Joy. Sorrow. Fury. Disgust. And Hope. All at Once.

Reacting to this disorienting, misrepresented, misperceived moment in the Middle East.

When a bad man does a good thing, he does not become a good man.

Indeed, it is quite possible he has done the good thing for the wrong reasons. Perhaps it is in part to exculpate himself from his previous transgressions. It is also may be because he sees the good thing as a means to an immoral or selfish end.

One does not have to be very experienced at life to understand that unraveling the motives and moral implications of human actions is one of the great challenges we face in life. At least it is if we care about being moral beings or even if we just seek to understand human behavior because we must contend with it in our daily lives.

Matters only become more complex when multiple individuals are involved in a human undertaking, all with different motivations, different values.

Needless to say, these thoughts are on my mind because I have been following closely the events in Israel, Gaza and Egypt over the past few days.

Like anyone with a heart, I find it hard to watch hostages being returned to their families after two years in captivity without tears streaming down my cheeks. All too often events here on this planet become stripped of real human context, politicized, headlines, hijacked to advance one argument or another.

But underlying those events are human beings who are wracked by them. Imagine what your despair would be if your son or daughter or husband or wife or nephew or neighbor were taken by terrorists, beaten, tortured, and only kept alive by the random whims of the criminals who took them. Imagine the relentless fear and longing and anger.

You can see it all in the drawn but relieved faces of hostage families being reunited with their loved ones after so long.

I understand why they celebrate. I understand why they are full of gratitude to those who helped win the hostages’ release.

There is reason to be thankful for each of the 20 Israeli hostages released over this past weekend, to appreciate the work of all who invested time and effort to achieve their freedom.

It is also easy in moments like these, when other hostages are being returned home in body bags, to be heartbroken for those who hoped and whose prayers were not answered, whose lives were shattered. Heartbroken…and full of rage at those who inflicted such evil.

But as I watch the events of the past several days, other images linger with me and also evoke powerful emotions.

Vast Faultlines Remain

I’m afraid I cannot join with those who say, let us celebrate the return of the hostages today and begin to think of what to do about the tragedy of Gaza tomorrow. I’m afraid, and I apologize to all who might be triggered by what I am about to say, I cannot tolerate that subtext in so much of the media coverage and American and Israeli rhetoric that I have heard that somehow suggests that the return of these last hostages is the central story of the Gaza war, the one prerequisite for peace.

I cannot accept that the central story of what has just happened to produce the current ceasefire is one of the return of 20 people when 2 million are returning to a wasteland. It is estimated that one in ten residents of Gaza was killed or wounded in the two years of fighting that is now paused. At least 70,000 are dead, very likely many many more than that. 20,000 of them, at least, were children. But every single individual who has made their home in Gaza has suffered extraordinarily. They have lived in unspeakable fear and deprivation. They have had every fundamental human right stripped away. They have been victims of war crimes.

Their suffering has been immense, unimaginable and it continues to be so to this day.

They are returning to find rubble where their homes once were. Death tolls will rise as bodies are found beneath the rubble. But their futures are no more certain than they were yesterday. The “deal” being celebrated in the media and in Israel, resolves none of their core concerns. Israel is left in control of more than half of Gaza and, effectively all of it given that it controls the territory’s borders. Israel’s leaders remain opposed to Palestinian self-determination. Many remain dedicated to ethnic cleansing, to erradicating any hint of Palestinians with a claim to the land their families have called home for centuries.

Of the 20 points in the peace plan being celebrated, only 2 have been achieved and those will be only temporary if the others are not advanced. Of the remaining 18, the experts with whom I have spoken universally feel somewhere between the vast majority and all of them will be impossible to bring to pass. The fate of the people of Palestine remains beyond their own control.

Yet, the stories I read in the media and the speeches I have watched on television, cast what has happened in a light that minimizes Palestinian rights or the atrocities that have been committed against them.

Once again, the clear message I get is that many of those in power in the US, in Israel and around the world, feel that Israeli lives are worth more than Palestinian lives, that Israeli suffering is somehow more worthy of empathy than that of Palestinians.

Worse, those who inflicted that suffering are now being celebrated as heroes. Trump and Netanyahu are engaged in a festival of self-congratulation. Leaders from around the world are editing their memories of the past to accommodate the egos of those men.

Yet, they have not changed. Their motives remain in doubt. They have blood on their hands. It is unclear they seek a just and lasting peace.

