From Alone in the Ranks
Prologue — Two Funerals
The dead man’s family lived seven thousand miles from the grave.
On the morning of July 23, 2014, the buses began unloading at Mount Herzl, Jerusalem’s military cemetery, hours before the ceremony. It was the third week of Operation Protective Edge, and the soldier being buried that day was Sergeant Max Steinberg of Woodland Hills, California — a sharpshooter in the Golani Brigade’s 13th Battalion, killed three days earlier when his armored personnel carrier was struck in Shuja’iyya, in Gaza City, on a night that killed thirteen soldiers of the Golani Brigade.
Steinberg was twenty-four. He had visited Israel for the first time only two years before, on a Birthright trip. He had gone home to Los Angeles, packed, and come back to enlist in an army whose language he could barely speak, in a country where he knew almost no one. When the army, doubtful of his Hebrew, tried to steer him away from a combat role, he refused every alternative they offered: “Send me home or send me to jail.”
In the vocabulary of the Israel Defense Forces, Steinberg was a chayal boded — a “lone soldier,” a soldier without family in Israel. The term is bureaucratic; the reality it describes is ancient and simple. A lone soldier is the one with no home to go to when the base empties out for Shabbat, no parents at the swearing-in ceremony at the Western Wall, no one to do his laundry or argue with him or notice, quickly, if something starts to go wrong. And, in the worst case, a lone soldier is the one whose funeral might be empty.
That fear — the empty funeral — is precisely what summoned the crowds of July 2014. Steinberg’s family flew in from California to bury him. An estimated thirty thousand people came. They filled the plaza, the paths, the hillside between the pines; most of them could not see the grave and none of them had ever met the man in it. The United States ambassador, Dan Shapiro, spoke at the service. Secretary of State John Kerry, in Jerusalem that day to negotiate a ceasefire in the very war that had killed Steinberg, met the family and expressed, in words reported across the coverage, his “profound gratitude” to the Israelis who had turned out.
It was not an isolated scene. Days earlier, in Haifa, another Golani lone soldier killed in the same battle — Staff Sergeant Sean Carmeli, who had split his years between Ra’anana and South Padre Island, Texas — had been buried before a crowd estimated at twenty thousand by police and by some press accounts at twice that, after the Maccabi Haifa football club appealed to its supporters to attend. “Sean Carmeli was a lone soldier,” the fan-forum notice read, “and we don’t want his funeral to be empty. Come and pay your last respects to a hero who was killed so that we could live.” The following day, roughly six thousand people, many of them French immigrants, buried Staff Sergeant Jordan Bensemhoun of Lyon in Ashkelon; his parents flew in from France. Three lone soldiers, one battle, tens of thousands of mourners — nearly all of them strangers.
Something was on display in those crowds that sociologists and press columns spent the following weeks trying to name. It was not exactly grief, since the mourners did not know the dead. It was closer to a debt being acknowledged in public — the recognition that these young men had done the most demanding thing citizenship asks, on behalf of a citizenry that did not include their own mothers and fathers. A country that conscripts its children is bound to its soldiers by family. For the soldier who has no family there, the country itself steps in — or fails to. In July 2014, at three gravesides, it stepped in massively, visibly, and with cameras rolling.
It was not always so.
On May 20, 1948 — six days into Israel’s independence, with Egyptian columns driving north toward Tel Aviv — Canada’s most celebrated fighter pilot died in a ferry accident at Urbe airfield outside Rome. George “Buzz” Beurling, the “Falcon of Malta,” was Canada’s leading ace of the Second World War, credited with more than thirty aerial victories. He was twenty-six, not Jewish, and en route to fly for a Jewish state that had existed for less than a week. The Noorduyn Norseman he was ferrying toward Israel caught fire on a test flight’s landing approach and exploded, killing Beurling and his fellow volunteer, the British pilot Leonard Cohen. Sabotage was suspected; the Italian inquiry found mechanical failure, and nothing was ever proven.
What happened next is the part that matters here. No state claimed him. Israel, days old and fighting for its life, could barely bury its own. Beurling’s remains lay unclaimed in Rome for months, until his widow arranged a burial in the city’s Protestant Cemetery. There he stayed for two and a half years — the greatest ace his country ever produced, dead in the service of a nation not yet a week old, lying in a foreign grave that almost nobody visited.
Only in November 1950 did Israel bring him home to a country he had never reached alive. Israeli Air Force aircraft dipped overhead; an Anglican priest and a Jewish chaplain shared the service; and Beurling was reburied with full military honors in the military cemetery at the foot of Mount Carmel in Haifa. It was a gesture of real gratitude — and an admission of how close the new state had come to forgetting him entirely.
