In its 75 years of existence, Israel and Israelis have gone through much.
They’ve experienced war and peace, hostages captured and hostages released, and wicked, wicked acts of terrorism. They’ve never experienced a week like this.
This was a week where, night after night, the nation sat glued to its television sets, watching to see if the day’s planned tranche of hostages would indeed be released.
It was a week of watching, day after day, videos of daughters running into the arms of fathers, and mothers gently stroking the faces of sons not seen for more than 50 days.
Yet it was also a week of listening to grandparents’ heartbreaking pleas that their grandchildren be on the next day’s list of people to be let go, and grandchildren begging that their grandfathers be released or at least be provided with medication.
It was a week of reading about the cruel ordeals the hostages faced in Hamas captivity; a week of listening to soul-crushing interviews of children returning whose parents were murdered; a week wondering whether the war would resume tomorrow, once again sending the country’s soldiers and reservists – sons and daughters, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters – back into harm’s way.
Israelis have dealt in the past with emotional peaks and valleys, with the intermingling of joy and sorrow, with national highs and lows. However, little compares to the current situation, where, on a national level, the removal of the metaphorical Band-Aid is being done at an agonizingly slow pace.
It was a week with an ordeal that never ended.
A week of sorrow and joy
The previous night’s sorrow and joy were followed by yet another night of sorrow and joy, and another, and another. This week strained the nation’s nerves and rocked its emotional equilibrium. This was an Israeli week without precedent.
It was also a week that featured many images that capture the essence of Israel: the cheering, flag-waving people lining the roads, night after night, near the Hatzerim Air Force Base to greet the vans carrying the hostages; the pictures of helicopter pilots showing kindness to young children who just emerged from a horrible ordeal.One video image was particularly striking and captured Israeliness very well.
Rimon Kirsht, wearing pink pajamas and among the liberated hostages, emerged from a Hamas vehicle on Tuesday night.
She boldly stared with unwavering disdain into the eyes of a masked and heavily armed Hamas terrorist, and then cocked her head to one side in a gesture that said, “You’re not the boss of me.”
Then, with her arm wrapped over the arm of another freed hostage, Merav Tal, she walked with her head held high and with great dignity to a waiting Red Cross vehicle as a crowd of people jeered and booed.
Before getting into the car, she exchanged a few words of apparent dismissal with a worker of the International Red Cross, an organization whose inefficacy has been painfully evident during this whole ordeal.
Kirsht’s actions swiftly catapulted her into social media stardom. Responding to footage of this brief encounter, one person remarked, “The heroine of the day, the legendary Rimon Kirsht, stands up to the Hamas terrorist and confronts him with unvarnished truth. Then she did not spare the Red Cross representative justified criticism.
Courageous, resourceful women are emblematic of Israel’s growing strength these days. I could watch this in loops. [She is a] champion.”
TELLINGLY, DESPITE the week that strained the country’s emotional resources, hardly a public voice was heard calling on the government to agree to a permanent ceasefire and stop the war now.
All over the world – in the streets and in the corridors of power – there were calls, many of them hateful and downright antisemitic, calling for an end to the fighting in Gaza. All over the world, there were demands for a permanent ceasefire.
But not in Israel.
Not among Israelis who will actually pay the price of not ending the war, since it is their sons and daughters who will be risking their lives in continuing to fight the war, and since it is their wives and husbands at home alone with children while their spouses are in the north or south fighting terrorists.
Israeli life has been turned entirely on its head by this war – the economy has been devastated, and families torn apart temporarily as husbands and fathers have been away from home now for two months. Yet there are no protests here to end the war, no significant calls – even from the most left-wing Zionist parties – to stop the fighting.
In Israel, along with the tremendous emotional upheaval, there remains robust and wall-to-wall support for the war. An Israel Democracy Institute poll last week found that more than 90% of Jewish Israelis support the following goals of the war: toppling Hamas, releasing all the hostages, and restoring deterrence.
There may be disagreement over whether the primary goal of the war should be incapacitating Hamas or facilitating the return of the hostages. There may be differences over whether these two objectives are complementary or contradictory. But there is strong agreement that since neither goal has been met, once the humanitarian truces designed for the hostage releases conclude, the war needs to be restarted.
The memory of the atrocities and horrors committed by Hamas on October 7 may be fading in the world, but not in Israel. Here, they remain raw and fresh and very much in the minds of soldiers and reservists, who, despite the hardships of the last two months for them and their families, remain – at least according to most accounts – fired up and motivated.
There was some concern that the truce and the release of the hostages day after day would temper the fury and anger felt by Israelis that have propelled the military thrust into Gaza. But there has been no evidence of this at all.
On the contrary, the way Hamas seems to be cruelly toying with the nation’s emotions; the way it released Saturday night’s tranche only two minutes before midnight; the way it says it cannot “find” some mothers and children; the way it is not releasing 10-month-old Kfir Bibas, his brother Ariel, four, or their parents, Shiri and Yarden, claiming they were killed in an Israeli airstrike, only increases the nation’s anger and determination to destroy the terrorist organization.
As do the tales now filtering out telling of how Hamas mistreated hostages – mentally torturing them in some instances, beating them in others. This does not deaden the desire to fight the terrorist organization; instead, it increases it. As does, of course, the terrorist attack in Jerusalem on Thursday morning – yet another bloodthirsty case of terrorists murdering innocent civilians.
The nation’s sentiment was summed up well on Wednesday afternoon by Haim Jelin, a Kibbutz Be’eri resident, former head of the Eshkol Regional Council, and former Yesh Atid Knesset member from 2015 to 2019 who then jumped to the Labor Party but failed to make it back into the Knesset on its list.
“Let’s put everything on the table,” he said in a KAN Reshet Bet interview. “First, all of the hostages need to be brought home. All of them.”
Second, he said, “the government must direct the IDF to eliminate terrorism. Without that, there will be no settling of the Negev. This is not a war for our region but for the character of the state: how Israel can eliminate terrorism in a manner that all our neighbors will understand and see. This is what we need to do, not be afraid. Will there be diplomatic pressure? Yes, there will be. But they humiliated all of Israel. Everyone, the whole state.”
Those words come not from someone on the Right, but from someone identified with the Center-Left. Those words come after two months of fighting inside Gaza and reflect the consensus opinion in this country that Israel is fighting a justified and unavoidable war that it absolutely must win.
As the war rages on, as pressure mounts from abroad, as ideas will be floated for Israel to stop the war if Hamas releases the remaining hostages or if its leaders agree to leave Gaza, cracks may appear in this consensus.
But that is in the future. Right now, even after an emotionally turbulent week the likes of which the country has never before experienced and amid full understanding of the human and material costs involved in continuing the war, the nation remains resolute.
In the early stages of the war, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu framed it in very stark terms: it is either Hamas or us. Few Israelis took issue with that portrayal at the time, and few Israelis would say – even after a week in which more than 100 hostages were released – that this characterization is no longer on the mark.•