What to Make of the Testimony from the Released Hamas Hostage

Y ou might say that Yocheved Lifshitz — an Israeli hostage released yesterday by Hamas — was one of the lucky ones. The 1,400 men, women, and children who died on October 7 were massacred in horrific ways. At this writing, only four — less than 2 percent — of an estimated 222 hostages taken into Gaza by terrorists on October 7 have been released.

Upon Lifshitz’s release, brokered by Qatar and Egypt, the 85-year-old Israeli said she had “been through hell.” She spoke of being beaten and robbed as Hamas “abducted the elderly and the young.” She has “these images all the time” embedded in her memory. Her husband is still being held hostage.

But she also said that after being moved to a room with five others from her kibbutz, “they treated us gently and fulfilled all our needs.” She said the hostages had access to sanitary conditions and medical oversight. She said the terrorists were “friendly in their way” and “shared their food and ate with us.” When parting with them, as captured in a propaganda video published by Hamas’s Qassam Brigades, she shook the hand of her captor and told him, “Shalom,” meaning peace.

This handshake clearly impressed some members of the international press. The Guardian editorialized that “a small gesture of kindness toward a person who represents your enemy can stop time, can show in an instant that we are all human, as opposed to an impulse for revenge that reinscribes the past, setting off an endless chain of attack and reprisal.”

Was this a PR victory for Hamas, which preposterously claims that it released Lifshitz and another elderly woman, Nurit Cooper, for “humanitarian reasons”? Were hostages selected for release with PR tactics in mind? How much can you read into her testimony given that her husband is still being held captive? In a sense, Lifshitz is still being held hostage, too, at least psychologically. She’s also an elderly woman who has undergone major trauma. She has spent her entire life committed to peace, ferrying sick Palestinians from the border to and from the hospital with her husband, whose life is still imperiled.

No additional evidence is needed to condemn Hamas. We might say that Holocaust survivors, by virtue of being survivors, were fortunate when compared with their friends and family who perished in concentration camps. But even stories about Nazis such as Oskar Schindler, who saved Jews, do not redeem Nazi atrocities or Nazi ideology generally.

Besides, there is a huge variety of ways in which human beings, whether perpetrators or victims, cope with and inflict pain.

Some perpetrators enjoy the opportunity to be as cruel and sadistic as possible — consider Amon Göth, the Nazi commandant who killed and tortured Jews for sport, or the Hamas terrorist who called his parents on October 7 to boast, “I killed ten Jews! . . . I’m in a kibbutz, their blood is on my hands!” Others raised in a culture in which Jew-hatred is ingrained from an early age may view the “solution” to the problem of Israel as a necessary evil, and when given license to be merciful, as in a PR stunt, will gladly take it.

There is great variety among victims, too. Victims of crimes do not always behave as we expect or believe they should. In 2018, the Australian writer Germaine Greer sparked uproar when she expressed that despite being “violently raped” and “beaten half unconscious” as an 18-year-old, afterwards she “wasn’t that angry” and still doesn’t “feel angry enough.” She said she had been “bloody annoyed” rather than “destroyed” by the experience and recommended that society institute lighter sentences for nonviolent rapes, which would make it easier for juries to convict offenders: “Instead of thinking of rape as a spectacularly violent crime — and some rapes are — think about it as non-consensual, that is, bad sex. Sex where there is no communication, no tenderness, no mention of love.”

Fellow feminists were incensed and accused Greer of trivializing rape. But there is another way of looking at Greer’s comments, which is to marvel in her remarkable resilience, strong will, and admirable determination not to be defined by her status as a victim. After all, the subjective experience of the victim can be disentangled from the objective crime of the assailant.

Compared with spraying civilian drivers with bullets, shooting pedestrians indiscriminately, setting families alight in their homes, murdering babies, killing parents in front of their children, then sure — allowing an elderly woman held at gunpoint to use a clean toilet and eat decent food seems positively chivalrous. But since when do we judge such behavior by the worst possible standards instead of the basic, universal standards of decency? For example, I don’t see anyone rushing to commend Craig Ross Jr., the man accused of kidnapping nine-year-old Charlotte Sena at an upstate New York park and holding her for ransom, for not raping the little girl or chopping her into bits.

Once you’ve been kidnapped and held against your will, the bar for “relatively well treated” is low. Clearing it naturally brings relief to the victims and their families, but it would be madness to let it endear us to terrorists.