ISRAEL at BROOKLYN

Right now, the question of the hostages is the central question of our lives. It is not just a political issue but a question that touches on the very heart of our emotional world: How will we preserve our capacity for compassion, for love, for friendship? How will we defend ourselves against a state that shows contempt for those who grieve – for the many who lie awake night after night, hearts torn by pain and helplessness?

A fierce public debate is taking place in Israel about how to rescue the 48 hostages still being held in Gaza – living as though dead.​

On one side stand the hostages’ families and many Israelis who are haunted by their suffering. They cannot rest. Their moral demand is clear and urgent: the State of Israel must act now to save the hostages, because every day they live under the shadow of death. This demand assumes that Hamas’s defeat can wait – but the hostages cannot. The sand in the hourglass of their lives is running out.​

The government’s decision to prioritize the destruction of Hamas before rescuing the hostages is, in effect, an abandonment of its ongoing responsibility to protect all its citizens – including the hostages.

On the other side is the argument that the state’s responsibility to its citizens requires it to postpone a hostage deal until Hamas is defeated, to eradicate the evil that enabled the October 7 massacres and prevent future attacks. Supporters of this view sometimes argue that a hostage deal would demand an unacceptably high price in soldiers’ lives, and so they weigh the value of lives in a cost-benefit calculation, concluding that military victory must come first.

This logic is deeply troubling. It makes the right to self-defense depend on a numbers game – on the ratio between the hostages who might be saved and the soldiers who might be killed. By this logic, the nations of the world should never have fought the Nazis or sought to save Jews during the Holocaust, because that war cost millions of soldiers’ lives. But no one argued this then. The principle of a just war assumes that human lives are worth defending even at great cost. Until now, Israel has never guided its policy by such cold cost-benefit calculations.

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The government and its supporters distort the debate by presenting it as though there are only two variables: the hostages on one side and the state’s duty to defend its citizens on the other – while conveniently excluding the hostages from the definition of “citizens.”

This framing also erases the pain of the citizens who are alive and present here and now. The state denies its responsibility to prevent harm not only to people’s physical safety but to their emotional well-being.

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Homeland = Security

The state is obligated to create a space in which people feel calm, safe, and able to trust one another. This is the deeper meaning of “homeland”: a place where one feels secure.

As the Jewish thinker Jean Améry, who survived the camps, wrote: “Homeland, reduced to its positive psychological essence, is security.” Security begins with comfort and familiarity: a person walks confidently through a place he knows, not feeling alienated or uprooted.

Home is not just a physical structure. It is an inner experience, the feeling that there is order, familiarity, and a government that works to preserve that sense of home.

Today, it is not only the hostages who have lost their sense of home.

Someone whose physical house is destroyed may grieve, but this does not necessarily strip him of his sense of belonging. He still lives in a familiar place, hears a familiar language, knows the names of the streets, and trusts that someone will hear his cry.

But when a person is torn away from that security, something inside him breaks. His familiar world collapses. His very being is consumed by the rupture.

As Wislawa Szymborska wrote in her poem Autonomy:

“The abyss does not divide us / the abyss surrounds us.”

This is the essence of horror: being thrown out of one’s world into the void. The world loses meaning. There is nothing left to hold onto, no explanation to make sense of it. Horror leaves a person unbearably alone, cut off from all bonds.

Who can understand the terror he feels? Who can comfort one whose world has been annihilated?

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The Ideal Citizen = The Obedient Citizen

In these terrible days, many of us are living with a shattering fear. The safe world we thought we knew is collapsing. Our fear is woven from two threads: the personal trauma of an unimaginable disaster and the political reality that the state is retreating from its most basic commitment – to guarantee our security and peace of mind.

The state has become blind to its citizens, treating them as invisible and inconvenient. We are witnessing the destruction of “home” – not just metaphorically but in the deepest existential sense.

Not only houses of stone have been destroyed, but the very infrastructure of belonging. This leads to deep alienation.

Martin Buber captured this precisely:

“Man stands in a world that he can no longer regard and experience as his home, and he is no longer secure in it.”

Death and ruin have broken into our lives, shattering our trust in the order of existence.

Anyone who calls this place “home” now faces the fact that it no longer offers certainty or safety. No one is truly protected – not infants, not the elderly, not those who built their lives here believing in human goodness.

This experience has led to a wave of collective trauma: rising suicide rates and a mental health crisis.

The problem today is not only the hostages “over there.” It is also the people “right here,” whose hearts are broken.

The government, blind to this collapse of home, stands apart – and sometimes even lectures us about how we should think and behave.

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In its indifference, it offers us a model of the “ideal citizen”: an obedient subject who submits to the state’s absolute authority and suppresses his own emotions for the sake of “total victory over evil.”

The state uses education, policing, and media to try to cut the knot that ties our moral and emotional world to the suffering of the hostages, erecting an iron curtain between our conscience and what it calls the “new duty” of citizenship: obedience to power.

 

Losing Hope = Surrendering to Evil

The cynicism of the state’s stance is revealed in the fact that ministers and officials wear yellow hostage ribbons.

Instead of serving as a moral alarm bell, the ribbon has become a hollow ritual, devoid of commitment.

Officials speak of “sharing the families’ pain,” but these are only words – spoken without looking at the faces of those who suffer.

Sometimes state representatives even attack those who demand moral responsibility, branding them traitors or extremists.

The state is deaf and blind.

At this moment, the question of the hostages is no longer only about them – it is about us.

It asks: How can we protect our emotional world, our compassion, our humanity?

How can we defend ourselves from a government that shows contempt for grief, that robs us of our sleep, that replaces reality with empty rituals and words?

Faced with this situation, we have a civic duty to confront the state and charge it with failing in its most basic role: to protect the quality of human life.

If we fail to remain vigilant, not only will the state collapse – we ourselves will lose our ability to feel compassion.

Now more than ever, we must stand with those who suffer, listen, show solidarity, and act with compassion.

We must resist the state’s attempt to detach the question of the hostages from our civic and moral lives.

We must remember the warning of Albert Camus in The Plague:

“It is wrong to say that this is just a bad dream that will pass… from one bad dream to the next, it is man who passes away – especially the humanists, for having failed to take precautions.”

We must not lose hope.

We must not surrender to evil, numbness, or the government’s attempts to dull our moral senses.

We must refuse to yield and continue the Sisyphean struggle against evil.

As Leonard Cohen wrote in Anthem:

“Ring the bells that still can ring… there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”

Hope lies in humanity, in the faith that we can act, resist, repair.

The light is the good in humanity, shining through the cracks to break the darkness.

The struggle for the hostages is ultimately the struggle for that light – for the humanity within us.

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The article was originally published in Hebrew on the Hartman Institute's website, translated by Lior Lekner. For the original article