By José Galicot
TIJUANA, Mexico — They return the hostages to us. They will be with us again. They come broken, destroyed by the evils and cruelties that only men are capable of doing to men; the raped women come, the broken men, they were cruel to them. They had lost hope, hatikva; they humiliated them, and they ate away at their souls.
Their families waited for them after months of pain. They had gone to a peace party, where they were kidnapped, and hell itself opened. Every day, every moment was one of terror. They return them to us broken but alive; it doesn’t matter, we will rebuild them. We have already done it before with the beating of the concentration camps; how many of them will we revive with love? When they returned to life, how many became doctors or poets and continued contributing to humanity? They did good. They stopped evil with good. The hostages will be with us; we will take care of them with love, we will rebuild them piece by piece, and we will bring them back to life. We have done it before, many times, we pay a very high price for them, four hundred soldiers of the army of Israel young 18-year-olds who died in the rescue, they will return, they will smile, they will love, they will live, God willing.
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José Galicot, the founder of Tijuana Innovadora, is a leader of the Mexican Jewish community on both sides of the San Diego/ Tijuana border.