700 days of truth held hostage

Israel, as both a nation and people, has been held hostage for the past 700 days. As the only Jewish nation in the world, it has been held hostage to the most ridiculous double standards that one can imagine, by way of warfare, media scrutiny, and overall survival. And then there are the real, breathing people held captive by both terrorists and the world’s failings.

It was always sickly ironic that the haranguing “all eyes on” crowd never could spare any eyes for the most undeniable war crime yet the most denied afterthought of the war: the hostages, whose very existence is so objectively criminal that it cuts through the falsest of narratives to the harshest of realities.

The hostages, who display the worst depravity that humans can offer: haunting abductions of Jews in their pajamas, bloodied, sobbing with horror, clutching children too young to even comprehend the extent of the terror happening to them.

The hostages, who embody the ultimate microcosm of 10/7 itself, encompassing and exposing the absolute worst of all of its abhorrent devastation and searing truths.

Yet there simply couldn’t be any eyes on what no one could let themselves risk seeing: a truth that could never be defended, and therefore a truth that must be buried.

On a day that has become so perverted and propagandized, the reality of the hostages is a shining marquee of the impossible to deny horror that took place. And the reason why it is so easy to see the horror is the very reason why it has to be hidden from sight.

The hostages completely blew open the truth of the victims from which so many have turned away. They showed that these stolen hostages were peace loving civilians, not genocidal colonizers. Kibbutz dwellers and festival attendees, not war criminals. They demonstrated both the targeting of families and those of literally every age, as there was no discriminating when it came to stealing Jews. More than anything, they exposed the most denied truth of all: that they were fellow human beings. Humans, who were one moment sleeping soundly, and the next having their entire lives ripped from them.

And by exposing who exactly was attacked, the truth about the attackers themselves was exposed as well.

The only reason we ever even knew the extent of the terror experienced that day is because someone made the choice to literally stand there with a camera, sadistically filming each moment of agony to publicize, as they believed so much in their cause that it should be preserved forever.

Every second of horrific footage not only exposed the victims, but the true, irredeemable nature of the victimizers as well. Every second showed that these thieves were not freedom fighters when fighting and stealing the freedom of mere children. They were not passive, devoid-of-agency souls when actively seeking out families to terrorize. And they were certainly not justified in their “resistance” when parents couldn’t even resist because their children were at gunpoint.

But perhaps even more damning than the truth of what they are not is the truth of what they are. These abductors were not only Hamas militants, but the very civilians of Gaza that the world dotes on, exposing an all too insidious truth: that almost half of the Gazans who broke into and pillaged Israel were simply “civilians,” that there is no true delineation between labels of terrorist and civilian, and that terror through Jew hatred is not only woven into this society, but the core feature of it.

In revealing the bare truths of the hostages and the hostage thieves, the hostages didn’t just shine a spotlight on the raw reality of the massacre and the timeless ideology of loathing behind it. It absolutely eviscerated the predominantly preferred and pushed Israel-as-oppressor and Palestine-as-victim narrative.

Therefore, like all such dangerous and unacceptable honesty, it must be hidden, gaslit, and perverted at any cost. And so these victims didn’t just reveal the vilest of the antisemitism that has lived among us…they unveiled the actual abyss of inhumanity.

In derangement seemingly reserved specifically for Jew-hate, hostage posters had to be grotesquely defaced and violently torn down, as it literally burned to see the faces of those who disproved everything. Lies were spun and narratives were spread, from “no evidence” of abduction to being fully deserving of it. Children were now guilty of being ethnic cleansers. A literal baby was now a literal Nazi. And mothers bore the ultimate crime by daring to bear future Zionists.

As viscerally sickening as it was to watch the perverse propaganda play out, it was inevitable. The hostages’ stories always had to be utterly belittled and denied in their savagery, because to admit the reality of their suffering is to concede the existence of humanity. Obviously this is a completely unacceptable and dangerous truth to even flirt with acknowledging, as it clashes with the entire goal of severing Jews from the ability to possess humanity. And if one can reattach humanity to us, one is then left with the complication of pesky empathy for those worthy of compassion. Therefore, anything and everything became fair game in order to suppress the brutality that could never be allowed to be seen.

