We Dare Not Fail Our Hostages Yet Again

Today, 500 days since the massacre of October 7^th, truth comes from the mouth of 10-year-old freed hostage Emily Hand who asks:  “How can we think of tomorrow?”

According to a report in the press she asks:  “How is it possible to think of the future when the war is still ongoing, hostages still remain in Gaza, and some people will never return?”

Emily Hand was released from Hamas captivity in the November 2023 hostage-ceasefire deal.  She was kidnapped from Kibbutz Be’eri and people arranged to have her speak to an Artificial Intelligence chatbot, asking for help to imagine the future.

In the conversation, Hand explained how she did not wish to speak of the past, missing her kibbutz, her friends, and those she lost.

“I haven’t returned to my home yet… not everyone has come home safely… and some never will… and my dreams… they’re not always good… so how can we even think about tomorrow today?” she asked.

The Irish-Israeli was abducted from a sleepover at her friend’s house in Be’eri, along with her friend’s mother, Raya Rotem.

People say to me that those who were kidnapped and kept in unimaginably bad conditions for 500 days will, just like those who survived the Holocaust, find a way to rebuild their lives, marry, have children and grandchildren and be productive members of society.

I’m not so sure.  While I am not a psychologist, it seems to this lay person that the experience of the hostages is not and was not comparable to those who survived Auschwitz and Maidanek.  While neither experience was summer camp, in Auschwitz, Maidanek and the other camps, there was a semblance of community.  People had each other and survivors will relate how there was an effort inside those insidious barracks, to have some kind of order that helped people to remain sane in the face of unspeakable events all around them.

That is quite different than living in underground dungeons, being deprived food and water, tortured, degraded and lacking any sense of time, space or community.

In addition, when the camps were liberated, there was a world-wide effort to try the Nazi leadership in a global court set up for that purpose.  There was also recognition by the world that what happened should never have been allowed to occur and all efforts needed to be made so that “never again” would the world stand idly by as a madman went berserk on a whole people.

But after Gaza, we are facing an entirely different reality.  The world has accused us, the nation for whom the word genocide was defined, as having committed genocide in Gaza.  We, who were slaughtered just because we are living in Israel as Jews, are seen as the oppressors.  And even worse, not only will there be no trials for those who perpetrated this massacre against us, but we ourselves cannot even make a decision to empower a state commission of inquiry to find out what went wrong and who was at fault.

So how do the former hostages who have survived deal with all of this?  How do they take all of these facts and move on.   They don’t.

In an article this week in the Jerusalem Post, Freed hostage Noa Argamani said she has been unable to return to her life as she knew it after her time in Hamas captivity.

Her words:  “I can’t describe to you in words the feeling that a person who was by your side the whole time in captivity is left behind, and you seemingly come back to life,” Argamani wrote. “A part of you still remains in Gaza, it is not possible to rehabilitate and return to a human routine in such a situation.”

Therefore, on this 500^th day since that terrible Shabbat/Shmini Atzeret when over 1,200 of our people were killed and more than 250 were taken hostage, we, as a nation, need to allocate every resource possible to the effort to rehabilitate those who survived.  It is part and parcel of the convenient a government makes with its people.

We failed the hostages on October 7^th by not being able to protect them and further by taking so long to get them back.  We dare not fail them again now that some of them are home.  THAT would be unforgivable.