Eretz Nehederet, Israel’s more-or-less SNL, did a piece on the Red Cross this week that it clearly wanted the Red Cross and the international community to understand—which is why they produced it in English.
It’s gotten more than a few chuckles out of Israelis as it’s made its way across social media, but not much more than a chuckle—because the whole International Red Cross thing and the staged “ceremonies” the hostages are forced to endure upon their release are so utterly sickening and abusive.
Thankfully, the IRC video was hardly the only one that made its way around Israeli social media this week. Another one, which we’ve subtitled for our readers, is of Naamah Levy, having left the hospital, returning to her home in Raanana with her father.
She doesn’t look like she is entirely comfortable with all the attention and the crowd around the car, but was without question better than the last time the car she was in was surrounded by a crowd:
Even a video like that, though, is not without controversy, out of the best of intentions.
Israelis have been asked to respect the privacy of the returned hostages—not to share information about their medical condition or to guess about it, not to spread rumors about what they endured in captivity, and the like. By and large, the public has been pretty disciplined about this, as has the press.
But the limits of what’s appropriate are increasingly the subject of intense debate. A different segment of the same Eretz Nehederet episode included an AI-generated image of Liri Elbag, another hostage who has been described as having exhibited extraordinary fortitude in captivity and is seen by the others as having kept them going.
The image enraged some journalists:
The Maariv columnist wrote, “Keshet [the TV channel that hosts and produces Eretz Nehederet] has lost its mind. My eyes could not believe what you did.”
Why?
In the image, Elbag is standing at the Knesset plenum, with a “subtitle” that reads, “Liri Elbag, Prime Minister.”
The columnist wrote, “This time my eyes couldn't believe that it was a shocking artificial intelligence video featuring the hostages, in a take that completely romanticizes the poor people who have just been released from captivity and their family members.”
Personally, I don’t share the critique. I didn’t think the show romanticized anything at all, and if anything, I assume that the recently released women would prefer to be thought of as potential Prime Ministers than as “poor people who have just been released.”
But maybe I’m wrong.
It’s a good debate to have. The hostages are not going to disappear from Israeli news any time soon, and what the limits of decent discourse are is a conversation worth having.
It’s worth having, no less, because it’s something that we control, and it’s an issue that will say something about the character of our society.
The American President’s totally unrealistic plans to move millions of people say a lot about him, not about us.
We’re better off, I think, thinking about the kinds of people we want to be, and to leave DJT’s machinations to the people who elected him.
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