and made it to safety, only to turn around and drive back twice more to try and save as many people as he could. Lt. Adar Ben Simon, 20, led dozens of young military cadets to safety at the Zikim training base, before leading a charge on the incoming wave of terrorists. Sgt. Matan Abergil, 19, saved the lives of six friends by jumping on a grenade that had been thrown into their armored personnel carrier.

Nor was this valor seen only on the battlefield. In the days, weeks, and months that followed, young Israelis stepped up anywhere they were needed: volunteering with refugees who had fled from all across the country, entertaining and educating children in hotels and makeshift trailer schools, picking crops from abandoned fields, renovating dilapidated bomb shelters, babysitting for families of reservists who had been called off to war.

The list goes on and on. For weeks, the most common hashtag on Israeli social media was lo noflim midor tashach, which translates loosely as “we’re as great as the generation of ’48”—just as selfless, brave, and values-driven as the pioneers and fighters who founded our country.

How did our generation go, in the blink of an eye, from being the “TikTok Generation” to worthy of comparison to The Greatest Generation?

The answer, I believe, is simple. In a word—Zionism. In three—Zionism is hope.

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The near-perfect storm that hit us on October 7, 2023 struck during a time of acute economic struggle and after nearly a year of political crisis that tore our nation apart—which themselves followed years of stress and anxiety, climate crisis, the pandemic, and more. Ours was a generation in desperate need of hope, in need of a cause. October 7 suddenly restored the factory settings in our collective psyche, and together we remembered that Zionism is hope.

The early Zionist thinkers knew this well. In his foundational 1882 pamphlet Auto-Emancipation, Leon Pinsker was adamant that without purpose and drive, the Jewish nation would die. Jews, he wrote, “must not consent to play forever the hopeless role of the ‘Wandering Jew.’ It is a truly hopeless one, leading to despair…. we are bound by duty to devote all our remaining moral force to re-establishing ourselves as a living nation.” Zionism, Pinsker believed, was a psychological tool to avoid despair. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks aptly called the Zionist project “the principled defeat of tragedy by the power of hope,” and one need not look further than our national anthem—“Hatikvah” (“The Hope”)—to know that building a strong, vibrant, independent, and flourishing Jewish state is, and always was, our two-thousand-year-old source of hope.

Within days of the assault, our generation discovered that we had found our cause—much like the founding generation of 1948, with its waves of young Zionists who reached the shores of Palestine and found a source of hope in the face of the brutal antisemitism of their time.

Two important steps lie before us. The first is to spread our message of hope as far and wide as possible—that Zionism is the answer. Enough with the angst and the social, economic, and political dread. Worried about the future? Be the future. Rebuild the homeland any way you can.

The second step, the true culmination, must be to embrace our role in leading that rebuild. We, the young Jews of Israel, the United States, and across the Diaspora, must fully internalize that we are the new Greatest Generation. The leadership shown on the battlefield, on the homefront, on college campuses, at pro-Israel rallies, in synagogues and youth groups, must now be translated into leadership positions in the community as a whole. It is time to translate our fire into a seat at the table. For lack of a better expression, as Lin Manuel-Miranda put it, it’s time for our generation to be in “The Room Where It Happens.”

We’ve proven beyond doubt that we’re capable, that we’re necessary, and that we have the tools to envision a better tomorrow. Our time is now.