HOPE FOR PEACE — DESPITE ALL
COUSIN OF HOSTAGE WHO WAS MURDERED AFTER 11 MONTHS IN CAPTIVITY REMAINS IN “PEACE CAMP.”
Carmel Gat survived 11 months in Hamas captivity. She was taken hostage from Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7, 2023. Her body was discovered by Israel Defense Forces on September 1 last year. She and four other hostages had been shot point blank in the head as the IDF closed in on them.
At Hostages Square in Tel Aviv last month, I spoke with Gat’s cousin, Gil Dickmann, who, like a number of other ordinary Israelis, has risen to become a recognized face and voice in this time of tragedy.
One of the reasons it has taken me time to process and write about what I heard while in Israel is that there is no easy-to-sum-up consensus. There are not two or even three streams of thought about how Israel should proceed, but dozens, or hundreds. The old saw about “Two Jews, three opinions” seems to hold true here, but this is hardly a time for droll stereotypes. By sharing individual stories and perspectives, I hope I can give a hint of the complexity of Israeli attitudes and experiences.
What Israelis are facing right now goes to the heart of the most sacred value in Jewish tradition — the sanctity of every human life.
In my last post, I wrote about my meeting with Harel Oren, who saved dozens or hundreds of lives when he and fewer than a dozen other heroes held off an estimated 80 or more invading terrorists at Kibbutz Re’im. Oren does not see a hope for peace in his lifetime. If Palestinian social norms and the UN-run education system were to begin teaching peace and coexistence today, there might be a chance for hope in a generation or two, he believes.
While Oren made a point about the long-range future, my discussion with Dickmann focused on something more immediate — freeing the 24 hostages who Israeli officials believe remain alive (and repatriating the bodies of those killed in captivity).
If it is possible to generalize, a schism exists between those who view saving the remaining hostages as an absolute obligation and those who (while certainly expressing hope for the hostages’ well-being) emphasize eliminating Hamas as the overarching existential necessity. (I will share conversations with others in future.) The former tend to call for a ceasefire and a negotiated deal. The latter tend to emphasize the military imperatives.
Inevitably, some people view the latter as a willingness to sacrifice the hostages to the goal of eliminating Hamas.
But between these positions, I suspect, are where most Israelis fall. Rescuing the hostages and ending Hamas — and decades of terrorism from Gaza — are parallel obligations. Several people have said to me that there is nothing stopping Israel from going back to war with Hamas after a negotiated release of the hostages.
The gradations of these opinions make it difficult to summarize any consensus among Israelis. Plotting every opinion on a line of “saving hostages” versus “ending Hamas” would see a graph with millions of dots.
Like many of the victims of October 7 (because the communities attacked that day were home to some of Israel’s most fervent peace activists and coexistence advocates), Dickmann and others in his family are firmly in the “peace camp.”
Where Oren, who I discussed in my last post, sees a new education system in Gaza as key to (very) long-range coexistence, Dickmann comes at it from the perspective that the current war is creating a new generation of enraged Palestinians.
“Little children who were born just 10, 11, 12 years ago, they are now holding the ideology that Israel is an enemy that they must eliminate,” Dickmann told me. “I believe that was Hamas’s goal to begin with. That’s why they started this war — because they wanted another generation of hate to be born in Gaza and, in a way, also in Israel. That’s their success. I don’t believe that we can let them win this.”
Peace activists like Dickmann are mostly staying quiet right now, he contends, because to speak up implies one does not recognize the horrific enemy Hamas represents.
“The way I see it,” he responds, “Hamas was my enemy for a very long time before October 7. They are a terror organization and they don’t believe in forming peace with us. But not all Palestinians are Hamas.”
Israelis and Palestinians cannot continue fighting forever, he says.
