Hostage rescue: breaking with tradition

I don’t normally write about events in Israel and Palestine, but the rescue of four Israeli hostages from Gaza, freed from the terrorists of Hamas by the Israeli army, is too important a moment not to acknowledge - and I’ve been taken aback by the negative reaction to it from some commentators, which is why I’ve chosen to write about it.

Firstly, it is wonderful most of all, of course, for Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov, and Shlomi Ziv - and all of their families. It also restores, to some extent, the profound faith amongst Jews that Israel, for all its failings on October 7, and for all its flaws and errors since, will always treat the rescue and safety of Jews as its top priority. History tells us that we cannot truly rely on any other country or government to say the same. This is Israel’s raison d'être, and, while at times its political leaders have failed to live up to this purpose, the State of Israel is nothing without it.

While Jews are weeping with joy, there are some people - including prominent journalists and commentators - who are talking of today’s events not as a rescue but a “massacre”; not a targeted raid on a terrorist holdout but an “attack” on a refugee camp. I am no military expert, but I don’t think special forces embarking on a complex and dangerous operation would divert from their target to carry out random massacres of civilians. It’s an astonishing response.

I imagine it will be a few days before we know the true death toll, both civilian and combatant, from today’s rescue operation. It may well turn out that many Palestinian civilians lost their lives, and nothing illustrates the callous cynicism of Hamas more than hiding hostages amongst their own civilian population. But the idea that the Israeli army - indeed, any army - should refrain from rescuing those hostages because Hamas hides them amongst civilians is totally detached from reality. The first duty of any government is to protect its own people, and if my children were kidnapped by a terrorist group and held hostage in a foreign land, I would want the British army to do whatever was necessary to get them home.

Instead, I think some people are actually disappointed that Israel managed to free four hostages, all on their own, without needing the Americans or the Egyptians or the Qataris to do it for them. I know that many more hostages have been freed through negotiations than through force, and a deal is still the most likely way to get the rest of the hostages home. But still: some people seem to be irritated by today’s rescue, and their reaction is almost as staggering as the rescue itself.

In the updated edition of Everyday Hate, I try to answer the puzzle of why this particular conflict stirs the emotions of people with no personal connection to it in a way that no other conflict does. I came up with what I considered at the time to be a rather outlandish, improbable explanation:

The killing of Jews is a familiar, repeated part of history. Pogroms, medieval massacres, mass immolations during the Inquisition or the Black Death, the Farhud, the Shoah: all widely condemned, of course, but nevertheless a pattern of behaviour that repeats too often to be coincidence. You might even call this antisemitism a tradition, a custom that people turn to sometimes. Normally, the Jews under attack have not been able to fight back. There have been exceptions to this – I have a photograph of Jewish World War Two partisans on my office wall to remind me – but most of the time they were defenceless. Sometimes, under both Christian and Islamic rule, Jews were even forbidden from carrying weapons at all. Today, Israel has a powerful army and air force and is willing to use them to defend the lives of its citizens, even if many are killed in the process. This is not the customary way things have worked in history when it comes to Jews and killing. It is the wrong way round, an affront to tradition. When Shylock is legally permitted to kill Antonio in The Merchant of Venice he is prevented from doing so by a miraculous intervention, because that’s the way this is supposed to work. Moreover, there is a parallel tradition of Jews being assumed to kill for evil purposes: the crucifixion, blood libel, well poisonings, that kind of thing. Who can say whether these traditional patterns of thought, however deeply buried, explain why so many people are relatively unmoved by appalling suffering anywhere else on Earth, yet treat the killing of Palestinians by the Israeli army as the greatest outrage imaginable? I genuinely don’t know. Perhaps I’m taking things too far. But what are we supposed to think, as Jews living in this world, when pro-Palestinian activism and anti-Jewish hatred rise and fall in tandem so repeatedly and predictably? This is not a generic response to suffering but a singular one. I have sometimes thought that if every war on Earth were reported on, and protested against, like Israel’s wars, the world would be a much better place. But they aren’t, and it isn’t. This reaction exists only for Israel and always lands on Jews.

Having seen the reaction of some intelligent, informed, influential people to the successful rescue of hostages by the ingenuity and courage of the armed forces of the Jewish state, I am starting to wonder whether this theory has more to it than I realised.