Homecoming: Underground

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What was going through the heads of the Israeli POWs when they emerged from below on October 13? I assume they had not seen daylight in several years, but they may have been moved from safehouse to safehouse as their army bombed whole residential blocks. Does this mean they are comparable to other prisoners held in solitary? Only sense: hearing. Only color: darkness, the redness behind the eyes.

So the twenty emerged. When they gazed upon the rubble around them, a vast ruination which had done nothing to secure their freedom, which was undertaken as part of a far larger operation to seize living space, whose extent is unprecedented since Hiroshima, did they understand they had been inserted into a present which had abandoned them? The sheer scale of Gaza’s destruction dwarfed these tiny figures. Catastrophe ejected them into a world where they had become a state embarrassment. And here lies the problem with hostages: the only way to ensure their release is through negotiation. A captive is a liability—hence the indisputable military truth of the IDF’s Hannibal Directive. One last question: for one moment, did these twenty liabilities sense a a common destiny? Who knows what is in another man’s mind. ‘I wish the Palestinians would just disappear’, Israelis often say. You can be a prisoner of your wishes.

What these men saw is unimportant. The sentimental question is dead. The Israeli monopoly on speech—as opposed to the muteness of Palestinians, silent until they blow themselves up or return to their land for an hour with a gun—is the weight of the currency of silence. The POWS, who had been kidnapped from their tanks, rejoice. But they must suspect that their value is oddly one-sided, being that only their captors were at all interested in keeping them alive.

We are told many things. We are asked to imagine things. Most of them are despicable.

We hear that Gaza is the graveyard of Western values. We heard that Auschwitz and Rwanda were, too. If something has a burial, then it must have had life and legs. It must have walked on earth and been the envy of less civilized men. If Western values have gone subterranean, who still prays that these pious words might crawl out from under the historic debris? The survival of a ghost—and this was the stupidest dream of all.

We repeat that Gaza is the West’s graveyard. But no one is waiting on the West. No one is waiting for anything except more graveyards. And the Western world ate itself back in 1914, then again in 1945. It hunted for Indians at the Somme and surrounded Stalingrad; it forced Moroccans to build the streets of Indochine and it gave China Oriental dreams of opium. Its sciences slumped toward IG Farben—incompetently, with none of that legendary cold efficiency, rather rivers of human grease and faulty products—having grown tired of magic and Renaissance and Humanism. And silence followed that.

In the Ettersberg, near Weimar, the oak tree under which Goethe wrote the famous Walpurgisnacht section of Faust stood until 1937. It was cleared along with the rest of the beechwood to make room for the detention complex called Buchenwald. Some say that Goethe composed his ‘Wanderer’s Nightsong’ under the tree and not anything from Faust. It is also said that these stories were invented by the inmates of the camp, made to commemorate the many walks the great German poet had taken in those days when the area was an idyllic, sylvan paradise and where some of them were presently allowed to amble around within the sight of the observation towers.

Where the prisoner sees the past, the turnkey imagines an eternity. And this armed guard inserts himself into every moment of time with the skill of an artist.

A piece of advice from Hell: It is never a good idea to have a conscience in black situations. A conscience means that one is a coward—cannot face up to the actions of one’s colleagues, one’s people, the necessity of making history whole. Western decency consists in delaying matters. Later, men of conscience can become useful. They will provide an alibi. Their hypocrisy can be decried by the condemned all the way up the scaffold and the condemned will be absolved, at least intellectually.

But do not expect for a moment that those who have been utterly destroyed by these Gideon’s Chariots or Rising Lions, will ever—not this time, not in one single eternal passage—will never draw any distinction by which some of the perpetrators are damned and others are saved. By their protestations and their latecomers’ attempts to distance themselves from the dark militia and the prophets, or from Danny Danon’s waxed and cruel face, the liberals deny that they were raised in a nation that has proved itself capable of absolutely anything. The price of the Israeli peace camp has been paid for. Whoever sets the scales settles the debt. Yet Liberal Israel still cannot accept that specter which haunts their hopes and manages their despair, which always contains an affirmation that is more than Palestine can endure.

In May of 2025, wildfires raged all over Israel because of the high flammability of non-native pine and eucalyptus trees. These imported trees were planted to cover the ruins of Native villages and took the place of huge swathes of Palestinian lands which were tilled as ancient orchards and olive gardens. The settler state blamed ‘the Arabs’. The reason was weather conditions and negligence: the total incompatibility of the trees with the area’s climate. But those in power could hardly admit that they had no understanding of what they claimed was their ‘ancestral home’ and that the land burst into flame because it rejected a ruthless yet fragile transplant. Über allen Gipfeln, Ist Ruh…

Reports of mistreatment trickle in. The POWs were subject to beatings and insults. Bruises and memories must have remained when these twenty Israelis walked out into a landscape where many more than 20,000 corpses of children lie buried. Unobstructed by buildings, the horizon is open. Little obscures the range of the eye, though the sun surely burns in the eye’s light-adapted state. Tens or hundreds of thousands of children were underground, lying beneath concrete slabs and wrack, pushed down by the commanders and parents of these constricted pupils who have been released as part of a deal one of the parties has already broken. Yes, the parents of countless dead children have exercised great restraint in response. But when the tears of perpetrators take on the gleam of Roman pearls, a rare snow covers everything. We are depicted as one single lifeform again. And that which must not, can not be.

Judgement did not begin in time immemorial, but at the division of days and years which separated the universe from duration. One life contains all of time. Judgment has finished with time when time declares the war is over. Now is the moment to do what we want. Words like shapes, diacritical marks and points of stress.

There is no West to build or rebuild a graveyard. We do what we want. “Then I was put in a pit in the ground. When I was in it, with all the other detainees, ... one of them (IDF) told me: “I killed your husband and I want to bury you alive. Let the dogs eat you.”

Note: Last line taken from B’tselem’s report, ‘Welcome to Hell.’