Israel’s government knew that it had no
choice but to accept the deal it was offered in which some of the
hostages taken by Hamas on Oct. 7 would be freed in exchange for the
release of Palestinian prisoners and a temporary ceasefire in the war to
eliminate the terrorist group from the Gaza Strip. Pressure from the
families of the hostages and a Jewish tradition that prioritizes the
redemption of captives swamped all of the objections to giving Hamas
what it wanted in exchange for the lives of Jewish women and children.
But the question before the Jewish state
and its allies isn’t so much whether the deal was one that enhances
Israel’s security or if, instead, it strengthens the barbaric group that
committed unspeakable atrocities last month and makes it easier for
them to survive. Rather, the key dilemma facing it and those who claim
to be its friends is whether this is the start of a prolonged bargaining
process that will bring victory to Hamas. And the party that will have
the most to say about that is President Joe Biden, not Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
If the United States continues to back
Israel’s campaign to eliminate Hamas control of the Gaza Strip and to
wipe out all of its military capabilities, then the hostage negotiations
and the ceasefire will be no more than a brief pause that won’t impact
the outcome of the war. The Biden administration has sought to
micromanage and second-guess Israel’s counter-offensive from the start
of this war. It also has political reasons to want the conflict to end
regardless of what that will mean for the future of Israel and the
Palestinians.
If Washington pressures Israel not to
resume the fighting and to make subsequent deals for more halts to the
Israel Defense Forces’ operations, then it will be a turning point for
its alliance with the Jewish state with implications that go far beyond
the current war or the political fates of Biden or Netanyahu. That would
mean that Hamas will not just be allowed to get away with mass murder.
It would also emerge, however battered and bloody, as the victor of the
war this genocidal movement began on Oct. 7.
A terrible deal
There can be no real debate about the
hostage deal being good for Israel. It’s a terrible agreement from the
viewpoint of its national security. Whether or not the deal is lopsided,
treating the Oct. 7 victims as the moral equivalents of Palestinians
convicted of involvement in terrorism buttresses the arguments of
Israel’s enemies that these criminals are no different than innocent
civilians taken violently from their homes. As with every past hostage
deal, including what all must now acknowledge as Netanyahu’s disastrous
decision to trade more than 1,000 Palestinian terrorists to free Gilad
Shalit—a solitary Israeli soldier who had been kidnapped and taken to
Gaza—Hamas gains politically from its ability to humiliate and force the
more powerful Jewish state to bend to its will.
It also sets up a dynamic by which the
terrorist group can seek to prolong the ceasefire by bartering more
hostages—assuming, that is, as we must pray is true, that enough of them
are still alive in order to continue such a process over the next few
weeks. In this manner, Hamas can stall Israel’s offensive in Gaza for
not just a few days but perhaps indefinitely.
The recriminations about the hostage deal
are a reminder of the failure of Israel’s political, military and
security establishments on Oct. 7. Having failed to protect its citizens
from mass slaughter, gang rape, torture and kidnapping, the government
Netanyahu leads is now forced to pay almost any price to free as many
civilians as he can.
There are sound reasons for refusing to
play the terrorists’ game. And perhaps a less politically vulnerable
leader than Netanyahu could have held out against the emotional appeals
of those who believe that the fate of the hostages must take precedence
over the long-term best interests of all of Israel’s citizens. But the
hostages, especially the children who were traumatized by witnessing the
murder of parents and neighbors before being kidnapped, have become the
focus of an international campaign on the part of Israel and Jewish
communities to remind a world that seems primarily focused on the
suffering of Palestinians that this war was launched with atrocities
committed against Jews.
For Netanyahu to have done anything that
could be interpreted as prolonging the suffering of the hostages, even
if freeing them helps the murderers and makes it more likely that others
will be subjected to their cruelty in the future, was a non-starter.
Once this deal is set in motion, the
debate about it will further undermine the prime minister. He may still
harbor illusory hopes that a decisive victory over Hamas in Gaza will
enable him to survive in office. Nevertheless, he must shoulder
responsibility both for a bad deal and for a catastrophe that happened
on his watch because of the failure of his policies toward Gaza, even if
his political opponents didn’t oppose them at the time.
