email #44 — extremely first reactions to the reaching of a deal

[Leon Kraiem]

Hi friends,

The catastrophe is over.

To be clear: I don't mean: what's broken has been repaired. 

I only mean: the initial act of breaking is completed.

Now it's finally: broken. 

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The hostages are coming home. It is extremely, extremely good news.

It is, ultimately the only good news, toward which everyone has been oriented for 734 days.

We'll believe it when we see it — but we have reason to believe we'll see it this time. 

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In return, we will release 250 terror convicts serving life sentences.

We will release 1,700 people detained by the IDF amid operations in Gaza.

Hamas members who "agree to lay down their weapons" or some construction like that are to be granted amnesty.

But the really sick thing — the thing that makes my stomach churn — is not those facts, is not the ways in which we are saving the lives of these 20 people we love by underwriting the murders and likely kidnappings of god knows how many more people we love — the thing that really makes my stomach churn is these images of the Hamas representatives sitting in a big conference room, wearing suits, smiling in front of little microphones like they're diplomats from an actual country signing an actual peace deal. 

I'm sure there was pressure to get our people to sit down in the same room as them. I'm sure we pulled out all the stops to prevent a photo that shows everyone in one frame. But it's a disgrace.

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Normal people are not expected to do this. 

There is no other group of people who — when a weaker group of people murders, rapes, and kidnaps them, burns their homes, kills one in every four people in their peaceful, hippie border communities and throws hand grenades at partygoers hiding inside of bomb shelters — is expected, two years later, to sign a "peace deal" with the leaders of that onslaught, release people who carried it out, and then celebrate. 

This is not a victory. It is not even a Pyrrhic victory. It is, if anything, a Jewish victory. Which is to say, survival. Let's eat.

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October 7 started with a hostage deal. It started when we released 1,027 prisoners — including Yahya Sinwar — in exchange for Gilad Shalit. 

October 7 has now ended, with another hostage deal. We'll be letting out Nukhba guys, probably. Marwan Barghouti, possibly. And who knows what the name of the next Sinwar will be? We probably haven't heard of him. After all, Sinwar was in prison for killing Palestinians, not Israelis. Because people are thirsty for Jewish blood, but we've succeeded in making it expensive. Palestinian blood is dirt-cheap. So it's reasonable to expect the real sociopaths to start there and work their way up. 

But hey — Hamas won't be the government of Gaza, right? It'll be technocrats! It'll be a reformed PA! 

I don't know who it will be. God willing, it will really turn out better. They won't build an endless bomb shelter system exclusively for combatants; they won't fire rockets at Israeli kids every so often, and barely face repercussions; maybe they won't tell all their kids that the best thing they can do is be a martyr; maybe they'll teach algebra with word problems about baskets of apples instead of buses of massacred zionists; maybe some visionary leaders will even manage to build a palestinian culture whose holy of holies is not the destruction of the only home that millions of jews have. 

Or maybe: we're looking at two main scenarios, one of which is the return of something like Hamas, and the other of which is a palestinian national government that is just normal-seeming enough to gain international legitimacy, as the world returns to its natural state of blaming all evil on the jews; and maybe that normal-enough palestinian state won't have actually worked through its deep-seated radicalization and dysfunction but this time it will be sensible enough to wait a while, until they can actually pull the thing off. maybe, in both of those scenarios, oct. 7 will be independence day, de facto if not de jure. 

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It didn't have to be this way.

Imagine if protests around the world — for palestinians! they don't have to care about israelis at all — but imagine if protests around the world, held in the name of palestinians, actually cared about palestinians, and called on them to hand over the hostages, starting on day one. or on day one hundred. or day two hundred. or three or four or five or six or seven hundred. 

Imagine if countries had actually let Palestinians flee the war, so they weren't sitting ducks for dense urban combat.

Imagine if countries had put pressure on qatar and turkey to put pressure on hamas.

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There's this idea, batted around in Israel sometimes, taken as a sort of given, that once the war is over, the global storm will subside. 

That they won't care about the Gaza "genocide" once it's no longer ongoing. 

Maybe. Or maybe, once it's in the past, you won't need any tether to reality. Maybe we're losing the PR war when you have a self-righteous activist on one half of the screen denouncing Israeli war crimes and a pompous barely-anglophone propagandist on the other half denouncing Hamas terrorism, but we'll have lost it completely once that second guy is out of the picture altogether. When there is no "what actually happened today" that has to vaguely align with what they're saying happened. Maybe, now that the Gaza Genocide is history, it can be memorialized, and enshrined in collective memory, and time will have run out to let journalists into the Strip to see for themselves, because that's all over now, and you won't be able to take diplomats on a tour of charred houses in Kfar Aza and bullethole-ridden shelters because those will have been torn down and replaced with new life, and no one will believe the atrocities ever happened in the first place.

The world thinks we committed a genocide. People don't stop caring about genocides once they're over. That would be wrong. People seek justice after genocides. 

This isn't the finish line, it's the starting line. 

Maybe not. But maybe. 

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Still: the hostages are coming home. 

That is — again — the good news. 

The soldiers and the reservists are probably coming home soon, too, at least for a while.

Evacuated kids, too, God willing. 

And apart from Iran round 2, which I'd bet is coming sooner rather than later, they might actually live free from missile attacks for a while.

Wouldn't that be nice.

Yes, actually.

It will be.

It's what we've hoped and prayed for, and it's extremely good news.

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For Jews, at least.

LK