The bitter lesson of the hostage release
This week, the release of several Israeli hostages should have been an unequivocal moment of relief — a rare shaft of sunlight piercing the gloom of unspeakable tragedy. Emily Damari, Romi Gonen, and Doron Steinbrecher returned home after 471 days of captivity, each moment a grotesque affront to decency, humanity, and civilization. Yet, amidst the homecomings and the hugs, something profoundly troubling lingers — a shadow of hypocrisy, moral cowardice, and a peculiar reluctance to call terror by its proper name.
Let us begin, as we must, with the language. Ah, words — those little parcels of meaning that we rely on to make sense of the world. In this instance, they’ve been marshalled not to illuminate, but to obscure. “Prisoner exchange,” they say. “Hostage swap.” How conveniently these terms flatten a moral landscape of chasms and peaks into a level playing field. For what, pray, is being swapped here? On one side, innocent civilians — children, mothers, grandparents — dragged from their homes and held in conditions so appalling that no civilized person could imagine them without a shudder. On the other, convicted criminals, many of whom have committed atrocities that chill the blood. Equating the two is not merely lazy; it is profoundly immoral.
Yet, some persist in this linguistic sleight of hand, reshaping Hamas — a proscribed terrorist organization, let us not forget — into something resembling a state actor. The implication, subtle, but unmistakable, is that this “exchange” is part of some twisted game of political chess. No. Hamas does not play chess. It burns the board, murders the players, and then claims victimhood when it is called out for its crimes.
What is worse, this rhetorical contortion grants a veneer of legitimacy to an organization whose charter calls for the annihilation of an entire people. In doing so, it provides Hamas with precisely what it craves: a moral smokescreen behind which it can carry out its abhorrent aims. This is not merely a failure of language; it is a betrayal of principle.
And then there is the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and its humanitarian kin. Oh, how they trumpet their noble mandates! How loudly they declare their commitment to the rights of the oppressed, the downtrodden, the forgotten! Yet where were they for these hostages? For 471 days, the Red Cross failed to confirm their welfare, their treatment, or even their existence. This was not a lapse. This was abdication.
Contrast this with their insistence — urgent, unrelenting — on the rights of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli custody. These prisoners, convicted of violent crimes, are afforded the protections of international law. They receive medical care, legal representation, and family visits. Meanwhile, Israelis taken hostage are reduced to shadows, their humanity obscured by the same organizations that ought to champion it. The double standard is as glaring as it is inexcusable.
And what of the media? Here we see another form of betrayal. The October 7 massacre, a day of unparalleled barbarity that should have shocked the world into moral clarity, was met not with outrage but with equivocation. “Context,” they said. “The cycle of violence,” they murmured, as if such phrases could explain away the slaughter of some 1,200 innocent souls. Imagine, if you will, this same equivocation applied to any other act of terror. The outrage would be deafening. And yet, when the victims are Israelis — when they are Jews — the world’s moral compass seems to falter.
This selective compassion is not merely unfortunate; it is dangerous. It emboldens the forces of terror, who see in the world’s equivocation as tacit endorsement of their actions. It dehumanizes the victims, rendering their suffering somehow less worthy of attention, of empathy, of justice. And it feeds the latent antisemitism that lurks in the corners of polite society, emboldened now to step into the light.
What, then, is to be done? First, we must demand more — from our media, from our humanitarian organizations, from ourselves. We must name terror for what it is, without euphemism or equivocation. We must hold those who enable it, whether through action or inaction, to account. And we must rediscover the moral clarity that seems so often to desert us when the victims are Israelis.
The release of these hostages is, indeed, a moment of hope. But it is a fragile hope, one that must be nurtured with truth, justice, and an unwavering commitment to the values that bind us as a civilized society. Anything less is not neutrality; it is complicity. Let us not look away. Let us not be silent. Let us, for once, get it right.