Mick Hartley

Another look at the terrible dilemma that Israel faces – to bring back the hostages, or to defeat Hamas. Bret Stephens in the NYT (via Jerry Coyne):

Since the days of Abraham — who, according to Genesis, rescued his nephew Lot after he’d been seized by an invading army — Jewish tradition has placed supreme value on the redemption of captives. It is, in a sense, the fulfillment of a primary, implicit commandment: to be one’s brother’s keeper. It is also a source of Jewish communal cohesion over millenniums to never forsake those who have been taken, even if only to give them a proper burial.

It’s also, to mix references from antiquity, a Jewish Achilles’ heel.

In 2006, an Israeli soldier named Gilad Shalit was captured by Hamas and held in Gaza. He was released five years later in exchange for more than 1,000 Palestinian security prisoners — a euphemism, in many cases, for terrorists. The deal, which was approved by Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, included the release of Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of Oct. 7.

These two reference points are now at the heart of the debate Israelis are having about what comes next in Gaza. Huge demonstrations in Tel Aviv, coinciding with the heartbreaking funerals of six murdered hostages, have demanded that the prime minister agree to a cease-fire deal to obtain the release of additional hostages, at the cost of conceding one of Hamas’s core demands: an Israeli withdrawal from a strip of land known as the Philadelphi Corridor, which separates Gaza from Egypt. Netanyahu has refused, insisting in a news conference on Monday that Israeli forces will not leave.

Netanyahu is right, and it’s important for his usual critics, including me, to acknowledge it.

He’s right, first because the highest justification for fighting a war, besides survival, is to prevent its repetition. Israel has lost hundreds of soldiers to defeat Hamas. Thousands of innocent Palestinians have died and hundreds of thousands have suffered, because Hamas has held every Gazan hostage to its fanatical aims. Hamas was able to initiate and fight this war only because of a secure line of logistical supply under its border with Egypt.

Israel’s control of the Philadelphi Corridor largely stops this. To relinquish it now, for any reason, forsakes what Israel has been fighting for, consigns Palestinians to further misery under Hamas and all but guarantees that a similar war will eventually be fought again. Why do that? […]

Whatever one thinks of Netanyahu, the weight of outrage should fall not on him but on Hamas. It released a video of a hostage it later murdered — 24-year-old Eden Yerushalmi, telling her family how much she loved them — on Monday, the day after her funeral. It’s another act of cynical, grotesque and unadulterated sadism by the group that pretends to speak in the name of all Palestinians. It does not deserve a cease-fire so that it can regain its strength. It deserves the same ash heap of history on which, in our better moments, we deposited the Nazis, Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.

There are bright people who say that what Israel ought to do now is cut a deal, recover its hostages, take a breather and start preparing for the next war, probably in Lebanon. Israelis should remember that wars will be worse, and come more often, to those who fail to win them.

Als0 – what agreement can there ever be with Hamas over the hostages? They simply cannot be trusted. When the six hostages were about to be rescued in Rafah, they were brutally and coldly murdered.

One side in this war places a supreme value on saving lives, while the other places none – and views the lives of both Israelis and Gazans as expendable bargaining chips. How do you fight a war against an enemy that not only doesn't care about the number of deaths on its side, but actively welcomes them?

Naturally, in the state we're in, we see thousands and thousands of demonstrators in our cities lauding the killers as freedom fighters, while shouting mindlessly about "genocide" against the Palestinians.