Most of Israel's Protest Movement Only Cares About the Lives of the Gaza Hostages – Not of Palestinians -
Gideon LevyAug 31, 2025
Israel is being led by a cruel government and a heartless prime minister, the likes of which have not been seen here before. Human lives, be it Gazans, hostages or soldiers, are of no interest to this government. It is massacring the residents of Gaza and abandoning hostages and soldiers with the same equanimity.
Opposing it is a small extra-parliamentary movement, humane and bold, which values all human lives equally.
Between this handful and the evil government lies the middle-of-the-road camp. Most of it struggles against the increasing loss of humanity and deception exhibited by the government. People in this camp are shocked by every video clip, losing sleep over the fate of the emaciated hostages and dead soldiers. But when they hear reports of a horrific massacre at a hospital, they yawn, disinterested.
They are better than the government and its supporters. They are humane and show solidarity, but only selectively. There is no such thing as being half-moral. Just as double-standard morality is not morality, so is half-morality. It is the opposite of true morality. That's what people in this camp are like. They worry about the lives of 20 hostages while ignoring the fact that their country kills 20 innocent people an hour on average.
For them, humanity stops at the borders of nationality. They'll leave no stone unturned to help any Israeli but avert their gaze with a lack of interest in the case of a Palestinian whose fate is often much worse. They are enraged at Benjamin Netanyahu's cold-heartedness, but theirs is no less evident. When it comes to Palestinians, they exhibit the same evil and cold hearts.
It's hard to understand this phenomenon, which has reached its nadir during the current war. How can one be shocked at the sight of starving hostage Evyatar David and shrug or even rejoice at the killing taking place in lines for food? How can one be shocked at the murder of the Bibas family yet show no interest in the 1,000 babies and 19,000 children killed by the IDF, or in the 40,000 Gazan orphans?
How can one lose sleep over Hamas tunnels and show no interest in what goes on at the Sde Teiman or Megiddo detention centers, to our shame? How is this possible? How can one demand Red Cross visits for the hostages while knowing that Israel prevents such visits to thousands of kidnapped Palestinians?
It is human nature and understandable to first and foremost worry about your own people. But exhibiting total indifference to members of the other nation, who are being massacred in the tens of thousands, with their country destroyed before our eyes by our own hands, turns many of the good people at the Kaplan Street and Hostage Square demonstrations into non-human people themselves.
For them – and some of them say so openly – Israel must do everything to release the hostages, and then it can return to the war, to genocide and ethnic cleansing. The main thing is for the hostages to be released. This isn't morality or humaneness. This is abject ultra-nationalism.
Viewing human beings – children, the disabled, the elderly, women, and other helpless people as dust, as people whose killing and starvation are legitimate, with their property worthless and their dignity non-existent – is tantamount to being Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich.
Opposing total evil, one must stand for total humanity, which is almost non-existent in Israel. The moral refuge of hanging a yellow ribbon from the car door and the ostensible _expression_ of concern for the hostages is not a refuge and does not constitute morality. Even a hollow extremist ultra-nationalist such as journalist Almog Boker, who knows that "there are no innocent people in Gaza" wants the release of hostages. This doesn't make him less ultra-nationalist or less vile, even for a moment.
The moral power of the protest movement is only partial because of its selective nature. If it were fully moral, it would make its main concern the struggle against genocide, along with the campaign for releasing the hostages. Its struggle would not be diminished; its moral validity would only be strengthened. One cannot escape the numbers: 20 living hostages and over 2 million Palestinians whose lives are hell. One's heart cannot help but be with both.