"This is not a victory." Damn right.

The anti-hostage protesters have been getting more vocal and more threatening. But the rest of us may still have some shards left to our humanity.

Hadas Kalderon, whose two children Sahar (now 17) and Erez (now 13) were taken captive by Hamas and released a year ago in the first hostage exchange deal, released a book this week about the ordeal and shared a particularly appalling story about her children’s continued recovery from the trauma. She said that among the many post-traumatic effects of captivity, her children have been afraid to go outside and often don’t leave her side. The first time she finally convinced her son Erez to go outside, they sat on a bench on the Tel Aviv promenade. Although he was clinging to her and unable to even consider playing on the beach, she thought for a moment, “Okay, we’re having some normalcy. Maybe there is hope for recovery.” Just then, a man passed by and looked at them, clearly having recognized their faces from the news. And then, just like that, the man stopped in his tracks and started screaming at them and cursing them.

“He started cursing me, in front of Erez, something like,
‘You hostage families, you went along with the Left! You deserve whatever happens to you!’
And then my son, who just a month earlier had returned from captivity in Gaza,
looks at this man cursing me and says, ‘Ima, no, no, please take me home.’
You see? It’s hard enough convincing them to trust in the world again, to believe that people are good, and then all your efforts are for nothing. My son finally has the courage to trust the world and go to the beach, and some guy comes along and curses his mother for fighting for the hostages. I have no more words or tools to help them navigate this world, this country, in which families of hostages are attacked.
To tell you the truth, when I think about this cursing man,
it’s hard for me to believe in it myself.”

Hadas and Erez Kalderon. Erez’ father Ofer is still being held captive by Hamas, slated to be released in the first stage of the ceasefire deal.

We have been seeing this awful dynamic throughout this war, in which hostage families and their allies have been attacked by passersby, by car rammings, by Knesset members. Last week I wrote about how Einav Zangauker, tireless mother of hostage Matan Zangauker, was kicked out of the Knesset. This week we saw something even worse, if you can believe it. Likud MK Eliyahu Revivo screamed at a hostage father, “Your son will stay in Gaza forever.” Can you imagine?

This is Israel 2025. A nation that seems to have lost its humanity. Or at least its ruling party has. The rest of us are still here.

Those opposing a hostage deal have been working overtime this week to gain influence and get their message across. Just as so many of us are waiting with bated breath for a hostage return and end to this war, some members of the government, along with their supporters will not have it. They are screaming from bridges and from social media that this ceasefire/hostage return deal is somehow a terrible thing. Ben Gvir and Smotrich are threatening to bolt the coalition if this goes through, and have already signaled that even if Stage One of a 42 day ceasefire and return of 33 hostages succeeds, they will nevertheless vehemently oppose Stage Two of an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in exchange for the remaining 67 hostages. Values of revenge, bolstered by plans to Judaize Gaza and expel as many Palestinians as possible, are top priority for this camp. Hostages and their family can go to hell as far as they are concerned — which, in fact, they are already in. Hell, I mean. Yes, 15 months in hell.

The anti-hostage camp, such as Ben Gvir supporters but not only, are looking for ways to gain sympathy for their perspective, trying to give legitimacy to a perspective that is ultimately about hate, tribalism, power, and violence.

*****

I had an experience this week about legitimacy for the hostage-hostility that deeply troubles me. I am currently taking a certification course in Non-Violent Communication (NVC) and Multiculturalism with a group of Jewish and Palestinian Israelis in the Galilee. I am learning many useful tools and insights while practicing making peace and building shared society on the micro level, hopefully to expand to the macro level at some point. But this week, someone shared a story that I can’t get my head around. My classmate described an exchange between hostage supporters and hostage-hostiles, in which each group was encouraged to “understand” the other. The hostage-hostiles were encouraged to understand the need to release the hostages and end the war, and the hostage families were encouraged to understand the other side’s need to not release Palestinian prisoners and detainees. Or something like that. And I was thinking to myself, that is a false equivalence. The need of the hostage families to GET BACK THEIR LOVED ONES and SAVE THEM from hell is just not the same as a need for vengeance, or some kind of abstract fear of one-day-in-the-future-this-guy-might-do-a-bad-thing. These are just nowhere near equal.

