Twice Wounded: A Family’s 20-Year Life Around Jonathan Levine’s Injury
Twenty years after Jonathan Levine was gravely wounded near the end of the Second Lebanon War, his mother, Rachel, says the hardest part is still other people’s reactions. She recalls being asked whether it would have been better to let him die, or why she chose one treatment over another. “You cannot say about your own child, ‘Fine, let him go,’” she says, adding that it was especially hard to give up when she believes he chose to stay alive.
Levine, now 45, was a 25-year-old reserve deputy company commander in the Paratroopers Reconnaissance Battalion, working in an operational Shin Bet role, and was about to begin his third year in political science and consider Israel’s Foreign Ministry cadets course. On August 10, 2006, during a chaotic battle in Marwahin, he was hit by a rocket that tore away much of his leg and also suffered a shrapnel wound to the face that lodged in his brain. He remained conscious for hours, gave orders and asked about his soldiers, and lost consciousness only in the helicopter. The family later learned he was the most severely wounded IDF soldier from that war.
The article details the family’s collapse and long adjustment. His younger brother Eili says the home descended into uncertainty, with little military coordination for the evacuation or for the parents. Rachel says doctors told them the next morning they would say goodbye and declare brain death, but in the elevator Levine’s hand moved and he was rushed back. He now lives in a special adapted wing of the family home in Ganei Tikva, uses a wheelchair and a portable ventilator, and is described medically as being in minimal consciousness. He has two caregivers, a nurse, therapy sessions, and visits from army friends, childhood friends and relatives.
Rachel says Israel does not properly support families unless the mother fights for every detail, and that bureaucracy only passes knowledge downward. She and her ex-husband Avishai stayed at Jonathan’s side for nearly three years, before they divorced and she rebuilt the home around him. The siblings say the injury changed all of them, and that the family’s trauma never ended even if the headlines moved on. Eili says officials such as Dan Halutz and Ehud Olmert never came to acknowledge the family, while Gabi Ashkenazi and Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar did. Rachel says she once believed Jonathan would speak again, but now accepts that is unlikely, and wants families to keep living as normally as possible around the wounded child.
