The Hostages and the Oslo Syndrome

Rabbi Avigdor Miller has told us that everything that happens is a message from Hashem. Our job is to understand it and, if necessary, to take action.

Though many have been released, we have now had the remaining hostages at the mercy of Hamas for a year and a half. All the hostages have been tortured, molested, starved and who knows what other horrors they have had to endure? We’ve been able to defeat Hezbollah and topple Assad but how is it that we cannot defeat Hamas? How is it that we can not find the hostages? Is Gaza really so large that in all this time we couldn’t locate them? Or do we know where they are but if we attempt a rescue we know Hamas will kill them?

Hamas has released many of them but what terrible cost did we have to pay for them? And what terrible cost have they themselves paid?

We must look to see the hand of God here. God has been preventing us from finding (or if we knew where they were – of rescuing) the hostages all this time, just as He opened our gates to the vicious terrorists on Oct 7. The number of crazy errors that happened that day were well beyond the probable. Many people say that He allowed them in to wake us up – right, left and center. Religious and secular – all of us.
But why did He specifically prevent us from finding the hostages ourselves without having to make this horrible deal: 1 hostage for perhaps hundreds of terrorist murderers?

I believe it’s no coincidence that we are being tortured when it comes to the hostages. Hashem is speaking to us loudly and clearly. What is He saying?
Of course I don’t know for sure but here is a proposition:

Kenneth Levin is a psychiatrist and historian who wrote a book in 2005 called The Oslo Syndrome. In this book he puts forth a thesis about the phenomenon of the so-called “self hating Jew”.

We all know about the Stockholm Syndrome. This is a reaction that can occur to people who have been taken hostage and have eventually identified with their captors. The most dramatic example of this phenomenon has been the Patty Hearst kidnapping in the early 1970’s. It happened in Berkeley California. She was an heiress to the Hearst fortune.

Within months of being captured by ruthless revolutionaries, she was publicly taking part in their bank robberies and other criminal activities, though she had been a normal law abiding citizen before the kidnapping. They had succeeded in completely brainwashing her to the point where she vehemently believed in their evil goals of destruction.

Levin explains the Stockholm Syndrome and then analyzes the Oslo Accords. These agreements have proven to be devastatingly bad for Israel. Why did the left (and some on the right) support this nightmare agreement with the murderous Yasser Arafat who continued his terror with Intifada 2 after the Accords were signed? Why has the left kept insisting that we have to be friends with the Arabs when they show over and over again, ad nauseum, that, rather than wanting to be friends and live in peace with us, a majority of them want to kill us and take our land. “From the river to the sea” means Israel is Juden-free, God forbid. And now this murderous ideology is all over the world.

Levin shows us quite brilliantly that the distorted thinking of the left is a result of the same phenomenon as the Stockholm Syndrome. Just as the hostage-takers relentlessly pounded their poison ideology into their victims until the victims took on that same ideology as their own, so too, susceptible people who hear the poison of Jew and Israel hatred over and over can incorporate that ideology into their own consciousness – or rather unconsciousness since they would be shocked to realize what they’re really doing.

Sane people who have not taken on the Jew hatred of their enemies can’t understand the left’s thinking. It seems suicidal and masochistic. That’s because it is. The Jew hater wants all Jews dead or at least in chains. The victim of the Oslo Syndrome cannot see this.

This phenomenon was more hidden for many years after the holocaust. But now it’s mamash straight out in the open again. Yet we have Israelis who are calling to end the war with Hamas and topple Netanyahu, as though he is responsible for the war and the kidnapping of the hostages. They want to surrender and wait for the next Hamas atrocity, sure to be perpetrated by all the terrorists that we are releasing. The only logical way to understand their thinking is by understanding the Oslo Syndrome and the cult-like brainwashing that it causes.

What can we do about this? I believe just understanding what is going on is a big step forward and can help wake up some of the sleepers who have been slowly lulled into self hatred. Even if one person on the left reads this and considers the truth of it carefully, that would be a miracle.

On the right are other issues but that is an article for another day.