Bearing Witness to Heartbreak — Reflections on the War’s Toll

This has been a brutal week for the Jewish people. Six hostages, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi, Ori Danino, Almog Sarusi, and Alexander Lobanov, individuals whom we had gotten to know through accounts by their loved ones, were murdered by Hamas in the tunnels of Gaza, executed just hours before they could be saved by members of the Israeli Defense Forces — Hamas preferring their deaths to the possibility that they could be reunited with their families and the victories that would bring Israel.

Meanwhile, throughout this war, Gazans have known immense suffering, too. When Hamas launched the murderous attack of October 7, proceeding then to embed themselves within civilian populations, Israel responding to destroy Hamas’ military and governing capabilities, it led to devastating results for the people of Gaza, with destruction, hunger, and even the emergence of polio, whose presence had previously been eradicated (and which has led, thankfully, to a surprisingly successful vaccination campaign centered around pauses in the fighting).

I have a confession to make: throughout my thinking and writing about this war, I have not centered the experience of the hostages and their families as much as I should have.

This is in part because the humanization of the victims of this war is almost too much to bear. There is so much suffering — by the hostages and their families, by Gazans and theirs, by all of Israel, the Palestinians, and much of the world. To allow myself to focus on individual human beings in the midst of all of this — how can the soul carry such a weight?

And yet that is of course no defense. It is merely a description of my reflexive response to limit my internal experience of the world’s sufferings — which we all do, to some degree, to facilitate our carrying on with our days. The fact that we all do it to some degree — and we all do; we all have to; we all also have to experience joy, and offer love and support to those in our direct orbit, amongst a range of other emotions — does not excuse our averting our eyes. It is incumbent upon us all to bear witness.

Still, I don’t want to suggest that this disclaims all my previous writings on this war: as I have cited many times, there are conflicts — when an enemy swears they will destroy you, no matter the cost (Hamas); when a global actor is bent on world domination and the extermination of whom they perceive to be subhuman races (the Nazis) — where the ideology driving at least one of the actors will not permit an exclusively peaceful resolution to the conflict.

And yet, there are limits to this logic, too. As I wrote in a previous piece, it is unlikely we will see an end to this war like we saw with World War II, where one side offers an unconditional surrender. Perhaps (well, certainly) I don’t know enough about war, but it’s hard to imagine Hamas surrendering the way Nazi Germany did after Hitler’s suicide.

Therefore, we have to ask: at what point has this war gone on long enough? At what point will Hamas’ military and governing capabilities have been sufficiently degraded as to yield substantially more security for Israel on its southwest border than existed before October 7, recognizing that there is no such thing as “100% secure”? At what point is the cost to the lives of the hostages and the cost of the lives of Palestinians too great to bear for increasingly diminishing returns on the security front?

Israeli society is debating these questions right now. To simplify a bit, the military establishment is saying that at this stage in the game, the priority should be to return the approximately 101 remaining hostages home (35 of whom are declared dead) by agreeing to a ceasefire and releasing Palestinian prisoners who had been deemed a security threat, and that if subsequent military threats from Hamas develop later, the IDF can always respond in turn. Far-right members of the governing political coalition Itamar Ben-Givr and Bezalel Smotrich want to continue to pursue Hamas and to reoccupy Gaza. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims that to agree to a ceasefire-hostage deal without maintaining control of the Philadelphi Corridor (a strip of land on the Gaza-Egypt border through which has Hamas has smuggled weapons) would further endanger Israel’s security, and that no hostage-ceasefire deal can be completed without that term.

The problem here is that Prime Minister Netanyahu has burned up all trust he had with much of Israeli society. His political survival as Prime Minister is dependent on the aforementioned far-right members of the coalition, who do not want a hostage deal, but instead want to continue fighting Hamas. If Netanyahu were to spurn their war aims, it is likely that they would leave the governing coalition — leading the government to collapse, which would necessitate new elections in Israel. That would allow for the possibility that Netanyahu would lose the premiership, and the further possibility that Netanyahu could face jail time as a result of (unrelated) ongoing corruption charges.

The choices Netanyahu makes on behalf of Israel are therefore inextricably and directly linked with his personal political future, thereby undermining the faith of many Israelis in their own government.

I am heartbroken for Israelis, for Jews, for my people. Not only was Israel brutally attacked by Hamas on October 7, and subsequently by Hamas’ Iranian-backed allies — Hezbollah, the Houthis, militias in Iraq and Syria, and Iran itself; not only does it have the heartbreaking experience of hostages sitting in tunnels in God-knows-what physical conditions; not only has Israel been demonized on the world stage by protestors and world leaders bent on minimizing the very real threats Israel faces and its peoples’ millenia-old ties to the land; but it also has a government whom it can’t even trust to make decisions that are grounded in what is for the benefit of its people, rather than for the benefit of one man’s political future.

There are reasonable debates to be held about what Israel should do next — concede that the war effort has largely reached its limits and make an exchange for the hostages, also limiting civilian casualties; or continue to pursue Hamas until its military and governing capabilities are further destroyed. But those debates cannot be held honestly and with clarity when the government is led by someone whose personal interests so strongly tilt the scales in one direction.

I’m further heartbroken for Palestinians. It’s true that there are many Palestinians who support Hamas and want to see the destruction of Israel. There are also Israelis who seek to intimidate and terrorize innocent Palestinians, and who pray for a day when Palestinians will relinquish all claims on all lands “from the river to the sea,” including the West Bank and Gaza.

Neither people is going anywhere. While it is a long way off, we have to steer our way towards a solution that recognizes both people’s claims to the land, most likely around a two-state solution with a secure, prosperous Jewish state in Israel proper, and, someday, a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. 

Just as I am heartbroken for Israelis, for Jews, for my people, I am heartbroken for so many innocent Palestinians who have been in the crosshairs of this war between Israel and Hamas.

Sometimes it is easier for me to retreat to a “head” space — to keep my experience of this war grounded solely from the neck up: what are the arguments for and against the war? What policy choices make sense? What does the future look like?

Sometimes it’s important for me — and I need to push myself — to drop into a heart space: whose lives have been upended by this war? Whose families have been broken? Whose dreams shattered?

Only from that place can we work to pick up the pieces, together.