Welcome home, Edan

This week has brought us unequivocally good news.

Hamas has released Edan Alexander. He can’t be unharmed — it is not possible, realistically, to come out of 584 days of imprisonment, occasional torture, frequent cruelty, and the existential terror that would come from not knowing if you will ever be released or will die in captivity — but he seems to have survived with his essential self intact.

As our story about another hostage, Andrei Kozlov — whose time in Gaza was much shorter because the IDF was able to storm the place where he was imprisoned and rescue him, along with three other hostages — shows, the scars left by brutal imprisonment are thick and real, even if they are invisible. But it is possible to rise above them, particularly when you are surrounded by love, as the rescued hostages seem to be.

The release also helps lift the pain of the hostages’ parents — the hostages’ ages ran along a wide range, but many of the ones still held are young enough not only to have living parents but to have parents deeply involved in their lives. Edan was only 19 when he was kidnapped, and he’s just 21 now, at least chronologically.

It’s easier for us to imagine the pain of a parent or partner or child of a hostage than to imagine what the hostage feels, because that experience, thankfully, is so far away from most of our lives that we have nothing real to base it on. But the pain of worrying desperately about someone we love, whom we cannot rescue, or even reach, is something many of us have experienced.

Edan is out now. That is a simply joyous thing.

The politics behind it are dizzying. The relationship between Israel and the United States seems to be shifting, on the highest governmental level. Over the last decade or so, we have watched the cracks develop in public support for Israel, as underground antisemitism swells up from the sewers and Israel’s conduct in Gaza, while arguably justified, becomes harder and harder for regular people to justify. But now the news we read from the Middle East is both murky and troubling.

One thing of the many that have changed recently is our ability to predict even the near future with any confidence. So who knows what will happen?

We can’t predict, but we can hope. So let’s hope that Edan’s release will portend the release of the other hostages, an end to the war in Gaza and to the threat posed by the barbarians who make up Hamas, and a return to sanity around the world.

We can hope, can’t we?

Welcome home, Edan. And bring everyone else home now.

—JP

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