Emily is back with her dad and her dog.  She, along with twelve other Israelis and four people from Thailand, were released yesterday.  First a note, her name is Emily Hand.  In prior postings I had only included her first name.  It turns out that perhaps she is distantly related by a couple of marriages.  Not sure if I’m getting this right or not, my stepmother’s cousin married a member of the Hand family.  They live in Florida and we’ve spent time with them there.

So as I was listening to the news yesterday regarding the exchanges of hostages and prisoners I was left with more questions than answers.   “The first casualty of war is the truth”.  I looked up this phrase and found that it’s been said in many forms going back at least a couple of hundred years.  And I can find no truth.  Little of what Hamas says has any credibility.  The number of deaths in Gaza comes from their health ministry with no way to confirm the total.  The so called “attack” on a hospital in Gaza was a fabrication leading to protests, and I believe, some rioting in Muslim cities.   When the layers were unwrapped and the facts uncovered it turned out not that 500 or more had been killed when Israel bomber a hospital, but rather that an Islamic Jihad rocket had failed and crashed in a hospital parking lot killing a handful of people.  I expect the lies from Hamas.  From Israel and the IDF I expect better.

The original reports from October 7 were that 1400 Israelis were killed in the morning attack by Hamas.  Later the number was lowered to 1200.  OK, I get that things published during chaos need to be revised.  But yesterday I was left to wonder what the real number was.  CNN interviewed a spokesperson for the IDF.  He explained why people from Thailand and The Philippines are in Israel.  They are there as guest workers.  He went on to outline that the first people killed in the attack were not Israelis, but rather foreign workers working in the fields on the along the Gaza / Israel border.  Knowing this allows me to understand why they were also taken as hostages.  What confuses me is why this wasn’t reported before.  I can only conclude two things: that as non-white people, as foreign workers, they weren’t important enough to talk about.  The other reason?  Could it be that Israel and the IDF were hoping for more support and sympathy with a higher number of dead said to be Jewish?  Was the drop from 1400 to 1200 really that 1400 died, 1200 were Jewish, and reporting non-Israelis was irrelevant?  I don’t know.  What I do know is I expect better.  While I expect Hamas to lie, I hold Israel to a higher standard and they are failing.  Credibility matters.  The perception in the street matters.  Israel has been losing the propaganda war in the Arab / Muslim world and this doesn’t help.  It, in fact, hurts.  It feeds the narrative that Israel believes non-Jews are disposable, that they don’t matter.  It should have been enough to say that more Jews were killed on October 7 than on any day since the end of the Holocaust.  I believe that “never again is now” is true.  Yet it is also true that painting a partial picture of those killed and kidnapped is at best a deception.  At worst it’s a racist lie that denigrates and denies those who were excluded.

I stand with Israel.  I still believe that Hamas owns responsibility for every death, Palestinian, Israeli, Thai, and Philippine.  Still, it’s time to start telling the truth.

I looked and haven’t seen that Ella has been freed.  Maybe today is her day.

#resist #neverforget

Be the Pebble