Smotrich
Every Saturday at our synagogue in Tulsa, our community prays for the return of the hostages. Some 59 people remain in Gaza, 24 still living and the rest now dead. I have no doubt that the living are suffering terribly. That is the testimony of those who have returned. They have spoken about the brutality of their captors, starvation rations, sexual abuse, and prolonged immobility in the tunnels of Hamas. Some have spent months shackled in the dark. Their condition is a reminder of what happened on October 7: the extravagant cruelty of Hamas invaders who murdered men, women, and children with a kind of savage glee. We will carry this memory until the end of time. When a Jewish child is burned alive, it has a way of lodging itself in the psyche.
In my own imagination, the issue is Hamas. What stands between the hostages and their repatriation? As I drift along on the swell of words, the resonant language that constitutes the prayer for hostages, I picture Palestinian terrorists in black balaclavas refusing the pleas of desperate families, and a government that would do anything to reclaim the captives. Why are the captives in Gaza to begin with? They were dragged there on the morning of October 7 and have been held in tunnels for a year and a half. There is truth in that image and justice in such a claim. I’m sure that our congregants feel much the same. We say that Israel has done all that it can and it is Hamas that refuses humane release.
After all, Israel has done everything before. You will naturally remember Gilad Shalit. Held forever as a hapless hostage, he was a human bargaining chip in Israel’s war with the Palestinians. Ultimately Israel could take the pressure no longer. Thousands of Palestinians, many of them murderers, were traded away for Shalit’s return.
But there are additional factors in play this time. Israel’s jails are full of “pawns.” They could be traded for the hostages at any time. If the reports are true, a ceasefire would do the same. The families of the hostages have demanded that Netanyahu negotiate, and they are backed by hundreds of thousands of activists. Einav Zangauker is the most prominent of these. She is the mother of Matan who has been held from the beginning, and she spends every day in principled protest. She has pointed her finger at the Israeli Prime Minister and accused him legitimately of undermining negotiations. That is the judgment of Israel’s most significant newspaper.
What Netanyahu thinks is beyond imagining, apart from a reptilian commitment to his political survival and the primacy of his party in the Israeli parliament. Which brings us to the question of Bezalel Smotrich, the most obdurate and uncompromising of Israel’s ethno-nationalists. Driven by the force of a pathological messianism and a commitment to send Palestinians into exile, he is also the Israeli kingmaker of the hour. A nod from him would bring down this government. He insists on total war in Gaza, and Netanyahu is terrified of crossing him and his allies. They are the same people who object to pictures of Palestinians—mostly mangled children killed in Gaza—now being carried through the streets by Jewish protesters.
And so the hostages remain in the tunnels of Gaza. As Smotrich said during the week of Passover, they are no longer the primary commitment of this government. Whether they live or die, it is Gaza itself that counts, along with its reoccupation by ethno-nationalist settlers. The same for Palestinians communities in the West Bank. It means that Matan will not be returned to his mother, nor the living and the dead who are being held in the tunnels. Can we live with that? I don’t think so, but I want to cry out in strenuous protest: Not in my name. Not now. Not ever.