The discovery of the bodies of the six hostages killed by Hamas, as the IDF approached the hideout where they were being held, has a profoundly contradictory meaning.
On the one hand, it shows the kind of enemy Israel is actually fighting: a movement whose aim is to murder Jews, one by one and as many as possible. To do as they did on October 7, in the same way and with the same determination. October 7 was repeated on that day, was a common refrain among those supporting the hostage families. Indeed, that’s what it felt like: eleven months apart, the unbearable ordeal of summary execution at point-blank range was repeated. The classic antisemitic murder has been repeated. A repetition that surprises only those who, faced with a war that unjustifiably decimates the Palestinian population of Gaza, do not bear in mind what really happened eleven months ago – not to mention those who are surprised by nothing anyway, since they are driven by an irrepressible desire to rename the crimes of Hamas as resistance to the Zionist oppressor, and thus see the expression of the Palestinian cause in acts of pure terror whose motive is exterminist antisemitism. But then, it’s the rightness of the war itself that is confirmed: of such an enemy, there is no other option than to want its disappearance. For they themselves want nothing more than the death of the Jews, of every Jew within reach, as they proved on October 7.
But this is only one side of the truth of the event. There is also another, opposite and inseparable. The war being waged by the IDF in Gaza is the exact a contrario of what it was intended to achieve. The primary aim of the army of the Jewish State is to defend and save the Jews, first and foremost the hostages who are under threat of death. However, the IDF’s advances can trigger nothing in the cornered enemy but the realization of its criminal vocation. So, on this side, we draw the opposite conclusion to the previous one. To want to go “all the way”, to remain fixated on the war aim of the complete elimination of Hamas – legitimate because of what this movement is -, to obstruct a negotiated agreement, is to betray the highest aim, the only one that really counts: to preserve all Jewish lives, starting with those most at risk within the people in the present situation.
Never since October 7 has Israeli public protest against the Netanyahu government been so strong as in the last few days. Even during the previous long period of mass mobilization against judicial reform, when it was Israeli democracy that the far right was attacking, this level of confrontation between large sections of society and the ruling power had not been reached. It culminates in the call for a general strike by opposition leaders. It’s easy to see why. With the execution of the hostages, the contradiction of aims reached its breaking point. The more the war aim of eliminating Hamas is pursued, the more the war aim of rescuing the hostages is de facto abandoned – the more they are surely doomed to execution. This reveals the fact that the contradiction cannot hold; it must eventually break. As all Zionists know, saving threatened Jewish lives is what defines Israel. The hostages are at the epicenter of this nation-state’s self-awareness as what justifies it and makes it properly speaking a “state of the Jews” – of all Jews, inside and outside Israel. For such a state, hostages have a status that exceeds the motive of national defense alone, and therefore that of war as the pursuit of victory over the enemy, however radical. They transcend the limits of the Israeli national community. Ultimately, their rescue takes precedence over any other goal: if it has been a goal in war, it has never been a goal of war, because it has always been above all others. If we renounce it, this singular state loses its meaning. It is no more than an empty shell, however solid it may be.
Solid, strong, impenetrable – that’s what Netanyahu has always promised, determined to cast the rift of October 7 into the past with no way back. But it is still gaping, and the execution of the hostages not only brings back memories of it: it reopens it unambiguously, reforming it by attesting that Israel has ceased to protect the Jews. What’s more, it shows that the head of the Jewish State has knowingly renounced this protection by waging the war he has been waging for the past eleven months. This is tantamount to declaring – as a significant proportion of public opinion did in the months leading up to October 7, and as an even larger proportion does today – that he is alien to the ethos of the Zionist project, insofar as it aims to protect the Jews. So we must finally get rid of this leader: end the war whose sheer number of Palestinian victims has made it unjust, and whose sacrifice of hostages simply makes it senseless. And conclude that Hamas will indeed be neutralized by other means, as it must be.
