600 days!!! How did we reach 600 days?

600 Days!!!!

I remember 100 days and how none of us could believe that the government had allowed our hostages to be in Gaza for 100 days. And then again at 200 days, and 300 days. No one at the demonstrations marking those hated milestones could believe that so many days have gone by and our hostages are still in Gaza.

And then came 400 days – unbelievable! How could our leadership forget our greatest values? We do not leave anyone behind! Life is the most important thing. Freeing prisoners is the first Mitzvah (good deed) as determined both by Rambam and Ramban and has been a guiding light of the Jewish people for ages.
And then, the unimaginable, 500 days! What? 500 days! How? Why are they still there? Does anyone think this is a normal situation? And each day that passes, our shock deepens, our nerves are both numbed and overly sensitive. We question every day, every hour where our country is going? We think, how can we send our children to the army when the army and our government have abandoned their commitment to us that our children will not be left behind under any circumstances?

And now 600 days! 600 days! I try to understand this number. How many months is that? We have passed a year, passed a year and a half. Are we really, unimaginably on our way to 2 years?

I think of Gilad Schalit and his 5 years and 4 months in captivity, until Netanyahu was finally ready to make a deal and bring him home. I think about David Meidan, the newly appointed coordinator for missing and captive soldiers and how he asked Netanyahu what his mandate is. Netanyahu said 3 words that he refused to say before – “Bring him home”. (I know the intimate details through my brother who worked directly with David Meidan to bring Gilad home).

In the past 600 days, Netanyahu has refused to utter those three most important words “Bring them home” and has never given any of the negotiators a mandate to make the deal to bring them all home.

For 600 days, Netanyahu, who has made himself an autocrat with the support of his corrupted coalition, is the single voice to make all decisions about the hostages. He only brings the issue to his cabinet knowing they will vote against a deal, so he can say that it wasn’t him but his duly elected government. The big problem is that he is an autocrat who is led by the nose by his extremist messianic coalition partners who have made no secret that the hostages don’t mean anything to them and if they die, that is the price of war.

Together, this trio, Netanyahu, Smotrich and Ben Gvir, succeeded in turning the hostages issue from a national crisis into a political issue. So anyone who supports the hostages and their families and calls for a deal to bring the hostages home and end the war is called a traitor, a leftist, an anti Netanyahu Hamas supporter. They have made the unfathomable a distorted reality. But they have lost. Despite the multiple poison machines that they manage, the strongest being the Netanyahu family poison machine which is partnered with the Prime Minister’s Office, the majority of Israelis want the hostages to be brought home in a single deal and end the war.

In the latest polls, the majority of the population know that the continuation of the war is for Netanyahu’s personal political survival and not for the hostages and not for the security of the country.

The problem is that this majority has no power until the elections, which are currently scheduled for October 2026, which is far too late. At least that is how many feel, but it’s not correct. If we had a million protesters in the streets on a regular basis, it wouldn’t move Netanyahu but it would move others in the coalition. They would start feeling the pressure on the street and within their voting populations and would recognize that early elections must happen. A million people would have the power to make the change.

And this change would also bring about a change with the hostages and the war. If we were facing early elections, Netanyahu, together with his PR and political advisors, would stitch together the deal to bring home all the hostages and end the war. He would create a new narrative that he succeeded in achieving all of his goals for the war and that we have reached his “Total Victory” which has purposely never been defined and kept elusive so Netanyahu could never be held at his word or have said about him that his “Total victory” was not achieved. It will be achieved whenever Netanyahu says it is as he is the only one who knows what it means. With early elections within 3 months of its declaration, Netanyahu would be announcing from every podium, from every shuk (market place), on every channel that he, and only he and his sticking to his goals brought the country the “Total victory” and with it, the hostages home. He will try to show that keeping the hostages in Gaza was only due to Hamas’ refusal to make a deal and that he did everything in his power to bring them home. Fortunately, very few people outside of his cult will buy his disingenuous narrative. Most of us know that it is all lies and that he, and he alone is responsible for the hostages being left in captivity in Gaza for so long and for the deaths of so many hostages who were killed in captivity. They all could have been brought home in November 2023 with the first hostage deal. No one will forget that Netanyahu broke that deal and went back to fighting, leaving behind most of the hostages. If he was a true leader who put the good of the people and the nation before everything else, all of the hostages would have been brought home then. We would never have reached 100 days, 200, 300, 400, 500, and now 600 days that they are in literal hell. It never should have happened. Netanyahu abandoned them on October 7 and 600 days later, they are still abandoned. #BRING THEM HOME NOW!

“I’ve never met them,
But I miss them.
I’ve never met them,
but I think of them every second.
I’ve never met them,
but they are my family.
BRING THEM HOME NOW!!!”