Random Thoughts on Everything

Broken-hearted

Since Wednesday evening I’ve been glued to the circus we call TV news. The ‘experts’ the ‘spokespeople’ the commentators announcing jubilation in Tel Aviv, before backtracking. A slow dawning that they had misread the room.

The Israeli nation are weary, distrustful and hurting. Let down by a cold world that will come to regret the blinkered naivety, that allowed them to romanticise ‘from the river to the sea.’ To excuse themselves from actively demanding (as any civilised country should) the return of 251 hostages.

Meanwhile in Gaza the ceasefire party has already begun in earnest. Of course it has.

Despite making bold public statements that inflated their personal success, neither Biden nor Trump, know if the signed peace agreement between Israel and Hamas will actually happen. Pencilled into the White House diary for Sunday 19th, the first paltry hostage exchange offers a convenient fanfare of glory for Monday’s presidential inauguration. Hamas and Netanyahu have much to gain by appeasing Trump. But can they pull it off? So many questions, so little time as the second MAGA games begin with all to play for.

On the list of 33 for a slow drip release, are the red-headed Bibas babies. Kfir, 9 months old when taken, and Ariel his toddler brother aged 2. Correction … not taken … abducted. Seized by Hamas and the accompanying Palestinians who joyfully slaughtered. maimed, raped and murdered 1,200 people. Many of them young, many of them children, many of them women.

For a malicious act of such magnitude there is NO justification. Resistance is not ripping out unborn babies from pregnant mother’s stomachs, it is not roasting a live baby in an oven, it is not cutting off the arm of an eight year old and leaving her to crawl away bleeding, and alone, to slowly die. It is not castration, blinding or beheading. It is not shooting bolts into teenage vaginas or slicing off women’s breasts. It is not shooting innocents who came to dance, or shackling families together … parents with young children … and setting them alight. None of these horrific actions can be called resistance. Heinous crimes, yes. Resistance, no.

And yet … should we be as afraid of this so called peace deal, as we are hopeful for the few living survivors coming home. It’s impossible to truly imagine the pain of each parent with a child locked away in the subterranean hell-holes of Gaza. The pain of each grandparent and sibling, wife, husband, child and friend, their dearest love held prisoner in the equivalent of a medieval dungeon. 15 months of rape, abuse, starvation, assault and torture. Held by terrorists with a death fetish and fewer morals than the German gestapo. How can any human being ever be the same again? Understandably those families would give anything, do anything, to save their flesh and blood.

And yet … thousands of legally convicted terrorists will soon be set free to maim and kill again. In 2011 Yahya Sinwar (serving 4 life sentences) and 1,026 others were swapped for Gilad Shalit, a single Israeli soldier. This is the same Sinwar who put together October 7. The ignoble Sinwar, saved from cancer by an Israeli doctor. The terrorist with more blood on his hands than any previous Hamas leader. The Sinwar who allegedly stole billions of dollars from citizens of Gaza for his personal wealth and an Hermes handbag.

And yet … the Bibas babies deserve life.

All part of the fun for Hamas, is the ongoing uncertainty about the list of 33 hostages chosen for release. How many are still breathing, and which of them will arrive home in a body-bag? If there is a God … please, please, don’t let it be the Bibas babies.

I can think of nothing worse than sacrificing your child. I’ve never understood how Abraham was prepared to do so with his son Isaac in the Old Testament story. Fortunately for them even the all powerful God of the bible had limits. What a shame for Israel that violence loving Hamas is too blinded by hatred, driven by a currency of victimhood, and so obsessed with the pleasures of virgins after death. For them all life is cheap and expendable.