Revolutionising combat medicine in Gaza

In his beautifully-illustrated, illuminating new book, Dr Tuvia Book helps unravel one of the central mysteries of the last three years – and the last 3500 years.

Since October 7, many people around the world marvel at Israel’s resilience – sometimes silently, not often enough publicly. Think about it, Israel not only bounced back after an unprecedented barbaric massacre, but it also punched back so effectively, we will be celebrating the geopolitical achievements years from now. And rather than this rebound being an anomaly in Jewish history, it’s a common characteristic. We are the Phoenix people. We get knocked down, even burned, and we rise again and again.

What is our secret? Many wonder. Book’s book makes it clear: “people power.”

Jews – in this case Israelis – have long exhibited impressive buoyancy, remarkable courage, enduring values, and an unquenchable love of life. Heroes of PALMAR highlights one case study, emphasising the combat medical professionals. These everyday superheroes swoop in, sometimes under enemy fire, to save apparent strangers who are fellow citizens and comrades in arms.

This book, however, is no abstract treatise. It’s a memoir and photo-essay because Tuvia Book is not just the combat medics’ chronicler, but a combat medic himself. He’s a reservist, deep into his 50s, who like so many other Israelis, just couldn’t stay home after October 7.

Book had last served in reserves 17 years earlier, when called back into combat during the Second Lebanon War. Remarkably, after October 7, he fought through unforgiving bureaucratic headwinds to get deployed again. Then served for hundreds of days through searing, sometimes terrifying, conditions.

PALMAR is the Hebrew acronym for the combat medical extraction unit. This battalion, we learn, “evacuated 2871 wounded soldiers during the war (including 370 aerial evacuations).” Beyond saving the lives of fellow Israelis, Jews and non-Jews alike, Tuvia and his buddies have saved and will continue to save countless lives, on battlefields, in emergency rooms, at car crash sites.

That’s because, along with the IDF’s regular medical corps, these reservists – tour guides and educators like Book, or high-tech executives, cab drivers, teachers, whatever – are medical pioneers not just brave warriors. He reports: “we were the first unit in the world to introduce the revolutionary use of real blood….” These and other breakthroughs speeded the evacuation times of wounded soldiers from battlefield to hospital wards, improved combat medics’ life-saving effectiveness, and halved Israel’s death rate among the injured from the Second Lebanon War to today’s 6.7 per cent rate.

The ripple effects from such improvisational genius generate better lives and creative innovations in field after field. With so many more wounded soldiers surviving, Israel improved rehabilitation methods and post-trauma treatment. The New York Post marveled in December 2024: “From surgical robots that remove bullets and shrapnel to 3D-printed prosthetics tailored for rapid deployment, to a battlefield burn treatment developed from pineapples, these technologies are redefining modern medicine and saving lives.”

Tuvia, who is a friend and colleague, also understands the power of ripple effects and how to generate them. Beyond his extraordinary self-sacrifice, he has been chronicling and photographing his story, in the media, for others to appreciate. And, struck by how outdated and inadequate some of the equipment was, he mobilised his “Diaspora friends,” raising four million shekels “over the course of 24 months” for his unit’s needs, from “tactical vests and helmets to medical equipment and winter clothing.”

That’s because Tuvia Book knows – and this book shows – that the Jewish people’s power is not just found during wartime and on the battlefield, but in the heroics and poetics of everyday life.

Indeed, this book is a memoir, a singular story about a special individual who stood up when needed and was on the right side of history. But this Heroes of PALMAR title is ever so appropriately, so deeply, Jewishly, in the plural. It celebrates the collective effort in Israel, and throughout the Jewish world, not just to save Israel but to defend democracy throughout the world, while bettering it too.

Gil Troy is an American presidential historian and political commentator. He is a professor of history at McGill University and the author of twelve books.

Heroes of PALMAR: How One IDF Unit Revolutionized Combat Medicine in Gaza is available to purchase on Amazon.