The Israeli Shrug

By Daniel Foster

Wednesday, June 18, 2025

 

I’m proud to be in Kayla’s good company as an accidental National Review war correspondent. Kayla and I were part of the same small delegation of hacks and flacks visiting Israel for a conference of sorts, and so I am a fellow veteran of the misadventures she captures so colorfully.

 

The only thing I’ll add to her great account of our Jordanian exfil, and her Twitter/X catalog of life inside our Jerusalem bomb shelter (which my wife found indispensable), is a couple of observations about what I’ve come to call the Israeli shrug.

 

We were lucky to be briefed on Events — with a capital E — as they unfolded in real time by a number of soldiers, politicians, diplomats, academics, and journalists who, by dint of their quintessential Israeliness, were often several of those things at once. We also had a chance to talk to a bunch of what I’ll have to call — though the adjective seems inapt — ordinary Israelis. I think I saw each and every one of them do the Israeli shrug at least once.

 

Take the bride and groom who got married the day Netanyahu launched the strikes, and so spent their wedding night and the next umpteen nights in our hotel bunker. “Mazel tov,” I said to the groom, “I’m sorry you have to spend your honeymoon like this.”

 

“Eh,” he said in English with a mixed American-Israeli accent, his shoulders moving up toward his ears. “It was a beautiful wedding.”

 

The Israeli shrug is, ergonomically, a close cousin to the standard issue. The shoulders, the incongruous pairing of an exaggerated frown around the mouth with mild resignation or mild amusement in the eyes. Often enough joined by the open hands, palms turned up and either out toward the world — as if to say, Get a load of all this — or held close together and thrust toward friend or interlocutor in what Italian Americans will recognize as a nonverbal Whaddaya gonna do?

 

America, for our part, is full of shrugging ethnics. Look for it at the bodega, the souk, the social club. Even when you don’t understand the language, you’ll catch the shrug inside of two minutes. There must be some kind of convergent evolution toward it. Something about the experience of living as an immigrant that requires a readymade and efficient gesture to convey, Could be worse, you know?

 

But what distinguishes the Israeli shrug, I think, is the scale of what’s being shrugged off. The wedding night ballistic missiles. The Shabbat dinner rituals interrupted by sirens. The lunatic imputations and blood libels of the world’s elites and unwashed alike. The impossible, proximate, intimate, relentless, and daily sacrifices of a civilized people called on to defend their borders, homes, and families from nihilistic murder. The woman working as a travel agent who three nights ago was a battalion-level staff officer inside the Gaza envelope, and who two days from now will don the uniform and go back again.

 

Speaking of the uniform, we got a tour de force briefing from a highly placed IDF brigadier who was the very model of Israeli generalship. Trim and leathery, cap tucked neatly into his epaulet, immaculately preserved Czech-made sidearm that looked like it might have debuted in the Yom Kippur War.

 

In the midst of discussing the progress of the war, he implied that the IDF had a capability to project force that wasn’t being discussed in the media. A capability you’d more often associate with the United States Marine Corps at the height of its powers. I raised my hand and asked him explicitly if the IDF could do what he seemed to be suggesting it could. I’ll elide the words that made up his answer, but it ended with a stately Israeli shrug that said, Yes, why not?

 

But maybe the best Israeli shrug came from a retired IDF colonel turned scholar. This was the first or second day of the war, and someone else in our group had asked him about the prospects for long-term support, or even just forbearance, from other countries in the region should the conflict drag out for an extended period of time.

 

He thought a second. “I would say we rely only on ourselves, trust only the Americans, and everything else —”

 

Israeli shrug.

 

“— a luxury. Nice to have, not to be expected.”