Hostage deal must only be mid-point of the Gaza war.
Israel's hostage-ceasefire deal with Hamas is necessary but unendurable. It is what Israel does from here that really matters.
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This is a guest essay written by Nachum Kaplan of the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
There is no right answer to whether Israel should have agreed to the hostage-ceasefire deal with Hamas. My heart is with the hostages and their families, but in terms of Israeli security, the deal leaves Hamas on the board. That is intolerable.
Here are the deal’s key points (as known):
Phase 1 (42 days):
Hamas to release 33 (of 98) Israeli hostages, presumed to be alive
Israel to commence a staged withdrawal but retain a security perimeter around Gaza and some presence in the Philadelphia Corridor (on the Gaza border with Egypt)
Israel to release 1,904 Palestinian terrorists (including 200 those serving life sentences for murder) but excluding anyone involved in the October 7th pogrom
Phase 2:
Talks on more hostage releases and further Israeli withdrawals will commence on Day 16 of Phase 1.
Security protocols to be agreed for Palestinians returning to northern Gaza
Phase 3:
Remaining hostages released
IDF to withdraw fully once all hostages are freed
The deal’s supporters say that getting the hostages back after 15 months in unimaginably cruel Hamas captivity is the most important thing. They have a point.
Polling shows that most Israelis, including majorities of Jews and Arabs, favor a deal. Some 58 percent support the deal in full, even at the cost of leaving Hamas in power in Gaza, while 70 percent support Phase 1 (according to the Israel Democracy Institute).
Critics, which include me, see the deal as a disaster. Hamas remains in Gaza, remains armed, remains in power, gets a respite from fighting, gets copious amounts of humanitarian aid to steal, and the release of almost 2,000 jihadist terrorists, some of whom will undoubtedly commit future atrocities.
Israel does not even get all its hostages back, which is the only point at which one can say there is a ceasefire. Until then, this is just Hamas’ latest tactic.
This is unacceptable.
Yet, history has not ended with this agreement. How history judges the deal depends on what Israel does next.
If this ceasefire becomes permanent, it will be a political and propaganda win for Hamas, whose definition of victory has always been surviving. Israel has not yet achieved its contradictory goals of destroying Hamas and getting its hostages back alive.
For this ceasefire to make sense, once the hostages are back, Israel must eradicate Hamas and do so with maximum prejudice. Jerusalem must ignore the morally empty sounds that will dribble from the mouths of European leaders and United Nations lickspittles — and reduce Hamas to nothing.
Frankly, it is what should have been done on October 8th, 2023, but the spineless international community cravenly chose evil over good and pressured Israel to show restraint. Had Israel gone into Gaza full tilt from the start, this might have been over a year ago, and Hamas would know that taking hostages does not pay.
Hopefully, a Donald Trump Administration will give Israel the room to do this — and judging by what Trump’s pick for National Security Adviser Mike Waltz says, it may well.
“We’ve been clear that Gaza has to be fully demilitarized, Hamas has to be destroyed to the point that it cannot reconstitute, and that Israel has every right to fully protect itself,” he said. “Hamas cannot have a role. ISIS doesn’t have a role. Al Qaeda doesn’t have a role.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his security cabinet during the seven-hour meeting on Friday to approve the agreement that presidents Joe Biden and Trump had given assurances in which the U.S. would back Israel resuming full-scale military operations if Phase 2 talks fail and Hamas does not meet Israel’s security demands.
While this ceasefire deal is a dud, it is just plain odd to say Israel has achieved nothing in this war. Quite the opposite is true.
Even limiting the analysis to Gaza in Israel’s seven-front war against Islamists, Israel has smashed Hamas’ military capabilities, killed its leadership, wiped out its elite Nukhba special forces, re-established its deterrence credentials after the October 7th attacks, set new standards in urban warfare strategy and execution, re-emerged as the region’s military and intelligence superpower, and, crucially, weakened Iran.
However, for Israel to make this war really count, claim a victory, and give full meaning to the Israeli soldiers — many of them reservists who have died or been injured — Jerusalem must ensure this ceasefire is only the war’s midpoint and not the end of it.
Israel must not make the mistake of choosing illusory “peace” over security, only to find itself back in the same situation in a few years. It must crush Hamas and send a clear message about deterrence and its new security doctrine (following the Nagel Committee Report) under which Israel will act preemptively and no longer allow threats to build up.
While the noises coming out of the incoming Trump Administration are hawkish and pro-Israel — including statements that it will not withhold weapons exports to Israel, not try to soften Israeli military operations, and remove sanctions on extremist Israeli settlers in Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank) — the relationship between Trump and Israel is curious and potentially concerning.
