It has finally happened. The return of the last hostage. Aside from the obvious relief and the feelings of gratitude that a family in Israel’s suffering has finally ended, I find that collectively, our emotions have a far more complex range.

For not only has the Gvili family been released from their pain and uncertainty, their hero son Ran receiving the hero’s funeral he deserved; but also the rest of us have been freed from the veritable cult holding the entire nation hostage to their own nefarious political purposes. This cult, which at every point doused us with guilt, with self-righteous wrath, pointing out the nation’s failure to make progress when it was absolutely clear that there was nothing more anyone could do to speed up the release of hostages held by the Nazi-inspired Hamas beasts, has finally lost its excuse for existing.

It didn’t matter that whatever they were doing was useless except to bolster their self-righteous delight. They marched. They committed acts of violence, stopped traffic, held hate gatherings … none of which save one hostage from a single day, a single hour, a single minute of torture or captivity. All they accomplished was to demoralize a nation in the midst of an existential crisis, magnifying its sense of inadequacy and collective pain over something over which we had zero influence.

They cared, they screamed. And because we didn’t hate Netanyahu enough, we didn’t. While they claimed it was the hostages we were failing, actually it was their political agenda. Why weren’t all of us out for Netanyahu’s blood? Why weren’t we aiming at his house with incendiaries? Banging pots, burning tires? Obviously because we weren’t as caring and good and moral as they were; because we refused to invest our precious time, energy, and souls into an enterprise as useless as reminding Israelis that their people were being held hostage.

As if we could ever forget!

We didn’t need them bellowing in the streets. In between worrying about our spouses, children and grandchildren at the front in uniform, or hiding from bombs in shelters – there was never a time our minds and hearts were free from the pain of our 250 brothers and sisters, living and dead, suffering in Hamas captivity.

Never mind that in the end it was Netanyahu and the IDF and Trump who got the hostages released. Swallow that, Kaplan-istim. While all they accomplished was to hammer great chinks in the united wall of our people’s courage, doing their best to destroy our faith, our morale, our unity. Thank G-d they didn’t succeed. But it wasn’t for lack of trying.

What will they do now? Well, that’s pretty clear. They are going to seamlessly segue over to demanding a national Inquisition for Netanyahu for the entire October 7 mess. Yes, he was responsible. But he wasn’t alone.

The list is unfortunately long – the IDF, the Shabak, the Mossad, many government ministers, and an entire segment of the population that pushed Oslo and its false, destructive fairy-tale of land for peace down our throats. The list includes martyrs like Yitzchak Rabin, and his partner in the falsely given and falsely received Nobel Peace Prize Shimon Peres. It includes Ehud Barak, who in between plane rides with pedophile Epstein, was willing to give away the entire West Bank, the Golan Heights, and East Jerusalem to our enemies. He didn’t succeed only because Arafat said no!

It includes all the virtue signaling Israelis who hired Gazans and took them for treatment in our hospitals, including prison officials who gave Sinwar a new lease on life with expensive cancer treatments in Israeli hospitals. It includes all those who demonstrated to force Israel to give thousands of blood drenched terrorists (including Sinwar) get out of jail free cards in exchange for Gilad Shalit, thus encouraging and proving this Hamas tactic was the way to go: if one hostage got a thousand released, what could 250 hostages do? Instead of Israel patiently picking off Hamas operatives and their families one by one until Shalit was released, like the Russians did faced with the same terrorist tactics, huge segments of the public pushed Netanyahu to give up and give in, which he did, signing the death warrant for future Hamas hostages.

But at least for now, we are all happy. Happy for the Gvili family. Happy that finally all those yellow ribbons Gvili symbols of our enduring heartbreak and failure as a nation – are finally consigned to the trash bins. That those empty chairs, many of which will never be filled, are folded up and put away. Happy that our captors – the Kaplan group – and their leaders are finally silenced for the moment, releasing the entire nation from being held hostage to their false narrative, their personal enmities and their political agendas.

That is, for now.

---