Part Two: Murder in Chavat Gilad

It was Friday afternoon. The Sovereignty movement, led by Nadia Matar, was gathering a solidarity drive up to Chavat Gilad to comfort the bereaved family. It had been a very heavy week: devastating fire, and now bloodshed. The weight of it had been sitting on my chest. I did not have to think twice.

I fixed our two big Israeli flags to broom poles and strapped them to the sides of the van, jumped in with my two oldest sons, and we drove ten minutes down the road to join the caravan. When we pulled up, there was a group of cars idling in the dark, flags flying from the windows, engines running, breath fogging in the cool night air. Because we had the big van with two huge flags mounted on its flanks, they asked us to lead. I was a little overwhelmed as I pulled out onto the highway at the head of that line, my two boys beside me, and led a river of Israeli flags into the night. We turned at the junction and drove on, emergency lights flashing, and flags waving. At each cluster of people we passed, every horn in the caravan sounded out into the hills. The message was clear: The Jewish people are here, and they are not afraid. 

What most people, even those in the caravan itself, probably missed, is that there were three non-Jews in attendance. We were honored to unashamedly join as representatives from the nations and wholeheartedly stand with the Jewish people, fully endorsing their message!

As we drove, I could not stop thinking about the man we were going to honor, and the wife and the two little girls he had left behind. His name was Benayahu Mellet. He was thirty-two years old. Chavat Gilad sits just over the ridge from Har Bracha, the Mount of Blessing. These are our regular stomping grounds, the area we drive across on the most ordinary days. Benayahu worked that ground as the head of agriculture in the community, a man whose whole calling was making the land bring forth life, and he served on the local first-response security team. Only days before, just down the hill from where we now drove, a terrorist had murdered him in cold blood. May his memory be for a blessing.

The details have become clearer as video footage, pictures, and eyewitness accounts have come in. It happened before dawn. A group of hikers had set out from Har Bracha to walk the biblical hills down toward Chavat Gilad, and they had done everything the right way, coordinating their route in advance with the local security, the whole thing planned and organized and above board. There is nothing strange about this. People hike all over Israel. These are public trails on open land, the ancient footpaths of Israel's inheritance, not anyone's private garden.

Around seven in the morning, a band of Arabs fell on them, and thank God the hikers managed to de-escalate the situation and escape. An hour later, a second and larger mob surrounded them, screaming, hurling rocks, closing in with stones and iron bars. The hikers called for help. The army was dispatched, and so were the local security teams, and because Chavat Gilad was the nearest Jewish community, its team was among the first to answer. Benayahu was on it. He ran toward the danger, the way he had on many battlefields before.

Soldiers on the scene hesitated to open fire, and the security team was straining to push the mob back and shield the hikers without firing a shot. And in the middle of that chaos, a terrorist tore Benayahu's own rifle out of his hands. The terrorist was a sheikh of the neighboring village. He lifted that stolen weapon and opened fire on the group, and Benayahu was murdered where he stood. A soldier was shot dead. One young man was left fighting for his life. A third was wounded. Only then, only after a father of two lay dead on the ground, did the army finally return fire, neutralizing four of the terrorists and wounding others who fled into a manhunt that ran through the day. The sheikh who had seized the rifle and pulled the trigger was neutralized, and the stolen weapon was recovered.

I thought about the day it had happened, and it made the whole thing burn hotter in my gut. The day before Benayahu was murdered was Tisha B'Av, the ninth of Av, the saddest day on the entire Jewish calendar, the day this whole nation mourns the destruction of both Temples and a hundred other catastrophes that have crashed over this people through the ages. The enemies of Israel knew exactly what day it was. And they poured out as much havoc as they could on the very day the Jewish people lay fasting and grieving, without food, without water. That is who they are. That is the spirit moving behind the violence.

And I thought about the lie, because the lie was already everywhere. Within hours, outlets and social media posts were laying Benayahu's murder at the feet of the Jewish people. If only the hikers had stayed home. If only Jews would keep out of other people's land. Some went so far as to call it self-defense, as though the sheikh who ripped a rifle from a soldier's hands and executed him was somehow the victim. It is a grotesque inversion, and the truth is not hard to see if you are willing to look. 

A group of people went for a coordinated walk on public ground, harming no one and nothing, loving the very land beneath their feet. A mob came out to meet them with stones and iron, not to defend a home, but to announce that Jews are not permitted to set foot on these hills. The Jewish side did not start the fight and did not want it. The security team that arrived carried weapons they refused to use, showing a restraint most would never dream of, holding their fire again and again while the mob pressed in. It was the terrorists who escalated. It was the terrorist who seized the gun from the one man determined not to fire it. It was the terrorist who shot point blank, without a flicker of hesitation, and killed him. There is no way on earth to twist that into the story of a people who long for peace.

