The Racist Element in the Hostage Campaign

The Racist Component in the Hostages Campaign

The issue of the hostages is tearing Israeli society apart. The families’ pain is heartbreaking. It is hard to remain indifferent in the face of the tears of parents, children, and spouses who have been waiting for months for the return of their loved ones. The emotions are raw, the pain is real – but in my eyes, the discourse that has developed around them deviates from the necessary moral-rational discussion and leads us into unconscious realms of emotional manipulation and covert racism.

Unlike the shallow discourse that divides the world into two types of people – “those who have a heart” and “those who don’t” – it’s important to say: this is not really a matter of heart. On the contrary – the expectation that we ignore all other considerations for the sake of returning the hostages exposes a mechanism in which Jewish lives are counted, while the lives of others simply do not exist.

About 30,000 civilian deaths in Gaza, half of them women and children, hundreds of thousands wounded, displaced, starving – do not succeed in arousing the same urge to stop everything, to demand an immediate ceasefire, “at any cost.” Why? Because they are not “us.”

Precisely those who hold a deep humanist position – who believe in the equal value of all human life – must ask themselves: is this war justified? Does the goal – the destruction of Hamas – justify the price? In my eyes, the answer is yes. And therefore, even the tragic deaths of thousands of children are not a “massacre,” but a terrible result of moral necessity. If you accept this – you must also accept the possibility that the lives of the hostages are not the sole consideration that determines the fate of the war.

But what is happening in practice is the opposite: the hostages campaign presents halting the fighting as an urgent moral imperative – not because of the terrible cost in Gaza, but because of the national cost. Not because of dead children – but because of our dead children. Not in the name of humanism – but in the name of limited emotional identification, which in practice perpetuates an ethnic hierarchy between kinds of blood.

This creates a moral perversity: a struggle wrapped in a “humanist” guise of “anyone with a heart” is actually a cynical exploitation of a covert national-racist emotion. It does not fight for the lives of people as such – but only for the lives of our people. It uses a real personal tragedy – to push for the end of a war that many believe is moral, just, and essential to the security of all citizens of the state, Jews and Arabs alike.

And therefore, precisely from an egalitarian worldview, which believes the question is not “whose blood” but “is the goal worthy,” I believe that this war is justified – and that it cannot be stopped just because we have a heart – because a real heart doesn’t stop at a border.