By Zachary Benjamin
As I write this on Day 471 since Hamas committed the crimes against humanity of October 7, 2023, I feel compelled to confess an uncomfortable personal reality. The agreement struck between Israel and Hamas—a veritable deal with the devil to gradually exchange a handful of October 7 hostages for the release of over 1,000 convicted and imprisoned Hamas terrorists—certainly brings with it a measure of relief. However, as the first few of the 33 hostages to be released during “phase one” of the agreement walk back into the arms of their families, I feel no joy.
Allow me a correction. 33 captives will not cross the border into Israel and the safe harbor of their homes and loved ones. 23 living individuals in various states of physical and mental anguish will return, along with 10 corpses, leaving more than 60 still languishing in the throes of bondage and distress.
The price that Israel, the Jewish people, and the free world has paid for the liberty of these 23 women, men, and children is the return to society of hundreds upon hundreds of the most vile human detritus that our species is capable of producing. Walking free are convicted and confessed mass murderers, serial rapists, abusers of children, oppressors of women, as well as the architects of what would be the elimination of the State of Israel and the existential endangerment of the world’s 17 million Jews.
We have often, during times of geopolitical frustration in Israel and the Middle East, complained that Jewish blood runs cheap. Today, we are learning the painful but necessary lesson that the opposite is true. Jewish life is unimaginably expensive. By Hamas’s own calculation, the life of a single Jewish woman is worth 30 of their own. Those tens and scores of terroristic lives resurrected serve no purpose but to endanger innumerable others.
Another confession: I find it nearly impossible, and utterly unpalatable, to choke out the phrase “both sides” with regard to Israel’s conflict with Hamas. The thought of uttering those words triggers my gag reflex. I cannot bring myself to consider for even an instant that any equivalency exists between members of Hamas and the infants, elderly, Holocaust survivors, youth, and other innocents who were subject to such unthinkably horrific, depraved acts of violence on and since October 7. The victims of these atrocities have been repeatedly raped, physically tortured, and in many cases were forced to watch as their parents, children, and loved ones’ living bodies were gruesomely violated before suffering horrifying deaths, spending their final moments in paralyzing fear and excruciating physical pain.
Hamas is a non-state, irrational terrorist actor that by every measure operates outside the rules of engagement. They, with Iranian funding and paramilitary training, have weaponized the rhetoric of human rights to produce a stranglehold on the regional narrative that is not only false, but that endangers non-combatants of all faiths, backgrounds, and ages. The impact of this poisonous philosophy extends well beyond Middle East. The ideology, for example, that fueled the crimes of October 7 are the same principles that emboldened the terrorist who drove his pickup truck through a crowd of New Year’s revelers on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing 14 civilians and injuring nearly 60 others, including two young Israelis who had recently completed their army service.
When I think about the hostages, my mind immediately conjures images of little Kfir Bibas, who, if he remains alive, has now marked both his first and second birthdays in Hamas’s labyrinth of terror infrastructure deep below the streets of Gaza. He has spent more of his young life as a captive than he has as a free human being. As a father, my heart breaks for Kfir, his parents, and his big brother, all of whom either remain in captivity or are dead. Even if Kfir is eventually released, he has, in all likelihood, been viciously robbed of his childhood, along with the innocent wonder and joy that should mark the early years of any life.
Hamas has also cheated countless children of Gaza out of any opportunity that may have existed for them to experience childhood or to develop into empathetic, humane adults. From the moment of birth, Hamas-operated daycares and schools sow within the vulnerable minds of their youth a brand of hate and blood libel that, as they approach adulthood, yields a contempt for life and humanity that enables atrocities such as those that took place on October 7. Before they can walk, UN-funded “schools” begin compelling children to aspire to martyrdom, warning them that their well-being depends upon their ability to kill Jews, who if left to exist, are thirsty for Arab blood.
In times of peace, these children are emotionally and intellectually abused, their capacity for critical thought stunted and manipulated to the point that they lose all agency over their own futures. They are programmed by their abusers for evil, eventually unleashed as Hamas foot soldiers whose only objectives are to spill Jewish blood and to perpetuate false, ancient libels.
In wartime, these same children become human shields, forced to physically stand between the IDF and Hamas’s stores of missiles and other materiel. Their very existence is weaponized to manufacture the empathy, and to leverage the naivete, of a Western media infrastructure that, perhaps unwittingly, contributes with brutal effect to the endangerment of the Jewish people and indeed all who value life.
Is the suffering of innocents in Gaza a human tragedy? Absolutely. Is Hamas completely and knowingly responsible for their plight? Without a doubt. Does any reasonable, rational argument stand to establish an equivalency between Hamas and Israel or Israelis? I have come to the conclusion that the answer to this question is “no.”
Perhaps time will yield a more just resolution to the nightmare that has unfolded in slow motion before humanity’s eyes over the course of the past 470 days. Perhaps, by the time this column is printed, we will have witnessed the Bibas family entering, alive, the warm embrace of not only their extended family, but of a nation-state and indeed an entire people yearning for their safe return. Perhaps in time, all 98 living and deceased October 7 captives remaining in Gaza will be freed, and we can begin the process of salving the emotional scars that this era has inflicted upon the Jewish people.
For now, however, I feel that I can only watch with muted, melancholic relief from afar as our hostages trickle across the border, many having incurred irreparable physical and emotional damage, while others return in coffins. Hamas places no value on life. The Jewish people, on the other hand, value life over all else, and thus we are now learning just how expensive that unbridgeable gulf between these two value systems has become.
Am Yisrael chai. Bring them home.