Day 689 of the War: Bring Them Home Now
I stopped watching television more than 20 years ago, but every so often, when I hear about a recommended program, I try to watch it to stay updated. Over the weekend, everyone in my circle was shocked by the findings of the investigative report The Source on Channel 13. The report, by journalists Raviv Drucker and Neria Kraus, followed the negotiations for the return of the hostages from the very beginning and revealed that every attempt to reach a deal for their release was sabotaged by Benjamin Netanyahu.
Although this has become common knowledge, actually hearing it from the people directly involved in the negotiations—the Israelis and the Americans—gave me chills. I had to stop watching several times because it was so hard to take in. We grew up believing that in times of trouble, our country would take care of us. Over the years, so many rescue missions were carried out to save Israelis who got into trouble abroad. And yet here, innocent citizens abducted from their homes—including women and children—were left to die in Hamas’s tunnels. It is incomprehensible, and it shatters everything we believed to be true and right.
On Saturday night, I went with a friend to the demonstration on Begin Bridge. The parents of the hostages cannot believe Netanyahu’s choice to continue the war in Gaza, a decision that jeopardizes the lives of their children. It seems that although we thought we were living in a democracy, this is no longer the case.
This month marks 20 years since the Gaza Disengagement. At the time, before social media and in the early days of the internet, I didn’t know much about it. For me, it felt primarily like a personal tragedy for the settlers. As a secular person, I had a blind spot—I couldn’t imagine the consequences of a unilateral disengagement that forced about 10,000 people to leave their homes and resettle elsewhere in Israel. Not long after, Ariel Sharon, who had initiated and carried out the move, had a serious stroke and was no longer with us. Much like Yitzhak Rabin—whose assassination in the midst of the Oslo Accord abruptly ended that process—Sharon never had the chance to see the Disengagement through or tie up its loose ends.
Many of my friends are upset that so many programs are now revisiting the Disengagement and reevaluating it from a different perspective. But I feel that, especially now in such dark times, it is important to learn more about a move that may not have directly changed my own life, yet has reshaped the reality we live in today.
