The issue of the 133 remaining hostages, who have been in captivity for six months now, is constantly in the news, not because there is any progress toward their release, but because there is growing tension between the government and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the one hand, and part of the hostages’ families – the activists among them – over their release, on the other.
These families feel that time is running out and that the government is not doing enough to get the hostages out as soon as possible, while parts of the government and Netanyahu personally are starting to view the activist families as pests at best and as enemies at worst.
The hostage issue is beginning to serve as a divisive force in Israeli society rather than a uniting one. If God forbid, most of the hostages will die before they are released, this whole affair could turn into a time bomb.
The hostage affair also highlights the current trend in Israel to be flimsy with facts, which I personally find extremely frustrating when I try to absorb and understand all the factors involved in our complicated current situation. We keep talking of “the October 7 hostages” and of all the hostages being Israeli Jews, whom we hope to see at home for the Passover Seder.
Well, the facts are a little more complicated. Of the 133 remaining hostages, two are Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul, who were killed in 2014 during Operation Protection Edge, and their bodies have remained ever since in the Gaza Strip.
Another two are the Ethiopian Avera Mengistu and the Bedouin Hisham al-Sayed, who crossed into the Strip of their own free will (the first in 2014, the second in 2015) and have been stuck there.
Five of the hostages are Israeli Arabs (including Sayed); nine are foreign workers from Southeast Asia; Joshua Mollet came from Tanzania to study agriculture, and is known to have been killed; and Orión Hernández Radoux, who attended the Supernova music festival, is from Mexico.
In other words, three Jews who had nothing to do with October 7 and another 16 non-Jews (five of whom are Israeli Muslims and another 11 foreigners) are counted among the 133. This is all part of the reality, and I do not believe it is petty to mention it – not for our own sake and not in terms of our national hasbara (public diplomacy) effort abroad.
Another recent event in which we were a little flimsy with the facts concerns the IDF’s second attack on Shifa Hospital in Gaza City in mid-March.
This attack on the Shifa compound was undoubtedly extremely important because of its results: the fact that 200-300 Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists who resettled in the hospital after being ejected from it during Israel’s first attack were killed, and close to 500 – many of them known to Israeli security forces from previous terrorist activities, including those of October 7 – were taken to Israel for interrogation.
Large quantities of arms and ammunition belonging to Hamas were seized, as well as documents and cash.
However, the fact that, in the process of the two weeks of fighting, massive destruction was caused in the compound, which has made the hospital and its various wards unusable, and there were reported cases of patients who had been killed in the buildings, even though Israel claimed that it had evacuated all the patients and medical staff to the 80-bed Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza in advance of the fighting, were not reported in Israel until after gruesome photographs appeared in foreign media.
I first saw the dimensions of the destruction in the Shifa compound on Christiane Amanpour’s CNN program on April 2, in which Amanpour interviewed UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths.
I actually wish our official spokesmen would report on events in the Strip as fully and accurately as possible in real-time rather than react to frequently false local Palestinian reports and strongly critical reports by the foreign media. This also applies to events such as the accidental killing by Israeli forces of seven foreign aid workers from the food charity World Central Kitchen.
A LOT has been said recently about Israel’s hasbara activities abroad after Netanyahu complained, during a meeting in the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Security Committee, that there is a shortage of suitable people to do the job and that he is surrounded by people who are incapable of putting two words (in English) together.
It is not clear whether Netanyahu was referring to some of his ministers who speak broken English or to some of his professional staff, but a serious analysis of Israel’s hasbara would conclude that language is not the problem; rather, it is the basic reality that must be explained.
Events of October 7 intitally spoke for themselves
When the reality that had to be explained was that of October 7 and its immediate aftermath, Israel had very few hasbara problems. The events were horrendous and, if they did not speak for themselves, were not too difficult to bring across.
It was only after Israel started its onslaught on the Gaza Strip, causing major physical destruction to homes, public buildings, and infrastructures, the forced movement of one million five hundred thousand inhabitants of the northern Gaza Strip to the south, and a major shortage of basic commodities required to prevent starvation, and basic accommodation and conditions for survival, that Israel’s international status started to plummet.
The problem of the large numbers of innocent civilians – especially children – killed in the course of Israel’s efforts to inflict a total defeat on Hamas and of certain groups in Israel that vociferously objected to international humanitarian aid pouring into the Gaza Strip while advocating Jewish resettlement in the Gaza Strip, further aggravated the situation.
Netanyahu’s decision to refuse to hold talks about “the day after” and his verbal insistence on entering the city of Rafah, where Hamas continues to hold organized troops and an intricate system of underground tunnels, without ensuring the safety of the 1.5 million displaced persons living in tents and other makeshift forms of accommodation, added insult to injury.
The problem of disseminating effective hasbara under these conditions is monumental. Part of the solution, of course, is to give in to certain international (but especially American) demands and pressures based on democratic principles rather than fleeting political considerations.
However, I believe that sticking to the facts in what one says is also of importance under the circumstances I have described. Lying, and perverting the portrayal of facts, might work for the Hamas as a fanatic, even criminal religious movement, and for dictatorships around the world.
As long as we still view ourselves as a democracy – even if less of a liberal democracy and more as an electoral democracy – we should try to stick to facts, even if we sometimes have difficulty in agreeing among ourselves what the facts are.
The writer worked as a researcher in the Knesset for many years and has published extensively journalistic and academic articles on current affairs and Israeli politics. Her most recent book, Israel’s Knesset Members—A Comparative Study of an Undefined Job, was published by Routledge.