When my phone buzzed last Saturday evening, I peered down and saw a mate had sent a short video clip of a woman whose face was vaguely familiar. She was embracing an older man. In a hospital maybe? Long dark hair. An open smile.
Surely not – is that, is she? Noa’s ALIVE? I wrote back, incredulous. Elated. Eyes stinging. It felt overwhelming. Noa Argamani, last seen in the clutches of homicidal rapists as she was dragged from the Nova music festival eight months ago, pleading for her life, was alive.
The point of reference I have for that feeling was back in 1997, as I sat crouched anxiously in front of the TV in my parents’ loungeroom watching Stuart Diver being stretchered out of the ruins of a Thredbo chalet. I didn’t know him but I cried as if I did.
Argamani wasn’t the only Israeli hostage rescued by Israeli forces last weekend, there were also three men. But hers was the face of Hamas brutality in those shocking first hours of October 7 last year. It was her screams the world heard.
“Don’t kill me! No, no, no,” she pleaded as she was taken captive, and then paraded through Gaza like a hunting trophy. In her I saw my younger self. I saw my niece. My friends and their daughters. A Jewish woman being taken hostage by violent Islamic extremists would understand that rape and death were not just possible but likely.
I didn’t expect to see her alive. And she is because Israel ignored the rest of the world, fat and lazy in its privileged security, when it said stop.
Thankfully, Israel remembered Entebbe and the Air France hostage rescue in 1976. It remembered the criticism thrown by the UN when it nabbed one of the principal architects of the Nazis’ Final Solution, Adolf Eichmann, and brought him to justice. Israel remembers. Why don’t we?
It seems so many can’t even remember back eight months to how this started. With an unprovoked, bloody slaughter. An orgy of violent rape and sexual brutalisation. With the most horrific atrocities since the Holocaust.
Now we learn that while Argamani was moved between houses during her captivity, the three men rescued with her had been held at the home of gentrified Gazans, one of whom was a doctor. His son was a journalist for Al Jazeera who wrote stories about the horror of this war for Gazans.
Both were killed in the hostages’ rescue. I wish I felt pity. I imagine how I’d feel as a relative of those four hostages. I don’t think I’d care what happened to the animals who kept them locked up. I could lie and say I have sympathy, but they were educated people. I have nothing but contempt.
And this is what the federal government and the “from the river to the sea” collective must now reconcile: the fact the “innocent” civilian narrative is full of holes. That many Gazans were complicit in the October 7 massacres. They have participated and willingly continue to participate.
This is the problem for our Foreign Minister and the Prime Minister. The face of evil isn’t just a young man with an AK47 on his back, crowing over Shani Louk’s broken body as they drag her naked and exposed through Gaza.
The face of evil is that of an elderly educated doctor and his journalist son living in comfort and keeping hostages.
Australia’s official, somewhat muted, almost resentful reaction to the rescues speaks volumes. The “look, we’re happy they’re free, BUT…”.
Add to that the weird birth of something I call terrorist maths. Four hundred die to rescue four, the anti-Israel mob lamented. Those numbers, like all that come from the Hamas ministry of health, are untrustworthy. That aside, there is only one equation to consider. Take no hostages, incur no casualties.
Wait, maybe another – release all the remaining hostages, including the bodies of those murdered, and incur no further casualties. It ends in an instant. Today. This minute.
In the personification of inanity, our federal government is still calling for a ceasefire. It bears repeating. Hamas continues to refuse any deal on offer.
Hamas is truthful in one thing only: its refusal to coexist peacefully with Israel. The Israeli government is right to pursue Hamas’s eradication. Every civilian death is on the head of Yahya Sinwar, the coward, the butcher of Khan Younis who this week was exposed by The Wall Street Journal when it published a verified suite of messages that proved comprehensively that for Hamas dead civilians are a strategy.
So many in the West have allowed themselves to be played.
How dare we tell Israel how to rescue its own, how to defend itself. As I’m writing this, hundreds of rockets have been fired by Hezbollah in Lebanon into Israel’s north and not a single word from our federal government.
I don’t know when this will be over. I pray that it’s soon. I do know that in the wilds of these uncharted days and months, history, that great friend, counsellor and teacher, foreshadows an outcome. One that was written in Entebbe. Eichmann. Munich.
The message I have, respectfully, for our federal government is this. As much as it’s uncomfortable, as much as it’s electorally risky for you, there is right and wrong here. There is no grey.
As Labor prime minister Bob Hawke warned, if the bell tolls for Israel, it won’t just toll for Israel, it will toll for all mankind. You’d do well to remember his words.
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