Alone in the Ranks: Israel's Lone Soldiers and the Alliance That Shows Up

The Insider is on its August pause, and the Dispatch is carrying the daily load exactly as planned. Sundays are different. Sundays are for the Long View, and I have spent this vacation finishing something I want you to hear about here first: a book. It is called Alone in the Ranks, a history of the IDF’s lone soldiers from the volunteers of 1948 to the generation serving right now. Because I am away, the wall stays down today; the whole issue goes to every reader, free and premium alike. Fair warning: the essay runs at twice its usual length. It has a book behind it.

Alone in the Ranks

On vacation, I have been writing a history of the IDF’s lone soldiers. Its finding: the alliance’s oldest infrastructure is not aid. It is people who show up.

On the morning of July 23, 2014, the buses began unloading at Mount Herzl hours before the ceremony. The soldier being buried was Sergeant Max Steinberg of Woodland Hills, California, a sharpshooter in the Golani Brigade’s 13th Battalion, killed in Shuja’iyya on a night that took thirteen of the brigade’s men. He was twenty-four. He had first seen Israel on a Birthright trip two years earlier; he went home to Los Angeles, packed, and came back to enlist in an army whose language he could barely speak. When it tried to steer him away from combat, he refused: “Send me home or send me to jail.” Thirty thousand people came to bury him. Almost none of them had ever met him.

The crowd was no accident. Days earlier in Haifa, twenty thousand had buried Staff Sergeant Sean Carmeli of South Padre Island, Texas, after the Maccabi Haifa football club asked its supporters to make sure a lone soldier’s funeral would not be empty. The following day, six thousand mourners, many of them French immigrants, buried Staff Sergeant Jordan Bensemhoun of Lyon in Ashkelon. Three lone soldiers, one battle, tens of thousands of mourners, nearly all of them strangers.

Sixty-six years earlier, Israel could not manage a funeral for a man of the same kind. George Beurling, the “Falcon of Malta,” was Canada’s most celebrated fighter ace. He was twenty-six, and he was not Jewish. On May 20, 1948, six days into Israel’s independence, the plane he was ferrying toward the week-old state caught fire outside Rome and killed him. No government claimed the body. He lay in Rome’s Protestant cemetery for two and a half years, until Israel reburied him with full honors at the foot of Mount Carmel in November 1950, aircraft dipping overhead: gratitude, and an admission of how close the state had come to forgetting him.

Between those two funerals runs the history I have been writing. The book is called Alone in the Ranks: A History of Lone Soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces, 1948-2026. The draft is finished. As far as I could establish, and I looked, no comprehensive history of the lone soldier exists in any language. Nobody had ever assembled the fragments in order. This morning, a first look at what the assembled record shows.

The volunteer with no family in the land appears at every hinge of Israel’s military history, and he predates the state by a generation. Mule drivers hauled water under fire at Gallipoli in 1915 in the Zion Mule Corps. David Ben-Gurion, a deportee in New York, enlisted in the Jewish Legion’s American battalion in 1918. The Jewish Brigade crossed the Senio in 1945 and smuggled fifteen thousand survivors into Italy that summer; American and Canadian crews ran the blockade-runners of Aliyah Bet. The line was already old when the state was born.

Then 1948. Some 3,500 volunteers from more than three dozen countries fought for Israel’s independence under the Hebrew acronym Machal, “volunteers from outside the land”; their own monument says 4,800, and the distance between those figures gets its own chapter. Their weight was never in their numbers. It was in the seats only they could fill. Foreign volunteers held roughly two thirds of the infant air force’s aircrew positions and supplied nearly nine of every ten pilots with combat experience. The army’s first general was a lone soldier from Brooklyn, Mickey Marcus, killed by his own sentry and buried at West Point. The navy’s first commander, Paul Shulman of Annapolis, was twenty-six when Ben-Gurion issued him the entire naval doctrine by telephone as Egypt’s flagship stood off Gaza: “Paul, if you can sink them, shoot; if you can’t, don’t.”

At least 119 of the volunteers died, and the state built them no memorial for forty-five years. When Yitzhak Rabin finally dedicated the stone at Sha’ar HaGai in 1993, he stood before the survivors as the Palmach commander who had fought beside them and opened with the debt: “They came to us when we most needed them.” They had contributed, he told them, “far beyond their number” to the war that decided “if we will be or will not be.” Then: “My generation will never forget what you have done.”

Ben-Gurion had seen the deeper point in real time. The diaspora’s volunteering youth struck him, in October 1948, as “a wonderful kibbutz galuyot,” a gathering of the exiles, “merging Jewish bravery and fraternity, which will set an example for Jewish youths wherever they are.” He was not describing manpower. He was describing precedent.

