When Israel and the Jewish Diaspora found themselves reeling from the execution of six hostages in Gaza, one might have expected the rage of the Jewish people to pour onto the murderers. One might have thought the leader of the free world would reevaluate the strategy of endless bargaining with the patrons of the killers. One might have believed the press would take a beat and concentrate on the evil of the fiends who filmed the last words of their captives before shooting them one by one, forcing the condemned survivors to watch.
Perhaps it would have been like this in a rational world. But the one we live in instead chose to blame Bibi. Israel’s prime minister may not have pulled the trigger, but in the eyes of many, he is a co-conspirator. They believe that the responsibility for the deaths of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Ori Danino, Alex Lobanov, Carmel Gat, and Almog Sarusi falls in part or even in whole on Benjamin Netanyahu.
In Israel, the news of the murdered hostages erupted like a volcano. Recriminations abounded. The Histadrut, the country’s main labor union, called a general strike. Tens of thousands of angry Israelis poured into the streets. An Israeli court shut down the strike, and fewer protesters showed up than initially reported. But the tenor and tone of the outrage directed at Bibi from many Israelis were stark. “They were alive,” the leader of Israel’s opposition, Yair Lapid, said on September 1. “Netanyahu and the cabinet of death decided not to save them.”
The response from New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was even worse. He began his September 3 column as follows: “If President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris needed any reminder that Benjamin Netanyahu is not their friend, not America’s friend and, most shamefully, not the friend of the Israeli hostages in Gaza, the murder by Hamas of six Israeli souls while Netanyahu dragged out negotiations should make that clear.”
To her credit, the initial reaction from Vice President Kamala Harris was admirable. In a written statement, the Democratic nominee for president did not call for more negotiations. The threat posed by Hamas “must be eliminated,” she said. “Hamas cannot control Gaza.”
The response from the actual president, Joe Biden, lacked any such moral clarity. As he stepped out of the presidential helicopter, reporters peppered Biden with questions about whether Netanyahu was doing enough to free the hostages. “No,” he responded.
Maybe this was another senior moment. Maybe this was a “Kinsley gaffe,” when a politician accidentally tells the truth as he sees it. But either way, Biden’s “no” was appalling. On the day that Israelis were burying the dead hostages, the American president suggested they might have been alive had Netanyahu been willing to sacrifice more at the negotiating table.
It must be stated plainly: There was no deal for Netanyahu to reject. Hamas is not participating in the actual negotiations. The diplomacy has been between America, Israel, Egypt, and Qatar. The Qataris are stand-ins for Hamas, but they are not proxies. Several times since April, Hamas has rejected offers for a cease-fire, or in some cases, has insisted on last-minute deal-killing demands—such as a stipulation that the first round of hostages need not be alive.
Biden’s “no” is also contradicted by his own administration’s previous statements. On August 19, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters that Netanyahu “confirmed to me that Israel supports the bridging proposal”—the term the administration was using for a kind of “deal sheet” designed to precede a formal agreement. “The next important step,” Blinken continued, “is for Hamas to say ‘yes.’” This has been the State Department message on cease-fire talks since the beginning of the summer; Israel is negotiating and Hamas is not. Has anyone informed the president or Tom Friedman?
Finally, there is the meaning of the executions themselves. Netanyahu made this point on September 2. “He who murders abductees does not want a deal,” he said. This seems obvious, and yet it is remarkable that the only leader willing to say it is Netanyahu.
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Israelis are being forced to confront the paradox of the war that has consumed them. Since October 7, Israel has pursued two goals: the return of the hostages and the elimination of Hamas as the sovereigns of Gaza. Until Israel’s Defense Forces went into the final Hamas redoubt, the town of Rafah, in May, it might have been possible to believe Israel could achieve both. But the success of the Rafah operation has presented a terrible dilemma. The tunnels between Rafah and Egypt were a lifeline for the hostage-takers. Any deal for the hostages would mean abandoning the strategic Philadelphi Corridor that separates Gaza from Egypt. Which means Israel can have hostages returned or it can secure the destruction of Hamas—but it’s almost certain it cannot have both.
This debate—hostages or Philadelphi—became a public crisis in Israel at the end of August after a meeting of the Jewish state’s security cabinet. According to Israeli press reports, Netanyahu surprised his ministers by asking them to vote on whether Israel would move forward with a negotiating position that might have necessitated giving up the corridor. The cabinet voted 8 to 1 to stay there, but the defense minister, Yoav Gallant—along with the IDF’s top generals—argued that they should offer to leave if it meant getting back some of the hostages.
Gallant’s argument was that the IDF could return to the Philadelphi Corridor whenever it chose. And that is likely true from a purely military perspective. But Israel’s strategic challenge is not that it lacks the military capabilities to defend itself in Gaza. It’s that the international community and its most important ally clearly will not abide a truly robust self-defense strategy on Israel’s part. As Menachem Begin once famously said, “there is no such thing as a guarantee of a guarantee.” So what guarantee does Israel have that if it chose to return to the Philadelphi Corridor at some later point, it would not face international sanction and censure? This question should vex anyone who takes Israel’s security seriously.
