How Netanyahu failed the dead hostages

There was a thin hope that despite everything, he might actually return home. It was stoked by a series of images that unexpectedly emerged.

Not long after Hersh Goldberg-Polin’s abduction on October 7, CNN stumbled on video of terrorists loading the Berkeley-born, Jerusalem-raised 24-year-old into a pickup truck, the stump of one of his arms wrapped in a tourniquet because a grenade had blown off the rest. It was proof of life.

In April, at the beginning of Passover, Hamas released a propaganda video. Then there was no doubting his full-blooded existence. Speaking to his captors’ camera, he rested the remnant of his arm in his lap. His once-wavy locks were clipped close to the scalp. Untangling his words from those imposed by the gun was impossible. But at the very end of the clip he addressed his mother and sister: “I know you’re doing everything possible to bring me home.”

As Shabbat descended this past Friday night and his parents turned off their phones for the day of rest, it was possible to imagine that Goldberg-Polin might finally emerge from the ultimate parental nightmare. Negotiations to end the war and bring home the hostages have been grinding along, even though Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has seemed intent on stalling a deal.

But last night, when Goldberg-Polin’s family returned to their devices, they learned that the Israeli Defense Forces had found, in a tunnel in Gaza, six bodies only recently murdered. Just more than a week after his parents had eloquently addressed the Democratic National Convention, when the teary audience chanted “Bring them home,” they learned that their son was one of the corpses.

Catastrophe is a bulldozer that flattens victims. Horror drains biography of every other detail. But Hersh’s parents, Rachel and Jon, insisted that the world know their son as a full human being. That was how they wanted Hersh to be remembered in the worst case—and in the best case, they believed that empathy might exist, even hundreds of feet belowground in the tunnels that constitute Hamas’s domain.

They described how Hersh wanted to wrap his arms around the globe in an embrace. He loved geography and, even before his adolescence, he stockpiled maps and atlases in his room. His father hoped that he might eventually become a journalist for National Geographic, because the diversity of the planet and the wonders of foreign cultures lit Hersh’s mind on fire. He loved adventure. Just before Hamas kidnapped him, Hersh had traveled across Europe attending music festivals. He would bathe in rivers and make friends with strangers.

Emigrating to Israel at the age of 7 challenged him. He struggled to learn Hebrew. He yearned desperately for friends. But as his mother watched him mature, she marveled at his ease, how he felt entirely at home in the world.

After his kidnapping, Hersh became the best-known of the hostages in the U.S. His American parents were unafraid of confronting their pain over and over, in conversations with whichever reporter or politicians agreed to meet them. Like mythological characters, they were doomed to relive their worst day—and doomed to experience it with clarity that never dulled. And despite their pain, they eloquently expressed empathy for the suffering of Palestinian parents too.

As the war grinds toward its end, Hersh’s murder will haunt Israeli dreams—and Netanyahu’s legacy. In a moral sense, culpability rests entirely with Hersh’s depraved executioners. But Netanyahu behaved grotesquely when presented with opportunities to secure his release.

More than once this summer, the Biden administration brought Hamas and Israel within range of a deal to release the hostages and end the war. On some of these occasions, Hamas has thrown up obstacles, knocking the talks off course. But in moments where Hamas looked inclined to agree, Netanyahu wrecked the possibility of an agreement by insisting on new conditions. Frustrated with the prime minister’s tactics, the Americans leaked documentary evidence of his intransigence to The New York Times.

Just as damningly, Netanyahu’s own defense minister has blamed him for scuppering a deal. In a cabinet meeting this past week, Yoav Gallant excoriated him for insisting on new conditions that Hamas would never tolerate—that effectively guaranteed that the hostages would remain in jeopardy in Gaza. Gallant reportedly chastised him, “There are living people there.”

Netanyahu refuses to push toward yes because he doesn’t want to face the consequences of agreeing to a deal that far-right members of his cabinet have vowed to reject. He’s reverting to lifelong patterns of behavior: dithering in the face of a hard choice, excessive deference to fanatical political bedmates, the elevation of his own survival above every other consideration. And now, a beautiful young man and five other hostages will return from Gaza in bags—lives horrifically truncated when they could plausibly have been saved.