Israel and the US have made the clearest admission yet that any ceasefire resolution is solely about the return of the Israeli hostages. In remarks by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken released by the US Department of State, the objective is clear: “The focus of my visit [to the apartheid state] is intensely on getting the hostages back, getting the ceasefire done.” As such, the US focus is clearly misplaced, because ending the genocide should be Blinken’s main objective.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog went a step further. “There is no greater humanitarian objective and there’s no greater humanitarian cause than bringing our hostages home, as they should have returned long ago,” he said. There are many bigger humanitarian objectives as a result of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and the return of the hostages would fall far behind the safety and security of the Palestinian people, who are constantly being forcibly displaced, bombed and butchered, facing various infectious diseases, starved and buried under the rubble of their homes and other civilian infrastructure.
We should also mention that Herzog paints the entire world as an active threat to Israel, instead of Israel being a threat to the world. “We are surrounded by terror from the four corners of the Earth and we are fighting back as a resilient and strong nation,” he claimed. Wrong.
Israel created the genocide against Palestinians and the threats in the region.
It is a belligerent, colonial state based on an expansionist ideology. A resilient and strong nation would not need to resort to genocide and brutal military occupation. A settler-colonial entity that thrives on ethnic cleansing and land usurpation, on the other hand? Genocide becomes just another tool in the settler-colonial process and the international community has legitimized Israel’s war crimes through its silence.
It might be added that the international community, like Israel, has no qualms about the Israel Occupation Forces bombing the hostages while bombing the Palestinians in Gaza, because “hostages” is now just a diplomatic trigger word through which the genocide is being carried out with impunity. Neither Herzog nor Netanyahu nor the international community really care much about their survival. There are bigger issues at stake, one of which is to ensure that Israel is able to murder as many Palestinians as possible for the Zionist colonial process to move forward. Where are the humanitarian concerns Herzog thought it appropriate to elaborate upon? How is there “no greater humanitarian objective” when Israel relentlessly bombs Gaza with the tacit approval of what the Israeli president calls “all the leadership of the world”?
Israel’s National Security Minister, the far-right fanatic Itamar Ben-Gvir also sees no contradiction between bombing Gaza and the Israeli hostages’ return, stating that the remaining hostages “must only be returned via intense military pressure, halting the entry of fuel and humanitarian [aid] to terrorism and its supporters, and not via irresponsible deals that will bring upon us, God forbid, more hostages and fatalities in the future.”
Herzog and Ben-Gvir are two sides of the same Zionist coin.
Between them the only definition of “humanitarian objective” is distorted to kill as many Palestinians as possible, under the pretext of the hostages’ return. If the Israeli hostages are killed as collateral damage, then they will have served a purpose, because the rising toll of Palestinians being killed is preferable to Zionist Israel.
The occupation state’s politics of genocide are simple: Kill Palestinians to save the hostages and kill Palestinians even if it means the hostages are not saved. Because nothing matters, except the illegal theft of as much Palestinian land as possible with as few Palestinians living on it as possible. That’s what Zionism is all about. Herzog’s faux “humanitarian objective” is soaked in Palestinian blood.
-Ramona Wadi is an independent researcher, freelance journalist, book reviewer and blogger. Her writing covers a range of themes in relation to Palestine, Chile and Latin America. Her article appeared in MEMO.
