A Promise

Memory, if it could be touched, would feel like an old shirt, once soft and familiar, now worn thin, coming apart at the slightest touch. Promises, too, wear out like this. Netanyahu appears on the screen again, his face marked by decades of decisions and recycled promises. He speaks of victory, returning to the north, and giving people back their homes. But everything sounds like a rusty song, which, after being repeated so many times, has lost its rhythm and melody.

He forgot. He forgot about the hostages, about the lives suspended somewhere beyond the horizon. And we, who watch, end up trapped in another kind of captivity: a wait that takes root in us like a slow disease. Each new promise covers the old ones, like layers of paint over a crack that keeps spreading. And so, like an anchor drifting in the sea, we are dragged out of control.

Do you remember? Because I don’t forget. I remember the first promise. The second. And the third. What remains now is an empty echo, a speech that has lost weight. He speaks of total victory, but what is that victory worth when those who should have been rescued have become nothing more than shadows erased from memory?

To Netanyahu, the hostages are nothing more than footnotes. Details he has already discarded, piled in some corner like crumpled papers, scribbled over with promises that have lost all meaning.

But life is not made of great victories. Life happens in the small things. It’s in the mother who waits, not knowing what else to wait for. In the father who, every night, looks at the door, still hoping for the impossible. It’s on the plate left untouched, on the chair that remains empty at the dinner table. These small, silent tragedies are what hold the world together. And this is where Netanyahu fails. He never understood the weight of these absences. Or worse, maybe he chose to ignore them.

He talks about the North as if it were a place on a map, a line drawn between geographic points. But the north he promised no longer exists. Not because bombs destroyed it but because it was eroded by absence. People may return to their homes, but what will they find there? Empty, cold walls. And inside them, an even greater emptiness. Because war, before it destroys what’s outside, destroys what’s inside.

Promising a return to the north is easy. It’s harder to bring back the people who have withered inside, even though their bodies are still here. Each broken promise is a wound that won’t heal. Invisible violence that Netanyahu seems to have normalized, as if betraying trust were just part of politics. And maybe it is. But we who wait do not have the luxury of forgetting.

Life is an endless cycle of waiting, promises that dissolve in the air like smoke and disillusionments that numb us. We live hoping something will change, that something will finally happen. But deep down, we know nothing changes. Time passes, and the waiting people become ghosts, mere echoes of a promise never kept.

What is left, then? Perhaps only the memory that we once believed. Maybe only the quiet pain of knowing we were deceived. Time is unforgiving, and memory… memory is like a boat that’s lost its way, drifting until it disappears on the horizon. And when it’s gone, what remains of us? What’s left of those empty promises, of those victories that never existed?