Cosmetics and an office vignette

While she dyed my eyebrows, we talked about the imminent hostage release deal announced the night before by Qatari Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad Al Thani. Her son is 18, a cadet in a prestigious pre-military academy with young Israeli and Druze men and women to be drafted in June.

Thinking she is soon-to-be a mother of a soldier, I told her Haim commented that the pending ceasefire brings relief to many families of soldiers now expecting their children to be discharged from duty on the Gaza front. She rebounded referring to soldiers’ lives lost for a war without winners. My just-treated eyebrows raised to helpless mode, my cheeks puffed, and my lips pursed into grim smile mode.

Israeli bombardment killed dozens of Gazans, after the announcement of the deal and pending ceasefire. Palestinians anticipated this, as Israelis can learn from foreign media sources, if they look for it. I hear it from my Palestinian colleagues too. But as expected by Israelis, rockets were shot from Gaza to Israel that night too. The familiar routine: before ceasefires go into effect, attacks are launched against us.

Thursday was hardly my first political discussion with the cosmetician. Like most, but not all, Israelis, we both want our hostages released, and this war to end. We would probably articulate it differently but are both disturbed by the number of Palestinian prisoners with blood on their hands that Israel will release as part of the deal – an issue at the heart of the arguments against the deal.

We agree Bibi should have resigned immediately after the Hamas infiltration and atrocities on October 7. We agree about very little beyond that. Yet, we acknowledge that neither Israel nor Hamas won this war. She takes that thought to the next: “We need to kill them all.” To retain my composure, I say to myself, “Hamas,” allowing her to think I agree, since at least I have no place in my heart for ruthless, sworn terrorists, though knowing their death doesn’t bring peace. She surely believes I agree to kill all Palestinians. If I thought otherwise, I would have asked her to rephrase, but I know she means all Gazans, all Palestinians probably, possibly willing to make an exception for those who are citizens of the State of Israel. She knows Palestinian citizens of Israel saved Jewish lives on October 7, despite others identifying with and acting upon ideologies of hate thereafter.

Jewish Israelis have been recruited by Iran to collaborate on plans to attack leading Israeli defense and security personnel. Their incentive – money. When Israeli Intelligence identifies them, their arrests are published by the media.

I don’t underestimate my cosmetician’s ability to acknowledge that a people, a national identity group, is made up of individuals. Rather, I presume limited willingness, or need, to reflect to that extent, because making distinctions among individuals in a national struggle gets stressful. Yet, her blanket statement calling to kill all Palestinians, like many Israelis, would surely not strike her as endorsing genocide.

Regardless, we both, at least by default, accept the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israel with blood on their hands to save lives of Israeli hostages and bring home bodies of others.

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Wednesday, in the office, I was a silent participant in a conversation with two colleagues. One asked if we could focus on work or were completely preoccupied negotiating anxiety, to see if this time, with Trump’s threats, Israel and Hamas would agree to the deal Biden orchestrated in May. My other colleague confirmed her distraction. If this is us, how do families – parents, partners, children, siblings, grandchildren and grandparents of hostages – get through these days?

How will they cope when their loved ones arrive? How many will prepare for funerals? How many babies were born to women raped by terrorists? Will babies return with them or be kept by Hamas? My colleagues discuss scenarios, and I leave the details in the meeting room, lest there be any measure of judgmental implication, however unintentionally, in a seemingly preferred scenario – for who can possibly judge or quantify how such a mother can best recover and heal.

In this public writing space, in social and professional interactions, in evening teatime discussions at home, and in our media, we are reminded that scenes of hostages returning will be unlike anything seen in November-December 2023. Then deceptive hope allowed us to believe that in a matter of days the rest of the hostages would return home. Experience prevents us such certainty now. Will this deal move from stage 1 to stage 2 to bring the remaining hostages home on day 43?

Returning hostages in 2025 will be more frail, more weak, more broken, longer tortured, longer reduced to control by captors’ decisions, longer subject to despair and uncertainty of rescue, less certain about the return of hostages left behind. Will 42 days of 33 hostages returning be followed immediately by the second stage of hostage releases? Will Israeli government ministers sabotage that to resume war, to defend us, they will claim, against Hamas, and kill them all?

How will families of 65 hostages not included in stage 1 cope? With empathy, we will gratefully watch hostages return, not knowing how as a society, we will cope with the pictures awaiting us, and next stage anxiety about negotiations to ensure every hostage will return on day 43.

Although critical of Israeli media practices of coverage avoidance when it comes to destruction of Gaza, I can manage without watching Palestinian celebrations, welcoming home 1000 terrorists to be released from Israeli prisons in exchange for the release of 33 hostages. But the media shows those pictures. They serve public opinion questioning the prudence of the deal.

Just as Israeli hostages’ families receive official notification of the imminent return of their loved one, Israeli families are notified if the murderer of their loved one is on this list of Palestinian prisoners Israel will release as part of this deal. I have a friend who has been notified. The terrorist who killed her son 22 years ago will be released.

I want to share this in a safe room, and then realize most people are unavailable for the inconclusive arguments. They find safety in holding to a set of tightly packed beliefs and belonging to convictions shared with many others. I say that with sincere respect, not cynicism. I am selfishly frustrated, wishing I could share my angst over complexity with more people. It would be reinforcing, reenergizing.

By association, I recalled a job offer I turned down last winter. In the moment in the final interview when I sounded passionate, the CEO knew I was the senior partner he wanted on his team. I knew I faked it. At the time, at that moment of the interview I faked energy, not passion, but passion without energy is empty. I was simply drained of so much energy by then, by the war. Sharing this yesterday with Haim, watching his facial expression, I said, “you too, are so drained by this war.” He said what we were both thinking –nobody is not drained by this war. Anticipating the release of hostages and parallel tracks alongside the joy may drain more energy. We will face questions of why only now, and questions about the values of our society.

Harriet Gimpel, January 18, 2025