Helpless

One full year. What goes on in the minds of hostages still alive in Gaza?

By now they must have understood that their government – the State of Israel! – will not bring them back home. Some of them at least must have grasped that this government will not attempt anything that may jeopardize its own survival to bring them home. Their feeling of helplessness must be unfathomable.

What has happened to them was as unimaginable on October 6 last year as any terror attack on Israeli soil on the scale of October 7. But both have happened, and since last November, we haven’t seen any level of pressure from anywhere on this government resulting in the hostages’ rescue, or any actions likely to bring even a single member of this coalition to reckoning. Which means, at least for the time being, that once unthinkable events – events that go against Israel’s DNA in the most radical fashion – can now happen, and Israel will, essentially, move on.

That Netanyahu has done everything possible to torpedo those cease-fire negotiations that could have brought the hostages home should by now be plain to all Israelis. (Sadly, it is not.) While responding to security considerations that are beyond dispute, Netanyahu’s belated switch of focus from Hamas to Hezbollah and from the southern to the northern front in the last few weeks has had the benefit, from his vantage point, to shift the public’s attention from the fate of the hostages in Gaza and his indifference to it to another war that Israelis overwhelmingly view as necessary and, thus far, spotless. With the broad success of operations against Hezbollah since the pager episode, Netanyahu’s ratings in opinion polls have indeed risen to levels unseen since October 7. Yesterday’s lethal Hezbollah attack on the military base near Binyamina, though an unprecedented success for the terror group, is unlikely to change that. Missiles and rockets raining night and day on one third of the country is becoming the new normal, no longer eliciting the protests it once did. An Israeli response to Iran’s ineffective missile attack of October 1st, if it doesn’t hurl the entire region into an all-out war, will arguably boost Netanyahu’s popularity further yet.

Looking, therefore, at the recent turn of events from Netanyahu’s vantage point, what’s not to like? Can anybody believe that he hasn’t thought about how the spectacle of a return of the hostages – mostly corpses, a handful still alive but in all likelihood psychologically and physically destroyed – would reflect on his tenure, on the responsibility he will eternally bear for the October 7 massacre but that he has, consistently and with total impunity so far, refused to recognize? The commemorations of a week ago may have brought back the breadth of the horror of that day to the public’s consciousness, but the moment is passing and Israelis are going back to the unnerving routine that settled months ago, in which the astonishment, the sorrow, the rage, are receding behind the daily grind of war. Can anybody truly believe that Netanyahu would now exert himself to bring about, more than a year on, the return of the hostages when he has done his utmost over the last few months to camouflage the correlation between his policies as prime minister for years prior to October 7 and the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust on that day?

This truth has begun to dawn on some of the hostages’ families and those who support them. The mantras heard for months now in demonstrations demanding that Israel do the moral – the Jewish – thing (pidyon shvuyim) and bring the hostages home now sound more and more detached from the reality of what this government is up to. Since the peak of popular anger triggered by Hamas’s murder of the six hostages at the end of August, demonstrations have become little more than a dwindling weekly ritual. Bring them home now, when things are going swimmingly in Lebanon and any new initiative to that end could topple the coalition? Bring them home now, when, if the government collapsed, Netanyahu would have to face not just his corruption trials but also the state commission of inquiry he can forestall by staying in office?

No. The path to survival, for him and for his cabinet members, is to stay away from the hot potato issue they have turned the hostages’ return into. Ben Gvir and Smotrich, if they look at the polls, must know that their chances to be part of a new government would be non-existent (not that this prevents Ben Gvir in particular to threaten to quit every other day.) This is even truer of Gidon Saar, another self-serving operator quite worthy of his new minister-without-portfolio status. And what better way to keep the hot potato on the back burner than to remain busy with a multi-front war devoid of exit strategy?

