As preparations for an Iranian-led regional war have been underway over the past week and October 2024 draws ever closer, the hostage posters are beginning to lose their color after ten months of upholstery and the new normal that once felt so alien and shocking is now taking hold a little more comfortably.
There are still 115 hostages in Gaza. In a joint statement on Friday, the US, Qatar and Egypt announced that negotiations on a ceasefire had been concluded. They called on Israel and Hamas to send delegations planned for Thursday to either Cairo or Doha.
It was time to provide “immediate assistance to both the suffering people of Gaza and the suffering hostages and their families,” it said. Immediately after this statement, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that an Israeli negotiating team would be present.
Since the November agreement, one has had the impression that Netanyahu is trying to manipulate the agreement so that the terms are as sophisticated as possible to ensure Israel’s survival. But the hostages’ time has long since run out. Last week, Israel celebrated the fifth birthday of Ariel Bibas, who was kidnapped along with his brother Kfir, who celebrated his own first birthday in captivity, along with their mother Shiri and father Yarden.
Perhaps this paradox is emblematic of the different approaches that have emerged since October 7: one, the micro approach, focuses on the hostages and their families and on the high casualty rates on both sides, which humanize the individual. The other, the macro approach, asks bigger picture questions and is more power-oriented: How can we guarantee Israel’s security militarily? How can we use our strengths and allies to defeat Iran?
The second approach sees the first as narrow-minded and beside the point, while the first approach claims that national salvation is not feasible without individual salvation. Both approaches should be considered and included in such an agreement.
Perhaps the divide lies much deeper and goes back further than October 7. Perhaps it is the clash of two national approaches with different priorities.
We cannot ignore the fact that even when an agreement is reached, when hands are shaken and photographs are taken, it will take years, perhaps even a generation, for the painful scars left on individuals, collectives and communities to heal.
The emotional, psychological, diplomatic, financial and physical damage is truly life-changing and has shaped – and continues to shape – this entire generation. Channel 12 aired a segment last week in which interviewers spoke to survivors of the southern kibbutzim and the Nova music festival; they are the dor hamilhama, “the war generation.”
The damage knows no distinctions: the survivors of October 7; those who lost family and friends; the soldiers who fought and died and are still doing so at this very moment; the roughly 200,000 citizens forced to flee within their sovereign borders, whose lives hang in the balance; those struggling with stress, anxiety and depression; Arab Israelis trapped in a tortured state of split identities – a conversation the public is not ready to have. None of this will go away; it will take years of focused healing and time, and its legacy will be passed on to the next generation of Israelis and Palestinians living here.
This will not be forgotten by an agreement that “ends” the war. Because a war really has no end, there are only victims and survivors, and the survivors on this side of the border will not be forgotten. Moreover, most people understand that “ending the war” actually means a temporary ceasefire.
An ideology cannot be killed
You cannot kill an ideology, but you can kill people, especially those who have been held captive in airtight tunnels deep underground for an unimaginably long period of time, after dozens of them have already been killed since November.
“I would rather have bad press than a good obituary,” Netanyahu said in an exclusive interview with Time magazine last week. This is a calculation that the victims and hostages were not allowed to make.
This delegation must be the last one. It must ensure the release of all the hostages and the best possible conditions for Israel’s security. People are tired and exhausted, and they don’t want the best deal – there is no time left – they just want their people to come home so they can start recovering. Without that, without the micro, the recovery cannot begin.
