‘When the Lord returned the captives to Zion,’ Psalm 126 goes, ‘we were like dreamers. Our mouths were filled with laughter and our tongues with songs of joy.’ Watching the images of Alexander Troufanov, Sagui Dekel-Chen, and Iair Horn paraded by their captors after almost 500 days of torment, there was no laughter and not a hint of joy. That the three Israelis have been reunited with their families will bring immense relief to those who know and love them, but it cannot give this nightmare the illusion of a dream.
These captives have been returned, but others remain. Iair’s brother Eitan is still in Palestinian hands. Their mother Ruti says: ‘I am very happy, but the joy is partial. I still have one child who is there.’ Matan Zangauker is still there, too. In an eleventh hour act of petty sadism, the Palestinian side made Iair carry an hourglass branded with a photograph of 25-year-old Matan and his mother, and the words, ‘Time is running out.’ It is not enough to separate son from mother, they must taunt mother too. Or, in Sagui’s case, father from daughter. Now freed, Sagui will meet his little girl Shachar for the first time, the infant having been born while her father was being held at gunpoint. His jubilation will be tempered by the knowledge that his Palestinian kidnappers deprived him of the first year and a half of his daughter’s life.
The three men are not the only ones going home. In exchange for their freedom, Israel has released 369 Palestinian ‘security prisoners’, the preferred euphemism. These included Mazen al-Qadi, who was serving three life sentences for his involvement in a 2002 attack on a Tel Aviv restaurant that killed three Israelis; Ahmed Barghouti, a commander in the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, who sent suicide bombers to murder a dozen Israelis during the Second Intifada; and Iyad Abu Shakhdam, jailed for his role in the murders of dozens of Israelis, including 16 Jews blown up in a 2004 bus bombing in Beersheba. When Israel demands its sons and fathers back, men like Alexander, Sagui and Iair come home. When the Palestinian side demands its sons and fathers back, men like al-Qadi, Barghouti, and Shakhdam come home.
It’s a commonplace to say that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a cycle of violence, but it is in fact a cycle of avoidance. The Israeli government has again avoided the long-term, large-scale military operation required to destroy Hamas and allies such as Palestine Islamic Jihad for good. The Israeli people have again avoided facing up to a grim reality: that freeing terrorists to secure the release of hostages will guarantee Israel more of both.
The Palestinian leadership continues to avoid all but the most cursory diplomatic consequences for invading a neighbouring state and slaughtering and raping its citizens. The Palestinian people continue to avoid the painful truth that their investment in extremism and rejectionism, and their commitment to passing on these strategies for self-defeat to their children and grandchildren, is more of an obstacle to Palestinian independence than any Israeli prime minister, fighter jet or settlement project.
The Israelis and Palestinians will be here again, and again, and again. More captives, more killers; more mothers pleading for sons, more fathers kept from daughters. The world will go on encouraging the deadly fiction that the Palestinians can have a future in the land without making their peace with a Jewish state next door. Only when the Palestinians accept that Israel is here to stay, that they cannot murder or kidnap their way around the onerous work of coexistence, will their own dispossession come to an end. Only then will our mouths be filled with laughter and our tongues with songs of joy.
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