I cried when Gilad Shalit was released after five years in captivity by Hamas. I posted pictures of him all over my dressing room door at “The Big Bang Theory.” The unimaginable impossibility of someone’s son being a prisoner for five years tore me up inside as a mother in a way few stories have since I became a mother. He ate schnitzel the first night home. The country sold out of schnitzel after they heard through the press that that was what Gilad ate for dinner. That’s Israel.
The kidnapping of three teenagers–not soldiers; teenagers–last week in Israel has been on my mind constantly. My posts about other things (“Blossom” reunions, or how cute my hairless cat is) should not detract from this ongoing crisis or its significance. It has been on my mind all of the time.
I have been weighing how to comment on it since it happened. There are so many haters of Israel on the internet and so many racists, to be quite honest, who send me disgusting hateful horrible things about what a horrible person I am because I am Jewish and believe in the right of the State of Israel to exist (also known as Zionism). I shouldn’t read those (or any!) comments, and it shouldn’t bother me, but it does. And I don’t want to start a fight on Facebook or allow a fight on my Facebook page about if Israel has the right to exist (it does and has to and always will) or if kidnapping innocent teenagers and holding them hostage is a political statement (um…it’s not; it’s terrorism).
My heart breaks, and it aches when I picture what the parents of these teenagers are experiencing. The mothers. Their sons taken not in a war or in battle, but off of the street as they complete adolescence but are not yet men. Kidnapped and held hostage for the purpose of a political negotiation? The world is so broken. So broken.
Whose life matters most? The government of Israel has to decide. As a mother, I know whose: my sons’. And the decisions ongoing are excruciating to contemplate. It’s horrible.
I understand the complexity of Israel and I try to learn about the complexity of the Palestinian people as best as I can. But it is not okay for teenagers to be kidnapped and used as a political bargaining tool.
Sarah Tuttle-Singer, who lives in Israel, has written about it here on Kveller and I want to share it.
May God in Heaven bless these young boys and guard them and protect them as much as possible. And their families. And the government responsible for bringing them home.
Please God, bring them home.
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