Palestinian hostages released
Choices of language and images
There is never any shortage of linguistic comparison in how the conflict and military occupation in Palestine is covered in Western media. Palestinians have “deaths” where Israelis are “killed”, sentences are stripped of their normal subjects, so that a Palestinian was killed by a bullet, rather than the soldier with a gun. Most recently we have had a few hundred Israeli “hostages” held by Al-Qassam Brigades inside Gaza, while of course the thousands of Palestinians held without trial in Israeli jails are “prisoners”. Of those Israeli hostages now released, a certain number of the Israelis were children, while the Palestinian hostages who were released and of the same age were - somewhat less tenderly - described by The Guardian as “people aged 18 and under”.
But let us put that aside for a moment, because these contradictions become apparent quite easily as the situation long wrought by the Israelis in Palestine receives nothing more complicated than the weight of greater attention. For now it is simply a relief that we at least have a ceasefire in Gaza, a ceasefire that must be made permanent. While attention must also be kept on Israeli aggressions now diverted to the West Bank, and so too - as the bombing halts - a revelation of their crimes and atrocities in Gaza, it is no less important to bear witness to the scenes of Palestinian hostages being released from Israeli jails. (It is also good that Israeli families can be reunited in this ceasefire, but Western media can be trusted to cover this rather more fully than their Palestinian counterparts).
There are a number of reasons why it is important to show Palestinian hostages released from Israeli jails. Firstly, as seen in the Marah Bakir video from which the above image is taken, they are scenes of great, relatable, human joy.
Given that so much of the Israeli information war against Palestinians is premised on dehumanising them, or on making their demands seem unreasonable or fanatical, to show something as obviously relatable as people reunited, after years unjustly apart from their families, is an essential part of replacing these lies with the reality they are designed to obscure.
Western media has been slow, or has failed entirely, to show Palestinian hostages released by the Israelis because to do so is to admit that they existed in the first place. Considering that the initial hostage-taking by Al-Qassam on October 7 was broadly covered, with added Islamophobia, as an act likely to lead to brutal executions, or to satisfy some specific, unhinged desire to kill Jewish people, it is a jarring corrective to be shown images of joyously reunited Palestinian families, images that in themselves pose the question - a question Western audiences are not supposed to see or ask - is this actually what it’s all about?
Beyond that, and for all the heartbreaking death and destruction brought against the people of Gaza in the last month, the release of Palestinian hostages back to their families is maybe only a small image of small victories, but like all such victories, in them is contained entire universes of hope for a wider one.
It is a primary endeavour of the Israeli regime in Palestine to destroy the possibility of such victories, to such an extent that they cannot even be imagined. Consequently, to see such images at all, secured by armed resistance, while dealmaking with the Israelis — pursued in good faith by the Palestinian Authority and Fatah — has delivered nothing but broken promises and more Palestinians held captive, is not just to repudiate the strategy of working-with the Israelis, it is a worrying but frank corroboration that armed resistance can be made to work to greater effect than talks.
As someone who, like every Palestinian I personally ever met, likes and believes in peace but also in justice, and as someone who — for the sake of our shared humanity, but more importantly, for those I know in Gaza — wants desperately for the ceasefire to be made permanent, I do not for a second wish for the prolongation of conflict. I do however understand that in order to bring closer the eventual peace that will one day arrive, the Israelis must first be made aware of the grave errors - both moral and strategic - in their methods.
Reunited Palestinian families were told by the Israelis not to publicly celebrate, or they might face abduction back to the jails they had just been let out from. As a result, most of the images of release are from inside houses. Crowds that gathered to welcome the release of hostages were dispersed by Israeli forces with tear gas, so that even in these moments of joy, still the Israeli occupation did not fail to remind of its ugliness.
And yet still, while demanding the ceasefire continue, while recognising the unimaginable pain of Gazans returning to the rubble of their homes, there is nevertheless space and indeed a necessity to take joy in seeing a young son rush to his mother upon returning to her from an Israeli jail. In such images is held the small victory that reminds of, and so makes possible, the greater ones.