"Why Doesn't Hamas Release The Hostages?", And Other Reader Questions

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

Nick on Patreon asks, “I don’t know if this is a question that you would know the answer to, but it’s worth a try. The one Zionist question I have a hard time answering is ‘why don’t Hamas release the hostages?’ Israel doesn’t give a shit about killing its own citizens, so they don’t seem to be much of a bargaining chip.”

The most important thing to make clear here is that anyone who suggests that Israel’s onslaught in Gaza has anything whatsoever to do with hostages is either ignorant or lying. Netanyahu has explicitly said that Israel’s attack will not end until Trump’s ethnic cleansing plan to permanently remove all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip has been accomplished. This is not about freeing hostages, this is about a land grab that Israel has been pursuing for generations.

So when people say “why don’t Hamas release the hostages?” in response to criticisms of Israel’s genocidal atrocities in Gaza, they’re generally just throwing up a completely fallacious red herring to nullify that criticism.

It is of course true that the Israeli government doesn’t care about the hostages, but it’s not accurate to say the hostages aren’t a bargaining chip. Some 2.5 million Israelis are estimated to have filled the streets this past Sunday demanding that their government secure a deal to release the hostages — that’s a quarter of the nation’s population. Numbers like that amount to political pressure, even if the Netanyahu regime itself only cares about the land grab. They’re not protesting because they care about stopping a genocide, they’re doing it because they care about their own.

And of course the argument can be made that taking hostages is illegal and immoral under any circumstances, but most people tend to lose interest in this argument when they learn that thousands of Palestinian political prisoners are held captive by Israel without charge or trial as a matter of longstanding Israeli policy. You can argue that two wrongs don’t make a right if you want, but it’s hard to deny that Israel looks pretty ridiculous demanding the unconditional release of its hostages while holding thousands of Palestinians hostage itself. Everything Hamas has done to Israel are things Israel has been doing to Palestinians for decades at a far greater scale. When you do nasty things to people, you leave yourself open to retaliation in kind.

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Elizabeth on Twitter asks, “Who are the journalists you read and admire?”

Too many to list. Some favorites include Julian Assange, Bisan Owda and everyone in Gaza who’s ever taken a photo or made a video since 2023, the late great John Pilger, Chris Hedges, Joe Lauria and the folks at Consortium News, Dave DeCamp and everyone at Antiwar, Ali Abunimah and Asa Winstanley and everyone at Electronic Intifada, Aaron Maté and Max Blumenthal and everyone at The Grayzone, Rania Khalek and everyone at BreakThrough News, Ryan Grim and everyone at Drop Site News, Seymour Hersh, Glenn Greenwald, Muhammad Shehada, Amanda Yee, that anonymous Zei Squirrel account on Twitter, Alan MacLeod, Mark Ames, Yasha Levine, Kevin Gosztola, Sharmine Narwani, Arnaud Bertrand, the Davids at Media Lens, and the Moon of Alabama blog.

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Jo on Substack asks, “Hi Caitlin and Tim, apologies if you’d answered this before. You both write on here and I think i can detect a difference in tone and could hazard a guess as to which is which! I’m sure you agree on the big things; however, there must be things that you disagree on. How does this inform your work?”

Not really, to be honest. We have too much in common and were both raised to be critical of the US war machine, me by my journalist father and Tim by his Quaker upbringing. When we first got together Tim was sympathetic to American libertarianism, but I’d converted him into a godless commie using my womanly wiles before we started writing together.

We don’t really disagree on anything political, or actually on much of anything these days. We used to have fights and arguments sometimes, but we don’t really anymore. Our thing thrives on collaborative “yes, and”ing and mutual cheerleading; we’re always trying to encourage each other and lift each other up.

Some people’s idea of a happy couple looks like debate and healthy competition and keeping each other in check, but that sort of model has never worked for us. Ever since we got together we’ve had this urge to merge into each other and become one, and we’ve been getting closer and closer ever since we got together.

