The Hostage Deal: Circumstances Determine

Good or Not, Israel and the US have accepted the Hamas view of Morality

Whether this particular hostage deal ought to have been agreed to or not is not really the question. Hamas held all the cards not because Israel lacked the capabilities or the will to win, but because its military and political leaders never intended to win this war. This is not about a good or bad hostage deal but about how the military leadership presented plans for a non-win to the security cabinet and how the security cabinet approved it. We can talk all we want about how Netanyahu is not given all the information and about how Smutrich or Ben-Gvir objected but the fact remains that they approved all plans presented to them. No one in the military was fired, no one demoted and no one was even moved from his position. The head of intelligence at the southern Command on October 7 was supposed to get a promotion until public outrage stymied it. The chief operations officer of the IDF on October 7 – the man responsible for the position of forces and the man who refused requests for helicopters moved to the south that fateful night – was promoted to General and head of intelligence. No one was moved or fired. The Defense Minister, Galant was the army’s protector and not one who challenged them. Netanyahu accepted, in the end, what was given to him.

We can’t deny the gains made by the IDF and by decisions that Netanyahu made, pushed for or encouraged. This included the decision to have a ground invasion of Gaza, the move into Rafah the famous beeper attack and elimination of Nasrallah in Lebanon and the decision to send ground forces in a very limited incursion into Lebanon. But Netanyahu, his government, the opposition, the heads of all the security forces refused to take that one decision which was to push for the destruction of Hamas and then Hezbollah and yes – victory.

Why?

Let’s start at the top with Netanyahu. Was he pushed into a ground invasion by the demands of the people, or did he want that from the start? Hard to tell and only official documents, classified, will tell us. All through the first 4 months of the war he said all the right things and spoke of destroying Hamas’s civil and military capabilities in Gaza and freeing all the hostages. Against the wishes of “the world” and his own security leadership he pushed the Rafah operation and refused to end the war. He pushed the beeper attack and the hit on Nasrallah against the advice of the General Staff. This is all to his credit. But he did not fire Herzi Halevi and his cronies even though they never presented adequate plans for victory. Like many of his predecessors he thought he could create a new reality based on his will to do so. Of all the 120 members of the Knesset he is the only one I would have picked to run this war but in addition to the new strategic position in the middle east due to the fall of Assad – a direct result of the decimation of Hezbollah – he is responsible for our non-victory in Gaza.

In my view, Netanyahu looked at this new situation and along with the election of Trump realized that he could forget Hamas in Gaza and forget even a weakened Hezbollah in Lebanon and look forward to the two prizes that he has desired all along – the destruction of Iran’s nuclear capabilities and diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia. Both of these outweigh any other issue to such an extent, according to Netanyahu, that leaving Hamas in power is a minor blip. He can return to his October 6 mindset where Hamas is not an “existential threat” and convince himself that October 7 can no longer happen – at least for the next decade or so. A rocket on Sderot here an RPG attack on an army bus there, all of that is acceptable since the threat is not “existential. This obsession on only existential threats goes back at least to Rabin who viewed the terrorist attacks subsequent to the Oslo agreement (see buses blowing up every Sunday morning) not as existential threats and thereby did not require radical (military) action. What both Rabin and Netanyahu miss is that in a democracy a government has to protect individual citizens and individual towns and not just the “important” existential parts of the state. Dictatorships worry about the regime, true leaders of democracies worry about the lives of the citizens who put them there.

The other Security Cabinet members like Ben-Gvir and Smutrich who are making noises over the hostage agreement are being disingenuous. They too, approved Herzi Halevi’s plans and they too bear responsibility for the non-victory situation we find ourselves. Ending the war without victory is bad – fighting the war without plans for victory is worse. And they have approved these plans that do not allow for victory. They ignored the complaints of the reserve officers and they ignored simple logic. They have no right to oppose a deal that ends the war if they have approved these plans.

