The Hostage and the Robot

Somewhere in the center of Gaza. A podium. Behind the podium, a banner in three languages (Arabic for the crowd, English for the world, Hebrew for the devil). And on the banner, “Total Victory” and “We Are the Deluge.”

Hooded men arrive, dressed in green and black keffiyehs, fists raised but gazes cold like robots. Two pickup trucks appear — trucks that, since Oct. 7, have carried the taste of Shani Louk’s blood, the young woman, half-naked, taken like a small animal, defiled, and murdered. Now we see Eli, Or, and Ohad — the three hostages, or rather, the ghost men — emaciated and powerless, dragged by the robot-men to the platform.

One wears dark glasses as if the sunlight, after emerging from the depths of the tunnels, were unbearable to him. Another, like a child on the first day of school, holds a printed piece of paper that looks like a certificate of martyrdom. The third is forced to recite a text; if he fails, stumbles, or forgets to say that “a deal is better than a war,” he must repeat it. Reduced to the shadow of himself, staggering, he has neither the right, nor the strength, nor even the will to ask whether he will really be reunited with his wife and daughters.

Then, the Red Cross representative steps into the frame. He looks like an administrator signing a transfer slip. Everything is organized. Everything is under control. The state is us, Hamas, and our “Praise be to God” when one of our children dies. The half-dead hostages are released. The display of strength is over. Cut.

***

No one is surprised anymore by such cruelty. Nor by this obsession with staging, meant to etch humiliation and suffering into the eye of anyone strong enough to watch. Had ISIS not already accustomed us, with its beheadings posted on YouTube, to this Hollywood-style barbarism? And before that, Al-Qaeda filming Daniel Pearl reciting, before being slaughtered, the Jewish profession of faith they had prepared for him?

However, the contrast with Tel Aviv was striking — where people gathered to watch from afar, in Hostage Square, praying for the resurrection of three men who, each in their own way, “save a world”: silence and dignity; the blue and white of Israeli flags waving above the heads; and, instead of the expected outbursts of joy or rage, an atmosphere of solemnity and tears.

For such is the involuntary, “Proustian” memory of humankind. One watches captives on their way to freedom. But what one sees — comparable or not — are survivors of the Nazi death camps. The same bodies, reduced to bags of bones. The same hollow eye sockets, with that vacant stare. The same despair, gaunt and dazed. One wonders whether Hamas, which has taken such deep inspiration from Hitlerian demonology, realizes what it is doing. But so much, indeed, is a matter of image. And these images speak the truth — they say it all.

***

After this, one no longer wishes to hear Trump boast about his deal of gold and fine sand, his project to remove the 2 million Gazans who watch this infamy unfold, and his mad idea of drowning it all, once and for all, under a flood of concrete, glass towers, infinity pools — Gaza is over, onward to Mar-a-Gaza.

Nor is there time anymore to listen to the too-clever ones explaining that there is no real cause for concern, that it’s just a game of poker, a bluff, “I have a straight flush, show me your three of a kind” — thus exposing, for all to see, the hypocrisy of those who have, for 50 years, repeated, like broken records, “an open-air prison”: A prison, really? Fine! Here are the keys.

And for once, I do not have the heart to remember that this is how peoples are. They are bewitched by their executioners. How could it be otherwise when they have been raised on UNRWA schoolbooks filled with anti-Jewish hatred? Yes, it will take time. But the Palestinians must be awakened and freed from their demons. Even if it’s five minutes to midnight in the realm of human thought, another Palestinian people must emerge.

One and only one feeling takes hold over these days. Rage at this parade, at this 3-for-183 exchange — what next? Two? Two-and-a-half? How long will this bookkeeping go on? And what of the myth of Israel’s ruthless power— when something deeply Jewish within it remains helpless in the face of the spectacle of black-clad men, of their martial, wordless hatred, of their barbaric glee.

This travesty must be rejected. We must revolt against this endless torment. Israel’s allies, in Europe and in the U.S., have only one thing to negotiate with Hamas and, above all, with its sponsors: the unconditional surrender of those responsible for these sadistic charades and the immediate release of all hostages, every single one, without waiting for phase 1, phase 2 or phase 3 to be completed. This arithmetic is obscene. And we will realize, one day, that we were wrong to let ourselves be paralyzed by the blackmail of uniformed robots who are strong only because of our moral weakness.

Bernard-Henri Lévy, known most widely as a philosopher and nonfiction writer, is also a novelist, filmmaker, and playwright. He is the author of more than 40 books.