abridged from an article by Besheva Editor Emmanuel Shilo, translated by Hillel Fendel.
Israel's Prime Minister can either extricate himself from the second
stage of the hostage-ceasefire deal that brings defeat upon Israel – or he can
be remembered in infamy as he who sought to teach the world how to defeat
terrorism but ended up teaching the terrorists how to defeat Israel.
Clarification: As the English version of this article is being prepared, the world is in a tizzy following President Trump's announcement that he wants to deport most of the Gazan population, with the United States taking over, owning, and rebuilding the Gaza Strip. This article deals with Netanyahu's stark choice between defeating the terrorists and caving in to them – a choice that could become moot if Trump has his way.
1.
Israel is paying a very
heavy, multi-faceted price for its agreement to release thousands of terrorists
in exchange for some of our tortured captives from Hamas captivity. The first
issue, not at all to be sneezed at, is that it strikes a blow at justice and
morality. When cruel murderers are sent free to joyous victory celebrations instead
of being executed, or at least spending the rest of their lives in jail – the
injustice cries out to the heavens. It is evident in the renewed suffering of
the victims' families, the celebrations in our face of the terrorists' return, the
emasculation of our justice system's activities to convict them, and in the
apparent wasted energies of our soldiers who endangered themselves or even lost
their lives in capturing them.
2. But even graver is the danger that the Israeli populace faces with the freeing of these bloodthirsty animals from their cages and their return to the hunt. It has been said before and must be emphasized again: The Shabak has shown that some 80% of the terrorists freed in the 2011 Shalit deal returned to their terrorist ways – and have murdered nearly a dozen Israelis since then. This doesn't include the massacre of 1,200 Israelis initiated and led by Yichye Sinwar and other terrorists released with him in the Shalit deal. Israel thus saved one soldier at the price of ten other Jewish lives, including the three kidnapped youths in Gush Etzion in June 2014, and others.
Oct. 7th, of course, also led to
the abduction of 250 Israelis, which led in turn to the current release of
thousands more terrorists. Thus, the mistakes of the Shalit deal are being
catastrophically felt today – and who knows when the mistakes of the current
deal will be similarly felt?
In 2008, a special secret
committee, headed by the late Chief Justice Meir Shamgar, sought to set clear
guidelines and limitations on the release of terrorist prisoners. However, its
conclusions remained secret and were not implemented, and we thus ended up
paying exorbitant prices for our hostages not only in 2011 but again in 2025.
The simple principle of not encouraging future abductions by refusing to give
in to the abductors' demands, as manifest in the Talmudic law that
"captives are not redeemed for more than they are worth," is simply
overlooked time and again – with tragic results.
3. But the price is even
heavier than that. While some say that additional terrorists on the streets make
little difference given that those who wish to cry out Allahu Akbar and kill
Jews are not in short supply – they are not taking into account that these
specific terrorists who are being freed have gained many skills in organizing
attacks that they would not otherwise have easily acquired. They are thus a
qualitative reinforcement. The example of Sinwar proves that among them are
military leaders whose potential danger to Israel is inestimably greater than
that of regular terrorists recruited off the street.
And even furthermore: Our
deterrence capabilities suffer greatly, of course, whenever terrorists are
released in this manner. Today, any terrorist who wishes to murder Jews – for
the sake of Allah and heavenly delights, or for a life-long salary, or for fame
and glory, or for all of the above – knows that even if he is sentenced to many
life sentences, he will one day be freed in some kind of deal. This loss of
deterrence is itself something that encourages and increases terrorist attacks
against Israelis.
Those who clamor to Bring Them
Home! at absolutely any price, and those in the media who promote their cause –
do they not realize the future dangers they are pushing us and themselves into?
Do they not realize that every other possible alternative must be exhausted
before we take this perilous path? Our compassionate Jewish hearts go out to
our tortured brethren in Gaza, but whatever happened to our intelligent Jewish
brains that are usually able to learn from the past and calculate several steps
ahead?
4. As if all the above isn't bad enough, we are now paying an even higher price, if that can be imagined: If the next stage of this agreement goes through, we will actually stop a war forced upon us before our war objectives have been fully achieved.
We
are actually teaching our enemies that if they want to defeat us, all they have
to do, Heaven forbid, is to capture a few soldiers or civilians, hold them in
torturous conditions, reveal nothing about their fate, wage a psychological war
against us, and just wait for public campaigns to force us into giving in to
their demands. What's to stop them from demanding that we withdraw from the
security zone in Lebanon, or from other areas that they desire, or from all of
Judea and Samaria, or from Jerusalem? They could even demand that we give up
our nuclear capabilities. Once this precedent has been set, who's to say how
far it can be taken?
5. Throughout the first 15 months of this war, Prime Minister Netanyahu
showed impressive strength in standing up to the pressure of the Biden
Administration. Yet he caved in to the Trump Administration even before it took
office. This failure shakes our confidence in him as one who, despite his share
of the responsibility for the Oct. 7th travesty, is able to lead us
to full victory.
Minister Betzalel Smotrich and his Religious Zionism party remained in
the government and did not overthrow it, simply to ensure that the war would be
resumed after the current first phase of the deal, for the sake of defeating
and dismantling Hamas. [Again, this was written before Trump's announcement on
Tuesday regarding his plans for Gaza, as explained above. – HF] But given all
the pressures that will be so heavily exerted to continue the deal so as to
achieve the release of the remaining hostages, alive or dead, the chances are
small that the war can be resumed.
Netanyahu can either be remembered as one who learned from his errors and
led us to brilliant victory, or as one who, after having sought in his youth to
teach the world how to defeat terrorism, ended up in his old age teaching the
terrorists how to defeat the State of Israel. In the coming days, he will have
to make this choice.