Yesterday, the news broke that the remains of the IDF soldier Zachary Baumel—declared missing-in-action in 1982 during the First Lebanon War—have been returned to Israel. While Baumel has long been presumed dead, his name is well known to Israelis, who do not easily forget those who have been captured or gone missing while defending their country. The IDF even employs a special unit, known as EITAN, to find them, and it investigates cases going all the way back to the Jewish state’s first war. Matti Friedman, writing before the return of Baumel’s corpse, describes the unit’s operations:
In the offices [of] EITAN, there are 95 files still open from the 1948 war. A team of about 50 active researchers is tasked with closing them—a hybrid outfit of detective-historians, not regular soldiers but rather reservists called up for a few weeks a year. In their real lives, some of the researchers are academic historians. Others are policemen or computer programmers. The necessary personality type ranges from patient to pedantic. They might spend years on one case. The rule is that they can never give up. . . .
In the Jewish tradition, families must have a grave where they can mourn, explained [Nir Israeli, the unit’s commander]. And they need closure. “This is a commitment we make to our soldiers: we sent this person, and we have to bring him home.” Sometimes [Israeli] tries to demonstrate this value by bringing young soldiers along in his search parties. In a recent sweep to find the remains of four Givati Brigade soldiers who went missing in a skirmish with the Egyptians in 1948, for example, he used soldiers from the modern-day incarnation of the same military unit. (They found traces of the battle, such as old bullets, but no bodies.) . . .
Each file is periodically opened and reviewed for clues—something that might be apparent to a fresh pair of eyes, a hint that that might have evaded researchers in the past. . . . EITAN researchers manage to close a few files a year. In May, for example, after years of searching, they found the body of a thirty-four-year-old fighter, Libka Shefer, who was killed in an Egyptian assault against a kibbutz in southern Israel in 1948. Seventy years after her death, she was finally buried under her own name.
Read more on Globe and Mail: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-department-of-missing-spies/