Israel's Golani Brigade on the front line in the Gaza Strip
FeatureOne of the country's oldest military units paid a heavy toll in the October 7 attack, which killed more than 70 of its members. Since then, its soldiers have been on the front line of the campaign against Hamas.
"In 10 years, there will be [another] hero commander of the 13th, with hero troops. Some of you will be parents, some of you will be who knows where. [...] And they will tell about you and see pictures of our dead." These words – spoken by Lieutenant Colonel Tomer Grinberg to his men in the days following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack – sounded almost like a premonition. On December 2, 2023, this officer of the 13th Battalion of the Golani Brigade was killed along with eight other men during a Hamas ambush in the Shujaiya district of Gaza. The area had been hit the previous week by one of the Israeli army's heaviest bombardments since the start of the conflict.
"He was a genuine leader – the opposite of a superior. He did what he told the soldiers to do. When he asked us to run four times a week, he would run with us," said a former Israeli soldier, speaking on condition of anonymity, who served under Grinberg during his tour of duty. The lieutenant colonel came from the Almog settlement in the West Bank – Palestinian territory that since 1967 has been occupied by Israel, according to international law. He is survived by his wife and 4-year-old daughter.
The Suez and Six-Day wars
The officer's statement exemplifies the Golani Brigade: There's pride there, toughness, and also the specter of death. "Losing soldiers doesn't weaken this unit or cause it to lay down its arms. Quite the opposite, in fact. It reinforces their esprit de corps, the image they have of themselves, of being on the front line defending Israel," said Yagil Levy, a sociologist who specializes in military issues at Israel's Open University. "Their ethos is that of outsiders, drawn from marginalized minorities like the Sephardim, Russians and Druze, who have had to work their way up on their own, with the idea that citizenship is earned through bloodshed." Being a "Golanchik" has also become somewhat of a family affair, and it's not uncommon for multiple generations of men within a single family – from father to son, from uncle to nephew – to serve in the brigade.
The unit's history has become intertwined with that of Israel itself, for better or for worse. This brigade – the "1st Brigade" – was created just a few months before the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948, and it went on to capture cities such as Nazareth and to fight in the north and against the Egyptian army in Gaza. It also raided Palestinian villages at the time when Israel's struggle for independence, during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, came with the Nakba ("catastrophe" in Arabic) – the forced displacement of 700,000 Palestinians.
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