| | | As Israeli women face vitriol from Israelis who say they're "fueling Hamas" with protests calling for a deal to free captives held in Gaza, we must ask: When, then, would it be appropriate to fight for the hostages' release? | | |
|  | | Linda Dayan
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| | | | | |  | | | As women huddled together under umbrellas, blocking a major Tel Aviv intersection on Wednesday, a man under the awning of the nearby mall fumed. "Displays like this are fuel for Hamas!" he yelled, pointing to their signs demanding an agreement to free the Israeli hostages still held in Gaza.
He argued with one of the protesters, his voice rising over the calls of "Women demand a deal now!" about how inappropriate, how dangerous, this demonstration was. How are you protesting now, with our boys fighting and dying to keep them safe? Why not make these demands of Hamas instead, rather than the cabinet?
He was not the only one to ask these questions during the day of protests organized by women's groups, which took place simultaneously at dozens of locations around the country. At another blocked Tel Aviv intersection that afternoon, a man yelled at the protesters, "How dare you? My son is in Gaza!" To which a woman responded, "So is my brother, and so is my partner."
To the participants, the answer seemed obvious. They are protesting because Israeli soldiers are fighting and dying in Gaza. They are protesting because the war has no end in sight, especially when the goal that matters the most to the Israeli people – the freeing of the 136 Israelis held by Hamas and other terror groups in the Strip – seems to be getting further and further away.
Some signs stressed empathy for the Palestinians alongside the Israeli hostages: one read "end the war" in Arabic, and another bore the slogan "in Gaza and in Sderot, children want to live." Others showed the names and faces of the captive Israelis. When asked if she is related to Noa Argamani, whose picture she was holding, one protester said, "Not blood related, no, but I'm part of her larger, extended family – as are you."
From the halls of Knesset, opposition leader Yair Lapid seemed to echo the women's chants. He said that Israel's citizens "feel they have lost control of their lives, and no one is addressing it. Every day, more soldiers are killed, and no one knows when it will end."
Israelis, he said, must be told by their leadership that "in the first stage, we will bring back the hostages because that is the most urgent goal. In the second stage, Hamas will be disarmed. Not only because of our military strength, but also because we have decided and defined what mechanism should take its place." And we need more than tactics, he noted – we need a strategy to bring the war to an end.
In the meantime, the leadership is concerning itself with other matters. Speaking before Lapid, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dedicated his Knesset speech to a different outcome. "The war must end with the eradication of the new Nazis," he said. "There will be no compromise for the promise of our future."
As the protesters repeatedly stressed, the clock is ticking for the hostages; we must bring them home "alive and not in coffins," as the chant goes. The eradication of Hamas, as an organization and as an ideology, will take time that the hostages don't have and a strategy that the government doesn't seem willing to formulate. When, then, we must ask, would it be appropriate to fight for the hostages' release? |
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