Where Are We?
Hostages To Fortune
Links follow text.
I’ve been debating how far to go. In war, truth is so precious, bodyguard of lies, yada yada. But I’m tired of the propaganda. I reached a limit a few days ago. I’ve had it.
This is how I see where we are. We are all hostages now. Hostages to fortune, because we don’t look at the facts. The more you don’t look at the facts you flee into a fantasy world. Eventually reality bites you in the ass, as it did on October 7, 2023.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas perceived a weakness in Israel and attacked it. In addition to the torture, butchery, mayhem and murder, about 240 hostages were taken into Gaza. Brilliant move, if you look at history.
There’s a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas predicated on the release of the Israeli hostages. Israel stops bombing in exchange for its hostages. That’s what I read and that was wrong. The “exchange” is this: Israel gets some hostages back in dribs and drabs. The Palestinians get a ceasefire and prisoners (whom they and their supporters call “hostages,” clever clever).
So Hamas gets two things for one, not to mention the lopsided numbers in the hostage-prisoner exchange.1
Israel has two goals in Gaza: to destroy Hamas as a military threat and to get back its hostages.
Problem: You can’t do both. The two goals are diametrically opposed.
The hostage “drama” has taken over the story, obliterating the memory of the October 7 massacre. People have short memory spans. I can’t speak for others because I don’t watch the mainstream news, but the hostage “drama” has even overtaken the scenes of Gaza devastation. (Hmmm…. maybe Netanyahu likes this? In such an environment, bizarre thoughts sprout like weeds.)
It’s presumed that there are still some three children and some 22 women remaining in captivity in Gaza and some 131 male captives.
It’s not clear however if all of the children and women are alive. Hamas had said that Shiri Bibas and her two children Kfir and Ariel had died in captivity. The IDF has not been able to verify that account. A Hamas claim about a dead hostage had been proven false in the last week.
There is no formula for the release of dead hostages or male ones, with Hamas insisting on a high price for soldiers.
In other words, this good war that Israel supposedly began to rid itself of an evil terrorist entity has degenerated to a squalid haggling session about the price of a hostage—an insane and degrading turn of events.
Hamas has Israel by the balls.
For those of you who say: Israel will just re-start the war after all the hostages are released, I say, dream on. That’s not the way war works. No matter how many Hamasniks are killed they will emerge from this stronger, with their prestige enhanced. Because they brought the Zionist entity to heel.
Nothing comes from a vacuum.
As soon as the smoke cleared, Israel was in a frenzy about the hostages.
Gal Gadot’s Instagram account has featured nothing else since October 7. Big Hollywood movie star she may be, but in every other way she’s a typical middle-class Israeli “hiloni.”2 representing average Israeli psychology on this. Even leftie Natalie Portman put something on her Insta account about the hostages.
A bunch of Lululemon-clad women did yoga in public to “bring back the hostages.” I’m positive Hamas was impressed. This man thought it was great.
If this isn’t mass formation psychosis, what is?
Hamas knows their enemy. But let’s not give them credit for cleverness. You’d have to be a simpleton not to see the weakness Israel parades in public.
It’s not against the rules to press your enemy on his weakness. Hamas is not obliged to back off and say, “Oh, sorry, I noticed you don’t like to take casualties and you’re always game for a deal.”
It’s elementary bargaining psychology not to approach the table in a state of desperation. And yet, that’s what Israel does. They telegraph their punches miles in advance. This is not bargaining, this is a sale in which we’re just haggling over the price.
Let’s look at the background. Trigger warning: this is painful. Stop here if you don’t want to cringe.
Israel is the opposite of Spartan. Here is a Spartan, Sheikh Nasrallah:
When the IDF released photos of his son's body and offered to exchange it for body parts of those killed in the earlier ambush, Nasrallah responded: “Keep it. We have many more men like Hadi ready to offer themselves to the struggle.”
Some years ago, when I was still reading the print version of the NY Times, I read about a hostage situation in Central Africa Ethiopia. The big man of the country in which this happened Mengistu brushed off the offer of a hostage deal with this heartless phrase: “Boil them and eat them for all I care.”3
I can’t recall the details but I distinctly remember that sang froid.
Remember the Shalit exchange? I have to admit that the whole thing passed over my head, but it’s important for us observers to familiarize ourselves with what happened, because it informs the current situation.
Israel whipped itself into a hysteria over a soldier. (Who, it should be remembered, volunteered to serve in a combat unit despite being physically unfit. He should never have been in a combat unit—that’s a related, but whole ‘nother story.)
Sure, work for his release behind the scenes but try to tamp down the hysteria, OK guys? The exact opposite happened in Israel.