“People are going to die on both sides of the border and you just bring more revenge on both sides of the border and more hate on both sides of the border,” Dickmann says. “We have to put another alternative on the table because there is no future in a zone in which, once every few years, thousands of people die because extremists want the war to keep going. Even if hundreds of thousands of people on both sides believe that we can’t live together, I still believe that there is a large majority of people on both sides of the border that want life and that will have to find a solution for life, in Gaza, in Israel, in the occupied territories.”
In the long-term, he contends, some kind of a two-state solution is the only answer.
“I still consider this to be the most logical solution. It’s not going to happen tomorrow, we understand that. Gaza will have to be rebuilt and new ideas and a belief of the people in Gaza in the option of living near the Israelis — it’s going to take time. It’s not like I’m saying, ‘OK, if we come in, we sign an agreement, that’s it.’ We tried that.”
Extremists on both sides — he names the late radical Rabbi Meir Kahane and current cabinet minister Itamar Ben-Gvir as Israeli examples — are going to fight against peace and reconciliation between the two peoples, he says.
When I pressed, Dickmann clarified that he is not suggesting there is a viable “peace camp” on the Palestinian side.
“Not exactly,” he says. “It’s not like they want a peace agreement between the two sides, because it’s hard to believe it these days.”
But people on both sides want to live their lives, he says.
“[Israelis] don’t want to wake up in the morning and realize that thousands of people are coming to attack them,” he says. “They don’t want to wake up in Gaza and realize that the Israeli Air Force is bombing them.”
Even after all that has happened in the past year-and-a-half—all the pain, the violence and perhaps a hunger for retribution — most people on both sides, he believes, just want a quiet life.
“You can call it peace and you can call it a long ceasefire or a prolonged ceasefire, whatever you call it, but that’s what most people want,” says Dickmann. “I believe it is possible because it’s happened in so many other conflicted areas around the globe.”
Some people do not want to live in peace, though, he argues.
“If you ask Ben-Gvir what his plan [is], he says to continue the war forever and never end it,” Dickmann posits. “He believes in a reality where war is just consistent, that’s what we live through. He represents a small minority of Israelis and it only gets bigger while the war is continuing. That’s his political plan and that’s the political plan of Hamas on the other side. That’s what they want.”
Both sides will live with those extremists in their ranks, he argues. But most Israelis, according to surveys, Dickmann says, “care more about the human lives of the hostages and the core value of human life than revenge or eliminating the bad guys on the other side. … Even after so many years of no peace process and after this horrible tragedy of October 7, still most of the people want their own people to live more than they want the other side to die. This is true for the Israelis. I have no data to show for it, but I believe it is also true for all peoples and for the Palestinians as well.”
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A personal note …
I started this Substack because I thought my perspective as a progressive, gay, non-Jewish, Zionist Canadian offered something different to the dialogue about antisemitism, anti-Zionism, Palestinianism and peace. It actually never crossed my mind that people might give me money for it. When people started generously subscribing and donating, I threw myself into this project more, partly because I am a writer by trade and I am still building my RSPs for some distant retirement. Based on online advice (!) I started making my Saturday posts for “Paid Subscribers Only.” But, I modestly acknowledge, each one is too delicious to paywall. So I am going to assume that, if you like my stuff and want more of it, you’ll give if you can. If not, please share. (Please share regardless!) No more paywalls. But there may be other incentives I could offer. Not sure what. Got any ideas? Do folks want to get together for online discussions or see me compile some of these posts as a book? Let me know. Meanwhile, enjoy! (If that is the right word for these sometimes dark musings.)
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Excellent journalism. Your visit to Israel and your discussions with various Israelis is resulting in the kind of stories that are not common enough - even here on Substack. I
look forward to more opinions from the homeland.
Incredibly complex and nuanced issues that keep the Israeli society awake - and, Pat, you take a sound and honest approach to try and unpack it all. In the meantime, the Globe and Mail, NYT, WAPO, and BBC are trying to reduce this to a binary question of a victim and an aggressor. And even then, they get the two sides wrong by gobbling up terrorist propaganda!