And anyway, there are so many arguments about why the latter is false reasoning. We don’t know the future, prisoners eventually get released anyway, and plus we can’t tie terrorism to “one” person. (Like, they like to point out that Sinwar was released in the Gilad Shalit deal, but it wasn’t Sinwar alone who caused October 7, and it could have happened without him…. And anyway, if it was all Sinwar, why didn’t the war end when we killed Sinwar? It’s all such faulty logic.) But also, at the end of the day, the obligation to get these hostages out is more urgent than anything else. It is real human suffering right this second, whereas everything else is an abstraction. And if we don’t do it, then we have no business calling ourselves a people. Certainly not a people that values life. In fact, it’s possible we have abandoned the accuracy of that self-image long ago.

And anyway, the arguments of the hostage-hostiles is fake. Because we know that the real motivation behind Ben Gvir, Smotrich, Orit Struck, and their followers, is an Israeli takeover of Gaza. They don’t want a deal because they don’t want to end the war. They want to completely destroy Gaza. I’ve written about this many times at length. It’s terrifying, and it’s real.

So I’m looking at these exchanges and thinking, This is not an argument among moral equals. One argument is a morally just and humane need. And the other side is just hate-filled violence couched in fear. We should not be confusing the anti-hostage position with one that has some kind of moral legitimacy. It does not.

****

This situation reminds me of the time that I went to a “dialogue group” in which religious/secular Jewish Israelis, or right/left Jewish Israelis, were encouraged to learn how to listen to each other and understand each other. I found myself in a small group talking about the issue of homosexuality where there instructions were for me to try and understand the other guy by just listening. He was very clear and joyful in his position. He believes that homosexuality is a mental illness that needs to be cured, and that the legal system should ensure that homosexuality is illegal.

So, I’m supposed to just smile and nod at this? Like this is a legitimate position?

And by the way, the guy works as an educator in a religious boys’ high school, the one my son went to. So that was, you know, alarming. There were many gay kids in that class. What did this guy say to them??

To be clear, I’m heterosexual. But let’s say I wasn’t. Let’s say I was sitting there, me and my gay self, listening to a guy express his view that my choice of whom to love is a mental disease and that I need “fixing”? And I was encouraged to try and sit comfortably with that and learn to understand him, his own needs and values. How would that conversation have gone?

The answer is, it wouldn’t have. Because it would not have been a dialogue between two equal moral positions. It would have been one person threatening another. He was totally safe — ergo his smile and happy demeanor — while the other person was under attack. That’s not dialogue. That’s violence.

That event happened around a month or two ago, and was an exercise in getting Israelis to understand each other. And note that there were no Palestinians in the room, so it didn’t even recognize the depth of dehumanization practices taking place in Israeli culture. Even in this Jew-only space, certain groups were unsafe.

I think about this exchange in the context of today’s so-called public debate about the hostage deal. It’s not two morally equal positions of two groups that need to “understand” each other. There is one group with a moral imperative — end the war and get the hostages out — and another group that is rooted in callousness, dehumanization of the other, tribalism, fear, and thirst for power. That’s it.

****

Nevertheless, in the attempt to gain some kind of moral grounding and legitimacy, the anti-hostage group seems to be leaning heavily on language of “victory”, talking about how this deal means that Israel has failed to achieve its goal of “complete victory”. To wit, new signs along the Ayalon Highway read, “This is not victory”.

“This is not victory…This is not victory… This is not victory…” The latest signs on the Ayalon highway representing the anti-hostage-deal bloc.

To which anyone paying attention will likely respond, “Of course it’s not victory.” There is no such thing as victory here. We are all losers.

Gazans have lost an incalculable amount in this war — 45,000+ dead, including 15,000 babies and some entire families, 2 million people displaced, entire neighborhoods razed, in some places 90% of buildings are now in rubble, spread of diseases, most hospitals destroyed, most schools destroyed, and so much death that many people have not been given proper funerals, and the mountains of rubble will take years to clear because they are full of bodies and explosive materials.

