Yesterday I wrote a column in The Guardian about the Republican Party’s shameful response to the attack on Israel, which included the party chairwoman calling it a “great opportunity” to criticize Democrats. Check it out - but remember, my most well-developed takes are always here on America Explained, a newsletter that serves only its dedicated readership. Buying a subscription helps me to keep doing what I’m doing here and means you never miss any content - all for about $1 a week.
About 15 Americans - mostly dual citizens - are still unaccounted for after the attack on southern Israel, and the Biden administration believes that a “handful” are being held hostage in Gaza. They are part of a group of roughly 150 people of varying nationalities, but mostly Israeli, who are being held by Hamas or other Palestinian groups - including among their number a wheelchair-bound Holocaust survivor. Valuable to Hamas as a bargaining chip and a magnet for military raids, they are likely being held in the underground network of tunnels that Hamas maintains in Gaza.
In the coming weeks and months, the fate of these hostages will become one of the main subplots of the unfolding crisis. The suffering that they are undergoing is hard to imagine, especially when you consider that many of them are children. Emotions around this are raw as hell, as illustrated by this heartbreaking account of an Israeli father who says he was happy to discover that his eight year old daughter was dead rather than in Gaza - terrified, alone, and with who knows what fate awaiting her.
The lives of the hostages clearly continue to be in danger - as demonstrated at the weekend, Hamas is a genocidal anti-Semitic organization that would not shrink from killing any of them as soon as they are no longer useful to it. But Hamas will also want to use the hostages to engage in a diplomatic and military dance with the IDF, using the continued threat to their lives to temper the ferocity of the Israeli response to last weekend’s atrocities. They might succeed in some measure, both because the weakened Netanyahu government cannot afford to look indifferent to the fate of Israeli and allied civilians and because the IDF is a citizens’ army which prizes the life of its own.
That being said, the IDF is not going to allow the presence of the hostages to completely paralyze it. Fighting in dense urban areas is brutally difficult, and militaries who are forced to engage in it usually resort to heavy firepower in order to flatten structures and stun the enemy before launching their assaults. The difficulty of this sort of fighting is precisely why Israel has avoided extensive ground operations in Gaza for so long, and why it decided that the least-bad option was to let Hamas consolidate its rule over the strip and then try to control it with a mixture of carrots and sticks. Now that this calculus has changed and Israel has decided that Hamas must be destroyed, immense civilian suffering is baked in to what happens next. In urban warfare, there is going to be no guaranteeing that the hostages will stay safe.
For now at least, the presence of American hostages in Gaza is unlikely to affect the course of events too much. But it will certainly be on the minds of both the Israeli and American governments. There’s a reason that Netanyahu has concluded a new unity government and held consultations with U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken before launching an attack on Gaza. He’s getting his ducks in a row, both domestically and internationally. For now, U.S. support is rock solid, and the two sides likely agree that publicly at least they cannot give the impression that Hamas will be able to use the hostages to make particular demands regarding the parameters of the ground operation. But you can bet that behind the scenes, they have discussed how an attempt will be made to avoid harming the hostages, and whether the possibility of some sort of release deal exists. You can also bet that, if actionable intelligence arises, U.S. Special Forces will carry out an operation to rescue American hostages directly from Gaza.
Pirates and mullahs
There are also cultural and political reverberations to consider in the United States itself. There’s a deep history here, going right back to the days of the American Revolution. In the late 1700s, the Barbary States of North Africa made a living preying on European shipping in the Mediterranean, taking the crews hostage, and then demanding huge ransoms for their return. The hostages were typically held as slaves, and their only alternative to waiting to be ransomed was to convert to Islam - a type of coerced apostasy which enraged and scandalized Christians and Jews of the day.
Before the American Revolution, ships from the American colonies sailing in the Mediterranean had the protection of the British flag, and London had cut a deal with the Barbary States to protect them. After the revolution, the Americans were on their own - and Britain and other countries even encouraged the Barbary States to go after them in order to harm American commerce. And so they did. Morocco captured the first ship, the Betsy, in 1784 - but the sultan, who had been the first leader in the world to recognize the independence of the United States and then become piqued when American leaders ignored him, was just making a play for attention. Soon the crew was released and a U.S.-Moroccan treaty of friendship was signed - the first such treaty that the U.S. had with an Arab country.
Much more serious were the actions of Algiers, which captured two American ships in 1785. The crew remained enslaved for over a decade because the infant United States was too broke and powerless to win their release, and the impact on American culture was profound. The inability to save their people from Algerian captivity made Americans feel that their country was weak and its leaders ineffectual. Letters from the captives were printed in newspapers, causing revulsion at the conditions they described, which one called a “Situation of Horrors” - cramped cells, hard labor, exposure to the plague, and spoiled food. Confronting the situation, Thomas Jefferson said that “my faculties are absolutely suspended between indignation and impotence”. The need to develop naval power which might be able to force the Barbary states to relent became one of the arguments given for the adoption of the federal constitution in the late 1780s, and the eventual defeat of the pirates in the Barbary Wars was viewed by early Americans as an important milestone in their history.
More recently, the same drama of national impotence and rage played out during the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979 - 81. President Jimmy Carter was pummelled for weakness after failing to bring American hostages taken after the Iranian Revolution home. An attempted rescue attempt, Operation Eagle Claw, was a disaster, with most of the rescue force taken out of action by accidents and the mission ultimately aborted. Ronald Reagan hammered Carter for his failure to protect American lives, and for the feeling of impotence that the crisis created in the United States. It was one of the issues Reagan rode to victory in the next election, changing American history. Given their already shameful rhetoric, it’s easy to imagine Republicans trying to do the same.
In both the Barbary and Iranian cases, the religious, racial and cultural differences between the Americans and their tormentors also contributed to the way that the incidents were understood in the United States. By taking hostages and holding them captive in godforsaken conditions, the perpetrators as well as their nations in general came to be viewed as uncivilized barbarians. Lurid fantasies - and all too often real details - about what the hostages endured drove an enormous wedge between not just governments and groups but also peoples, poisoning the American view of the Middle East and Islam in ways that still reverberate to this day. This, after all, is what extremists try to do - they want to activate violent and uncompromising responses from the other side in order to make their own extreme beliefs seem more reasonable.
What next?
In the last few days, I have struggled mightily to keep my own emotions under control, and to prevent myself from indulging in the sort of response which would feed the cycle of extremism and violence that Hamas dearly wishes for. Of course, the views of some obscure writer don’t matter - but the Israeli government, as it decides what to do next, needs to engage in the same struggle. The continued plight of the hostages - both their suffering and the way that they signify the impotence of those who cannot rescue them - will be a constant incitement to unreasonable violence. Whatever happens to the hostages is the fault of Hamas and associated groups, not the children and other innocent civilians of Gaza, the West Bank, or Lebanon. Deploying extreme violence against civilians will do nothing to save the hostages, it will do nothing to save Israel, and it will do nothing to save the generations to come.
I keep returning, again and again, to that father who said that if the alternative was becoming a hostage, his daughter was better off dead. There is a universe of pain in those words, and if it were my own little girl held by fascists in some dark hole, I don’t know what I would think. But I do know that whatever her fate, I would not want it to become part of a never-ending cycle of violence and hate. I would want that cycle, somehow, to be broken.