A combat soldier in Lebanon got two days off for Pesach. He didn’t want them.
We were at a hotel by the Dead Sea for the last days of Passover. I had been invited to speak at a program about the charity work we do and about joining the army at age 44. My wife and I were there with friends. Good food, good company, the kind of holiday setting that makes you forget for a few hours that the country is at war.
At the table behind us sat a family. Parents, two married daughters with their husbands, grandkids running between chairs. One of the sons-in-law caught my attention immediately. He was walking around the hotel the entire time with his gun. You know what that means in Israel. It means he’s on miluim. His wife was next to him, and she looked like she could give birth any minute.
We ran into each other on the path down to the synagogue. Started talking. He told me he’s a combat soldier in an elite unit, currently serving deep in Lebanon. The army gave him 48 hours to be with his family for the holiday. Forty-eight hours. Then back.
I asked him if the ceasefire would give him extra time off. He said he’d get a few days when the baby arrives, but he doesn’t want days off.
He said it plainly. The way soldiers say things.
“I fought in the Second Lebanon War. I have been fighting since October 7th. In Lebanon, I am in the same cities I was in during the last war. Enough is enough. We need to make sure our kids are not walking through these same cities during their service. I have lost a lot of money. I put my PhD on hold. At this point, we need to finish the job.”
A PhD on hold. A baby on the way. A wife managing everything at home. And his only request is to not come home until the work is done.
There are many reasons the job hasn’t been finished before. Political reasons. Diplomatic reasons. Coalition reasons. International pressure. Timing. Fear. The reasons stretch back decades and they fill entire libraries. None of them matter right now.
What matters is that the mentality in Israel has shifted.
We have been at war for two and a half years. The longest war in the country’s history. The most taxing, fought on multiple fronts against multiple enemies at the same time. Gaza. Lebanon. Syria. Iran. The Houthis. The West Bank. Rockets, sirens, shelters, and the constant unknown that hangs over every family in every city.
It wears on everyone. Soldiers and civilians. Parents sending kids to school in the morning not knowing if the siren will send them running to a safe room before lunch. Reservists who have left their jobs three, four, five times since October 7th. Wives holding families together while their husbands hold positions on borders that shift by the week.
But something has changed. The exhaustion has not produced surrender. It has produced resolve. The country has taken enough. The soldiers have taken enough. The families have taken enough.
Israel now has a chance to redraw the line. To stop being a country that absorbs attacks and retaliates, and to become a country that takes the offensive as a form of defense. That fights outside its borders so the fighting never reaches inside them again.
The man I met by the Dead Sea understood this. He has been in these cities before. He watched Israel leave Lebanon the last time and saw what happened next. Twenty years later, he is back in the same streets, fighting the same war that was supposed to be over. He is not willing to leave the job unfinished a second time. Not for himself. For his kids. For the baby who is about to be born into a country that has been at war since before she took her first breath.
Maybe we won’t end it for good. Maybe the next generation will face its own version of this fight. But the line can be redrawn. The terms can be reset. The message can be made clear enough that the cost of testing Israel becomes too high to consider.
That requires courage from the soldiers. They have shown it. For two and a half years, they have shown it. The man at the Dead Sea is one of thousands who have given up income, careers, time with their families, and the basic safety of a normal life to stand on a border and hold it.
Now it requires courage from the leaders. The kind of courage that resists the pressure to stop before the work is done. The kind that says a ceasefire is not a victory, and a pause is not peace.
Finish the job. That’s what the soldiers are asking for. That’s what the families are waiting for. That’s what two and a half years of war has earned.
Let it be done right this time.