This Passover, there is no freedom, only defeat on every front

An Israeli house in the northern Israeli border town of Metula, damaged by Hezbollah shelling, is seen from Lebanon, 18 April 2024

Uri Misgav writes in Haaretz on 22 April 2024:

This is the saddest Passover I can remember.

There is no freedom, only enslavement and hostages and defeat on every front. I returned from a few days’ trip to the Upper Galilee in shock.

Nathan Alterman wrote, “No nation would retreat from the trenches of its life.” Alterman is long dead, and today he would be considered a bleeding heart, despite having been a hawk. The truth is that the north went the way of the south: attacked, abandoned, vacated. Kiryat Shmona is a ghost town. I traveled through it alone. Metula has been closed to civilians.

Fourteen border kibbutzim and a few neighboring moshavim were evacuated from the front line. Their residents have been exiles in their own country for six months now. A minority of them took the “generous” daily stipend and relocated to Copenhagen or Koh Samui.

The majority freak out in small hotel rooms or try to come up with some solution. There are also some who returned to their homes, living between missile and drone strikes. It’s hard to explain the damage to marriages, families, social, and community cohesion. Businesses are closed, tourism is dead, Tel-Hai Academic College’s thousands of students attend classes on Zoom. The children and teenagers have become unmoored and are lost.

There are also eight kibbutzim that were not included in the internal security zone that Israel imposed on itself, whose inhabitants are expected to withstand the daily sirens warning of missiles and drones, without a plan or a future. Maj. Gen. Ori Gordin, chief of the Northern Command, met with local representatives for a joyless Pesach toast. They were impressed by his character, but noted that he had nothing to offer them. After all, he is subordinate to a failed and dysfunctional political leadership.

Five minutes after I left Kibbutz Hagoshrim, where I visited friends who were fed up with the evacuation, a powerful missile hit a kayak launching dock. At my next destination, Kibbutz Lehavot Habashan, I told my audience that as far as I’m concerned, a state that gives up on the Negev, the Galilee and the hostages has no right to exist. It is the end of the Zionist vision and its founding ethoses (solidarity, settlement, combined military and diplomatic power).

In fact, it is no longer an Israeli matter: I ask myself whether, in the entire history of the West since 1945, there has been a worse ruler for his people and his country. Even Hezbollah is in shock. Hassan Nasrallah’s deputy told NBC last week: “We didn’t expect the war would last this long because we didn’t think that [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu was that foolish.” And it used to be said that Hezbollah has good intelligence and a deep understanding of Israeli society!

The truth is that it’s not folly, but rather a conscious decision. Netanyahu’s clear interest is to continue the war forever, preferably on a back burner that won’t force him to make any big decisions: a war of attrition in the south and the north with occasional flare-ups in other arenas (Iran, Iraq, Syria, the Houthis). This is, of course, the complete opposite of the Israeli national interest. The entire Israeli security doctrine was based on short wars, quick victories and leveraging successes on the battlefield for diplomatic gains.

Ending the fighting and withdrawing from Gaza will result in a deal for the release of the hostages (the few who are still alive; the rest were sacrificed), the possibility of an arrangement in the north and in its wake, the beginning of national recovery and reconstruction. But then will also come the time of reckoning and of protest against those responsible for the destruction – and this is what Netanyahu, his collaborators and, it turns out, also the generals want to postpone.

There is a desperate hope: This Memorial Day and Independence Day, everyone in Israel will remember the civilians and service members who were killed; the hostages who were sacrificed; the forsaking of the Negev and the Galilee; the economic ruin; the international isolation – and how it was all to preserve the government of Netanyahu and Benny Gantz, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, Yitzchak Goldknopf and Arye Dery. And then everything will explode again with tremendous fury. If not, that’s the end of our story.

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