Herzi Halevi, IDF Chief of Staff was the absolute wrong person at the wrong time. This was proven on the night of October 6 and on the day of October 7 and on each day subsequent to that. Halevi has done everything in his power to protect himself and his friends. He has backed up only those on “his side” and has not once backed up the soldiers and officers under his command who don’t agree with him or are not important enough. He has fired good officers because Blinken told him to, he has backed up his Chief Military Prosecutor (JAG) whose office has falsely accused reserve soldiers of rape and has never spoken in support of those soldiers. Herzi Halevi is a coward. At the start of the war I thought he should be able to leave honorably. No longer. He should be fired and denied his pension. He is a man without honor and has no right to be in the position he is in.

Halevi and Netanyahu are seemingly opponents but in fact they need each other. Halevi needs Netanyahu because the Barak-ist opposition needs him to protect the country against Netanyahu. Netanyahu needs him as an excuse for not winning this winnable war.

Why else are we in this position of non-victory? Lets turn to the opposition in the Knesset who have done nothing to help lead the country to victory. Gantz and Ashkenazy at least braved their opponents and did the right thing at the start of the war but then left abruptly as there is only so long one cannot tow the party line. Lapid and Leiberman were just selfish fools who feel the enemy was never Hamas but Netanyahu. But it was the non-Knesset opposition that did the most harm to the war effort. Let’s call them the Ehud Barak’s – I use his name as a metaphor for the group that feels that the country needs to be on a post-Zionist path and that those who are Zionists ought not to be given the power to control any important aspect of the country. I don’t use his name as literal.

The Ehud Barak’s have done everything in their power to make sure Israel could not win the war and the hostages only returned at the most horrible of prices. This includes the leaders of the “hostage families” who are not actual hostage families. With unlimited funding, just as the Kaplan gang had nearly unlimited funding, their constant protests against anything and everything the government did and who demanded an agreement at any cost caused more harm to the hostages than anyone else except Hamas themselves – and, of course the Biden-Blinken team that insisted that “humanitarian aid” be sent willy nilly into Gaza even if it meant supporting Hamas’ war effort.

Back to Netanyahu for a moment and we will add Biden/Blinken to this comment. What were they thinking by trusting Qatar in these negotiations? I know you will say there was no choice but they all knew of all the Qatari money involved in undermining the west and they all knew of the outright support of Hamas by al-Jazeera. Unless it was all that money that tempted them, of course. And for Netanyahu – what prompted him to send two spies, head of the Mossad and Shaback to be the main negotiators? Besides befriending the Qataris, what experience in negotiation did they have? Are there no experienced lawyers in this Jewish country?

We can go on and on, but we won’t.

Is this hostage deal good? My answer is that with the current leadership - government, military, opposition and US – it is as good as we are going to get. Hamas holds all the good cards not because they were dirty dealers but because Israel and the US insisted on giving them all the good cards. Israel – via stupid military plans and the US via the “humanitarian” aid that is a direct cause of the Hamas revival. Having a full house when your opponent has four aces is a loss – even though you had a great hand. This great hand is what our leadership is trying to sell us. See how much we accomplished? See how many Hamas leaders we killed? See all the destruction in Gaza? We have a full house – kings over queens. Can’t do much better than that.

But Hamas has four aces and we knowingly dealt them the cards.

All I will say about the deal is that the cruelty of the process is a surrender to Hamas’s nihilistic, pagan values. 23 people will be returned over the course of 6 weeks? Who thought that such a cruel process was acceptable? No list of alive and dead? Who thought this is the proper way to work? Who is taking credit for this cruelty? Biden? Trump? Netanyahu? The Israeli negotiators?

Hamas is celebrating their “victory” all over Gaza, the West Bank and the rest of the nihilistic world that sympathizes with them. The structure of this deal is a surrender to and acceptance of the cruelty, nihilism and bloodthirstiness that stands at the center of the Hamas and Islamist way of thinking.

Let’s just hope that in spite of this surrender to the Hamas way, those alive return and heal and those killed, allowed a proper and honorable burial.