Hostages are poignant and casualties are horrific.
Hamas is each day releasing 50 hostages in exchange for 150 people held in Israeli jails. The whole world watches the daily event of the hostages taken in ambulances to Israeli hospitals, footage of reunions, and snippets of what their captivity had been like, even though it means stalling the invasion of Israel to destroy Hamas because of its massacre of southern Israel on Oct. 7th. President Biden says the release of the hostages has been front and center ever since the hostages were taken and that rescuing the hostages results, Netenyahu states, because of Israeli military pressure rather than pondering the regrettable casualties that are the result of pursuing the war. Why are the hostages so important even though there are only hundreds of hostages while many thousands of Palestinian civilians, including women and children, die as the result of Israeli artillery. Isn’t that disproportionate?
The reason hostages are seen as more precious than civilians is existential. Hostages are particular while civilian casualties are statistical. A hostage is a person absconded and in grave danger of dying and so suspended between life and death and that leads to, well, suspense, which means concern for whether that particular person will die, a person full of feeling and personal lives, those recounted by un-hostaged relatives, and therefore precious because of their anguish. On the other hand, civilians are at any moment either dead or alive, mourned if gone but that over and done with, or else still alive and subject to the chance of a bomb falling on them or on the building which collapses on top of them. Some people have bad luck while others don’t even though the odds are worse in some places rather than others. Palestinians remind the world of the number of casualties even as Israelis have to remember what happened on Oct. 7th so as to explain why reprisal was justified. The media find the story of hostages a better story to cover because of individual biographies while all the media can show of casualties are bodies in shrouds, but the media is telling the story of the hostages because of its inherent poignancy: a person captured or released who was available to be killed.
There are precedents other than war of the poignancy of people under a sword of Damocles suspended under a thread, and so in recognition of immediate death, but still alive. Think of the Chilean miners a decade ago who were trapped underground world wide television closely following for days their eventual rescue while not covering the auto deaths on the highways at the same time except as a record of a particularly grisly one without covering the people who had lost live ones. Car accidents are just statistical and to be alleviated by seat belts and driverless cars rather than saving the guy who gets behind the driver’s seat to some unknown fate. Also think of Billy Wilder’s most cynical movie,”Ace in the Hole”, from 1951, where newspaperman Kirk Douglas creates dispatches of a trapped miner that leads to a carnival atmosphere and Douglas extends the time until he would be freed so as to do it more safely until the point that the miner dies, which is now a lose rather than an inspiration for hope, which is what everyone admires as a token of humanity, however manipulated by Douglas for his own advantage.
A way to overcome both hostages and casualties is to point to the grievances of one party and neglect those on the other side to the point that Palestiniians will claim that Oct. 7th was done by the Israelis to itself while Israelis will say that Gaza residents did not overthrow the Hamas regime and so those Palestinians afre being liberated by Israeli attacks on Gaza. A bit of hyperbole that is rhetorical and self-serving. But underneath the faux humanitarianism are the historical grounds for each side. Israelis were on the land for three or four thousand years and Palestinians claim that the land is part of the essential Muslim territory. There are quibbles about which side engaged in bad faith, the Israelis expelling the Palestinians during their War for Independence, the Israelis claiming that the Palestinians mostly left when they expected to return to their homes when Arab armies had taken over the area when they won the war. Both sides justify their own history, though I do find telling that the Palestinians never accepted any one of the many partitions offered to them. The Palestinian view “from the river to the sea” can be considered either principled or foolhardy or both.
It is no wonder then that political scientists will abandon historical rights and consider only realpolitik: what is useful rather than what is right. Japan had interests in getting scrap metal from the US and access to Indonesian oil so as to pursue its war against China. The US had been leery of Japan becoming a great Pacific power and so had conquered the Philippines in the Spanish American War so as to keep it from Japan. But realpolitik can go just so far. Hitlrr did not need a war for Germany to be prosperous and glorious. His daring risked too much. George Bush did not need to recapture Kuwait even if Iraq's control of it raised oil prices. The US adjusts to OPEC without going to war with it, Sunni nations useful for longer geo-political ends.The Palestinians and the Israelis are implacable foes for religious reasons and the US sides with the Israelis for domestic political reasons based on the idea that Israelis are westerners and Arabs are only slowly becoming that. Cultural affinities triumph over geo-political interests.
There is another way to explain the plight of hostages and casualties that takes advantage of their two properties: hostages as poignant and casualties as horrific. Biden uses both of them to accomplish his own goal, which is to get things to settle down rather than in war solve the problem once and for all, despite what Netenyahu and his most ardent supporters may want. Biden said a few days after the hostage taking that freeing the hostages was the first priority and would encourage humanitarian pauses so as to allow that. That Biden view may well have been heartfelt even though any pause would allow Hamas to regroup. The best Netanyahu could do was to use the poignancy of the hostages to say that only military pressure would allow Hamas to release hostages. And Biden, apparently with his active intervention, arranged for a trade between time and hostages, putting aside the Palestinians left out of jail. Then Biden talked about extending the days for exchange and possibly extending the situation into a full truce, which is counter to the Netanyahu position that Hamas has to be destroyed or else it will rise again and massacre Israelis. But Biden is concerned that the Palestinian casualties are so considerable that it will stain Israel permanently, there always people to blame the Jews for doing what other nations do regularly, as was the case when the US engaged in unacceptable behavior in Vietnam, killing civilians that were called “combatants'' because they were running away from American helicopters. So, by their own terms, Hamas would have won the war they expected: able to fight another day, thanks to American intervention. Biden would hope the Israeli people would kick out Netenyahu and elect a government that wpoui;ld supp[ort a two-state solution. Biden is sincere in what he says about Hamas and Israelis but is also cagey in the way he tries to leverage American power to his own ends, which means looking in the long run for a gradual accommodation between Israelis and Palestinians, over the course of generations, so deep is the chasm between them.