Beurling had plenty of company in that near-oblivion. Some 3,500 volunteers from abroad — perhaps 4,500; the counting, as we will see, is its own story — fought for Israel in 1948 under the name Machal, the Hebrew acronym for “volunteers from outside the land.” At least 119 of them were killed; the roll their veterans’ organization keeps today lists 123. They were the founding generation of what Israel would much later call lone soldiers, and for four and a half decades the state built them no memorial at all. Their monument at Sha’ar HaGai, on the road they died opening to Jerusalem, was not dedicated until 1993. Standing before the survivors that day, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin — who as a young Palmach commander had fought alongside them — made the omission itself part of the speech: “My generation will never forget what you have done,” he told them, forty-five years late. Seventeen years earlier, asked to write a foreword to the memoir of one of Machal’s brigade commanders, the same Rabin had confessed: “The time is probably not yet ripe to tell the full story.”
Between those two funerals — Beurling’s unclaimed coffin in Rome in 1948, and the thirty thousand strangers on Mount Herzl in 2014 — lies the history this book sets out to tell.
It is, first, a continuous story, though it has never been told continuously. The volunteer with no family in the land is present at every hinge of Israel’s military history: hauling water under fire at Gallipoli in 1915 in the Zion Mule Corps; marching through Whitechapel with the Jewish Legion in 1918, David Ben-Gurion — a deportee volunteering from New York — enlisting in its American battalion; crossing the Senio with the Jewish Brigade in 1945; crewing the blockade runners of Aliyah Bet; flying, in 1948, the fighters that stopped Egypt at Ad Halom, in an air force where two-thirds of the aircrew were foreign volunteers. The first general of the Israeli army was a lone soldier from Brooklyn, killed by his own sentry and buried at West Point. The commander of its infant navy was an American lone soldier, appointed at twenty-six.
Then the story goes quiet — decades in which volunteers trickled rather than streamed, and the army slowly discovered that it also had lone soldiers of its own making: immigrant orphans, Holocaust survivors’ children, teenagers whose parents were still behind the Iron Curtain or in Addis Ababa or, eventually, in Los Angeles. In December 1975 the IDF gave the situation a name and a standing order, and chayal boded became a category with rights attached. Around that category, from the 1990s onward, grew something that exists nowhere else on earth: a national ecosystem of adoptive kibbutz families, subsidized apartments, philanthropies, pre-army programs, and a paratroop lieutenant colonel from the Jezreel Valley whom the country came to call the father of the lone soldiers. By August 2024, according to the Knesset’s research service, the IDF counted 6,731 lone soldiers in its ranks — and, contrary to every popular image of the American idealist, more than four in ten of them were not immigrant volunteers at all but soldiers lacking family support — orphans, the estranged, young people whose ultra-Orthodox homes had closed behind them.
It is also, second, a story with a shadow side. The same decades that produced the crowds at Mount Herzl produced State Comptroller reports finding that no two agencies of the Israeli government could even agree on who counted as a lone soldier; produced discharged lone soldiers sleeping in stairwells; produced a suicide cluster that the army was slow to see and slower to admit; produced fraud, bureaucratic cruelty, and a critique — heard from scholars and sometimes from lone soldiers themselves — that Israel had built an industry of celebration atop a deficit of care. The thirty thousand strangers at a funeral and the veteran alone in a rented room are the same phenomenon, seen from opposite sides, and a history that includes only one of them is not a history.
And it is, third and throughout, a story about the relationship between Israel and the Jewish world — told not through speeches or philanthropy but through the most consequential decision a diaspora Jew can make short of aliyah itself, and often bound up with it: to put on the uniform. Every era of that relationship has sent its own emissaries. The Legion sent socialists and tailors; 1948 sent demobilized bomber crews; the seventies sent the sons and daughters of the Soviet aliyah; the 2000s sent Birthright alumni; and after October 7, 2023, lone soldiers were among the first to die and the first to fly home to fight — thousands of lone-soldier reservists returned on the packed flights of that autumn. The lone soldier is where the Jewish world’s ideas about Israel stop being ideas.
The chapters that follow proceed chronologically, from the mule drivers of Gallipoli to the volunteers of the Gaza war and its aftermath. The method is documentary throughout: what can be established is established, what is contested is flagged, and what is legend is enjoyed — but labeled. The reader deserves to know at the outset that the two funerals of this prologue are not a rhetorical device. They are the historical problem itself. How does a nation come to owe so much to soldiers who are not, in the ordinary sense, its own? What does it cost those soldiers? And what happens when the crowd goes home?
Max Steinberg is buried on Mount Herzl. George Beurling lies at the foot of Mount Carmel. Between them run sixty-six years, and this book.