Featured Post Crush Hamas or free hostages? I choose the hostages

Source: The Times of Israel + playing article

About the Author
Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, where he is co-director, together Imam Abdullah Antepli of Duke University and Maital Friedman, of the Muslim Leadership Initiative (MLI), and a member of the Institute's iEngage Project. His latest book, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, is a New York Times bestseller. His previous book, Like Dreamers, was named the 2013 National Jewish Book Council Book of the Year.

When the immediacy of the horrors of October 7 begins to fade, the trauma that will linger in the Israeli psyche is the shattering of two core assumptions about our country.

The first was the belief that we know how to defend ourselves and project deterrence in a hostile region. But on October 7, the weakest of our enemies delivered the most devastating blow in our history, sending a message of unprecedented vulnerability to our enemies.

The second was the belief that we know how to protect each other. But on October 7, the Israelis on the Gaza border were effectively abandoned by the army and the government, sending a message of unprecedented failure to ourselves.

The ongoing agony of the hostages only deepens that sense of failure and shame.

Israel’s strength and resilience depend on maintaining our deterrence and our solidarity, the two pillars of our national ethos. During the first months of the war, Israelis pretended that we could do both: defeat Hamas, restoring our deterrence, and free the hostages, restoring our faith in our ability to protect each other. Now though, we know that we must choose between those two essential goals.

That is the cruelty of our hostage dilemma.

Prioritizing the hostages will have consequences for restoring our deterrence; prioritizing victory will have consequences for restoring our solidarity. Proponents of either position need to acknowledge the brutal price their choice entails.

The struggle between those two positions is playing out on Israel’s streets through competing photographs of smiling faces. The posters advocating an immediate deal show snapshots of hostages in the poses of daily life, while posters advocating victory show snapshots of fallen soldiers in their youthful vigor. The images pull on shared emotions – our concern for each other – but demand opposing political conclusions. Will you allow your sisters and brothers to die in the tunnels? Will you allow those who fought in the tunnels to have died in vain?

(This dichotomy, promoted on the right, ignores the fact that many soldiers say the motive inspiring them into battle is the rescue of the hostages.)

Like most Israelis in the initial phase of the war, I prioritized military victory over rescue – even if I couldn’t quite admit that to myself. The overriding need in the immediate aftermath of October 7 was to prove that we could still defend ourselves. In media interviews and essays, (including those published in TOI), I argued that our long-term existence depends on restoring our deterrence and that that could not be achieved by leaving a genocidal regime on our border.

And I feared that the demonstrations to free the hostages might strengthen Hamas rejectionism in the negotiations.

Today, though, I am on the streets, demanding a deal.

What’s changed for me is the realization that allowing the hostages to die in captivity will also have fateful security consequences for Israel, perhaps even more devastating than not destroying Hamas.

If the hostages are left to die, large numbers of Israelis will believe they were sacrificed not for a higher security purpose like retaining the Philadephi Corridor on the border between Gaza and Egypt, but for the political needs of an endlessly cynical prime minister seeking to hold his coalition together. What matters for the well-being of Israel is not whether that perception is true but that many Israelis are convinced that it is. The consequences for the covenant of trust between the state and a large part of its people will be far-reaching.

As a citizen, whom am I to believe: the heads of the IDF, the Mossad, the Shin Bet, all of whom insist that the Philadelphi Corridor can be handled differently, or a prime minister who repeatedly adds new demands in negotiations and who barely mentioned the Corridor until recently, when far-right politicians threatened to bring down the government if he withdraws from there?

Certainly, my faith in the wisdom and capabilities of our senior security officials has been badly shaken by October 7. But at least I know I can trust their motives.

For many Israelis, Netanyahu and his coalition of “ultras” – ultra-nationalist, ultra-Orthodox, ultra corrupt – have lost all credibility. And as we say ironically in Hebrew, they’ve earned that mistrust “b’yosher,” fair and square.

Netanyahu has never conveyed to the nation a genuine sense of empathy with its anguish over the hostages. Instead, he and his ministers have sometimes communicated indifference to their fate and even contempt for their families.

Netanyahu has scarcely met with the families over these long months. He has encouraged divisions among them, highlighting meetings with the handful of relatives of hostages who support him. Outrageously, the pro-government media has turned the families who are trying to pressure the government into prioritizing the hostages into virtual enemies of the state.

The far right, which preaches love for one’s fellow Jews, has shown little concern for the families. At Knesset committee sessions chaired by far-right MKs, family members have been silenced, mocked, expelled. Some family members demonstrating against the government have been physically assaulted by its supporters, with no rebuke from the prime minister.

In a TV interview, a former hostage Adina Moshe recalled how she stood at an intersection holding a sign expressing solidarity with the remaining hostages. A passerby, recognizing her, shouted, “It’s too bad they freed you.” As she told the story, she wept – not only, one sensed, from personal hurt but from incredulity at the debasement of Israeli solidarity.

