Six murdered hostages ... and the MSO band plays on

Ben Gurion airport, Israel

Since Sunday, when the Israeli army announced it had found the bodies of six dead Israeli hostages in a tunnel in Rafah, in southern Gaza, friends have been sending heart-break emojis. On social media people — OK, mainly Jews — are sharing over and over the awful grid of the radiant and youthful faces of the six victims. In Melbourne, a snap prayer gathering was held on Monday night. 

For a while I entertained the idea of not writing about the dead. Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Ori Danino, Alex Lobanov, Almog Sarusi, Carmel Gat. All civilians, aged 40 and under. It’s too much. For 11 months it’s been too much.

The US had warned Israel to stay out of Rafah. On social media the activist meme declared “All Eyes” were on the southern city in Gaza. Who was looking out for the hostages, some of us are asking now?

According to the IDF, each was executed a few days ago. They were shot at short range — or, if, like the headline writers at CNN and other respected media outlets, you prefer the passive voice and a hint of mystery, they “died.”

In an attempt to get my mind off the dead hostages, I scrolled for other news only to find another instalment in the saga around the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, a subject that ought to be as remote from Gaza as you can get. The MSO has been in turmoil since a performance on August 11 when its acclaimed guest pianist, Jayson Gillham, introduced a work with a dedication to what he referred to as the more than 100 Palestinian journalists killed by Israel in 10 months. A number of these had been “targeted assassinations,” he declared from the stage.

“The killing of journalists is a war crime in international law and it is done in an effort to prevent the documentation and broadcasting of war crimes to the world.”

The MSO cancelled Gillham’s next performance, then backtracked, then called off the concert in its entirety, citing “safety concerns.” The musicians revolted. The MSO’s managing director was sacked. The lefty rock icon and former Labor minister Peter Garrett was appointed to lead an independent review, to delve, among other things, into the orchestra’s policy on freedom of expression, which doesn’t reassure me one bit. Gillham alleges he’s been discriminated against for his political beliefs, asserting his right of free expression not as a shield but as a sword. 

By this logic, a pro-Israel pianist has the right to dedicate their performance to the more than 1200 Israelis slaughtered on October 7 and call for the release of the hostages still in Gaza. If that were to happen would the MSO musicians again close ranks in solidarity with their outspoken comrade?

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Of the six dead hostages, five were snatched from the Nova music festival; the sixth, Carmel Gat, from Kibbutz Be’eri where she was visiting her mother. I visited Be'eri on a media trip in March, which I wrote about here.

Gat was a yoga practitioner; released hostages told of her running yoga classes for fellow captives. To help them find quiet in their ordeal. Regular yoga classes were held in her honour at “Hostages Square” in the forecourt of Tel Aviv’s Museum of Art. I watched about 100 or so people, solemn on their mats, intense with concentration as if they might bring Carmel home with the sheer force of an asana. 

Hostages Square, Tel Aviv

When confronted with six victims it’s only natural that we latch onto the one that feels closest, and focus our grief on them as representative of the whole. One soul being the whole world, and so on. Six feels overwhelming. Given I’d been to her kibbutz “home” and seen the ceremonies held to keep her memory alive when she still was, Gat’s name leapt out at me. The same dynamic is at work on a different scale when the victims number six million. It’s why, when visiting a Holocaust museum, I hold it together until I reach the section dealing with the fate of Hungary’s Jews because that’s where my murdered ancestors came from.

For most people, Hersh Goldberg-Polin’s name leaps out from the murdered half dozen, thanks to the indefatigable advocacy of his parents. On August 21 they appeared before a 50,000 strong crowd at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago to plead for all the captives and for their 23 year-old son, seen in footage from the 7th with his arm blown off, herded into the back of a pick-up truck. Hersh had twice texted his mother that day, first to say  “I love you,” then to say, “I’m sorry.” 

At the DNC, his mother Rachel said: “At this moment, 109 treasured human beings are being held hostage by Hamas in Gaza. They are Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists. They are from 23 different countries. The youngest hostage is a one-year-old redheaded baby boy and the oldest is an 86-year-old moustachioed grandad. Among the hostages are eight American citizens. One of those Americans is our only son.”

The Goldberg Polins received a standing ovation. The crowd chanted, “Bring them Home.” Eleven days later Hamas showed us precisely what it thinks about the treasured human beings it holds, the Americans included. Hamas showed us what it thinks about America.