While the hostages certainly brought the biggest bigots into full view, their perfect victimhood and hideous treatment should have elicited universal sympathy from the majority of the world. Their stories had everything to tug at the human heart. It was literally the easiest, bare minimum way, served up on a silver platter, to provide some sort of sympathy or solidarity with those victimized by the depths of evil. And yet, despite all that, somehow the squeamish world simply could not bring itself to make the effort.

So in this, the hostages exposed an even greater truth: the height of global apathy and the rock bottom of societal failing, to levels we didn’t realize even existed.

As we’ve gravely learned over this time, there are a few sobering truths that have plainly surfaced. Many people’s internal concern and external support is contingent upon the political temperature of the victim, and many people simply do not care at all. When it comes down to it, too many simply expect this situation for Jews, both in Israel and abroad. Whether that is because they either are so numb to jihadist violence by now that they genuinely believe it is just a normal part of life “over there” which requires toleration, or perhaps just assume that we must have had it coming…Jews are very simply not seen as full-fledged people deserving of complete and equal empathy, security, and liberty.

Each time another piece of violent evidence has been released over the months, I’ve wondered whether this might be the one that makes more of a difference, if this one is the one that will restore humanity in others’ eyes. But as time has moved along, this humanity of these hostages had to be ignored and denied for yet another reason: it would confess a gross void of one’s own if the choice were made to never act on knowledge of others’ dehumanization.

Even after the horror films of the abductions were made public, after coffins of children were paraded around, labeled with “date arrested,” after humans have emerged skin and bones, after testimony was offered to the world that would make horror authors blush…

…the depressing truth is that the average person will still choose to not recognize the horror at this point, because it would mean admitting complicity to themselves in that they have made the choice to ignore it for 700 days.

This still is and will always be the most excruciating part of all of this madness.

Yes, there will always exist raging bigots of every variety in the human population, and their actions will always be enraging. Yet hate is nothing new to any of us, and so we’ve all adapted in our own ways of coping in order to lessen the blow of each time.

What is so much worse is the compounding apathy that is so much greater in size and in difficulty to fight. Yes, everyone has daily lives to live, but we all live them carrying the knowledge of these victims who were not allowed to live their own. No one within this comfortably western world should get away without sharing the burden of those forcibly hidden from public sight, especially when those closest have to retraumatize themselves daily to have any shred of awareness shared.

Shame on the world for tasking such a small community with the ridiculous onus of having to constantly stress that these Jews even exist as hostages…and as fellow human beings.

Shame on the world for placing more value and humanity on their abductors, captors, and murderers than they and their families ever received, allowing Hamas to not just tunnel through Gaza, but through all of modern society.

Shame on the world for entombing not only these humans, but morality itself.

We can never look the other way on this. People may have made the choice to turn away, yet we must always stare this straight in the face. And so in the end, the hostages have truly unearthed a reality from which we can never come back.

None of us can coexist, nor should ever have to, with those who deem stealing babies, families, or any human being as justified. Israel cannot tolerate living next to a society which has built its own entirely upon the desire for another’s demise. The West cannot accept living among people that not only cheer this evil in our streets but defend it in our government. Any innocent ideas otherwise have been buried deep in the tunnels with those stolen from earth.

As Hamas’ hostage videos always insidiously conclude, time is truly running out.

It’s time for the entire world to recognize that these are not just simply random, famished faces of strangers on the internet, but real humans starved of vital solidarity and undeserving of the brutal inhumanity that they have faced, both at the hands of barbaric terrorism and insufferable indifference. And it’s well past time to recognize the timeless truth that burying the reality of antisemitism inevitably buries the future for any society.

These humans do not have the time to continue on this path of demise, and, frankly, neither do any of us. Because if this fatal course isn’t righted soon, it will soon be our own humanity inevitably buried as well.