A whole Sisyphean year in Gaza, with Hamas still running part of the Strip, tens of thousands of civilian casualties and massive destruction that may come to haunt Israel, if – sadly – not internally, at least in its dealings with the rest of the world for years if not decades – and not a single plan for ending this war, or for who will run and rebuild Gaza after the war. Nearly one month of open war with Hezbollah, including a ground incursion the IDF initially said would be a “limited, localized and targeted” operation, and a fourth division has already joined the offensive. The objective in this case has been clearly stated: enable displaced Israelis from the northern border towns and villages to go back home and live in safety. But since eradicating Hezbollah is no more realistic a goal than eradicating Hamas, what will be the gauge of safe living for communities on the northern border? A buffer zone south of the Litani River (UN Resolution 1701), because Hezbollah will never be able to restock on rockets and missiles with a range above 30 kilometers? No one can argue that dismantling Hezbollah’s and Hamas’s military capabilities isn’t what Israel needs, but how will achieving this with no sense of what should happen next produce durable quiet? Taking out terror group leaders, as Israel has done for decades, may bring a transient morale boost to troops and the public, but history has shown that leaders are replaced and terror groups live on (50,000 Hezbollah forces remain operational according to Corriere della Sera, compared to 25,000 Hamas fighting ranks before the war according to The New York Times). Hezbollah and Hamas will live on – unless perhaps, one day, the ayatollahs’ regime collapses.

“Military pressure” has all but stopped in Gaza, except for the current operation in the Jabalya area, obviously unrelated to the hostages. The only significant release of hostages occurred through negotiations. What do military pressure advocates in this government think they’re talking about when they say it’s the only way to rescue hostages? What is exactly going on in Gaza these days that may pressure Sinwar to change his mind? Who do these people think they’re fooling, beyond their unconditional fan base who will believe anything that comes out of their mouth?

With challenges like these and after past windows of opportunities have been shut tight by both Hamas and Netanyahu, there is, evidently, no time left to deal with the remaining hostages. The public’s mobilization to demand their release has, at any rate, never been as massive as the movements against the judicial reform last year. Netanyahu and his spin machine proxies have even managed to convince part of his voter base, however small, that the families of hostages are enemies of the state aligned with Sinwar, and Ben Gvir’s police forces complete the job by roughing them up and arresting them in demonstrations, while Netanyahu devotees insult them, threaten them, assault them – in scenes anyone who knew what Israel was like only twenty years ago can easily believe are coming right out of a dystopian movie. So what’s not to like for Netanyahu, really, in the present situation?

After all, it’s not as if there was a secure and stable future for Israel to worry about, or any vision of Israel’s future other than recurrent war, other than telling Israelis: continue to be ready to sacrifice your sons and daughters (unless they are haredi, of course) in forever wars, and, should our enemies ever kidnap you or them – which would be too bad, sincerely – please don’t count on your government to bend over backwards to engineer a rescue because, if that’s inconvenient for those of us in office, it just won’t happen.

Can Israelis, and Jews around the world, afford a government that sets such a precedent?

Two recent surveys paradoxically show that only 27 percent of Israelis think Israel is winning the war against Hamas (Kan News, October 6), and 62 percent believe that bringing back the hostages should be the primary goal of the war, with 53 percent wanting the war to end for that reason (The Israel Democracy Institute, October 7). These findings are only the latest to document that this is the prevailing public sentiment, yet the government might as well be taking care of business on another planet. In other words, what most citizens want has no impact on the coalition.

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Credit: Christopher Furlong

Over the last few months, I’ve asked everyone I know who feels this way why they and hundreds of thousands of others don’t mobilize more, act more to push this government to understand that with the issue of the hostages it is Israel’s very moral fabric and future as a society that are at stake. The answer is always the same: people are drained, filled with dread, overwhelmed by the daily drudgery of the war (part of the point of extending wars beyond their expiry date), struggling economically, worried about loved ones in the military, or bereaved. No strength left. In their own context – which, though tragic, cannot be compared with that of the hostages – they too are helpless.