When Israeli journalist legend Roni Daniel died, what died with him?

Using the entire opening quarter-hour of their primetime show, Channel 12 News’ anchors, correspondents and commentators took turns eulogizing military correspondent Roni Daniel, who died in his home of a cardiac arrest at age 73.

Daniel’s colleagues recalled him with a mixture of admiration, longing, and genuine grief whose warmth, glorification, and length of airtime might have brought to mind Ted Kennedy’s eulogy of Bobby Kennedy (“my brother need not be idealized”), or Charles Spencer’s of Princess Diana (“[my sister] was the very essence of compassion”), or Shimon Peres’s of Yitzhak Rabin (“so long to you, my elder brother”).

Broad shouldered, stern faced and ever serious, Daniel was indeed beloved by his colleagues on Channel 12, who appreciated his frankness, diligence and camaraderie, which is why he was eulogized with equal lamentation by political commentator Amnon Abramovich, who did not share his occasional militancy; by anchor Yonit Levi, whose femininity is the antithesis of the masculine tone in which Daniel reported; and by crime reporter Brano Taganya, who wept in live broadcast recalling how the gruff but fatherly Daniel mentored the cub reporter who arrived from Ethiopia at age nine.

Yes, Roni Daniel was the tribal chief of Channel 12 News. That is why his death shocked the colleagues who were ready to share with him tonight’s scoop and tomorrow’s exposé.

Still, this does not explain the prominent and extensive eulogies not only on Channel 12, but also on the two competing channels as well as on all radio stations, all news sites and all dailies’ front pages the following morning.

This is beside farewell statements by President Isaac Herzog, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, Defense Minister Benny Gantz, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Aviv Kohavi and a slew of retired generals. What, then, made Israel salute Roni Daniel in his death, the way it never did in his life?

THOUGH THESE will not answer our question, there were good reasons to admire Roni Daniel.

As a military correspondent, Daniel broadcast for 28 years from countless battle scenes in Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank and multiple terror scenes throughout Israel, displaying conviction, expertise and, at times, also courage.

In a famous moment in Sderot in 2014, a siren went off in the middle of his live broadcast warning of approaching rockets, and thus sending all about him running for cover. Not Daniel, who stood tall and continued reporting, refusing to abandon his position lest such footage help sow public panic.

Daniel also understood the military situations he witnessed. Having been an infantry officer and battalion commander, the colonels and generals he debriefed in the field felt he was one of them, which he indeed was. That alone made Daniel and his situation uniquely Israeli.

PETER ARNETT, the famous CNN war correspondent who broke journalistic ground with live coverage of the Vietnam and First Gulf wars, was never a soldier, not to mention the American and European journalists who covered this century’s wars.

Daniel, by contrast, was equipped, and more than willing, to argue with IDF brass in the field about non-journalistic dilemmas like where to position a particular outpost.

Much more significantly, Daniel embodied the Israeli dream, having been born in Baghdad and journeyed at age three with his recently widowed mother to the newborn Jewish state, where they landed penniless in Kibbutz Maoz Haim.

The product of this exodus became a farmer-warrior, a kibbutznik smelted in the Beit She’an Valley’s scorching heat; a combat commander who was wounded while fighting in the Sinai during the Six Day War; a consummate military correspondent who joined the Golani Brigade’s uphill conquest of Mt. Hermon during the Yom Kippur War; a conscientious reporter who several weeks before his death did a poetic segment about farmers struggling with market pressures and cultural change; an involved commentator whose disgust with the politically crooked removal of defense minister and fellow farmer-warrior Moshe Ya’alon made him fume on air “I am no longer sure I want my children to stay here.”

So was Israel eulogizing the passing of the farmer-warrior who once epitomized the New Jew it set out to mold, the muscular, gruff and ascetic pioneer who has since been succeeded by the cosmopolitan, rich and stylish hi-tech entrepreneur?

Well this too is not why Roni Daniel was eulogized as emphatically and extensively as he was, for the prosaic reason that there were in our midst, and still are, bigger warriors and larger farmers, as Daniel himself would be the first to note.

Rather, Israelis mourned Roni Daniel’s untimely passing because in a country that lives continuously between military operations, border skirmishes, air force sorties, terror attacks and full-time wars, the defense correspondent of the TV channel with the highest rating is a permanent item on every citizen’s dinner menu, and a daily guest in every citizen’s home.

For the colleagues who eulogized him in the studios he was a friend, but for the rest of his eulogizers he was a relative, a partner whose life intertwined with theirs not because of either side’s choice, but because of both sides’ fate.

War correspondents elsewhere are admired as would-be Hemingways and Tolstoys, as painters of war’s exoticism, inspiration and mystique. That is not what they are in Israel. Here war is everyone’s wicked neighbor, just like its reporter is everyone’s brother, and its casualty is everyone’s child.

That is why so many of us felt a sense of personal loss with Roni Daniel’s passing. Listening somberly to his colleagues’ heartfelt tributes, thousands of Middle Israelis said nothing, and yet could hear each other say: Roni is gone, but the warring that fed his illustrious career – lives on.