Veteran Israeli journalist Sima Kadmon expressed the views of many (but not all) in a YNet column shortly after the IDF released video footage of the tunnel where the hostages were killed.
I watched the longer version of the video on YouTube. can't speak as an Israeli - I haven't earned that right. But as another human being, I want to howl from the depths of my soul. How can anyone think that Hamas are freedom fighters or what they are doing is legitimate resistance? Whether there is a deal to be had - I don't know. Can you trust a deal with the devil? But. My God, you have to try.
Bibi, the man everyone loves to hate especially in Israel and Washington, D.C. Yet name another leader who could have navigated the Jewish State through the Scylla and Charybdis of the anti-Semitic world in which Israel finds itself. Now more than ever from my view from America Sinwar has fully engaged the Israeli and American Left in a Sisyphean hostage negotiation that will not free the hostages but only prolong the agony.
In the summer of 2022 you wrote a remarkable column: Ten Spies, 60 Israeli Teenagers, Istanbul and Theodor Herzl. It culminated with a photo of two young Israeli women in flip flops carrying M16s and cell phones - the New Jews. Ten days after October 7th you posted Moshe Dayan’s eulogy for Roi Rotberg:
“We mustn’t flinch from the hatred that accompanies and fills the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs, who live around us and are waiting for the moment when their hands may claim our blood. We mustn’t avert our eyes, lest our hands be weakened. That is the decree of our generation. That is the choice of our lives—to be willing and armed, strong and unyielding, lest the sword be knocked from our fists, and our lives severed.”
When I see keffiyeh-clad protesters in the US and Europe I see the violence before the Flood and the chaos before Creation. When I see the protesters in Israel I see the Old Jew, the sword fallen from his fist. Pikuach Nefesh - whose? The dozens of captives slowly dying in the tunnels, or the unnumbered who will surely die in the future if Hamas survives?
I’m sure that some of those protesters, who are parents of kids who were taken captive while serving as soldiers, would see it as more than ironic that those who don’t live here and have no skin of that sort in the game, would refer to THEM as “old Jews.”
I wasn’t addressing the parents of those who’ve been taken captive. I’ve said before that if I had a child in captivity I’d sacrifice anything in this life or the next to get them back. But just as judges should decide the fate of a murderer rather than the avenger of blood, so the fate of the nation should be decided by those with distance from their own personal tragedy. As for my own status, I’ve been trying desperately to make Aliyah since 2012. That’s the first time I asked my disabled wife - a quadrilateral amputee from meningococcal meningitis - if she’d accompany me on the journey that I felt at that time and since that I was born to make. She wouldn’t then and she won’t now and I have a higher calling to take care of her than I do to my own spiritual destiny. In 2014 - during Operation Protective Edge - I flew to Israel and stayed with a friend because it didn’t feel right to me to be safe in the US while my people were under attack. I was in an Airbnb in Bat Yam on October 7th and only left a week later because my wife wanted to go home. A friend in Shaked asked me why I wanted to make Aliyah. I told him that I was afraid to die, but I was less afraid to die as part of the Jewish people. So when you say I have no skin in the game, you’re right. I didn’t serve in the IDF and neither did my sons. But from a place of great personal pain, I have only one response: Fuck you.
Has it been determined that the 6 hostages were in this tunnel for most of they year, as Kadmon writes, and if so, how? Most hostages seem to have been moved from time to time.
I watched the longer version of the video on YouTube. can't speak as an Israeli - I haven't earned that right. But as another human being, I want to howl from the depths of my soul. How can anyone think that Hamas are freedom fighters or what they are doing is legitimate resistance? Whether there is a deal to be had - I don't know. Can you trust a deal with the devil? But. My God, you have to try.
Bibi, the man everyone loves to hate especially in Israel and Washington, D.C. Yet name another leader who could have navigated the Jewish State through the Scylla and Charybdis of the anti-Semitic world in which Israel finds itself. Now more than ever from my view from America Sinwar has fully engaged the Israeli and American Left in a Sisyphean hostage negotiation that will not free the hostages but only prolong the agony.
In the summer of 2022 you wrote a remarkable column: Ten Spies, 60 Israeli Teenagers, Istanbul and Theodor Herzl. It culminated with a photo of two young Israeli women in flip flops carrying M16s and cell phones - the New Jews. Ten days after October 7th you posted Moshe Dayan’s eulogy for Roi Rotberg:
“We mustn’t flinch from the hatred that accompanies and fills the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs, who live around us and are waiting for the moment when their hands may claim our blood. We mustn’t avert our eyes, lest our hands be weakened. That is the decree of our generation. That is the choice of our lives—to be willing and armed, strong and unyielding, lest the sword be knocked from our fists, and our lives severed.”
When I see keffiyeh-clad protesters in the US and Europe I see the violence before the Flood and the chaos before Creation. When I see the protesters in Israel I see the Old Jew, the sword fallen from his fist. Pikuach Nefesh - whose? The dozens of captives slowly dying in the tunnels, or the unnumbered who will surely die in the future if Hamas survives?
I’m sure that some of those protesters, who are parents of kids who were taken captive while serving as soldiers, would see it as more than ironic that those who don’t live here and have no skin of that sort in the game, would refer to THEM as “old Jews.”
I wasn’t addressing the parents of those who’ve been taken captive. I’ve said before that if I had a child in captivity I’d sacrifice anything in this life or the next to get them back. But just as judges should decide the fate of a murderer rather than the avenger of blood, so the fate of the nation should be decided by those with distance from their own personal tragedy. As for my own status, I’ve been trying desperately to make Aliyah since 2012. That’s the first time I asked my disabled wife - a quadrilateral amputee from meningococcal meningitis - if she’d accompany me on the journey that I felt at that time and since that I was born to make. She wouldn’t then and she won’t now and I have a higher calling to take care of her than I do to my own spiritual destiny. In 2014 - during Operation Protective Edge - I flew to Israel and stayed with a friend because it didn’t feel right to me to be safe in the US while my people were under attack. I was in an Airbnb in Bat Yam on October 7th and only left a week later because my wife wanted to go home. A friend in Shaked asked me why I wanted to make Aliyah. I told him that I was afraid to die, but I was less afraid to die as part of the Jewish people. So when you say I have no skin in the game, you’re right. I didn’t serve in the IDF and neither did my sons. But from a place of great personal pain, I have only one response: Fuck you.
Has it been determined that the 6 hostages were in this tunnel for most of they year, as Kadmon writes, and if so, how? Most hostages seem to have been moved from time to time.