Editorial note: This is a Cri de Coeur from Israel. The image above is a map covered with alerts transmitted by the IDF’s Home Front Command. The writer indicates that “I don’t capitalize certain names as a sign of contempt, and yahu is what I call the PM (after the characters in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels).“
App for alerts from IDF Home Front Command
Areyh Golan’s interview with ben gvir on reshet bet [radio] morning news is interrupted for long minutes by lists of the communities told to get into shelter immediately — that horrible rattatatat (I hate it) sounds like gunfire — and the names of places, dozens, read off in a monotone, overriding regular broadcasts. Then, it’s back to hearing this manic fanatic, returned to full power, control of his police, lecturing us about “anarchy.”
To be clear: Israel signed an agreement with hamas to END this entire episode. It was to begin talks about phase two on day 16 of phase one. It didn’t begin those talks and never proceeded to them. I won’t rehearse the rest of what has happened, various efforts to change the terms of the deal, evade phase two.
hamas has been consistent that all the hostages get released when there is a declared end to the war and IDF withdrawal from Gaza.
The basic condition has never changed nor has there ever been reason to fantasize that they would change it. I’ve laid out my understanding of this versus ignorant, utterly uninformed statements that various worse punishments will cause hamas to “surrender.” A terrorist group “surrendering”? Not the most basic familiarity with jihadist groups.
hamas wants the deal that it and we signed. That has not changed.
The only reliable route for the release of hostages is through deals. That record is utterly clear: 137 released through deals, eight through special ops/ military operations with numerous killed, either murdered by hamas when IDF neared or killed by mistake by IDF action.
While these basic realities are buried over by the government’s push to complete its coup, the hostages languish in captivity, starving, beaten, with serious wounds unattended, punished horrifically — as we know from released hostages — for what the Israeli government is doing, and all of Israeli society is captive with them. Only now, they have every reason to fear that they have been abandoned, again, by their country. Soldiers who fought to defend this place as well as civilians being left to their fate at the hands of hamas.
This talk of “civil war” — I don’t understand. Nearly 80% of Israelis, poll after poll, consistently say they want the hostages returned, those alive — alive, not in bags, as the first priority.
The vast majority of Israelis have opposed and oppose now, the government’s coup. The vast majority of society, from all sectors, opposing a radical government of 68 MKs and its religio-fascist zealots in whichever parties is not a “civil war,” or anything near it.
What we incontestably have is a return of rocket and ballistic missile fire on Israel from numerous directions: Yemen, Lebanon, Gaza. Metulla getting bombed again!
The illusory promise of renewed military action
The government that brought us Oct. 7th and numerous failures since, ongoing incompetence in all ways conceivable, brings us this too. Trying to dumb us off with renewed military action that poses an imminent danger to the hostages, when one senior retired military figure after another — to cite just one, Amos Yadlin, okay two, Noam Tibbon — say that going after hamas once the hostages are out will be infinitely easier for the army than with the hostages still there.
Still, this confines that project, for the sake of argument though not reality, just to military action, when the only way to end hamas is to replace it with different governance. But NOT by us.
The expressed concern that the US would not let Israel pursue hamas after a ceasefire, which maybe held water under the previous US government — though I don’t think that was the case even then — is manifestly not the case now.
A government using the state, the whole society, for its own, narrow interests, its survival. I cannot imagine a more fundamental betrayal — though I can absolutely, sadly, tragically, think of other regimes that have behaved similarly. I tuned in to the truly mortifying taped announcement of yahu last night, and watched a frantically mentally ill man rant, rattling off highly selected documents at us. No one but his cultish base believes anything he says.
Getting into the streets, but even more so now, threats of systemic economic action by powerful forces in the economy, are the best hope for outliving this horrible moment and getting within sight of a new day here.