The “now” demand has reappeared. Writing on the hostage-prisoner release deal in Haaretz on January 23, Zvi Barel noted that in the coming weeks, despite the very long multiple-stage process, “everyone will be begging that all the hostages be returned ‘now.’” He then added, “But ‘now’ is an obscene word in the prime minister’s lexicon.”
The demand that political and diplomatic agreements be achieved “now” entered into our Israeli lexicon in March 1978 with the founding of Peace Now.
The slogan “Peace Now” stemmed from the anti-Vietnam War protests in the United States more than a decade earlier, not to mention its use by pro-Communist popular peace fronts of the 1930s as well as the pro-appeasement crowd.
That “now” demand has returned to prominence in speeches, online messaging, banners, and posters in connection with the hostages taken by Hamas and other terrorist groups in Gaza.
The value Jews and Israelis place on human life is an essential and very understandable element that properly justifies this demand for urgency. Yet that justification for an immediacy must coordinate with a responsibility for the lives of other citizens of Israel in the future.
In these pages on July 25 last year, I wrote that it appeared as if “the ‘Kaplan Force’ demonstrators… had taken the hostages hostage once again, this time as a sort of wrecking ball to undermine [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s public support.”
At that time, they were prominently providing logistic, public relations, and manpower assistance to the more radical families raging at the government.
According to an “action goals” directive discussed at a meeting last week by the anti-judicial reform groups to regalvanize their efforts, displayed in a report by Amit Segal on the N12 news site on January 23, the revived protests need to zero in on the hostage issue, as it has the potential of causing an “earthquake” for the government. In other words, they will be exploiting the pain of the families of the hostages for their own political goals and actually have been doing so for months.
It would seem that for them, demonstrating against a Netanyahu-headed government has become basically a way of life. For over five years now, in various forms and guises, under multiple names, waving a variety of flags, alternating slogans, changing targets, creating new memes but always linking Netanyahu to the issue of the moment, our streets and junctions regularly have been the scenes of rallies, blockages, and bonfires.
They introduced a form of protest that personalizes an intensified friction between parties, camps, and ideas by showing up at homes and offices in quite an aggressive fashion. The friction they have sharpened has contributed to a weakening of Israel’s social cohesion.
They are the camp that can refuse to serve. They are the ones who can interrupt, shut down, burst into private property, and block the public from engaging in day-to-day business. And now, they’re co-opting the hostage issue, especially as its second phase looms, and the fate of the Philadelphi Corridor.
Will Netanyahu’s coalition collapse in the face of demands that the country’s future security yield completely to the return of all the hostages, or will the few yield to the vast majority’s requirements for safety? What holds together Israel’s society?
In Michael Oren’s phrasing, writing in The Free Press site, the “hostage deal is a testament to our society’s success” in that while the state “failed” on October 7, Israel’s society subsequently was “victorious.”
He ponders whether “perhaps the deal is the only way of reconciling Israel’s mutually exclusive goals of annihilating Hamas and repatriating the hostages.”
While a possibility, what is avoided in public discourse, and even suppressed by media benign neglect, is the current pain of families whose close ones’ murderers will be going free.
Is their pain and even anguish not to be taken into account? Is that because we cannot allow anything to interfere with the return of the 90-plus hostages? And if that is a morally justifiable decision, is it also forbidden to discuss the future murders and injuries that could, and most probably will, occur? As past release deals have proven, an overwhelming majority of terrorists exiting imprisonment return to their terrorist ways.
If it is acceptable to accuse Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich, and Itamar Ben-Gvir of wanting the hostages dead, as multiple hostage family members have charged at Knesset committee sessions and in media interviews, that they do not want to free them all, or that Netanyahu intentionally seeks to sabotage the second phase of the hostage deal to continue the Gaza war and/or avoid new elections, should not an opposing opinion be afforded a platform? Are we not a democracy? Is there not freedom of expression? Or does only one set of emotions dominate the conversation?
AS FOR THE future, to demand political, diplomatic, and military results within a time framework of “now” is to assure an inadequate, incomplete, and negligent outcome. It is to treat the ultimate sacrifice made by almost 1,000 soldiers killed and thousands more wounded in a heartless, almost cavalier attitude.
The Gazan perspective
Arab residents of Gaza may even have a better grasp of what awaits us Israelis. In a New York Times report by Adam Rasgon published on January 23, he quoted a 28-year-old sheltering in Deir el-Balah. His view was that Hamas will provoke Israel into another major war, saying, “As long as it’s in power, it’s only a matter of time.” It happened after the 2005 Disengagement and after every round of fighting since – in 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2021, and May 2023.
Will we win this war, as we must, at the cost of soldiers and hostages, or are we to fight it again and soon with a higher human cost?
What perhaps is left for us all to contemplate are the words of our national anthem: “Our hope has yet not been lost.”
The writer is a researcher, analyst, and commentator on political, cultural, and media issues.