Netanyahu hasn’t attended the funerals of hostages and only ritualistically acknowledged their deaths. But when the IDF succeeded in freeing a handful of hostages, he rushed to the podium to address the nation and claim the credit. Now, after six hostages were murdered and a large part of the public has erupted in protest, he has tried to do damage control by reaching out to the families. But he can no longer undo the widespread perception that we are led by a man who cares more for his own needs than for Israeli lives.

Since October 7, we’ve experienced a remarkable resurgence of resilience. Israeli society has tried valiantly to restore both its military deterrence and its solidarity. Our soldiers have shown extraordinary determination in battle and unity across political differences. And while the home front is once again convulsed by protests, there have been almost no demonstrations challenging the justness of this war.

But we can’t take that resilience for granted. One of the deepest sources of Israeli resilience is our solidarity. Yet if the hostages are left to die by this government and this prime minister, something essential will die within many Israelis. The resulting heartbreak would be compounded by cynicism and despair — which will impact on the ability of a critical part of the Israeli public to continue sacrificing for this country. And that could have strategic implications.

We are facing a long-term regional war. The battle against Hamas is only phase one – and by no means the most important phase – of the Iranian-Israeli war that began on October 7. An inevitable confrontation with Hezbollah awaits, and ultimately a confrontation with Iran. Preoccupied with Hamas, we have lost sight of the far greater threat of a nuclearizing Iran. Only Israel will prevent a bomb in the hands of the ayatollahs.

Ensuring our resilience and solidarity requires new elections. This government – which continues to invest massive funding in the Haredi community that abstains from the war effort, which indulges far-right mobs storming army bases and burning Palestinian homes, and which, even after October 7, never ceased prying open and feeding off of our schisms – cannot rally the nation for the next, more fateful phase of the Israeli-Iranian war.

Perhaps the greatest sin of this government against Israel was to cause so many who love this country and have devoted their lives to its well-being to feel like outsiders and wonder whether their children have a future here. That process began with the assault on Israeli democracy in the year leading up to October 7. During that time, there was widespread talk among liberals – and not only talk – about a mass emigration of despair.

Israelis can live with a level of threat to their personal security that would break many other peoples. They are able to cope, in large part, because of their faith in the decency of this society. That faith, severely tested before October 7, is now being strained to the breaking point.

The breakdown in trust between a large part of the citizenry and its government has other practical consequences.

In recent days, some voices have suggested that it is time to reexamine the very premise of hostage negotiations. A compelling argument can indeed be made for breaking the pattern of hostage-taking and the mass release of terrorists, which only encourages more hostage-taking. Yahya Sinwar, after all, was freed in the 2011 exchange for Gilad Shalit.

But changing the norm to prioritize strategic considerations over the lives of our fellow citizens requires the trust of Israelis in the morality of that hard decision. And that requires trust in the integrity of our leader.

Needless to say, Netanyahu is not that man.

Nor are the hostages of October 7 the ones at whose expense the norm should be changed. The hostages taken from the Gaza border have already been betrayed twice by the state. Even before they were abandoned on October 7, they were abandoned when we allowed Hamas to fire rockets into their communities. The residents of Kibbutz Beeri and Sderot were forced to live under impossible conditions. Their children grew up running to shelters, with barely fifteen seconds of warning before a rocket landed.

Allowing the hostages to die would be the final betrayal.

Some of the freed hostages have openly expressed their profound sense of abandonment. “We’re a people without a state, citizens without a leader,” said former hostage Liat Atzili.

Even more devastating was the TV interview with former hostage Adina Moshe’s recounting of a conversation in captivity with Chaim Peri, who later died in Gaza. Moshe sought to reassure Peri that their release was imminent. “We’ll be free within two months,” she said.

Peri disagreed. Two years, he countered.

“Why so pessimistic?” persisted Moshe. “We have a state.”

“We have Bibi,” said Peri, “and we’re leftists.”

When the six hostages were murdered, there was graffiti that read, “Chaim Peri was right.”

In a practical sense, it doesn’t matter whether Chaim Peri was right or not. What matters is that many here agree with him.

Standing among hundreds of thousands of Israelis at the pro-hostage protest on Sunday night in Tel Aviv, I sensed the cold rage of patriotic citizens who felt betrayed by their government. Young people, many of them back from the front, wrapped themselves in Israeli flags like a protective blanket, clinging to the symbol of the values on which they were raised and in whose name they have fought, seeking reassurance that those values still held.

Among the many hand-drawn signs was a poster with a single word in bright red letters: “Hatzilu!” The Hebrew is ambiguous. It could mean, Save them. But it could also mean, Save us.

About the Author
Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, where he is co-director, together Imam Abdullah Antepli of Duke University and Maital Friedman, of the Muslim Leadership Initiative (MLI), and a member of the Institute's iEngage Project. His latest book, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, is a New York Times bestseller. His previous book, Like Dreamers, was named the 2013 National Jewish Book Council Book of the Year.