A Mixture of Sadness and Joy
To say that yesterday, Sunday, was a day of mixed emotions in Israel would be a classic case of understatement.
On the joyous side, we witnessed the return of three young women who were taken captive by Hamas on October 7, 2023 and have been living under incredibly inhuman conditions for over 15 months…..it is a wonder that they survived. Clearly their relative youth, good physical condition, incredible (Israeli) resilience and faith that we would keep the promise not to leave anyone behind, helped them cope. My guess is, even though they are all secular, some prayer probably made its way through their lips as well. How could it not?
While they appear physically healthy there is no question that it will take time for them to recover the mental state they were in the day before the massacre, to rid their mind and body of the Gaza experience (if that is even fully achievable) and begin to live again. We wish them a full and complete recovery from the trauma and denigration of their humanity to which they had been suggested.
On the down side, we witnessed and acknowledged a series of other scenarios as well.
The transfer of the three women was made in Gaza and filmed by Hamas. Why was it filmed? Clearly to show the world that Hamas is still in control, that they can still turn out thousands of people for an event of their choosing and that they have replenished the forces destroyed by the IDF with new troops. So, it would appear that after 15 months of war, we have not eliminated Hamas, we have not wrested local control from Hamas, and we still don’t know when or if the other 65 hostages who will remain after this first full cohort is released, will ever be released. Not a great scorecard considering how many of our troops were killed and injured to get us to this point.
What Hamas did project in the video, perhaps inadvertently, is that there is actually no humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The video shows troops fully outfitted in pristine uniforms, armed with plenty of rifles, and clearly well fed. As for the multitudes in the square during the transfer, they also appeared well fed, properly clothed and almost everyone with an operating cellphone. So, while the physical space showed the signs of 15 months of war, the human face was in direct opposition to the claims by Hamas of people starving, lacking food and water, and facing death from malnutrition. My guess is someone in their p.r. apparatus missed their cue.
Then there were the 90 Palestinian prisoners released from Ofer Prison in North Jerusalem, 30 for each female hostage release. Male hostages are worth more to the Hamas negotiators and for each one released we will repatriate 50 Palestinian prisoners. I drove by the Ofer Prison in late afternoon on my way back from a meeting in Modi’in and saw the gathering crowd of Arabs wanting to be on the scene when the buses left with the released prisoners. It was clear to me that the group would grow exponentially as the evening hours wore on given that the prisoner release was not to take place until the Israeli hostages were back in Israel. One can only wonder how many of those released will be back soon enough to the anti-Israel activity that got them arrested and sentenced in the first place.
Last but not least are the multitude of unanswered questions. Will we see the release of all 33 hostages promised over the next six weeks? If we do and then release 1,000 or so Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails, have we, perhaps, released the next leader of Hamas anxious to eliminate us? Is their reasonable hope that after this first 42 day phase, that a longer peace can be established with Hamas no longer in power? Is it even possible to contemplate that based on what we saw during the hostage transfer on Sunday?
There are, to be sure, so so many unanswered questions not the least of which is whether our three main objectives in this war ever had a real chance of being realized? We’ve basically destroyed Gaza’s infrastructure, decimated Hamas’ fighting capabilities, and established control over the strip and its border with Egypt. Yet, even with all of that success, Hamas is not only still around, not only seemingly reconstituted but in charge of the population as well.
It is clear that a state commission of inquiry, when and if empowered, will find that our leadership was “asleep at the wheel” on October 7th…..let’s hope we don’t find that somehow or other, in getting us to this place, we had not yet fully awoken from that sleep.