Help From Major Itamar Ben David
Major Ben David shows me the post of a Sderot man named Doron Shabti, who describes day to day life with his children, 11 months following the October 7 massacre. Shabti, a social worker, writes of an utterly surreal moment when he says of his young son, “I took Negev to the playground. After the Simchat Torah massacre, there were bodies of terror- ists there. sprawled on the colorful rubber floor. They stayed there for a long time. Even after I left. Negev stands in the middle, exactly where the terrorist’s left hand rested, which has not been there for 11 months and I can still see and smell it. Dad, look how I jump [his child Negev says]. I see.” One can not only feel his horror and the temporality of the scene, but also his realization that this is his life - an instance that not only he lives through, but his children live through as well. Another post that Ben David shows me is written by Israel’s unofficial tech ambassador, Hillel Fuld. Fuld gives his own commentary on the aftermath of October 7, but in relation to a proposed deal to end the war that the U.S. has especially been working toward. Not only is what Fuld says a long-withheld commentary, he says, but it’s also an Israeli truth that must be understood. “My goodness,” he says, “enough already! Seriously, I kept quiet long enough. “Let me state this as clearly as I know how. “Just because someone is not in favor of a deal in which we negotiate with monsters, release monsters, and create new monsters by giving them incentive, doesn’t mean that person cares any less about the hostages than you do!! “I don’t care how many people take to the streets with blatant lies as if they want the hostages back more than anyone else. It’s a lie. “And I’ll go even further. “Hamas doesn’t want a deal. Hamas never agreed to a deal. It is not us rejecting a deal. It is them. “Spreading a lie as if it’s Netanyahu who rejected the deal because he wants to jeopardize our hostages is dishonest, it’s dangerous, and quite frankly, it is repulsive beyond words. Amazing how all those years ago, the entire right was blamed for Rabin because people held up signs of Rabin with a Muslim head covering or called him a traitor, and now, all these years later, those same people are totally ok with calling the PM a murderer, throwing sand at a minister, and referring to this government as a government of terrorists. “I cannot imagine anything more hypocritical. “So let’s set the record straight. “I want the hostages back with every fiber of my being. So does every single person in this country and in our government. “Hamas has no intention of giving them back because it’s their only leverage. Why would they? They know we can’t do what we need to do there because of the risk to our hostages. They know that if they give them back, dead or alive, they are finished. “Hamas has rejected every deal. So even if the deal was an amazing one, stop blaming Bibi as if he was the one who turned the deal down. It wasn’t. It was Hamas. It is Hamas. “But now to the issue itself. “It’s a really simple ques- tion. “If I release a terrorist to get a hostage back (No one is talking about releasing a terrorist. They’re talking about releasing thousands.) and that terrorist then goes and kills two people, was that a smart move? Yes or no? We saved one, and lost two. “So now, even if we put aside the fact that Hamas won’t release them, and we put aside the fact that we don’t even know who is alive and who isn’t, and we put aside the fact any deal that was ever on the table involved releasing hundreds of monsters with blood on their hands, put all that aside, and tell me, when we release these monsters, what will they do the very next day? “Let’s say we go forward. We give them a thousand prisoners and they give us all our hostages back (Again, that’s never even been on the table). Those terrorists that we released, ya know, like Sinwar, they will proceed to murder countless Jews. Why wouldn’t they? We let them go after they did it once. “Furthermore, what lesson are we telling Hamas? “Kidnap more! Not only will Israel release hundreds of monsters, but it’ll also rip their society apart and they’ll turn on each other!” “In other words, agreeing to a deal like this is collective national suicide. “You think for a second this is easy on anyone? You don’t think we all want those poor hostages back? We all do. Every single one of us. “We also want to make sure this doesn’t happen again and that we don’t have thousands of terrorists walking freely looking for their next Jewish victim. “So no, this isn’t a black and white issue that if you’re for a deal, you care about the hostages and if you’re against it, you don’t care about them. “Stop spreading this false narrative. “None of it is true. Not a single word of it. “We didn’t reject the deals. They did. “We aren’t getting them back through negotiations. We need to do the best we can using intelligence and the military to rescue them. Yes, it’s near impossible. But Hamas has zero incentive to release them. “And most importantly, a deal, as badly as I want to see our hostages back, would be our death wish. Yes, ‘abandoning’ our own is beyond terrible but handing them thousands of monsters? That’s abandoning us all! “So, unless something drastically miraculously changes, a deal in which we free hundreds of terrorists for every one hostage, is a horrible thing to do and I would not be the one to have to face those parents and tell them that, but that doesn’t change the fact that we need to think responsibly and long term and not act based on emotion. “I want them back just like you. I just don’t think committing national suicide is going to help anyone, and that’s what a deal would mean. “Now, for the love of God, can we get back on the same team and stop pretending that we are the enemy and not Hamas? Don’t you get it? They love seeing us rip each other apart almost as much as they love seeing us suffer and die. “Enough.” To that end, another com- mentator whom the Leader has referenced in the past, Tamar Meisels, says of the disunity that the media enhances, “This war was started when Israel wasn’t super united. We were having a lot of fighting from within… “Soldiers are feeling such a sense of unity when they come home, then they see what’s going on in the media, all the hatred… “We need to stay together as one nation,” she says, “be together as one people - when you’re united, it helps you in the battlefield.” Unity, for Israel, is in mili- tary service. In a land where serving in the military is like breathing, and Ben David’s own father served until his 50s, the IDF is as essential as the country itself.
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