May his memory be an indictment

Israel's war on its own took my cousin

Welcome to a Monday night edition of Progress Report.

There is a whole lot of news to cover right now, but tonight is a remembrance. I hope you read it.

---

---

My cousin Andrew died on Saturday, another victim of Israel’s expanding war across the Middle East. He was just weeks away from celebrating his 34th birthday.

American born and raised, he spent his childhood in California and Maryland, then moved to Chicago for college, where he studied music; before he became a soldier, Andrew was a drummer. The youngest of four children, he would be heard.

The last time I saw him was at our grandmother’s graveside funeral, but we didn’t get much time to catch up — I had to deal with the people at the cemetery who were trying to put her in the wrong plot, alongside some other family of Jews that had come to the US to escape persecution. Andrew must have seen the vast expanse of headstones, so many of them engraved with the names of cities purged and villages razed across Europe, and experienced a sense of affirmation for what had become his life’s mission.

Days later, Andrew flew back to his life in Israel, where he’d moved half a decade earlier to join the IDF. He was convinced of the righteousness of the cause of an independent Jewish state, though I’m not sure how that conviction emerged; he hadn’t been raised with any deep religious tradition, and we didn’t have any family in the Middle East. (Then again, I’m going to Liverpool later this month for the second time this year, having invested my identity in an overseas soccer team.)

Andrew considered himself a political leftist, even if that’s a bit relative these days in Israel, and he was no fan of Benjamin Netanyahu. By the time that Hamas’s monstrous October 7th massacre transpired, he was working in intelligence, a reservist with a bad back and a desire to serve. Many reservists had refused to report for duty that summer, withholding their service in protest of Netanyahu’s attempt to weaken the Israeli Supreme Court. I don’t know where he stood on that question before the attacks, but he was all-in on his duty to the Israeli people in the days that followed.

Andrew was shot during a combat mission up north, fighting Hezbollah in Lebanon; I never got the details, just that he was going to recover. Which he did, technically, for a while. But the horrors of what he’d seen during this war haunted him, and inflicted the kind of damage that no trauma unit or surgery team could heal. PTSD, depression, seizures, an inability to fight on. He was hardly alone; this is now an epidemic.

It’s not my place to share more about his life or condition, and right now, there are still question marks about his final days. But I can say that Andrew was hurting, broken by a war that he believed was being fought to preserve the freedom of Israel and the safety of Jews around the world. I believe that’s why he was fighting, but it’s also apparent that he was far more noble than those politicians and cowardly zealots who created hell on earth and convinced him and so many young people like him to march right in.

This isn’t to say that he was fooled. Instead, Andrew’s loyalty was abused. He went to war to defend his people from an evil fostered by his government. Hamas deserves an equal share of the blame, but never forget that it was empowered by Netanyahu.

Mt. Herzl, where Andrew will be buried

Andrew’s war was not Netanyahu’s war, but his blood is on the hands of those liars and criminals who cause so much unfathomable destruction and despair, manipulating the collective fears of a citizenry and diaspora trained for constant vigilance.

Andrew’s blood is on the hands of the Americans who exploit Jewish trauma to secure their own power and persecute those who might oppose them.

His blood is on the hands of those comfortable bigots who use antisemitism as a cudgel to silence objections to a war that they will never experience, to foreclose the possibility that the suffering might end any time soon.

The Israeli government continues to inflict atrocities on the Palestinian people, and there is an appalling number of soldiers who have willingly — even gleefully — surrendered their humanity to participate in war crimes. But there are many more who have had their humanity stripped away, who have been forced into unfathomable situations, pushed to the bleeding edge of depravity, and then abandoned to a society at war with itself.

I don’t want to impose my own opinions on my cousin or turn him into a martyr for a cause that he did not support. But I know that the would still be with us if it were not for callous politicians and violent zealots — on all sides — who have exploited trauma, sown hatred, inflicted injustice, and sacrificed generations of young people to maintain their own lousy fiefdoms.

He wasn’t even 34 years old. He has nieces and nephews who will never know him, siblings who will never stop mourning him, and parents who will never be whole again without him.

Andrew died for his desire to protect the Jewish people. If only we’d returned the favor.

---

Wait, Before You Leave!

Progress Report has raised over $7 million dollars for progressive candidates and causes, breaks national stories about corrupt politicians, and delivers incisive analysis, and goes deep into the grassroots.

None of the money we’ve raised for candidates and causes goes to producing this newsletter or all of the related projects we put out. In fact, it costs me money to do this. So, I need your help.

For just $5 a month, you can buy a premium subscription that includes:

• Premium member-only newsletters with original reporting

• Financing new projects and paying new reporters

• Access to upcoming chats and live notes

You can also make a one-time donation to Progress Report’s GoFundMe campaign — doing so will earn you a shout-out in the next weekend edition of the newsletter!