Another weekend, another grotesque spectacle in Gaza, as Hamas releases yet its latest handful of Israeli hostages as part of its fragile ceasefire agreement with Israel expected to expire next week.
Like with the many Saturdays before, Hamas paraded a trio of Israelis – Omer Shem Tov, Omer Wenkert, and Eliya Cohen – onto makeshift platforms emblazoned with multilingual propaganda declarations and decorative nationalistic flags.
As cheering crowds looked on, the trio were then forced onto the stage, made to smile and wave as heavily armed terrorists milled about, before finally being led to freedom by the Red Cross officials so glaringly impotent during their more than 500 days of captivity.
The Hamas display has been likened to everything from a ghoulish circus to a hint of what women accused of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials era might have endured.
But to me – an American Jew who is also African-American – the Hamas production feels like nothing less than a slave auction in America’s South during the years prior to the Civil War.
There are many parallels between America’s slave era and these horrifying Hamas happenings. The most obvious is race – slavery was a crime perpetrated by whites against blacks, with blackness the defining characteristic of this power dynamic.
Slaves were marked for chattel servitude because they were black – something that even two or three generations of miscegenation could not undo. One drop of blackness and you were black – stripped of all rights and fated to working the fields.
The same thinking applies to Hamas and Jews and Israelis. As they sat on Hamas’s impromptu dais forced to perform as the crowds eagerly inspected the Zionist captives, Shem Tov, Wenkert, and Cohen were reduced to little more than their sheer corpus – much like the slaves of the antebellum South.
They’re there solely to be prodded and picked over, booty from a bloody conquest – October 7 in the case of Gaza and Hamas, the Middle Passage during the era before emancipation. The trio were there in central Gaza because they were Jews.
Humas as mere currency
Most crucially, in the case of both slavery and Hamas’s hostage strategy, humans exist as mere currency – their only function to be bargained and traded as part of an evil end game.
For slave owners, the goal was cheap labor to fuel fallow cotton and tobacco plantations. In Gaza, kidnapped Jewish bodies are held captive and abused, to be traded for Palestinian prisoners held in Israel.
Unlike during the slave era – which required workers who could actually work – even dead Jews hold value for Hamas. Lots of value, as evidenced by the four corpses traded for hundreds of Palestinian criminals this week, including murdered children Kfir and Ariel Bibas.
The last 16 months of global anti-Israel protests and surging antisemitism have revealed Jews and Israelis vulnerable to violence and peril almost unimaginable before Hamas’s October 7 invasion.
But I could have imagined it. Having spent my life contending with racism, I’ve never lacked the ability to imagine the horrors humans are capable of inflicting upon one another.
For me, what Jews now endure in America is nothing less than the racism blacks have known for centuries. Indeed, as I wrote earlier this month, America’s Jews now exist as “America’s ‘new’ blacks.”
The slave-auction-like atmosphere that has accompanied each week’s Hamas hostage release only reaffirms this belief – aided and edified by pliant media like the BBC, for which justifying Hamas barbarism knows no limits.
Like blacks in the American South and Israelites in biblical Egypt, dozens of Jews remain captive in Gaza – chained like slaves and awaiting their conversion into currency.
As the first phase of the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel comes to an end, so, too, might the weekly hostage “auctions” that have been among its most defining optics.
Most Israelis, of course, pray this exodus from slavery to freedom will continue into phase two. One can only shudder when imagining the diabolical displays Hamas is already planning.
The writer is an editor and columnist at the New York Post and an adjunct fellow at the Tel Aviv Institute.