This is the modern blood libel, and an organization called Regavim has documented it in painstaking detail, showing how the world's endless catalog of so-called settler violence is padded with traffic disputes and with Jews defending their own children from stones, because in the eyes of the accusers the mere presence of a Jew in Judea and Samaria is itself the provocation. Golda Meir saw the heart of it long ago, when she said that peace would come only when our neighbors came to love their own children more than they hate the Jewish people. That is the whole tragedy pressed into a single sentence. Fewer lives would have been lost this week if the response had been decisive from the very first stone. Instead, because so much of the world refuses to see these killers for what they are, the IDF is boxed into a restraint that gets men like Benayahu murdered. That has to end.

But even in my outrage at what is not right, I felt a great deal of hope. Israel's finance minister, Betzalel Smotrich, who also holds authority over the Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria, put words to what so many of us were feeling. The enemy, he said, "has been raising its head in Judea and Samaria in recent days, and what is needed is immediate, sharp, determined, and unequivocal action by the IDF." But he did not stop at meting out basic justice. 

He announced that he would ask the Prime Minister to approve a brand new Jewish community right beside the place where Benayahu fell, transferring the land into Israel's hands so that homes could rise there. That, he said, is "our fitting Zionist response to the terrorist, to terrorism, and to the desire to undermine our hold on areas of our land." Answer murder with building. Answer fire with foundations. This is the way of the righteous, holy people of God. And that, in its own small way, was exactly what our line of flags was doing as it climbed the dark road that night, refusing to be moved.

We passed Yitzhar, turned in at the gate of Chavat Gilad, and made our way down to the house where the widow and her two little daughters were sitting shiva. It was nearly midnight. Think on that for a moment. A woman and her two small girls, only hours into the worst grief a family can carry, and the house was full. Fifty women or more were pressed in around them, sitting with them, weeping with them, holding them upright by sheer presence. The table sagged with food that neighbors kept carrying in. Someone had come to speak a word of comfort as we arrived, and my sons and I found a place, greeted a few familiar faces, and then stepped quietly back to leave the mourners their space.

Outside in the dark stood a few men. One young man had been part of the red heifer project. Another was a friend from Shilo whose wife shapes the pottery vessels being prepared even now for service in the Temple when it is rebuilt, a man I had stood beside only days earlier, on Tisha B'Av, up on the Temple Mount itself. And now here we were again, meeting a second time in a house of mourning. We stood under the stars and talked about the Temple, about the ancient and furious struggle over the light that is meant to pour out of Israel to the whole world, and how this fire and this murder are threads in that very war. 

And then I saw Naftali and his wife. They were there too, in the small hours, standing in a house of mourning for a neighbor only days after the fire took their home and their livelihood. I wrapped him in a big hug. I could see in his face how deeply the two blows had rocked him, the flames and now the funeral, one on top of the other. And to be able to hold him in that place, to stand shoulder to shoulder with him on that grieving mountain and be a voice from the nations that says you are not alone, we are standing right here with you, and we will keep standing here no matter what comes.

That is the answer to the fire and to the murder. Not despair. Not flight. Even as the funeral was taking place, tens of thousands of people from Israel and across the world had already given thirteen million shekels to lift up the families burned out of Chavat Gilad. And on a brand new farm on the ridge between Har Bracha and Chavat Gilad, more than a hundred Israelis gathered to plant their feet on the land, men and women and children, with animals and fresh-built homes rising around them, farming the hills the enemy is so desperate to empty of Jews. They bury their dead, and they build. They mourn, and they plant. They will not be moved.

The psalmist sang it three thousand years ago, "Those who trust in the LORD are like Mount Zion, which cannot be moved, but abides forever." Fires cannot move them. Terrorists cannot move them. The lies of the nations cannot move them. Benayahu Mellet laid down his life shielding hikers on the hills of his own inheritance, and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob has not forgotten his name, and has not forgotten this land.

As we finally pulled away from that house in the dead of night, the flags hanging free and still in the quiet air, I carried the faces of that widow and her two little girls out into the dark with me, and I have carried them ever since. So pray for them. Pray for Naftali, and for every family still standing in the ashes. Stand with the people of these hills, and if the Lord stirs your heart, come and stand with them in the flesh. Walk this land. Look with your own eyes on a people who answer provocation with restraint, fire with blueprints, and murder with life - heroes who will never be shaken.