The Undermining of Captivity as a Social Form
Captivity enters the world of war as a substitute for the finality of killing and promises of life and reconciliation are drawn from it. It embodies an intra-group transition from the collective’s sudden separation from its members to reunification, as well as an inter-group transition that includes an encounter between the home community and the enemy. The article examines the social aspects of being captured by Hamas and returning from captivity and finds that Israeli society has blurred the transition as a collective experience. Two historical parallels served to remove the social sting from the captivity phenomenon: the “Shalit Deal” and the redemption of captives after the Yom Kippur War. The “Shalit Deal” was mobilized to justify a move to abolish the term captivity in favor of the concept of kidnapping, which belongs to the criminal world, and to replace diplomatic methods for resolving captivity with military elimination embodied in the Hannibal Directive. The eradication of the sociality of captivity in favor of perceptions of constant war is also evident in the contemporary construct of the subject of the Yom Kippur prisoners of war. Their return from captivity is not depicted as a diplomatic process that culminated in the peace agreement with Egypt but rather marks two desirable and satisfactory collective responses: the enactment of compensation and psychological treatment. Thus, the return of these captives was privatized, and other lessons regarding the captivity in the Yom Kippur War, involving the crisis of trust in the state, the murder of many captives, and the connection between the release of captives and the end of the war, were abandoned. Nevertheless, the social dimensions of such a transition are emerging in Israel and coming together, for example, in demonstrations of support for the ransoming of captives among soccer fan communities and in the binding of the rescue to the social image of fathers, sons, and brothers.
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