I’ve linked to a one-page archived version of “Gilad Shalit and the Rising Price of an Israeli Life,” by Ronen Bergman. It makes for excruciating reading. Of course, read the whole thing. I cite the following passages because they get to the heart of WHY Israel approaches hostage negotiations in such a foolish fashion.
The first to grasp how sensitive Israeli public opinion was on the issue of hostages and M.I.A.’s — and therefore what a powerful weapon abduction could be — was Ahmed Jibril, the leader of a faction of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. In 1979, Israel reluctantly agreed to its first disproportionate exchange with a guerrilla organization when Jibril insisted on getting 76 P.L.O. members in exchange for one hostage.
…
If Jibril served as the inspiration for terrorist organizations, on the Israeli side it was Miriam Grof, the mother of one of Jibril’s Israeli captives, Yosef Grof, who became the model for the families of abductees. Without any experience in dealing with the media, Grof instinctively created strategies that have been used repeatedly by relatives of Israeli P.O.W.’s and M.I.A.’s. She grasped that public pressure on the government is a result of being aggressive and proactive: you make demands, not requests; you focus on what is important to you, not on the good of the country. One former high-ranking member of the I.D.F. recalled her saying that half the country could go up in smoke, just as long as her Yosef came home safe.
Eitan Haber, a respected military correspondent who later became a senior aide to Rabin, told me: “It is difficult to explain, but only someone who met that woman could understand how she filled everyone with a deep, blood-boiling, paralyzing sense of shame. We are speaking about three very tough men [Rabin, Peres and Yitzhak Shamir, the foreign minister] who had no problems saying no, but simply could not stand up to Mrs. Grof. What tipped the scales was not her tears or screaming or her teeth-grinding — all of which I remember clearly — it was the whole package. There was something menacing about her that threatened that the world was coming to an end. Her aggressiveness was not of this world. She broke them all down.”
In large part it was Miriam Grof’s battle for her son that allowed Jibril to get his deal: 1,150 Palestinian prisoners were freed, one of whom was the wheelchair-bound Sheik Ahmad Yassin, who later founded and led Hamas, the same movement whose suicide attacks exacted an enormous and bloody toll on Israelis, and the group that would one day capture Gilad Shalit.
…
By June 2008…The country was flooded with posters, billboards and one marketing gimmick after another. At one point, Israeli citizens were offered the chance to “write a letter to Gilad” in a special font that was based on Gilad’s own handwriting. Numerous demonstrations were held in the center of Tel Aviv under the slogan “Asking for Gilad’s Forgiveness,” and on Facebook, hundreds of thousands of Israelis replaced their profile picture with a photograph of Shalit. At one point, a “prison cell” was set up in a TV studio, windowless and cramped, similar to the one in which Gilad was presumed held. Local celebrities vied to take hourlong turns sitting inside it, to feel what it would be like in his shoes — all of which was broadcast live.
Bergman describes a country that is simply psychologically unfit to deal with its environment, which is rife with organizations that are dedicated to destroying it. Since Shalit, the Israelis have become even more ensconced in their bubble, resulting in such exhibitions of mass psychosis as yoga for hostages. Can you imagine such nonsense happening in the US?
But the more serious manifestation of bubble-thinking resulted in the October 7 massacre: the lack of manpower guarding the “security fence” and that no adults in the Gaza area were armed. Bomb shelters protect you against bombs and rocket attacks, not men with guns.
If Israel is the country of Miriam Grof, who would see “half the country go up in smoke as long as she got her Yosef back,” Palestine is the country of mothers who gladly sacrifice sons to the cause. MemriTV has many videos about them. Look on their website for more. Here’s one of the best. At 0:21 she says, “If every Palestinian mother was selfish when it came to defending Jerusalem, who would defend it?”
Insane? Fanatic? That depends on your perspective. I quoted this in a previous post about the movie Oppenheimer:
Two good questions.
“What else is bravery?
“If every Palestinian mother was selfish when it came to defending Jerusalem, who would defend it?”
I’ll say it openly: I admire Umm Fanatic.
I’ll say it again, and I’ll bold it: I admire her.
And I loathe Miriam Grof. That, I won’t bold. But I said it.
Can we go orthogonal on this and reject both Umm Fanatic4 and Miriam Grof? I think so. I think we Americans are there. But no society can survive Miriam Grof. It can survive Umm Fanatic.
Isn’t it funny? The supposed Spartan, communally-oriented Israelis really are a bunch of selfish individualists, and the supposedly selfish, individualistic Americans are the tough ones who can sacrifice for the common good. Go figure.
Where are we?