According to people who loathe Israel — their number being large and their loathing seemingly exclusive — the value the nation places on the lives of its individual citizens is in inverse proportion to its indifference to the lives of Palestinians. In other words, the Jewish state’s love for its own is seen as a sign of its intrinsic depravity. (Never mind that Israelis were no less jubilant when the Israeli Muslim Bedouin, Qaid Farhan Alkadi, was rescued by the IDF from a tunnel in southern Gaza a week ago.) The idea was voiced aloud in November when a Sky News UK anchor said to Israeli government spokesman Eylon Levy, “Israel is releasing 150 Palestinian prisoners in return for 50 hostages. Doesn’t it mean that Israel thinks the lives of Palestinians are valued less than Israelis?”

According to this pathological worldview, the large number of civilian deaths in Gaza is both a reflection of Israel’s random bloodlust and its racist self-regard.

But there is one context in which the IDF’s killing in Gaza is cast as precise rather than indiscriminate: when it comes to the alleged killing of journalists. As I’ve suggested before, the claim that Israel assassinates journalists is a highly consequential allegation because, if true, it logically follows that we cannot, should not, believe anything Eylon Levy or any other pro-Israel advocate has to say. How can we believe them? In this contemporary fable Israel is literally murdering the truth, in the words of the pianist Gillham, “to prevent the documentation and broadcasting of war crimes to the world.” 

Of all the calumnies against Israel, the most powerful is not that it’s a heartless murderer of Palestinian children. The most powerful of all calumnies against the Jewish state is that it’s a liar. 

Which is itself a pernicious lie. For a detailed, forensic analysis of the Israel-is-killing-journalists claim — and it started long before the current war in Gaza — you can read my post here. In summary: Israel is not assassinating journalists, unless your definition of journalists includes official propagandists for Hamas, Islamic Jihad and associated entities, which means that if such people were targeted, and it’s not always clear they were, then it was for reasons other than their Pulitzer-worthy scoops about Israeli wrongdoing. 

As we learned after the IDF hostage rescue operation in June, one-time Al Jazeera columnist and freelance “journalist” Abdallah Aljamal had even been holding three Israeli captives at his family home. Could things be any more farcical?

Still, Gillham, the pianist, describes his remarks before a captive audience that night as “quite prosaic.”

“The factual statement I made about the plight of Palestinian journalists is backed by reputable sources and aligns with international law,” he says.

Alas, the narrative about Israel assassinating journalists has run in almost every reputable media outlet, a fact that suggests Gaza isn’t the only place where journalists merge into propagandists.

By all accounts Gillham wouldn’t have needed much convincing on the subject of Israel’s inherent evil. Turns out the pianist has form. Since October 7 he’s been flooding his social media with anti-Israel vitriol, calling for an end to apartheid, colonialism and Zionism. None of this being a call for peace; more a cry for war. 

Nor is Gillham’s war-cry confined to the Middle East; Israel’s supporters also have to be singled out and ostracised. On Instagram he declared: “If you are friends with friends of Israel, you need new friends.” By sheer coincidence “friends of Israel” accurately describes the overwhelming majority of diaspora Jews, a disproportionate number of whom just happen to fund artistic endeavours such as the MSO. (And the Sydney Theatre Company and the Biennale of Sydney and the Rising festival and other bodies and landmark events that have become platforms for anti-Israel activism.) 

Now, maybe when Gillham made his Israel-is-assassinating-journalists remarks he wasn’t thinking about the Jewish audience members and the Jewish MSO donors who had believed they were supporting a reputable cultural institution, one dedicated to bringing people together through music. Only to discover they were helping support an earful of Hamas’s greatest hits. 

**

In Israel, journalists don’t function as official propagandists, much to the chagrin of the Netanyahu government, which has earned the bitter distrust of its people and somewhat oddly, considering its apparently lethal response to bad press in Gaza, desists from mowing down the peskier representatives of the Fourth Estate. As soon as the awful news broke about the hostages, hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets in protest, accusing the prime minister of putting up obstacles to a hostages-for-ceasefire deal so as to maintain his far-right coalition and stay in power. The labour union called a general strike. People held placards reading, “Bibi, you have blood on your hands!”

Israelis are wild with grief, and who can blame them. They are also bitterly divided.

All the while, Islamofascist Hamas and its conductor, Iran, play the West’s gullible intelligentsia like a finely-tuned instrument.