The precedent compounded quietly. Through the lean decades the stream narrowed to dozens a year, and the army discovered lone soldiers of its own making: immigrant orphans, survivors’ children, teenagers whose parents waited behind the Iron Curtain. On December 4, 1975, the General Staff issued Order 35.0808, “Lone Soldiers: Principles, Rights and Procedures,” and the chayal boded became a legal fact. The founding text was a welfare circular, not a covenant: a modest grant, rent help, hostel beds, three weeks a year to visit family abroad. But the grammar had changed. A soldier could now be a lone soldier officially, appealably, with a file. The state had accepted, in writing, that a soldier without a family was its business.

What no order could assign was somebody to wait at the end of a night march at three in the morning. That was invented by a field-crops worker from Kibbutz Yifat named Tzvika Levy, a decorated paratrooper who began in 1983 by gathering exempted development-town teenagers into uniform and became the man the country called the father of the lone soldiers. He placed soldiers in kibbutz spare rooms and laid a cotton branch on the graves of fallen lone soldiers, his way of saying that every one of them has someone who remembers. Five years into his rounds, the army amended the 1975 order with a new section titled with a single word: “Adoption.” The pattern of this whole history sits in that sequence: first somebody helps; afterward the state writes it down. When Levy died in 2018, Benny Gantz compressed seventy years into one sentence: “Tzvika fought in the Paratroopers, then fought for every lone soldier, and in recent years fought for his health.”

By then the category had absorbed its largest test. When the Soviet Union collapsed, close to a million of its Jews became Israelis, and the first wave’s children enlisted at rates above the general Jewish population; by the mid-2000s, by the most cited estimate, four of every five lone soldiers came from the former Soviet Union. Unlike the volunteers of 1948, they had not come intending to return; there was, increasingly, nothing to return to.

The Americans never became the majority. What they brought, in the 2000s, was a pipeline and a particular way of grieving. Birthright began flying young diaspora Jews to Israel free in 1999; Nefesh B’Nefesh began chartering planeloads of North American immigrants in 2002, mid-Intifada, when the traffic ran against every current of common sense. Michael Levin of Bucks County, Pennsylvania took that pipeline, and when his draft summons failed to arrive in 2003, he found the recruitment office’s only open window and climbed in: the American who broke into the draft office. In July 2006 he was home in Philadelphia on leave when Hezbollah ambushed a border patrol and started a war. His Israeli surrogate father, Tziki Aud, preserved what came next: “I told him: ‘Michael, don’t come. Wars here last four-five days, by the time you arrive it’ll already be over.’ But within 24 hours he was in the country, reached his buddies, and fell in Ayta ash-Shab.” He was twenty-two, the first American killed in that war.

Grief built the infrastructure. The Lone Soldier Center in Memory of Michael Levin opened in 2009 as the room he had wanted, open when everything else is closed; it has since stood behind more than 15,000 soldiers, its six houses renting beds at exactly the army’s housing allowance. Benji’s Home in Ra’anana rose from the shiva of Major Benji Hillman, an Egoz company commander killed three weeks after his wedding; not a lone soldier himself, but the commander who noticed the ones nobody else noticed. The house that carries his name rooms fifty combat lone soldiers at a time, local families collecting their laundry each week and returning it folded. On any given night now, more than two thousand soldiers sleep in beds that existed because the society outside the army had decided the army’s provision was not enough. His mother, Harriet, measured the change: “Until Michael fell, the term lone soldier was virtually unheard of. Now it’s a universal term.”

“The lone soldier is where the Jewish world’s ideas about Israel stop being ideas.”

The population behind the universal term is larger and stranger than the posters. The army’s most recent official census recorded 6,731 lone soldiers in August 2024, a brigade’s worth. More than four in ten were not foreign volunteers at all but Israelis serving without family support, many from haredi homes that closed behind them; the campaign to draft the ultra-Orthodox now produces new lone soldiers one estranged teenager at a time. Among the foreign-born, the United States supplies more of them than any other country.

The record, typically, cannot fully agree with itself; the Knesset’s own researchers confessed, in the war’s fifteenth month, that the army’s data did not match the definitions in the army’s founding order. What it does agree on is the outcome: 86 percent of immigrant lone soldiers discharged across a recent five-year stretch were still in Israel when sampled, and more than a fifth of lone soldiers’ families eventually follow their children. The teenager with the duffel bag turns out to be the family’s advance party.

