There Is No Moral High Ground Here

Just more rage, more killing, more unimaginable loss

Former hostage Emily Damari heading into surgery on the hand that was shattered when she was taken captive by Hamas on October 7, 2023. Photo from Emily Damari’s Instagram.

THIS MORNING, FREED HOSTAGE EMILY DAMARI posted on Instagram a powerful letter to the Pulitzer Prize Committee about the recent prize awarded to Gazan poet and journalist Mosab Abu Toha. In the post, she wrote about being dragged from bed on the morning of October 7, 2023, shot and kidnapped to Gaza, where she spent 500 days as a hostage. “I was starved, abused, and treated like I was less than human. I watched friends suffer. I watched hope dim. And even now, after returning home, I carry that darkness with me,” she wrote.

Damari went on to protest the committee’s decision to award the Pulitzer to Abu Toha, who won for essays he published in the New Yorker on the tragic situation in Gaza. (Full disclosure: Abu Toha was a former student of mine in a class on writing magazine journalism.) The essays carried titles like “My Family’s Daily Struggle to Find Food in Gaza” and “Requiem for a Refugee Camp.”

Specifically, Damari was protesting comments Abu Toha made about hostages, including her, on his social media feeds, which have been documenting the bombings, starvation, and killings in Gaza multiple times a day since the war began. Damari wrote that Abu Toha had questioned whether she was actually a prisoner, denied the murder of the Bibas family, and underestimated the severity of the October 7^th atrocities.

“You know that your purpose is to respect journalism that promotes truth, democracy and human dignity. But in your choice to give a prize to the person who denies the truth and despises the memory of the murdered—your action is completely contrary to these values,” she wrote. “This is not a political question. It’s a question of humanity. And today, unfortunately, you failed.” She described him as a “modern-day Holocaust denier.”

Abu Toha’s full posts are much more nuanced than Damari’s quotes; they question whether someone actively serving as a soldier can be described as a hostage. I don’t have an answer to that one, but I do know that context matters. Still, it’s also true that Abu Toha has often spoken out in rage against Israel, its military, and its actions in Gaza.

Photo from Mosab Abu Toha’s Instagram

I’M NOT HERE TO LITIGATE THIS DEBATE. Damari has been through hell and is entitled to her opinion. Abu Toha has also been through hell and is entitled to his opinion. And that’s the heart of the issue here: These two viewpoints are both valid and are therefore impossible to reconcile. In his book The Israel-Palestine Conflict: Contested Histories, political scientist Neil Caplan describes this as one of the core arguments of the situation in Israel and Gaza. “The ‘victims-versus-victims’ dimension is itself a large contributing factor to the intractability of this conflict,” writes Caplan (p. 55).

Researchers call this kind of conflict competitive victimhood. Needless to say, it has no real winners.

Neither Abu Toha’s posts nor Damari’s letter should surprise anyone. Imagine watching your friends and families targeted and killed, your children starved, your home destroyed, your entire way of life annihilated : How would you feel? What would you say and do?

Imagine being kidnapped and tortured, watching friends and family be threatened and hurt and killed, the existence of your people and your country threatened: How would you feel? What would you say and do?

There is no moral high ground here, just more rage, more killing, more unimaginable loss.

So please let us give grace to both of these young people, who have suffered far more than anyone should ever have to, along with millions of other people, past and present and, sadly, future.