The survivors of captivity are just props in a morbid performance, and if they don’t fancy it, they can return to the Hamas tunnels
In short, a good abductee is a silent abductee. Unfortunately, some of the abductees who returned from the tunnels exhibited a particularly dangerous physiological symptom: a voice.
By Yoana Gonen • Translated by Sol Salbe
The returned abductees have a clear role: not to testify but to corroborate. Their purpose is to make Hamas’s cruelty perceptible, not to reveal the callousness of the Israeli government. Their job is to gush over the bravery of the fighters, not to remind us of the terrifying moments when they feared for their lives as our pilots bombed them from above. The are meant to repeatedly talk about the hunger and torture in the tunnels, but in no way to point fingers at those who abandoned them there. It’s permitted and even preferable for them to come back with trauma, just not with an opinion. Because from Netanyahu’s point of view, the survivors of captivity are props — and when props start talking, the whole thing becomes a horror movie plot.
In short, a good abductee is a silent abductee. Unfortunately, some of the abductees who returned from the tunnels exhibited a particularly dangerous physiological symptom: a voice. Ilana Gritzewsky is struggling to bring back her partner, Matan Zangauker. Liri Albeg said that Netanyahu is to blame for the massacre on October 7, even though we all know nobody bothered to wake him up. Yarden Bibas had the chutzpah to assert that it’s impossible to celebrate Independence while the abductees are dying in the tunnels. Idan Alexander did not bow before the Prime Minister, who invested tremendous efforts in the deal for his return (efforts intended to thwart it, but still). And worst of all was Liat Atzili, who dared to participate in the Israeli-Palestinian memorial ceremony, as if two sides are suffering the pain.
In each of these cases, the response was swift: a toxic offensive on social media, like a tsunami of sewerage that built up instantaneously and crashed powerfully onto the beach. And as Itamar Minmar showed yesterday in his report on Channel 12’s main news program, this is not a spontaneous outburst but a functioning system. A sewerage plant, if you will, mixing authentic hatred, fake accounts, and orchestrated explosions. The report pointed out that there is a guiding hand behind all this, but refrained from explicitly saying whose hand it is — perhaps out of journalistic caution, and perhaps to avoid becoming the next target.
In any case, there is no need to be explicit with the name. All signs point to one office, a laboratory for producing venom that has used hatred for years to consolidate its supporters and entrench its rule. The traces of Netanyahu and his aides were evident in every corner of the article: in the toxic words of the government’s mouthpieces Yinon Magal and Avi Ratzon, in the silence of government ministers in the face of displays of hatred, in the fuelled rage of manipulated citizens, and in the foreign bot armies that echo the messages.
Netanyahu’s regime does not function as a government but as a consciousness campaign, and in a concentrated effort, he has managed to turn even the struggle for the abductees into a protest of treacherous leftists. The violence against the survivors of captivity is merely another expression, particularly shocking, of a regime that relies on a cult of personality and on artificially engineering reality. Anyone who refuses to play their role in this morbid production is welcome to stay in the tunnels.