On October 7 the system met a war that began inside the soldiers’ own homes. Rose Lubin of Atlanta had made aliyah alone a few months after finishing high school, enlisted in the Border Police, and been folded into Kibbutz Sa’ad: a room, a family, a place at the table. She had also joined the kibbutz’s civilian emergency squad, so when Hamas came through the fence that morning, the kibbutz’s adopted American daughter took up her weapon beside her neighbors and helped hold Sa’ad. The kibbutz held. A month later, a sixteen-year-old stabbed her to death at Herod’s Gate in Jerusalem. At her funeral, the rabbi who had known her as a teenager in Atlanta gave the lone soldier’s epitaph in one line: “Rose didn’t have to come here, but she did.”

She had company that morning: Nathanel Young, twenty, from Britain, killed with the Golani Brigade on the Gaza border; Elie Ghnassia of France, killed defending Kibbutz Be’eri days short of twenty-three. Within months, roughly twenty lone soldiers stood on the war’s roll of dead. And at a Gaza-border outpost, a tank commanded by Omer Neutra of Plainview, Long Island was hit and its crew taken. For 421 days his parents carried his story from synagogue halls to a national convention stage, not knowing their son had died the first morning.

The traffic in the other direction is what the book exists to preserve. While foreign carriers canceled, El Al flew the Sabbath for the first time since 1982, and reservists flew home free of charge, American financial institutions helping carry the cost. Among the passengers were thousands of veterans of the lone-soldier system, back from Los Angeles and Paris and Melbourne for a war they could have watched on television; the army later recognized about 8,000 of them as lone reservists, and some estimates run far higher. In March 1950, a forgotten official named Yona Ettinger had urged the young state to keep faith with its departed volunteers, “out of the hope that they would come back to the country should the need arise.” Seventy-three years later the need arose, and they came back unasked.

In November 2025, under the ceasefire, Omer Neutra came home at last, and the commander of US Central Command stood at his funeral and gave the American military’s verdict: “He is the son of two nations… he has firmly cemented his place in history as the hero of two countries.” And when a reservist named Alexander Filin fell in Lebanon in 2025 with no relatives in the country, Haifa, the city that had once filled a cemetery for Sean Carmeli, filled one again, the mayor himself giving the eulogy. The state still knows how to bury strangers as sons; that lesson held.

Washington spent July arguing about this alliance as a budget line. One hundred and three House Democrats, and one Republican, voted to cut the $3.3 billion in security assistance to Israel; the amendment failed, 314 to 104, and the two fringes that produced it now converge on a single claim, as this newsletter wrote before the break: that the US-Israel relationship is a subsidy, and a subsidy can be canceled.

The record in this book answers them. The alliance’s oldest infrastructure is not an appropriation. It is people. Four times the state’s need was mortal, in 1948, 1967, 1973, and 2023, and four times the Jewish world sent its children before any government finished deliberating; the paperwork always trailed the volunteers: the army created its Machal Department in September 1948 for men who had been dying since May; the lone-soldier order of 1975 arrived for soldiers who had been lonely since independence; the lone-reservist status of January 2026 followed reservists who had boarded their flights in October 2023. Israel has never once defined its lone soldiers before needing them. Need is the only census that has ever measured them accurately.

This is the Post-Aid Alliance in its purest form: a partnership that outgrows subsidy because it never actually lived in the subsidy. When thirty thousand Israelis climbed Mount Herzl for a sergeant from Los Angeles they had never met, they were ratifying a claim, the claim that Israel’s wars are the Jewish people’s wars, with their bodies, in the sun, on a Wednesday. No speech, no lobby, no appropriations bill has ever made that argument as well as the lone soldiers make it by existing. That is why the alliance’s opponents find them such an inconvenient fact, and why the case against the alliance always talks about money. Money is the part you can vote against.

And the pipeline is refilling. Last year 8,499 immigrants arrived from the United States, France, Britain, and Canada, a quarter more than the year before, with a third of all arrivals aged eighteen to thirty-five, the demographic from which lone soldiers are made. The West is sending Israel its young again, and Friends of the IDF alone reports more than $325 million moved to Israel across the war years. The question the book ends on is whether the state’s side holds too.

The record has another side, and the book does not look away from it. Israel honors its lone soldiers extravagantly at the graveside and has shortchanged them, across seventy-eight years, on the day after discharge. In June 1949, a Machal official wrote that the boys were going home because the state could not give them the minimum a new arrival needs. In 2018, the State Comptroller found that the army had never actually assessed what its lone soldiers need to live on, and that only 15 percent of discharged lone soldiers managed to use the housing benefit built for them. The follow-up review found most deficiencies “rectified to a small extent”: combat lone soldiers’ monthly pay rose 54 shekels across five years while national rents rose eleven percent. Between 1949 and 2023 the sums changed and the finding did not move.

