Bring Them Home

Random Thoughts On Everything

A soldier stood in my Tel Aviv kitchen yesterday evening. He carried a gun over his shoulder and had tears in his eyes.

A bear of a man, on leave from his army unit for a family Pesach, he had stopped off to say hello, on route, driving from Rafah in Gaza to his home here in Israel.

The tears were for his country’s future, for the little girl in a coffee shop who had come over that morning and thanked him … a complete stranger in uniform … for keeping her safe. They were for his bewilderment that the ‘innocent’ people of Gaza are digging tunnels once again. These sweet-natured Hamas haters are digging up the floors in their homes, not to build a safe shelter for their children but to enlarge the network of terror tunnels that still exist in the subterranean world below them. ‘What can we do?’ he shrugged, ‘We can’t enter every house to check for this madness.’

And the hostages? I asked him.

‘For every hostage many good people have died, this cannot continue.’ He shook his head in sadness. ‘We believe we are a merciful people … always we try for peace … but they … they only celebrate death. Every day I live with the horror. I’ve seen evils beyond description. How can we meet such darkness, so twisted a mindset with kindness?’

This morning in our politically liberal/left area of the city I passed a friendly ten minutes chatting with a local Israeli about the current fashion for expensive socks, the madness of Trump, her hatred for Netanyahu, and whether it was too much to serve both chicken soup and gefilte fish at her seder. She gifted me with bunches of yom tov flowers, and I bought a beautiful silk shirt from her shop, the most perfect forest green. I was loaded with bags and ready to leave when she said, ‘I only care now about the hostages. The cost to us, it doesn’t matter. Even if this means Bibi stays in power, Hamas continues, and every terrorist is released from prison. So be it. For me, the hostages come first, they must, must, all be freed.’

How can the differing points of view be reconciled? The battle weary soldier who is loosing his men, sees violence and death everyday. He lives in a reality that says the cost is too high and the value too poor. In his view the living hostages have a low chance of survival, and the country cannot bear the price of so many young men and women maimed or killed. I checked the available data and it suggests the average age of fallen soldiers to be early 20s, whilst the huge numbers of wounded soldiers are mostly aged 18-25. So many stolen futures to contemplate, it hurts like a dagger to the heart. I intend no boasting when I say, Israel is a leader for innovation in tech, in medicine and many other fields of expertise. How much has been lost to them and possibly to the world, by these deaths, (and those of October 7) it is incalculable.

But on the other hand, this is a small country and many Israelis have a connection to those who were taken. For my friend the fashion retailer no cost is too high for the hostages to be released. If it was my child, my relation, my friend, I would feel the same. But might it become too much to ask others to continue giving up their children, their family members and their friends … getting close to 1,000 soldiers lost so far. And what of the huge numbers of convicted terrorists returned in exchange for just handfuls of hostages? Not only a danger to Israel. What havoc might they wreak across our globe in the not too distant future?

Israeli society is shouldering the weight of that moral dilemma. They’re not just fighting Hamas, but as a healthy democracy they’re squabbling amongst themselves. Questioning the rights and wrongs, asking what kind of future they want, and if it will ever be possible without huge political upheaval. What miracle will it take to achieve the peaceful outcome that the population here most desire?