Hostages First

How did we manage to forget so quickly the painful, powerful lesson we learned on September 1^st?

When we learned of the execution of the “Beautiful Six” (as Rachel, Hersh’s mother, refers to them), on the very first day of the school year, many of us finally understood the lesson we had been refusing to internalize for an entire year. Military pressure kills the hostages more than it saves them.

And we knew that we could have brought them home with a deal that had been on the table. We knew, deep down, that we had failed them, and it filled us with pain and guilt and rage.

And we knew that if we didn’t stop everything to fight to bring back everyone else, we were in danger of failing them too, and this filled us with resolve and determination.

On that day, and in the days and weeks that followed, hundreds of thousands took to the streets, because we understood that this was on us, that the government wasn’t going to do it on its own. And we understood that every other cause, as true or important as it may be, would need to wait in line, because the very first thing we needed, as a society, was to bring them all home. This was both because they are in immediate mortal danger every second, and that gives them moral priority, but also because we understood that bringing them home is the necessary first step to everything else we’re fighting for, the first brick that we need to lay to start rebuilding this place.

After all, if the attempt to establish a national commission of inquiry is about the need to take responsibility, the government and society must first live up to its most basic and urgent responsibilities to the hostages- those people whom it failed most and who can still be saved.

And if the attempt to return the mandate to the people and hold new elections is all about the social contract with its citizens that has been violated, the ongoing failure to return the hostages is the most blaring example of that violation.

If the struggles against sectorial money and wasteful government offices and corrupt and misguided budgets are all about the need to divert resources to those most in need- to those who have been exiled from their homes, to the rebuilding of the north and the south- there is no one in our society in greater and more urgent need than 101 hostages in Hamas captivity for over a year.

If the struggle against judicial reform was fundamentally about the country changing basic elements of its DNA, there is no deeper and more fundamental change than trading the founding Zionist ethos of the sanctity of life and mutual responsibility and solidarity with an ethos that sanctifies absolute military victory and vengeance first, an ethos that we live to fight more than we fight to live.

And if the struggle against the law granting exemption from military service to the ultra-orthodox is all about properly sharing the burden of our common fate, we must all acknowledge that the fate of the hostages is our fate, and that that obligates each and every member of society, from the simplest citizen to the president and prime minister, to share the burden of that fate no less than the hostages’ immediate family members.

On September 2^nd and 3^rd, we knew all this, deeply, viscerally. It burned in our hearts, it upset our stomachs.

But since then, we’ve managed to forget. Our eyes were blinded by the shiny glare of military successes, our ears were deafened by the explosions of beepers and buildings filled with military commanders. And people. And our attention was grabbed again and again by a relentless news cycle of endless constitutional crises and disturbing laws, and the holidays came and the holidays went and then we went back to an attempt at some semblance of routine.

There is nothing more dangerous to Israeli society in this moment than returning to our routine.

To return to our routine means to submit to a reality in which the fate of those beautiful six, and the fate of 21 other captives who were killed after surviving for days and weeks sustained by the belief that we would do everything to bring them home, will most likely  be the fate of all those who remain. It means accepting that we will fail them as well.

Today, we have no battle that is more just and more existential for the state of Israel than the battle to bring them all home. There is no need that is greater or more urgent than the need to set everything else aside- our routine, our lives, and our causes- and to go back to that first lesson we received on September 1^st. When they all come home, we can go back to our routine in this holy land of building our lives as we continue to fight for everything that is important to us. If we give up on them, if we fail to bring them home, I don’t know what kind of routine or what kind of home will be left here for us.