The Reaction to a Gazan Doctor's Release Reveals the Troubling State of Israeli Society

Anyone who wants to learn what's happened to Israelis since October 7 is advised to look at the release from prison of Al-Shifa Hospital's director. Dr. Mohammed Abu Salmiya sat in jail for seven months, with no judicial supervision, no indictment, no guilt.

He was abducted by Israel in the same way that Hamas abducted the Israeli hostages, and was thrown in jail. Like the Israeli hostages, his family knew nothing of his fate, and neither Red Cross representatives nor his lawyer were permitted to visit him.

Released with him on Monday was surgeon Dr. Issam Abu Ajwa, who recounted horrific abuse he underwent. His picture before and after left no doubt about the veracity of his claims.

The other 50 released Palestinian abductees were not shown in the Israeli media, of course, but audiences abroad saw adults who have become broken shells: gaunt, timid, of bony body and spindly legs, injured and bruised and full of wounds.

Abu Salmiya, fortunately for him, was not thrown into Sde Teiman, and therefore was not tortured to death like his two colleagues, Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh, a renowned Gazan surgeon, and Dr. Iyad Rantisi, who ran a women's hospital, part of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya.

For Israelis agitated at his release, Israel was wrong not to kill him too, by beating, starvation, disease, or other forms of torture. Israel wants to see doctors, like everyone else in Gaza, die an agonizing death.

The image of Abu Salmiya released from jail, hugging his mother and crying, should have had an emotional effect on any human being: an innocent hostage walks free. In Israel, however, it marked the beginning of a hysterical campaign of panic, incrimination, hatred, dehumanization, lust for vengeance, thirst for blood.

Not just right-wingers – everybody, everybody, politicians, broadcasters, pundits and loudmouths in a choir singing in unison: His release became a failure that equals October 7. How did it happen, that Israel released an innocent doctor from Gaza, who gave the order and who's to blame? Israel 2024.

Now for the facts. Dr. Abu Salmiya was abducted in November from a UN convoy that was evacuating wounded Palestinians from the besieged and bombed-out hospital. Israel claimed the hospital served as a Hamas center of command, but an investigative report by The Washington Post revealed that Israel presented no evidence to support this. In any case, we may assume that Abu Salmiya knew of Hamas activity in the hospital, but did not take part in it. If he had, he would not have been released.

Abu Salmiya was held by Israel on the strength of a dubious law it passed, the illegal combatants law, which allows the detention of a person without a judge's review for 75 days – an even more draconian law than the one permitting administrative detention. Israel, and in particular its judicial and health establishments, cares nothing about this. A hospital director is in jail – he is, after all, Gazan, that is to say: a terrorist.

That's what he was called in the festival of fury over his release. Everywhere, including on the new ultranationalist channel, i24News, which already makes one miss the mire of Channel 14, he was called a terrorist and people were calling on the military to rearrest him. Among politicians, too, a wall-to-wall consensus prevailed, which proves again there's no opposition in Israel to Arab-hatred and the lust for vengeance. 

Two "moderates" stood out: Gideon Sa'ar, who termed Abu Salmiya's release "insensitivity to Israeli public opinion, which remembers the terrorist infrastructure at Al-Shifa," thus presenting the abduction of a doctor to satisfy the lust of the masses as a new justification for war crimes; and Avigdor Lieberman, who in recent years became, in the eyes of centrists, a model of moderation and reason, who – in his usual understated, delicate, allusive manner – gives a master class in Holocaust trivialization. "We came to realize that the director of Al-Shifa is not a doctor, but rather a Dr. Mengele." So if Abu Salmiya is Mengele, what shall we call Lieberman?