Grave digging

In possibly their most chilling move yet, last week Hamas released sign of life propaganda that cemented their status as a cult of death: a video of the hostage Evyatar David, forced to dig his own grave in a concrete hell. It’s no coincidence that they chose to release it on Shabbat, a day for rest, and just before Tisha b’Av, the saddest day on the Jewish calendar, to intentionally add more to mourn on a day already reserved for so much.

But while it stopped the hearts of the Jewish state and community, the disgusting truth is that it wasn’t truly intended for us. Rather, it was meant for the rest of the world, because if there is one thing Hamas knows, it is their audience, including both the depths of their hate and the shallowness of their moral intellect.

Hamas specifically chose to release such footage this week after masterminding one of the biggest grifts in modern history…a food famine that never existed, and a truth famine that now does.

These few horrific minutes were a grotesque proclamation of the culmination of their success: the hypnosis of a world with insidious propaganda, so successful that even when the reality is revealed, most cannot even be bothered to show concern. It is pure gloating over the fact that they can show off every undeniable crime on everlasting film while most will never even care, or worse, excuse and justify the horror. It’s a victory lap that the rest of the world has bought in, once again, to their alternative presented reality. At its core, it truly is a microcosm of October 8 and on, where it has been all too simple to push a satanic narrative, despite all evidence of what is actually happening.

Evyatar’s digging unearthed the depressing reality that Hamas has the world wrapped around its murderous little finger. The worst part is not that Hamas knows it, but that the world knows it as well, yet has willingly agreed to the fatal arrangement as denigrating or sacrificing Jews is worth selling an expendable soul.

It was always sickly ironic that the haranguing “all eyes on” crowd never could spare any eyes for the greatest war crime that became the biggest afterthought of the entire war: the hostages, whose very existence is so objectively criminal that it cuts through the falsest of narratives to the harshest of realities. Therefore 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 as deeply as the hostages themselves.

This internment didn’t just reveal the vilest of the antisemitism that has lived among us. It exposed, through the height of global apathy, the rock bottom of societal failing.

As we’ve gravely learned, a few sobering truths 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. Underneath, Jews are too often simply not seen as full-fledged people deserving of complete and equal empathy, liberty, and humanity.

Each time another piece of violent evidence gets released, I wonder whether it 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 continues 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 world was finally forced to see what it refused to for almost 700 days, the depressing truth is that the average person will still choose to not acknowledge the horror at this point, because it would mean admitting complicity to themselves in making the choice to bury it for the better part of two years.

Shame on the world for making these families have to decide between asking to keep such footage private for dignity or publicly sharing in hopes of some concern from a majority who has shown none.

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 human value on their captors than they and their families ever received, allowing Hamas to not just tunnel throughout Gaza, but through all of modern society.

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

We simply cannot continue to fall into this abyss of inhumanity. None of us can coexist, nor should ever have to, with those who deem stealing any human 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 governments. Any innocent ideas otherwise have simply been discarded in the graves being dug.

It’s time for the world to recognize that these are not just 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.

As Hamas’ horror films always sinisterly conclude, time is truly running out. These hostages do not have the time to continue on this path of demise, and, frankly, neither do we. Because if this global course isn’t righted soon, it’ll be our own graves we’re digging.