Trump said repeatedly he wanted a Gaza deal before taking office, and Netanyahu has given him one as an inauguration gift at great cost to the Jewish state. Netanyahu, who fell out with the Biden Administration, is betting that Trump will deliver on his promise to be the most pro-Israel administration ever, which he claims his first presidency was, too.
That remains to be seen because this deal looks like Israel gets Trump’s full support as long as he does what Trump wants. That has the hallmarks of a dependent relationship and, if there is one thing Israel must take from this war, it is that Israel needs greater self-reliant defense. Presumably, Netanyahu hopes that by giving Trump an early big foreign policy win, he will cement Trump’s favor.
However, more could be going on. Netanyahu knows that Trump is highly transactional, so the big question is what has Israel got in return? Netanyahu must have gotten something to make such a bold bet since, whatever his deficiencies, his political skills are usually peerless. It could be anything from assurances about tackling Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions, to the U.S. accepting more Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria.
Trump has said he wants to expand the Abraham Accords — with Israel-Saudi Arabia normalization the great prize — and many Arab and Muslim states would follow Saudi Arabia’s lead. The Abraham Accords, in which the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco recognized Israel in 2020, were Trump’s biggest foreign policy achievement during his first term, and he has said he wants to build on it.
He is known to think he should have won a Nobel Peace Prize for brokering the Abraham Accords — and winners have certainly been awarded for less. (Barack Obama springs to mind.) A Saudi deal might deliver him that.
Israel wants Saudi normalization, too. The danger, though, is that Trump may prize the glory of presiding over such an agreement more than he cares about Israel’s security. An Iran nuclear deal that Israel disagrees with would be an example of how Trump’s desire for a major agreement could conflict with Israel’s interests.
Intriguingly, however, there is a tantalizing opportunity.
Just as Israel must destroy Hamas, Israel must also pursue courageous diplomacy. The Middle East has changed enormously over the past year and Arab and Israeli strategic interests are overlapping in an unprecedented way.
A major reason Iran, via its proxy Hamas, attacked Israel on October 7th was to scupper imminent Israeli-Saudi normalization. Like many modernizing Arab countries, Saudi Arabia wants the region to prosper and saw no reason why the intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict should hold progress back any longer.
By starting the Israel-Hamas war, Iran brought international focus back on to the Palestinians, generated international outrage against Israel, and made it politically impossible for Riyadh to recognize Israel without a Palestinian state being created.
The collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s vile regime in Syria, however, has dramatically changed the equation again. It has made the Palestinians less important to Arab states’ broader strategic interests and Israel more so.
Turkey and Israel are the big winners from Assad’s downfall, while it is a disaster for Iran, which was Assad’s key ally and backer. All three states, now the region’s major powers, are meddling in Syria.
Iran is trying retain regional influence after Assad’s downfall; Turkey wants to prevent Syria’s Kurdish region becoming even more independent and defeat various ISIS-linked groups; and Israel has taken the opportunity to destroy the Syrian military’s equipment, on mass and unopposed, so no faction can use them to threaten Israel.
To many Arab countries, Israel is now the least threatening of these three powers. Iran is a colonialist and imperialist Shia state that the Sunni Arabs permanently fear and want to contain. Turkey does not have Iran’s imperial ambition but is too close to the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egypt-spawned Islamist group that Arab states have banned as an extremist threat.
Put simply, Israel and the Arab states share a common enemy in Iran, and a shared wariness of Turkey, which under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has become increasingly hostile to Israel and bellicose in its threats.
It has never made more sense for Arab states to recognize Israel, and they should be open to American-driven peace overtures. Likewise, Israel must recognize the opportunity but also be clear that it will always act decisively and independently, if necessary, to ensure its own security.
Of course, this could disappear into the Arabian sands where so many Middle East plans and policies are buried. It is questionable whether a transactional approach can work in a region where battles fought millennia ago are considered to have happened yesterday.
Whatever happens next, Israel must destroy Hamas to make the last 15 months of war worth it. Get the hostages home and keep the guns loaded.
No way, no way, no way can Hamas be allowed to survive--and that is where the deal will break down and war resume. I seriously doubt it will get to Phase Two. In an interview with NBC a few days ago, Trump stated he told Netanyahu to "keep doing what you have to do. ...we want the war to end, but keep doing what has to be done." And all of his pro-Israel cabinet are saying the same thing: Destroy Hamas. Huckabee and a few other team members have also stated publicly that Judea and Samaria, and even Gaza, should be Israel's with no more question about that, because it is historically Israel and necessary for Israel's security.
Are you sure that Turkey does not have imperial ambitions? I think Erdogan wishes to resurrect the Ottoman empire.