Dark Tunnels and Moral Beacons

Today at The Free Press, we mourn the six innocent Israelis murdered by Hamas terrorists who stole them nearly a year ago. 

They are:

Eden Yerushalmi, a 24-year-old from Tel Aviv, who attended the Nova music festival with friends.

Eden Yerushalmi (courtesy of family)

Ori Danino, a 25-year-old from Jerusalem who escaped the Nova music festival, but returned to help save others and was captured.

Ori Danino (courtesy of family)

Alex Lobanov, 32, the head bartender at the Nova music festival, who leaves behind two children, one who was born while he was held captive.

Alex Lobanov (courtesy of family)

Carmel Gat, a 40-year-old yoga instructor and occupational therapist from Tel Aviv. She had been visiting her mother in Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7. Released hostages reported that Carmel had been seen practicing yoga with other hostages.

Carmel Gat (courtesy of family)

Almog Sarusi, 27, from Ra’anana, north of Tel Aviv, who attended the Nova music festival with his girlfriend. She was murdered there. 

Almog Sarusi (courtesy of family)

And Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23, the American-Israeli citizen who lost part of his left arm reportedly fending off grenades, and was taken hostage from the Nova music festival.

Hersh Goldberg-Polin (courtesy of family)

It is that last name that will be most familiar to you. 

Hersh’s father, Jon Goldberg-Polin, was one of the first people The Free Press interviewed in the hours after we learned of the October 7 massacre. Jon told us that at 8:11 a.m. that morning, he and his wife, Rachel, received two text messages from their only son. “Message number one said ‘I love you.’ Message number two said ‘I’m sorry,’ ” Jon told us on Honestly. “It’s been chaos ever since.”

Listen to Jon and so many of the family members and friends of the hostages here:

The chaos Hamas ushered in that day with the mass rape, abduction, torture, and slaughter that marked the start of Iran’s multifront war against Israel exposed a moral confusion in the West that has compounded the chaos wrought by war. 

But Jon and Rachel Goldberg-Polin have brought order, drawing for the rest of us the bright line between good and evil.

In the 330 days since Hersh’s arm was blown off by a Hamas grenade and he was thrown, bloodied, into the back of a pickup truck headed for Gaza, his parents have not stopped. They’ve had audiences with the president and the pope. They went to the border with Gaza to scream their son’s name.

And, somehow, Rachel also made time to sit down with us in Jerusalem this past January. 

“The word pain is a privilege compared to what we feel,” she told us about the experience of Hamas stealing her son. “Trauma is being hit by a truck after the truck has moved on. The truck is still on us. It’s like asking someone who is being raped what being raped was like.” And yet she also said: “I still think we have so many blessings.” She invoked Psalm 23—the poem King David wrote about his cup overflowing. “Right now it overflows with tears,” Rachel said, “but I know it will overflow with joy again.” 

You can watch my conversation with Rachel Goldberg-Polin here:

In their strength, dignity, and moral clarity, Rachel and Jon have entered not just into the annals of Jewish history but of the history of the free world.

The names of Eden Yerushalmi, Ori Danino, Alex Lobanov, Carmel Gat, Almog Sarusi, and Hersh Goldberg-Polin should be seared into the minds of anyone who wishes to live in a civilized world. Instead, we read headlines in our most storied media outlets describing these six Israelis as having “died” in Gaza. We are told that those defending their murderous captors “have a point.”

As Matti Friedman writes in his searing column today from Jerusalem: “Hersh was an American citizen, born in California—and in California and elsewhere, we learned that other Americans would tear down his poster and those with the faces of other Israeli hostages. We’ve seen the support of the American administration wane as the war wears on, including an explicit demand by the White House to stay out of the southern Gaza city of Rafah—the city where Hersh and the five other hostages were just found by our soldiers, but too late.”

In a time of so much darkness—“The idea of being kidnapped by terrorists became a familiar one in our home, a subject discussed in my son’s third-grade class like kids in other countries talk about what they’ll be when they grow up,” Matti writes—I wonder how we will see ourselves out of the tunnel. 

As students return to campus, and a number of them renew the anarchy that proved so many administrators morally and physically unprepared to defend their Jewish students, there will be those prepared to tear down the hostage posters once more. Those eager to erase the faces and the meaning of those innocents who still remain in Gaza. I think about Hersh’s face and all of their faces. I think about the foundational principle of our civilization, that every human life has dignity. 

It is this very principle that Hamas and its barbaric ilk are trying to turn on its head. Much as they turn the people of Gaza into sacrifices, denying them shelter as they fire missiles from schools, mosques and hospitals, secure in the belief that the country they attacked will be found guilty of the bloodshed.

Many will rightly point out that Americans should be especially outraged by today’s horrific news because Hersh Goldberg-Polin was an American citizen. But it’s not just that one of Iran’s terror proxies murdered an American citizen. It’s that he and those and all of those murdered by Hamas are on the front lines of a wider war that America is already part of—whether we like it or not. 

In other words: This is not only about Israel. Or about special sympathy for allies who share our values, though they are and they do. It is about the reality that those who burn Israeli flags burn them alongside American ones. 

Hersh, and those executed beside him in the tunnels under Rafah, were killed by Iran. It’s a country, now in league with China and Russia, that calls for death to America in the same breath it calls for the destruction of Israel. It is a country that began its tyrannical rule in 1979 by taking Americans captive, and that, as I write this, is actively targeting Americans on American soil. 

That is what we face.

Statements of sorrow from the leaders of the free world are insufficient. The message to terrorists and those who support them should be that the defenders of civilization will defeat them. No matter the cost.

A few weeks before he was captured by Hamas terrorists, Hersh Goldberg-Polin and his family had Shabbat dinner with our columnist Matti Friedman. They were friends—part of the tight-knit English-speaking community of Jerusalem.

“The events that have unfolded since the day Hersh disappeared are bewildering,” writes Matti. “But today, here in his neighborhood in Jerusalem, for a moment they regained a kind of terrible simplicity, reduced to one beautiful human face.”

Please read Matti’s column: “Among the Mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.”

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