The world is debating sanctions against Israel. I am watching young warriors rebuild their lives

Last week the British government banned imports from Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and the foreign secretary told Parliament that London should have moved sooner. Eleven other countries signaled they would follow. 

In response, Israel barred a group of British lawmakers and ordered the U.K. consulate in east Jerusalem closed. You can argue that policy either way, and people will do that for months.

Let me be honest about my own reaction. I was not surprised.

Not by Britain. Not by the countries lining up behind it. Not by the language that arrived with it. I have spent enough time in this line of work to know when the mood turns, it turns in many places at once. It has turned in London and Paris and Sydney. It has turned on American campuses and in American arenas. It has turned in the comment sections under stories about my organization that have nothing to do with politics at all, stories about a man learning to walk again.

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A young soldier is evacuated to hospital after being injured in Gaza. (Nir Keidar/Anadolu via Getty Images)

So I am not going to spend this column cataloging the hate. Others do that work well. I want to tell you what I deal with instead, because it is the better story and it is the more important one.

Here is my week.

There are more than 90,000 IDF disabled veterans, creating the largest rehabilitation effort in Israel's history. Since Oct.7 and through "Swords of Iron," the number of wounded warriors has grown faster than at any point since 1948, and they are younger than any generation before them. 

Most were called up as reservists and were wounded while serving in the reserves — they had a business to run, a thesis to finish a baby at home. Now many carry a psychological injury alongside the physical one — which means nobody in the parking lot can see it at all.

A 24-year-old who loses a leg is not just facing a hard year. He is facing sixty years of prosthetics, revisions and physical therapy, alongside a marriage, a mortgage and a career he fully intends to have. In my field, a lifetime is not a figure of speech.

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A Beit Halochem Warrior participates in adaptive archery, building focus, strength and confidence through sport. (Warriors of Israel)

People assume this makes me bitter about the boycotts and the sanctions and the noise. It does not. It makes me impatient with it, which is different. The argument has become the one place where everyone participates and nothing gets built.

I care about words, by the way. Enormously. Just not those.

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We keep a terminology guide in our organization and we enforce it. We do not say disabled soldiers. After injury, a person is a "Wounded Warrior", a "Zahal Disabled Veteran," a Beit Halochem member. 

We do not say a veteran suffers from PTSD. He is coping with it, living with it and the gap between those verbs is the gap between a man defined by an injury and a man managing one. We never say returning to normal life, because that phrase quietly informs a 24-year-old that his real life ended on a Tuesday in October and everything after is a consolation prize. We say rebuilding their lives, because that is precisely what is happening in front of me.

That is what careful language is for. Not winning an argument with a stranger online — it's handing a person back their dignity.

And the rebuilding is the story nobody is fighting over, which is the real scandal, because it is the best story available.

A Beit Halochem Warrior participates in adaptive archery, building focus, strength and confidence through sport. (Warriors of Israel)

At Beit Halochem, the nationwide network of rehabilitation centers in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, Beer Sheva and Ashdod, the swimming pool is full by seven in the morning. 

A rehabilitation journey starts in that water and does not end there. Psychological support and treatment, delivered without shame and without a two-year wait. Vocational training and scholarships, because a man who cannot return to his trade needs a new one.

Swimming: A wounded warrior trains in the pool as part of the physical rehabilitation and adaptive sports programs. (Warriors of Israel)

Programs for spouses and their children, who carry this too. Sport at a serious level, which is why so many of Israel's Paralympic athletes come out of these gyms. And a room full of people who have been exactly where you are and who will not let you vanish into your apartment.

A Beit Halochem member who could not raise his arm in January hung a medal around his daughter's neck in June. A warrior living with PTSD spoke for the first time to a circle of men who understood him before he finished the sentence.

Those are not miracles. Those are Tuesdays.

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An image released by the IDF on Friday, Dec. 15, showing fighting unfolding in the Gaza Strip between IDF forces and Hamas terrorists. (IDF)

After 75 years as Beit Halochem USA, we recently became "Warriors of Israel." That is not a marketing exercise. It is the plainest description of the people we serve and of what they are still doing at seven in the morning. Our promise is four words: their sacrifice, our responsibility.

Americans ask me constantly what they can do about the headlines. Arguing on the internet is not the only option available to you, and it is not the most useful one.

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Boycotts are subtraction. A government can ban a crate of produce but no government on earth can ban a young man learning to swim again, and no one has yet found a way to sanction a scholarship, a prosthetic socket or an hour with a therapist. Those things get built, or they do not, and that depends entirely on whether people decide to build them. In a story where almost nothing is within your control, that part is.

The pool opens at seven. It will be full again tomorrow.

Iris Reff Ronen is the CEO of Warriors of Israel, the American partner of the Zahal Disabled Veterans Organization, supporting Israel's Wounded Warriors and their families through Beit Halochem's nationwide network of rehabilitation centers.