A Former Hostage Reconsiders Her Belief
In Peace with the Palestinians
Ada Sagi is an Israeli woman who was kidnapped on October 7 from her home in the Nir Oz kibbutz, and held for 53 days before being released in the November hostage-for-prisoner swap. All her adult life she had been a peace activist, a woman of the left who believed that Israel and the Palestinians could live in peace with each other. Not any longer. More on her new, more sober view can be found here:
Former hostage Ada Sagi to BBC: I understand
Hamas doesn’t want peace
Jerusalem Post, June 19, 2024:
Peace activist and former hostage Ada Sagi, 75, told the BBC that since being held hostage in Gaza, she has lost hope that peace between Israelis and Palestinians is possible.
Ada Sagi, 75, is a mother of three and the daughter of Holocaust survivors from Poland. Ada learned Arabic in order to make friends with her neighbors close to Kibbutz Nir Oz and began teaching Arabic to fellow residents of Kibbutz Nir Oz in an effort to better communicate with their Palestinian neighbors.
Her son Noam said that he last heard from his mother at 9:20 a.m. on October 7, when his mother called to say she could hear voices speaking in Arabic outside her home, after which she entered the safe room. She was then abducted to Gaza.
In her first interview since her release, Sagi told Emma Barnett on Radio 4’s Today program that she was held in an apartment by paid guards, that Hamas kept her in a hospital just before her release, and that she now believes the world hates Jews.
Surely Ada Sagi should be forgiven for concluding that “the world hates Jews.” Looking at how so much of the world — the UN General Assembly, the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice — has been so quick to condemn Israel for its attempt to defend itself against those who would destroy it, seeing the sinister protests on campuses and on city streets in dozens of cities, with mobs screaming their wish that “From the river to the sea/Palestine shall be free,” which is a demand for the disappearance of the Jewish state and its replacement by a 23rd Arab one, or those other sinister slogans, such as “Another Intifada,” which is an allusion to the Second Intifada in which 1000 Israelis were murdered, or simply “Kill Jews,” while accusing Israel of “genocide” in such chants as “Israel, Israel, you can’t hide: We charge you with genocide.” No wonder that Ada Sagi now believes — understandably though I allow myself to believe mistakenly — that “the world hates Jews.”
“I don’t believe in peace, I don’t, sorry,” Sagi told BBC. “I understand Hamas doesn’t want it,” she added.
She said she is well aware of the remaining 120 hostages in Gaza and urged the government to agree to a new ceasefire and hostage release deal with Hamas, the BBC reported.
Captive in a home with children
Sagi revealed that when she was first taken into Gaza, she and some other hostages were hidden in a family home with children but were taken to an apartment in Khan Yunis the next day because it was too “dangerous.”
The person who held her in their apartment in Gaza was a nurse, she told the BBC, and his wife and children had been sent to stay with his wife’s parents, Sagi recalled.
Sagi shared that she overheard students being paid 70 NIS to watch over them. “It’s a lot of money in Gaza because they have no work. And if you have work other than with Hamas, it’s no more than 20 NIS for a day,” she said….
When she was first taken as a hostage to Gaza, Sagi along with other, was hidden in a “family home with children.” The members of this hostage-holding family are what the world wants you to believe were “innocent civilians.” And once she had been moved, her guards were not members of Hamas, but students, being paid well to prevent the hostages from escaping. Again these are the people whom so many choose to believe are “innocent civilians.” If they prevent hostages from escaping — a job that they did not have to take, but chose to fulfill because of the high wages they would receive — can they be called “innocent civilians”? Aren’t they aiders and abetters of Hamas?
When she arrived in Khan Yunis, Sagi recalled that they were taken to a hospital, she believes was Nasser Hospital, and were told, “You are staying here.”
From other testimony of released hostages, 10 hostages in total were placed in Nasser Hospital, one of whom remains in captivity, according to the BBC.
The hospital’s director, Dr. Atef al-Hoot, denied these claims that there were any hostages held in Nasser Hospital, according to the BBC.
“People say that they are not involved. They’re involved… and getting money for each of us,” Sagi said….
Now whom shall we believe? Ada Sagi, who was taken, along with nine other hostages, to a place that she thinks was Nasser Hospital, or Dr. Atef al-Hoot, the head of the hospital, who denies that hostages were ever held there? Who should we believe, Dr. Atef al_Hoot, or the IDF, whose soldiers captured 200 Hamas terrorists who were in Nasser Hospital, along with stores of ammunition? Who has a record of telling the truth, and who a record of lying?
Tens of thousands of Israelis who were living near the border with Gaza have been displaced since October 8, and are now living elsewhere in the country. They will only be able to return to their homes, or what is left of them, once Hamas has been thoroughly dismantled, and its inventory of rockets destroyed.
Before October 7, like many members of the kibbutzim that were attacked on that day, Ada Sagi was a leftist and a peace activist. She believed that Israelis and Palestinians could come to a modus vivendi, could live side-by-side in peace. Other Israelis murdered that day had similar peacemaking hopes; some served as volunteers who picked up Gazan children and delivered them to be treated in Israeli hospitals.
But for Ada Sagi, the atrocities Hamas inflicted on October 7, and the treatment she and other hostages received from Hamas and at the hands of her “civilian” guards inside Gaza, have led her to reconsider all of her previous assumptions. Like the defenders of mass Muslim immigration in the countries of Western Europe, who have been mugged by reality, and reluctantly realized that the large-scale presence of Muslims in their countries has created a situation for the indigenous non-Muslims that is far more unpleasant, expensive, and physically dangerous than would be the case without that large-scale presence, Ada Sagi has had the scales fall from her eyes. She no longer believes in the possibility of a genuine peace between Israel and the Palestinians, or in a “two-state solution.” What is possible is something else — the absence of war, which will be the result not of peace treaties, but of Israel’s deterrent power. Since October 7, a great many other Israelis who believed in “peace” have come to the same somber, and sober, conclusion as Ada Sagi. The outside world needs to stop prating endlessly about a “two-state solution” and listen up.
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