Every day I see Israelis and pro-Israelis denying facts.
If you’re in a war and you want to understand why you’re in a war, you have to understand where the other guy is coming from. You have to understand the best of his argument, not the worst and most facile.
I’ve been listening to people fool themselves about the Palestinians since 1967, when I turned 12. It never stops. The most self-deluding are the finance and tech guys.
The Palestinians don’t want your peace. They think they’ve been dispossessed of their country and they won’t be satisfied with half-measures. Everything’s been tried: autonomy, investment, the works. They don’t want it. They want it all and they are willing to sacrifice for it.
This tweet was written in response to one of them, Bill Ackman, who claimed that he was pro-Israel, pro-Palestinian, and of course, “pro-peace.”
I agree.
I’ve been asking who the Israeli Churchill is. I settled on Martin Van Creveld, but I’ve always had reservations about him which I’ll explain another time. And in any case, he didn’t warn of this attack. Here is someone who did: General Yitzhak Brick. I came across him by chance, on Telegram.
I looked him up on the Internet. Not much about him but here is what little I found.
He has the face of a man who has looked into the abyss.
General Brick has been warning for years about the horror we saw in southern Israel on that accursed Shabbat morning a week ago. But his assessment was dismissed by the defense establishment and the political leadership. Brick was even called delusional by many.
“There could be a massacre, the State of Israel has not yet recognized the danger,” Brick warned. “We feel among the people that everything is fine and there is no threat, but the public is not told that powers (Hamas) are preparing. These are equipped, trained fighters who will cross the border on foot and attack and occupy our settlements in the south. The likelihood of this happening is very high. Hamas will conquer settlements, throw grenades into bunkers and shelters and cause a massacre. The local residents, you and me, must defend these communities because the army will not be there.” Brick said these words months ago, but no one wanted to listen to him. After the massacre in the south, everyone now has an ear for retired general, even Bibi.
(Interestingly, he wasn’t too crazy about the ground invasion.)
Brick warned that the Israel Defense Forces have turned into a primarily air-based military, and criticized the army leadership for its sensitivity to human losses on the ground.
The “human losses” he referred to were Israeli casualties. He was simply pointing out a fact: in war, your own guys are going to die.
With all due respect to the smart guys who say Israeli tech will take care of the threat to the north, I say bullshit. The smart guys are the same guys who discounted the Hamas threat. They’re the same guys who always tell us that technology will solve our problems. Well it doesn’t.
The former ombudsman added that technology alone is not enough to win wars. “The truth is that an imaginary reality has been created by the general staff and spread throughout the army. The soldiers have lost their motivation and fighting spirit in recent years, and many are not ready to go into battle.”
Wars are won by boots on the ground. Men’s boots. Husbands, fathers, sons, brothers. If you don’t want to lose any of them, if you let your country fall into the hands of the Miriam Grofs, get out of the Middle East.
But eventually the shit will catch up to you where ever you run. You can run but you can’t hide.
LINKS
Twitter thread on the history of hostages and Israel
“Keep it.” Nevertheless there was a deal. I don’t know what accounts for it.
Martin Van Creveld’s latest column
Why Israel has no imminent plans to wind down its war on Hamas: “The hostage issue remains a huge priority for Israel’s government, which not only failed dismally to protect its civilian population from the brutal October 7 attack but also maintains a historic commitment to repatriating its missing soldiers.”
You cannot be pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian
Delusional, or prophetic? One IDF general warned a massacre would happen
Twitter thread on Israeli Attitudes About Hostages
Ronen Bergen’s NY Times Article on Gilad Shalit
MemriTV: Mother Of “Martyred” Palestinian: I Will Be Happy If All My Children Are Martyred
Mass Formation Psychosis: The Left Says It Doesn’t Exist Except When It Does
Boil Them And Eat Them For All I Care
The most recently released is Ahed Tamimi, the cute blonde soldier-slapper, who was arrested for inciting hatred on Instagram. Her supporters claim that the account was a fake. I don’t know whom to believe, I really do not. I don’t put it beyond some Israeli cut-out to have started a fake Instagram account in her name and put some crude anti-Semitic propaganda on it.
Even if she did say what she did, I think it was a mistake to arrest her, and not because of some stupid American free speech reason, which is totally irrelevant in the Middle East. I just think it does no good. Talk about messaging. People had forgotten about her, now she’s all the rage, and she’s a terrific model for her cause. I predict another victory tour, this time in the West. The last time she went on a victory tour she visited marginal foreign communists and a few Arab countries. Now she’ll go to London and be the toast of the town.
Secular
It was Haile Mengistu, of Ethiopia.
“Mother of”