Doing It for Hersh

or at least thinking about it

Desert gazelle (tzvi in Hebrew, hersh in Yiddish), via.

The killing of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Ori Danino, Alex Lobanov, Carmel Gat, and Almog Sarusi in a tunnel underneath Rafah last Thursday, or possibly Friday morning, a day or two before the Israeli Defense Forces found their bodies Saturday afternoon, according to the autopsy reports from Israel's ministry of health, isn't the only terrible thing—it's all terrible—but maybe made especially poignant for many of us by the presence of the Israeli-American, the youngest of these particular victims, Goldberg-Polin, 23, who we've come to know a bit, or at least his parents, Rachel and Jon, who addressed the DNC in Chicago last month with a plea for a Gaza ceasefire:

the one thing that can most immediately release pressure and bring calm to the entire region: a deal that brings this diverse group of 109 hostages home and ends the suffering of the innocent civilians in Gaza. The time is now.

Hersh was my father's Yiddish name, and by extension that of my son, who was born just a month after my dad died, and named after him, in accordance with Jewish custom, so that I find myself involuntarily projecting the special qualities of my young Hersh, generous, attentive, deeply mentshlekh, on their young Hersh. It's too sad. May all their memories be blessings.

We don't always mention the other thing, which is that so many of the victims of the October 7 massacre belong to the Israeli left, a political movement that has been mostly defunct for three or four decades, with a commitment to equity between Jews and Palestinians that the Israeli government was not often willing to match and the Palestinian resistance movements rarely took seriously (with some reason; even the nicest Jews weren't usually offering to give the stolen land back).  

Regardless of who might or might not be in the right, taking them prisoner and holding on to them were war crimes as well as sins on the part of the Hamas fighters who did it, and killing them was worse, no question about it. That said, Binyamin Netanyahu cannot escape a share of the responsibility for his insistence on imposing ever more new demands on the ceasefire negotiations against the advice of the IDF commanders, even if it meant sacrificing the hostages, as Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told him in a rowdy cabinet meeting on Thursday, debating a new set of maps on IDF troop deployments Netantyahu wanted to maintain on the Gaza-Egypt border (adding a new condition to the Biden ceasefire plan that Israel has supposedly accepted and Hamas supposedly rejects),

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prioritizing his stance of maintaining Israeli troops in the Philadelphi Corridor over saving the lives of the remaining hostages in Gaza....

“The significance of this is that Hamas won’t agree to it, so there won’t be an agreement and there won’t be any hostages released,” Gallant told the ministers.

Netanyahu replied: “This is the decision.” (Times of Israel)

IDF chief of staff Herzi Halevi and Mossad director David Barnea, who leads the negotiations, objected that the Philadelphi Corridor wasn't a problem for IDF—if it needed to send troops back there after the first phase of the ceasefire they could do so—and wasn't an issue the negotiators were dealing with at the moment in any case, but Netanyahu insisted on having the ministers vote.

Gallant then told the ministers that their vote means that if Israel faces “two possibilities — either keeping the IDF deployed on the Philadelphi Corridor or bringing home the hostages — you are deciding to stay on the Philadelphi Corridor. Does this seem logical to you?” Gallant asked. “There are living (hostages) there!” Gallant exclaimed.

[Ron] Dermer responded, “The prime minister can do whatever he wants.”

Gallant replied, “The prime minister can indeed make all the decisions, and he can also decide to have all the hostages killed.”

At this point, other ministers in the room called out Gallant for speaking to the prime minister in such a manner.

The upshot being, of course, that they voted and Netanyahu got his way, another stumbling block on the road to getting the hostages home.

Gallant went on to acknowledge that he had lost the argument this time, but he predicted that the ministers would come around to his position.

“Hopefully, it will happen sooner rather than later,” the defense minister said.

It would have been too late to save the six already by then, no doubt, but it's chilling to think the Hamas guards might well have been shooting them at that very moment, somewhere under the Philadelphi Corridor itself. A couple of days before that in a tunnel nearby, IDF troops are said to have found and rescued Farhad al-Qadi, a Bedouin Israeli who had been snatched on October 7 from the kibbutz where he worked as a security guard, and it's thought the Hamas fighters might have been spooked by that and fled, killing their prisoners first (though, oddly, al-Qadi has said that he was kept in total isolation and didn't know of any other hostages—are there alternative explanations?).

I wonder, naturally, if Gallant's prophecy there could come true. It seems to me that it's pointing at the need to get rid of Netanyahu, one way or another, to bring an end to the Gaza war. I'm not talking this time about the far-right ministers Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, whose power is as dependent on Netanyahu as Netanyahu's is on them, and who are more committed to an apartheid state than Netanyahu himself and support a complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza and total Jewish domination of the sacred space of Temple Mount; I'm thinking of the Likud ministers who are going to have to take care of their party after Netanyahu goes to prison, such as Gallant himself and the Katzes (unrelated), foreign minister Israel Katz and minister of tourism Haim Katz, head of the Likud Central Committee, which is where the authority to rid of Netanyahu as party leader is, and where it's been under discussion at least since the last time Netanyahu lost the premiership, in 2022. I personally have no respect left for the Likud party, if I ever had any, but they still have to form part of any solution.

I'm thinking about that in part because of the fallout from those killings: the massive demonstrations in Israel on Sunday, more than half a million in the streets in Tel Aviv, demanding that Israel sign on to the Biden plan, followed by a general strike announcement by the Histadrut labor union (from which they were forced to pull out after the Supreme Court overruled it as a "political" rather than labor issue), and Joe Biden's Laconic assessment:

Asked whether he thought Netanyahu was doing enough to reach a hostage deal, Biden said "No." He did not elaborate on his remarks.

Pro-peace protests in Kibbutz Be'eri, where 101 were killed on October 7 and 32 taken hostage, are strong too. More hostage parents, like Adi and Yael Alexander whose Israeli-American son Edan is a hostage, are speaking out. Almost 70% of the US public now backs Biden's permanent ceasefire plan, and at least that much in UK, which arrived at that point last May, and the new Labour government is suspending quite a lot of arms sales to Israel.  (Gallant and Israel Katz express worry that this could be "sending the wrong message").

I've been thinking for months that it couldn't go on like this, and it's kept going on like this. It can't! What I want to say here that may not be getting said elsewhere is that when you protest Israeli apartheid, whether you demand a two-state or one-state alternative, the fundamental thing is that it can't go on like this, the kids on the left have always been right, however irritating you might find that, and that if the only thing you can do about it is listen, you must listen. Do it for Hersh.