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Gefen Bar-On Santor

Would you like to be told what to do by these men?

Image circulating on X (and other media) on January 19, 2024

The trailer of the movie Babygirl (I have not watched the movie) includes the following exchange between Romy, a CEO of a tech company, played by Nicole Kidman, and Samuel, a much younger intern, played by Harris Dickinson, with whom she ends up having an affair:

Samuel: So, how did it start? [He seems to be interviewing her about her company; she has given him only seven minutes of her time to do so.]

Romy: I see myself as a . . .

Samuel [interrupts]: power-hungry personality

Romy: You think that’s what I am?

Samuel: I think you like to be told what to do.

This charged exchange articulates the (sometimes true) cliché that the content of people’s fantasies might be quite different from how they would like to think about themselves or present themselves to the world.

But outside of the riveting realm of movies, turning a latent fantasy into reality can have disastrous consequences.

With this in mind, anti-Israel activists, especially those who self-identify as caring about human rights and women’s rights, might wish to contemplate the manner in which the Israeli hostages Romi Gonen, Doron Steinbrecher and Emily Damari were released on January 19 from cruel captivity in Gaza — surrounded by menacing men, both militants and civilians. The above picture depicts Steinbrecher (in the pink sweater), and the video below also depicts these difficult moments before the deeply moving return home, which many said hardly left a dry eye in Israel:

It is not easy to explain the de-facto collaboration that has been ongoing between some people among the supposedly most progressive elements of the West and these menacing men.

Many anti-Israeli activists in the West would swear on their swords that they are not antisemitic, but are motivated by compassion for the Palestinians — and yet the people of Gaza are now returning to the ruin and devastation that being ruled by Hamas has brought upon them.

The problem with the Hamas is that, unlike in a movie, it has not been conducting a make-belief fantasy of control that one could opt out of when it gets too much. These men really want to control peace-loving persons. They have controlled practically every peace-loving person in Gaza, channeling resources that could have turned Gaza into a livable city on the Mediterranean into what instead became an infrastructure designed to exploit civilians in order to pursue the fantasy of destroying Israel and murdering, raping and kidnapping Israeli citizens.

The mob-like scenes of the release of the hostages depict an epic clash of values: Doron, Romi and Emily have returned home to a society that, despite its flaws (and which society does not have flaws?), generally valorizes liberty and love for the individual human being.  But Doron is surrounded in the photo above by Hamas militants and supporters who have made liberty, peace and prosperity impossible for the people of Gaza.

People who claim to care about the Palestinians might benefit from looking inward and answering to themselves the following question: Do you like to be told what to do by these men?

Because they certainly like to tell you what to do — and have de facto done so successfully in the case of many people in the West who have been manipulated into the anti-Israel agenda (often the only way to experience the pleasures of Jew-hate in polite society today).

What will bring peace, stability and greater prosperity to the Palestinians is first and foremost refusing to be controlled by leaderships that pursue the delusion that Israel will be destroyed.  For Palestinians living under the Hamas’s reign of terror, saying no to Hamas can be very difficult and dangerous.  This makes it doubly important that people in the West will not allow themselves, from the comfort and safety of their homes, to be manipulated into essentially being told what to think and do by these destructive men.

About the Author
Gefen Bar-On Santor teaches English at the University of Ottawa, as well as adult-education literature courses at the Soloway Jewish Community Centre in Ottawa, Canada. She is an enthusiastic believer in life-long learning and in the relevance of fiction to our lives. She also writes at https://oldwildhorses.substack.com/.