There are a hundred examples from the news in the past few days that support this, but let me choose one. Let me zero in on the moment when in his triumphal speech to Israel’s Knesset, Trump chose to congratulate the Israelis on how well they used American weapons in Gaza.

No Moment to Exculpate War Criminals

Consider this excerpt from a thoughtful, powerful and unflinchingly accurate column from Nesrine Malik in the Guardian in which she writes about celebrating Trump and Netanyahu and the effort to minimize or move on from the crimes they committed or abetted:

Already Donald Trump is taking a victory lap for his peacemaking, after enabling what has taken place for months. Jared Kushner praised Israel’s conduct: “Instead of replicating the barbarism of the enemy, you chose to be exceptional.” Starmer lauded Trump for securing the deal, and focused on the importance of letting in humanitarian aid. He will, No 10 has said, pay “particular tribute” to the US president in Sharm el-Sheikh. And so now we have a crime without criminals, a genocide without génocidaires, a wretched population who, we are to believe, have been brought low by Hamas, and must be fed and watered while the world works out what to do with them. An entire history across Palestine of Israeli impunity and dominion, one of repetitive ethnic cleansing, military rule, expansion of settlements – and now explicit rejection of Palestinian self-determination – is erased, again.

She writes this earlier in the piece, “There is an Arabic expression, hameeha harameeha – meaning “its protector is its thief”, that comes to mind as those who have plied Israel with weaponry gather to figure out how to achieve peace in Gaza.” It underscores my initial point about the complexity of feelings we can have in a moment like this. So too, in a different way, does this video featuring remarks by Rachel Goldberg-Polin, in which she addresses the conflicting feelings of joy and loss felt by many Israelis at this moment.

So here we are again in one of those moments of emotional conflict. There is joy and sadness. There is anger and there is fear. There is also disgust at those who seek to personally capitalize on moments like this and those who misrepresent them or oversimplify them to serve their own ends.

Once again, as often happens in life, we are challenged to cope with a welter of feelings so discordant that it is profoundly disorienting.

More difficult however, than the nearly impossible task of reconciling such feelings, is determining how to act upon them.

First, we must take the time to understand the underlying truth of what has happened and what is happening. We must get beyond self-serving political speeches and the simplistic (and often equally self-serving) faux or faulty analyses of commentators.

No, what has happened is not a victory for anyone. No, Netanyahu and Trump are not heroes. No, peace is not at hand, it is not even close.

War criminals who cease do not become heroes by ceasing to commit war crimes. Moments of happiness, relief and joy for some do not offset enduring sadness and loss for others.

It is not, contrary to what some have said and written, a time to turn the page on the abuses of Israel no more than it is time to turn the page on the abuses of the other authors of this horror—of Hamas and of the enablers of Israel including the last two American presidents and many in power here in the United States.

While Donald Trump inappropriately called for a pardon for Netanyahu for the crimes of corruption of which he has been accused during his remarks to the Knesset, it would be an even greater injustice if those who reduced Gaza to dust and erased the lives of tens of thousands of innocents and starved hundreds of thousand were not held to account.

Worse still would be to allow those people to flip the words of Von Clausewitz and turn diplomacy into a way to wage war by other means. Any settlement that does not grant the Palestinian people self-determination, their own sovereign state, their ability to defend themselves, rights fully equal in every respect to the rights of every citizen of every other country, is not a settlement. It is either a way to ratify the crimes of war (and of decades of abuse and contempt for international law and human decency) or it is a path to the next conflict.

We Can’t Let the Perfect Be the Enemy of the Good…or Progress Be the Enemy of Justice

While I accept and believe that this peace process is very unlikely to succeed, all involved should work to see to it that it in every way possible remedies the injustices being committed against the Palestinians, assures the security of Palestinians and Israelis and their neighbors in the region alike, provides for the provision of necessary aid to those in Gaza, begins the rebuilding of Gaza to serve the needs of its residents and not of those who would exploit them be they real estate moguls from the US or Israeli extremists, ensures that such actions are not a screen for simultaneous crimes in the West Bank, and however, possible searches for some form of effective self-governance for Palestinians.

We may not achieve the 20 points of the plan. But the devastation of the past two years nonetheless obligates us to try and, cognizant of how unlikely the task is, approach each goal as closely as is humanly possible.

I do not expect that all the parties to the peace process will achieve all these goals. We can only hope that some will and we should support and assist each of them as they do just as we call out those that would seek to exploit the process to advance personal or political agendas that are immoral, unjust or dangerous.