When the news broke yesterday of the daring rescue of four Israeli hostages, I felt as though members of my family had been freed. I cried when I saw Noa’s father touch her as though he could not believe she was really alive, and when I heard that her dying mother (the same age as me) would see her daughter and know that she was free. I cried when I saw Almog’s mother and grandfather hold him tight, and I cried again when I read that his father had died hours before the good news came.
I felt joy and pride and relief, and sorrow too – for the families of the hostages who are still held, including Noa’s boyfriend, for the families of the hostages already killed by Hamas in captivity, for those killed on October 7 by the brutal terrorists who started this conflict.
And yes, of course, it was awful to see the suffering of innocent children killed in the market place, whether by Israeli fire or Hamas RPGs. Their deaths were a terrible example of what can happen if you hold hostages in a crowded area full of civilians. So many thousands of people would still be alive if Hamas had never launched their attack on October 7 and started this terrible war.
But look at some responses to the news, and you might think that Israel had planned the whole thing in order to kill as many Palestinians as possible, while Hamas quietly released the hostages as a noble, humanitarian act.
Take the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs Josep Borelles Fontelle, who tweeted: “Reports from Gaza of another massacre of civilians are appalling. We condemn this in the strongest terms.” This came straight after a tweet welcoming the fact that the four hostages were “free and safe”, and calling for the “release” of the others. No acknowledgement that the freedom had been won by brave IDF soldiers who rescued the hostages, with no help from the UN which runs the area where they were found.
Then there are the journalists – like Sky’s Alex Crawford who spent the day tweeting about the “massacre” quoting the Palestinian ambassador to the UN: “As you smile seeing a father finally embracing his daughter in Tel Aviv, shed a tear for a father having to bury his daughter in Gaza.” Well – but who was responsible for those father’s torments? What if Hamas had never taken hundreds of people hostage?
The Guardian’s Owen Jones demanded that everyone celebrating the “release” – that word again – of the hostages should look at a gory video of the “human consequences of the military action”. Not a glimmer there of the fact that the military action was the consequence of Hamas’s military action on October 7 and the deaths in the market place, all of them,followed from its refusal to accept the many offers of a deal ever since.
Only this week I was discussing with a friend how the last eight months have felt for many Jewish people. “It’s like being gaslit,” I said. “But it’s the whole world gaslighting us.”
Gaslighting, of course, is a form of psychological manipulation which aims to sow confusion and self-doubt, to gain dominance and power over the victim. Hamas and their supporters are champion gaslighters, but the UN and many world leaders who should know better are not far behind them. And the reaction to yesterday’s news was a prime example.
