Open Thread: The Problem with ‘Just Release the Hostages’

This is taken from a long reply to a comment on Facebook; I won’t reveal whose post or whose comment without permission. My birthday present to Vern today is that he can decide whether or not to make in an Open Thread. (A simple gift, but tasteful!) Send him your birthday greeting here or on FB.)

[Note: I’m just coming out of the longest and most intense couple of months or work that I’ve had for years, which explains why I’ve been so inactive here recently. I’m back because someone opined on Facebook that things would be fine in Gaza if Hamas would just release the hostages. This struck me as completely wrongheaded.] I think that Hamas was stupid to do what it did on October 7, whether they thought that it would break Israeli’s spirits or even if they just thought it would make it impossible for Saudi Arabia to reach a kind of peace with Israel. This was a miscalculation on the scale of Napoleon invading Russia or Japan attacking Pearl Harbor.

Here’s the problem with “just release the hostages”: It’s supposed to happen as part of a deal, and Netanyahu has absolutely no intention of keeping up his part of the agreement of which the release of hostages is envisioned to be a part. There is no reality in which a number of innocent lives in the two digits is comparable to a number of innocent lives in the four digits. That Hamas should not be holding hostages (usually a tactic of overmatched combatants) does not justify Israel’s magnitudes greater carnage, in absolute terms and even more so as a proportion of the population. Unlike the brave and honorable third (or so) of the Israeli Jewish populace who abhor being collectively responsible for his actions and who support their own protestors, just as he has no intent on giving “land for peace.” His prime axiom is that the world (especially the Muslim world) will not peacefully abide a Jewish state, therefore it must be strong enough to survive by use of force if necessary. And the proportion of Palestinians, pro-government Iranians, and others who need to be neutralized (to use a euphemism) before Israel can theoretically feel safe is probably around 90% (if not 100%.) Only Palestinians who will entirely capitulate to living peaceful and obedient lives in a “river-to-sea” Israel can be suffered to live.

In other words, Netanyahu will NEVER have to make good on his part of the deal so long as, at a minimum, the Iranian government has not been deposed. And we’ll have to wait long enough for that to happen that literally all Palestinians who refuse to completely acquiesce , and abjure any aspirations of living in a viable Palestinian-controlled state, continue to exist.

But maybe … maybe … they could continue to exist in Jordan (supposedly, according to most Zionist the story that was supposed to be the “Palestinian state,” notwithstanding that it’s a non-Palestinian monarchy, or in Egypt. And if that happens, then it logically follows that those nations as well would have to be “Palestinian-free” (tantamount to what the Nazis called “Judenrein”) for the people of the Jewish state to feel entirely safe. And then, when the rest of the world rises up in disgust at this perfidy, well, more and more “anti-Semites” have to be fed into the hopper.

And all of this can happen SOLELY because the United States — guided by Doomsday-hastening evangelical Republicans and Jews who would rather see American society handed over to those groups than unplug the power cord that allows Netanyahu to keep running his massacre machine — is allowing them to do it. It’s no wonder that students are absolutely horrified at the enormity (look it up, it doesn’t mean “bigness”) of this and feel that they must take extraordinary steps to oppose our stoking and maintaining it.

For many American Jews, Israel — not Torah, not Talmud, not the wonderful cosmopolitan beliefs that Jews were force to develop and defend in exile — IS their religion! That’s why “opposing Israel equals anti-Semitism” in their eyes. But — foolishly, I believe, first Hamas and then Palestinian activists deeply misunderstood the situation that Israel (and frankly the U.S. and its American Jewish community) let fester in the hope that it never REALLY had to be solved.

The Israeli experiment — not just creating a country, but creating a just country, one that could live in harmony with its neighbors — has now failed. I don’t see how we get back to a position from which we can start over, as might have happened in the late 40s had the world not had such a fresh scar and no understanding that the affront to the Palestinians was not so much different than that that had faced the Jews. It would have to start with contrition — and most Zionists (of which I am still theoretically one, but one who demands that it come into being and remains in harmony with its indigenous Muslim neighbors) — have no inclination to be contrite until the “necessary” massacres are complete. Then, like people wanting to assure a good (not not too immediate) afterlife, they might atone.

The great Roman writer Tacitus created a great quote on what is happening: “they create a desolation and called it peace.”

As a progressive Jew who cannot abide the desolation being caused partly, ostensibly, in my name, I am one of those that the Netanyahu forces and the AIPAC forces considers an enemy more important to subjugate than anyone than Hamas and Iran. But there is no way that I can do otherwise. villains. Then they turn our caring about those principles as Jews are now arguing against any rule of proportionality, against any rejection of collective punishment., against any of the international law principles that my kind of Jews played a major role in establishing, are softheaded traitors who must be neutralized. So yes — I am for the protesters 98% (I’m leaving out some of the worst Jew-haters who would hate Jews even if it were not for any actions taken by Israel in the past 77 years.

I wish that Palestinians and their sponsors had been wise enough not to think that they were the ones setting the trap rather then the ones falling into it, based on the belief that Israel gave a baby mosquito’s shit about what anyone in the world thought about them other than enough people to control U.S. policy.

Unfortunately for them, and for non-diaspora Jewry, the ghoulish victory now being won will eventually, inevitably, be “solved” by a relatively small number of relatively small tactical nuclear weapons. The loss of the Al Asqa Mosque would be a great loss to Islam and to the world’s heritage, but if right-wing Israeli Jews are hiding behind it like Hamas behind the hospitals and schools. Memories are long enough, and too many people are vengeful enough, to let this “chase them, corner them, trap them, kill them” strategy in Gaza (and soon in the West Bank) to go unpunished forever.

When that happens, thank God for the Jewish diaspora, which will be all that remains. If and when that day comes — and I invite my Muslim friends to join me in discussing such a possibility — I hope that we will do better the next time we seek a homeland. It did not have to come to this.