From an Israeli perspective, the war has not brought us any closer to a normal life, or safety, or security. All that bombing — and for what, exactly? All those lost lives of soldiers, all the injured, all the disrupted lives of reservist families, and for what exactly? Are we better off now than we were on October 6? Have we fixed the problem that caused all this? Have we even addressed it? Not even close. We have sacrificed so much — so many lives lost in the war, so many injured, so many with PTSD, so many people whose lives are ruined from this war. There is no victory here. Only pain.

Plus, the war has only escalated the violence and hatred, and legitimized continued bloodshed. Insane amounts of bloodshed. Not surprisingly, the war has already cultivated a new generation of Gazans who hate us so much that they are eagerly signing up as new Hamas recruits. Rockets are still flying in — from Yemen now, because you know, why not. And occasionally other places too. Terror attacks are still happening, too, including in Tel Aviv and Jaffa. So much for being safer. And of course there are the 97 hostages have been sitting in tunnels for longer than humanly possible.

How has this war made our lives better? The answer is, it hasn’t.

Plus, our economy is tanking and our international ratings are in the toilet and it’s really hard to picture what life is going to be like for our kids and grandkids here. We are staring down an abyss of endless violence.

But most importantly, we have done nothing to send a message to the Palestinians that we want a normal future, that we see that they are human beings who also want a normal life. Nothing. All we have done is inflict more and more violence wrapped up in language of dehumanization and erasure. In fact, a video circulating last week about a future of peace does not have a single Palestinian in it.

Where is the vision for a sunny future? Where is the long-term plan for a normal life for the people who live here?

So, yeah, what victory are these people talking about exactly? There is no such thing as victory here. We are all losers from all this endless bloodshed and hatred.

The language of “victory” is just a dog whistle, aimed to lure people to one side, like a bright shiny object. This seems to work for some people. But it’s just a lie. There is no victory.

*****

HOWEVER — right at this moment, we have an opportunity to at least bring some relief to certain swaths of people. This hostage/ceasefire deal will offer a glimmer of light amid all this darkness. We have the chance right now to do a good thing. Two good things actually.

For one thing: It will bring back hostages — at least some at first, and maybe if we’re lucky, we’ll make it through Stage One AND Stage two and get them all home, at least those still alive.

The 33 hostages slated to be released in the first 42-day stage of the deal, of whom 26 are reportedly still alive: (from top row, right to left) Hisham A-Said, Liri Elbag, Itzik Elgerat, and Karina Ariav; Ariel Bibas, Yarden Bibas, Kfir Bibas, and Shiri Bibas; Ohad Ben Ami, Agam Brener, Tomi Leshem Gonen, Daniella Gilboa, and Emili Damari; Yair Horen, Omer Vankret, Sagi Dekel Hen, Sasha Torponov, and Arbel Yehud; Ohad Yahalomi, Elia Cohen, Or Levi, Naama Levi, and Oded Lifshitz; Gadi Moshe Moses, Avra Mengisato, Shlomo Mansure, Keith Shmuel Seigel, and Zachi Idan; Ofer Kalderon, Tal Shoham, Doron Shteinbrecher, Omer Shem Tov, and Eli Sharabi.

This list still leaves behind 64 hostages, many of whom are still presumed to be alive, including Matan Zangauker, whose mother Einav Zangauker, a former die-hard Netanyahu supporters, has not stopped rallying for his release for one second this past year. These remaining hostages are meant to be released during “Stage Two” of the ceasefire deal, which begins at the 42 day mark of the cease fire, assuming all sides have lived up to their parts of the bargain. But, menacingly, the part of Stage Two that entails Israel retreating completely from Gaza, is already being upended by certain government members including Smotrich and Ben Gvir who refuse to agree to a withdrawal, no matter how much Palestinians AND Israelis are begging for it. So those are big question marks up ahead.

Nevertheless….

The second good thing is this: The deal will allow Gazans to rebuild their lives. To rebuild their homes, their schools, their hospitals, and their communities.

Or at least try to. If Israel is willing to get out of the way and stop bombing. Also a big if.

****

Let’s hope that the values of compassion, humanity, and non-violence win over the hostile dynamics of power and violence. That we can all have this moment to try and change the course of our lives.

Shabbat Shalom

#bringthemhomenow
#ceasefirenow