The war years ran the same pattern at speed, in both directions at once. In January the state finally made lone-reservist recognition automatic from the first day of reserve service; the Knesset committee chairman put the case in one sentence: “A lone soldier receives full support while serving in the IDF, but when he is discharged he is left alone.” In June, with budgets tightening, came word that a rent-assistance line for the most exposed discharged lone soldiers had been cut, the ministries pointing at one another while the Knesset presses for renewal and the army raises its discharge grants. Recognition expanding, resources contracting: the covenant’s two hands, doing what they have done since 1949. The army publishes no separate figures on the darkest outcomes of service without a family; the civilian press has begun to. A history that includes only the crowds at the funerals is not a history, and this book carries both sides, without ornament.

They keep coming anyway. The cuts were reported in the very month I completed the manuscript, and still they come: from Sydney and São Paulo and Toronto and Kyiv, and from Bnei Brak by way of a slammed family door. Every era’s explanations, Holocaust debt, adventure, faith, escape, are true and insufficient. The simplest account is the one the whole record makes quietly: there is a Jewish state, and there is a Jewish world outside it, and between them runs a current of obligation that no one has ever successfully regulated, taxed, or extinguished. The lone soldier is that current, wearing boots.

The manuscript is now through its final edit: fourteen chapters, Gallipoli to Gaza, built entirely from the documentary record, every date and quotation carrying its source, every conflict in the record shown rather than smoothed. Where the legend says one thing and the paper says another, the paper wins, gently. The famous Ben-Gurion sentence about Machal that opens half the commemorative literature turns out to have no traceable source; the sentence he verifiably did say is better anyway. Publication details will follow in this space, and premium members will read the first excerpts.

The monument at Sha’ar HaGai stands a little way off the old road to Jerusalem, where the burned convoy skeletons used to rust. Giant concrete letters, mem, chet, lamed, rise out of the pines, and the names of the fallen run down the stone in two alphabets, each name with a country beside it. Most of the year the clearing belongs to the wind, the picnickers, and the occasional visitor who stops, reads the names, and understands, or does not, that the road he is driving exists because people came from the ends of the earth to die opening it. The volunteers of 1948 used to say they came because they were needed. After assembling this record, I believe the truth runs the other way: they were needed because they came. And somewhere over the Mediterranean tonight, in an economy seat with a one-way ticket, the next chapter is already airborne.

Today it ran free, because I am on vacation and this argument belongs to every reader. Premium membership is $12 a month or $100 a year, and it now carries one more thing: first access to excerpts from Alone in the Ranks as publication approaches. Every MEF donor reads free, with the Forum’s thanks; if your invitation has not arrived, write [email protected].

The Forum’s desks do not pause. Three pieces from the past 72 hours:

Also this week: Mark Durie on the Kairos Palestine II document, Ali Almrayatee on Iran’s hold on Iraq’s telecommunications, and Michael Rubin on the case for targeting the regime’s command structure.

Lone soldiers in the IDF at the army’s most recent official census, August 2024: a brigade’s worth of soldiers with no family behind them, more than four in ten of them Israelis whose families cannot or will not stand behind their service. The book’s subject, in one figure.

The daily Insider stays on pause this week and returns before the September briefings. In the meantime the MEF Dispatch, our summary of new articles and analysis from meforum.org, arrives three times a week. One click:

New readers can orient with the Field Guide. Replies to this issue land in my inbox, and I read them on vacation too.

Boston · Tuesday, September 1 · Bankrupt the Revolution: The Money War Against Tehran

Philadelphia · Thursday, September 3 · Finish the Job: What Victory over Iran Requires

New York · Wednesday, September 9 · The Tentacles of the Outlaws: Iran’s Reach into American Life

All three run 12:00 to 1:30 p.m. Seating priority runs with annual giving. To host an evening around any stop, write Nikki Ellis ([email protected]) or me ([email protected]).

Clear this week. When it should not be, write [email protected]; corrections run here, in print.

Today’s essay went to every reader because someone, at some point, showed up for Israel without being asked. If a lone soldier, or a lone soldier’s family, is part of your life, forward them this issue; the book exists so that their chapter finally sits inside the whole story. And if the Forum’s work through this war has earned it, this is where that work is funded.

Reply question: the book’s chapters end in the summer of 2026, but the record keeps moving. Tell me the one thing a history of Israel’s lone soldiers must not leave out. Replies land in my inbox.

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