But in the eyes of his antagonists in Israel and Washington, Netanyahu’s insistence on Israeli control of the Philadelphi Corridor is nothing but a ploy. He won’t end a war that is keeping him in power. As Friedman wrote in his September 3 column, Netanyahu has only one interest: “his own immediate political survival, even if it undermines Israel’s long-term survival.”
Recent history teaches very nearly the opposite. The first lesson is that relinquishing land does not bring peace, contrary to the pithy slogan of the Oslo process. Rather, Israel’s withdrawals from southern Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005 have allowed its foes to launch military attacks from territory Israel had controlled and then unilaterally relinquished.
The second lesson involves hostage deals themselves. In 2011, Netanyahu agreed to free 1,027 prisoners (280 of whom were serving life sentences for plotting attacks on Israelis) in exchange for an abducted soldier, Gilad Shalit. That deal ended up replenishing the ranks of Hamas leadership. One of the released prisoners was Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of October 7 and the current leader of Hamas. It was at that moment that Sinwar discovered his adversary’s Achilles’ heel.
It is a horrible and unsolvable conundrum. Jewish tradition demands that a Jew must do whatever he can to free Jewish hostages. Paying ransom in this respect is not only permissible—it is, in certain circumstances, required. And the Jewish state has largely abided by this ancient practice. But the result has been a ferocious moral hazard. The humanitarian imperative to rescue the abducted has become an incentive for Israel’s enemies to take more hostages.
This is why so many Israelis were overjoyed this year when the IDF rescued four hostages kept near Gaza’s central coast and another in August. It would be nice to think these daring missions are an alternative to the terrible choice between leaving hostages in hell or making deals with the demons who took them. At the same time, these brilliant raids do not always succeed. That was the case with the mission to save the six who were murdered. The raids cannot be relied on to solve the paradox. They cannot be a long-term substitute for the hard choices the prime minister and his government must make.
That is what Netanyahu is doing. The prime minister is not opposed to hostage deals. He made the deal for Shalit, and he made one that freed hostages at the beginning of the war. What he opposes is a deal that trades the security of Israel for the freedom of the hostages. And a deal that allows Hamas to resupply and survive would do just that.
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So it’s worth turning this paradox around. What deal would the Bibi-blamers accept to return hostages? The answer depends on whom one is asking. For Friedman, and by extension the senior Biden officials his column often channels, a Gaza cease-fire is only one piece of an elaborate diplomatic puzzle. The IDF need not patrol the Philadelphi Corridor because eventually Moroccan, Emirati, and Egyptian troops would do it for them. Hamas will eventually go away because Israel would negotiate a two-state solution with their rivals in the Palestinian Authority. And Saudi Arabia would diplomatically recognize Israel and forge a regional alliance to beat back Iran and its proxies. After that, the region’s swords will become plowshares and the lion will lay down with the lamb.
The problem with what Friedman calls the “Biden Doctrine” is not only its wish-casting. It is the failure to understand Machiavelli’s dictum: “The vulgar crowd always is taken by appearances, and the world consists chiefly of the vulgar.” Put another way, if Israel is perceived to have lost a war to Hamas, no amount of peace processing will convince the Saudis, the Egyptians, the Emiratis, or the Moroccans to align with the war’s loser. Capitulation does not purchase security down the road; it only breeds contempt from friends and foes alike.
For Israelis, the allure of a hostage deal without the full defeat of Hamas is more human. Most Israelis are not tempted by the daydreams of Washington pundits. They are exhausted. It’s not only that the IDF has been fighting house to house and tunnel to tunnel now for nearly a year. It’s the psychological horror of knowing that their friends, neighbors, sons, daughters, and spouses are trapped and tormented in the labyrinth beneath Gaza. Some 100,000 Israelis are still living in hotels because the state cannot defend them from the fanatics firing missiles and rockets from Lebanon. An end to the war and the release of even some hostages seem as if they would be a sweet relief, no matter the long-term cost.
Lapid and others in Israel’s opposition are cynically playing to this exhaustion. They also play into the simmering resentments from before October 7, when Israelis flooded the streets and, in some cases, took over buildings to protest proposed reforms to the country’s judiciary.
But those of us in the Diaspora who do not feel the effects of the Gaza war as acutely should be able see through this pandering. A deal that hands back Hamas its lifeline will only postpone the next October 7. And even though Jews who choose to live in the Diaspora are not burdened with the sacrifice of our kin in Israel, we still have an interest in Israel’s survival and security. The Jewish state is our safe haven. Its peril is our peril. And in this rare moment, Jews who live far away from the scene of the initial crime have an obligation to see the wider picture.
None of this means that Netanyahu is blameless. He was prime minister during the buildup to October 7. If it’s true that there was ample intelligence that this massacre was in the offing, as the Israeli press has reported, then he should pay a price at the polls for failing to act on that intelligence.
At the same time, blaming Bibi for the deaths of the six hostages does the work of the hostage takers. Sinwar must be delighted that so many Israelis and Jews hold the prime minister responsible for his henchmen’s murders. Without even participating in the cease-fire talks, the leader of Hamas has a serious hand to play in this game. And as of this writing in early September, at least, it appears that the only person willing to deny this monster a victory is the man so many have blamed for the monster’s crimes.
AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg, Pool
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