Yet regardless of its impact on postwar
Israeli politics, the outcome of this conflict now depends on whether it
marks the beginning of the end of the campaign to destroy Hamas. If the
terrorists have more innocent hostages to barter in exchange for more
humiliating releases of captured terrorists, such as those with Israeli
blood on their hands, then that would give them the ability to put off,
perhaps indefinitely, the next stages in Israel’s efforts to wipe out
the terrorists’ hold on both northern Gaza and the as-yet uninvaded
southern part of the Strip.
Pulling the plug on the war
It remains to be seen whether having
gained the release of some hostages, the dynamic this establishes means
that Netanyahu will have no choice but to pay whatever Hamas asks for
the freedom of those remaining in the hands of the terrorists. Equally
important is whether the negotiations will be the excuse Biden has been
waiting for to pull the plug on his support for the war.
From the moment this conflict began,
observers have spoken of Israel having only a limited amount of time to
achieve its objectives. The assumption on the part of the country’s
critics was that the tsunami of international condemnation of Israel’s
push into Gaza to rid the Strip of its Islamist terrorist overlords
would eventually force it to stop.
Such expectations were based on the
expectation that the international media would almost immediately forget
about the atrocities of Oct. 7 and quickly adopt the Palestinian
narrative in which they were the innocent victims of Israeli
“disproportionate” force. That assumption was correct, as it was soon
apparent that the Hamas propaganda machine had corporate media outlets
like The New York Times and The Washington Post, and
much of the broadcast and cable-news channels eating out of their hands.
Their willingness to quote Hamas’s almost certainly inaccurate casualty
figures and to treat the war as one in which Israel was engaged in
“collective punishment” of an “occupied” and “oppressed” people helped
incite not just pressure for a ceasefire that would be a gift to Hamas
but also a surge in international antisemitism.
Biden’s choice
This also created a political problem for
the Biden administration, which has been bleeding support from its
left-wing base and its own staffers who are deeply hostile to Israel.
But to date, Biden has been willing to endure a storm of criticism from
his own party and has stuck with his support for the war against Hamas,
even if he also seems determined at times to prevent Israel from winning
it.
Now that the hostage negotiations have resulted in one deal that will grant a reprieve for Hamas, Biden has a choice to make.
If he listens to his left-wing critics,
Biden will use the effort to free the hostages as an excuse to turn off
the spigot of arms resupply and thereby prevent Israel from resuming the
war. That would effectively end a conflagration that is causing him
grief and, if the polls are correct, may well be dooming his hopes for
re-election next year. Biden can then use the freedom of the hostages to
declare victory for his policies and resume his pre-Oct. 7 policies of
appeasing Hamas’s sponsor: Iran. He can also begin pressuring Israel to
accept a resumption of talks to achieve a two-state solution to the
conflict even if this failed policy proposal after Oct. 7 showed
Israelis what a Palestinian state would really mean. Both appeasement of
Iran and pressure on Israel will be very popular among the left-wing
Democrats Biden needs to keep in his fold.
While that might make the president’s life
a little easier, it would also prevent Israel from achieving the
destruction of Hamas, which is a prerequisite for the security of
Israel’s citizens. Netanyahu can say “no” to American demands to wind up
the fighting in Gaza. But given that the task he has assigned his
military is one that will take months to complete, ignoring Washington
in this instance is not as easy or cost-free as past spats he has had
with Biden or former President Barack Obama.
This is the moment when the world will see
just how serious Biden’s commitment is—both to Israel’s security and to
eliminating Hamas. To its credit, the administration has acknowledged
that it is a terrorist movement and death cult comparable to ISIS, whose
genocidal goals are akin to those of the Nazis. But with so much of his
base pushing for an end to the fighting, Biden may prefer to let it
survive rather than to have to spend another few months defending a war
to ensure that they never repeat their crimes.
That is why American Jews who have rallied
around the cause of freeing hostages must be equally vocal about
pushing back against the pressure for a permanent ceasefire with Hamas.
Sympathy for those being held by the terrorists is important, as is the
effort to free them. But if the hostage negotiations provide Hamas with a
path to survival, then it will be more than a blow to the already shaky
morale of Israelis. It will only mean more Oct. 7-style mass slaughters
and more kidnappings of innocent victims. More than that, Hamas and its
Iranian funders won’t be satisfied with targeting Israel; their
ultimate goal is to do the same in Europe and the United States. If
decent Americans—both Jewish and non-Jewish—don’t push for Biden to
continue supporting a just war on Hamas, then we are dooming Israel as
well as Americans to a future of endless Islamist terrorism.
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