Protests, Videos, Darkness
The intractable hostage situation gets worse. And some Hamas background.
First, welcome to the new subscribers and the feedback you have given recently. My five week tour covering The Netherlands, the UK and Israel has wrapped up and it was really instructive to be on the ground for a while. Being local gives you such a different and better perspective on the news, the online sources come to life and day-to-day conversations and experiences give a level of context and colour that is otherwise missing.
Hostage Videos
There is always a debate around sharing sensitive videos online and in general there has been some reticence to throw everything what happened and was captured onscreen on October 7th online. But the level of desperation among the families of the girls captured at the military base Nahal Oz on that day has reached such proportions that they decided to go ahead with it this week. They okayed the release of a video taken moments after some of them were captured by Hamas and here is the result, the worst parts are edited out.
There were, as I understand it, twenty-two young women in the military facility and they worked as spotters, tracking whatever was going on near the border fence. They were not armed, still asleep and in their pajamas (it was 6:30 am) and only five of them survived: Liri Albag, Karina Ariev, Agam Berger, Daniella Gilboa and Naama Levy. All five were taken hostage. If you watch this video you cannot help but feel what they were probably thinking: help must be on the way, we will get out of this. But there wasn’t any immediate relief forthcoming, these girls were abandoned and left to the most horrific fate you can imagine while they witnessed the brutal murder of their colleagues.
It may be hard to explain, but when I was in Israel last week it became ever clearer how the pro-hostage position is now increasingly an anti-government position. Support for the hostages has merged, or actually is, a disapproval of how the Israeli government has handled the war and its victims to date. And this is, if you think about it, an impossible position as Israel still needs to apply pressure and destroy Hamas to achieve its war goals and get the hostages freed. These objectives were and still are incompatible. The pain resulting from this dilemma spills out onto the streets in ever violent protests where clashes with the Israeli police tend to escalate rapidly, especially on Saturday nights.
The hurt also finds its way into music. Above a gathering in front of Bibi Nethanyahu’s residence in Jerusalem where I managed to capture Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah sing along, below Israel’s Eurovision contestant Eden Golan who got on stage in hostage square in Tel Aviv to sing the un-edited version of her song ‘October Rain’ last Saturday.
Hamas
A reader asked me about the origins of Hamas and if the Israelis did help create the group. It is an understandable question as that is what many media have been reporting. Hamas got started in the 1980s as a more religious and more ideologically pure version of the then dominant PLO/Palestinian Authority (PA) under Yasser Arafat. They won the elections in 2006 in Gaza as they focused on social services and healthcare, initially to win the hearts and minds of Palestinians. They did this successfully and thus managed to take control of the area based on that popular support. They have a military wing which are the al-Qassam brigades, the group who breached the fences on October 7th and after whom more irregular troops and ordinary Gazans came to rape, pillage and murder. Hamas’s hold and influence on its citizens is evident.
So Israel did not create them, but Israel used the division in the Palestine camp between Hamas in Gaza and the PA in the West Bank to further its own goals from 2007 onwards. Divide and rule. It also is worth mentioning that in 2011 a deal was brokered to release 1,027 Palestinians from Israeli prisons in return for one soldier who was held captive by Hamas for five years, Gilad Shalit. Among the released prisoners back to Gaza was Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind behind October 7th. So Israel in a way has been somewhat lax and over-confident in dealing with Hamas which in turn has strengthened the terror group.
Over time Israel has allowed money and resources to flow to Hamas in Gaza, not only because it is obligated to do so under international agreements, but also in hoping to maintain Hamas as a counterweight to the PA. The inadvertent outcome of course was that it materially weakened the PA, and that as it stands now Hamas may actually be influencing and taking over in the West Bank creating an ever larger headache for Israel. It is the law of unintended consequences and I would not necessarily fault Nethanyahu for taking this course, it was a survival strategy based on the resources and opportunities that were available at the moment. What he and his government are responsible for and what will put them to shame forever is missing the signals of the October 7 attacks, in particular since the warning signs were there.
There were two hostage videos released. It is one thing to look at the video of the captured women on that day, it is quite another to see and feel the fear and panic at a time when they were still free and totally confused about what was going on. There was in all likelihood some fleeting hope that it might go away and that there might be a rescue. It never came.
Thankyou for sharing your insight and observations during these past few weeks. It has been both clarifying and at the same time affirming of our own “takes” of what has happened. The horror visited upon these innocents by Hamas will forever be etched on our consciences . It behooves all of us to stay awake, alert and informed.