Hersh/Columbia/Ethnostates
Dispatches on culture, politics, and religion from Matthew Schultz, a rabbinical student and writer living in Tel Aviv.
Dispatch One: Hersh is Alive
Why did Hamas release a video of Hersh Goldberg-Polin?
It was not to reassure us that he’s alive.
It was not to give a moment of solace to his mother.
It was not to inspire sympathy for the plight of the hostages.
Rather, the purpose was to increase pressure on Israel to bend to Hamas’ demands in negotiations. It’s the equivalent of a kidnapper sending a ransom note along with their victim’s severed thumb.
To use a human life as a bargaining chip is the most despicable thing imaginable. It is also the sum total of Hamas’ military strategy.
This is an act of psychological warfare. Moreover, it is a powerfully effective act of psychological warfare. It is the attempt to take one of our strengths as a people—our sense of belonging to one another and the care and responsibility that comes with that—and exploit it as a weakness to secure Hamas’ survival and Israel’s retreat.
So what should Israel do?
Should Israel play into their hands and buckle in order to rescue Hersh and any other hostages that may be still be alive?
The difficulty is this: the fact that doing so would be “playing into their hands” does not necessarily mean that this is the wrong course of action.
Dispatch Two: Columbia Protests
At the “pro-Palestinian” protests at Columbia University, we have seen the following:
Calls for Iran to destroy Tel Aviv.
Calls for Hamas to target American Jews.
Physical attacks on Jews.