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Buddhadev asks on Facebook, “You’ve said often that your hope for humanity lies in consciousness raising and spiritual awakening. I used believe this but no longer do. I know some incredibly experienced meditators, ayahuasca psychonauts, yogis/yoginis, etc who are ardent defenders of the Narrative Managers’ takes on RussiaGate, Russia/Ukraine, etc. On Gaza, many of them echo your ‘favorite’ corporate lib take wherein they talk about it as uncaused ‘heartbreaking tragedy’ that has no culprit behind it. Years of meeting people like this in ‘hippie woo woo’ communities (crystals, tarot, astrology, reikki, psychedelics, etc) has disabused me of any notion that their capacity for discernment is that much better than the general population. If you disagree and still think spiritual practice or consciousness expansion is the hope for ending war and tyranny, then what does such consciousness and spirituality look like to you and what should people be doing?”

There’s not really any connection between being a good meditator/yogini/psychonaut etc and a proper awakening, which is best understood as a radical shift in identity. People who wake up will often have spent time doing those things, but you can easily meditate your whole life without experiencing such a shift, and many have.

Some of the most toxic, unconscious, totally-asleep-at-the-wheel individuals I’ve ever encountered have had highly spiritual personalities. Spiritual people are very often neurotic and miserable psychological train wrecks, because miserable people often turn to spirituality out of desperation to escape their suffering. Awakening isn’t about having a particular kind of personality or becoming accomplished in a particular kind of spiritual practice — the illusion of the self who would be doing those things is precisely what’s awakened from.

Awakening from the dream of selfing brings with it a drastic change in the human organism’s relationship with mental narrative. Thoughts are no longer seen as true facts which need to be believed but as mental noises or energies which don’t require our attention. From there thought takes on the role as a useful tool that can be picked up when it’s needed and set down when it’s not, rather than the writer, director and star of the whole show.

This has obvious implications for seeing through the veil of propaganda. You’re much more aware of how dominated human consciousness is by mental narrative, and how much effort humans put into manipulating the narratives that other humans hold in their minds. Since thoughts don’t demand belief like they used to, a narrative like “That Evil Dictator needs to be removed!” is a lot less likely to be uncritically taken on board.

That said, you can also have a powerful and authentic awakening without having a lucid understanding of what’s really going on in the world. If 100 percent of your attention has gone into expanding your awareness of your internal processes, then you haven’t been putting any effort into expanding your awareness of what’s going on in the outer world. This is why you’ll sometimes see relatively awake people regurgitating the CNN line on a given issue; they simply haven’t yet put the effort into expanding their consciousness in that direction.

You can be spiritually enlightened while remaining clueless about Palestine in the same way you can be clear on Palestine while remaining totally transfixed by egoic delusion; the call is to expand consciousness both inwardly and outwardly. A sufficiently clear awakening will bring with it a call to compassion and a deep caring about the plight of humanity, which will naturally give rise to a curiosity about what factors are driving all the dysfunction we see in our society today. In the information age it’s not hard for that impulse to translate into a lucid perception of the abusive systems and power structures which are driving our species to its doom.

And really to talk about it as “inward” and “outward” isn’t quite accurate. Past a certain point of clarification you start to notice that all the dysfunction you see in the world is mirrored in the dysfunctionality you’ve found in yourself. You can see the Israel in you. The empire in you. The war profiteer in you. The propagandist in you. You no longer see yourself as separate from the wrongs of the world, and you just set about working to heal them wherever you see them — whether it’s in your own psyche or in a bombing campaign overseas. They’re not separate things.

So you’re right, a simple entry-level awakening won’t be enough to save us. We’ve got to become a truly conscious species by awakening to reality in all the ways that are relevant to the human adventure.

If you have a question or comment you’d like a response to, just write it in the replies section of whatever platform you’re reading this on and I’ll try to get to it.

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Feature image by Nizzan Cohen via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)