In a comment thread that I engaged in recently, someone asked me what I think about the potential hostage deal. Here’s my response to that question, with a few edits:
The conditions make me sick to my stomach, but I also believe there’s no other way to do this. I’m seeing posts from friends talking about cautious optimism, plus so many people have been in the streets demonstrating to end the war and bring the hostages home for months, so my sense is that a lot of Israelis feel the same way I do. With that, I know that there are others who believe that the price is too high or that we are giving up when we can achieve “victory”. I get it, but we need to end this somehow, and the only way to do that, I think, is painfully. Either we pay a high price to bring them home now or we keep going, risking the lives of even more soldiers and decreasing the likelihood that hostages will be brought home alive.
I remember turning to my husband in October 2023 after the situation became clear and wondering how on earth we were going to be able to bring more than 250 hostages home and what it was going to cost us to do so. The one thing I did know, though, was that it would probably be extremely painful. How could it not be? Even at our very best (and we were and have been so far from being our very best), I knew there was no way that we would be able to rescue 250 people of all ages being held and hidden. It simply wasn’t a viable option. Not doing everything in our power to bring them home was not an option either, though it seems that members of our governing coalition don’t share that sentiment and have not made it the priority they should have.
I don’t know if you’ve visited Israel since the war started, but if you have, you would have seen how exhausted we all are – how there is a pall of grief everywhere (even in our scattered moments of joy) and how there is no way to escape what’s happened because it’s constantly all around you.
I don’t know how we heal from what happened, but we can’t even begin the healing process until we are whole again, with our hostages and our soldiers home.
