The Hostages, their Custodians and the Observers

I suspect that there is not a shred of empathy to be found in the Palestinians charged with the custody of the Israeli hostages in Gaza. It is immaterial whether those in charge are Hamas operatives or merely ordinary Palestinians who have been brainwashed into looking upon their Jewish prisoners as alien, less than human and therefore deserving of the cruel privations being visited upon them. The analogy which comes to mind is that of workers who were paid to keep the machinery of the Nazi death camps functional without necessarily being called upon to commit the act of killing.

A lifetime of having been raised in a brutalizing environment, compounded by the hatred engendered by coming face to face with real people whom they had been taught to hate since childhood, would have resulted in a blunting of their empathic faculty, an indifference to the suffering of their captives and a socially sanctioned opportunity to act our their sadistic and murderous impulses. Consideration of the ages, gender and frailty of their victims would be obscured by a blinding awareness that they finally have some power over a few specimens of the Israeli enemy.

What I find equally reprehensible, and in some respects even more so, is the indifference to the fate of the hostages now being evinced up and down the line by so-called enlightened observers of the crisis. It is left to Israel and the Jewish people to keep the torch burning, to remind people that there are more than a hundred men, women and children still being held in unimaginably foul conditions, whose lives are slowly withering away and who to this day are being abused and murdered.

There are understandably other issues to command the headlines of the world media. At the same time, there is a deafening silence in the day to day reporting on the fate of the hostages. There are no banner headlines, no demonstrations of outrage, no vigils, no calls to spur on those in government to take urgent action. Instead, there is a monotonous call for a ceasefire, coupled with denunciations of Israel as the party responsible for the crisis, carrying the implication that the perpetrators of the hostage-taking are simply victims of Israeli aggression. This, of course, confers on the hostage-takers a further justification for their barbaric acts.

In any conflict there are always two sides and many shades of opinion on either side. When such a conflict mushrooms into war, it is easy for those on the sidelines to pontificate about the bigger picture. But when innocent individuals are seized, rendered powerless, abused and murdered in cold blood, we enter the realms of criminality.

There can be no doubt that the holding of the Israeli hostages is a crime against humanity. To treat such an act as a political manoeuver or merely as a bargaining tool for some sort of ‘deal’ is to deny its criminal nature. Onlookers, observers and commentators throughout the world are complicit unless they accept that this is a crime in the process of being committed and focus on ways and means of rescuing the hostages and bringing the perpetrators to justice.