What Will Be the Netanyahu Legacy?

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. 7^th, 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. 7^th 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.

Charge of the Hour: Transfer the Gaza Population

by Haggai Lober,  founder of Aspaklaria Theater Company and father of St.-Sgt. Yehonatan who fell in Gaza in Dec. '23, translated by Hillel Fendel.

Let's not lose the momentum! The three reasons not to take the ethical road and expel the Arabs of Gaza are no longer relevant.

The issue of expelling a war-hungry Arab populace from our country – which Ben-Gurion and his generals did as a matter of course during the War of Independence – has become in recent decades a dirty word. It has become forbidden and immoral to even think about, let alone say out loud.

But in light of the horrors seen and still being seen by our own eyes, we have no choice but to reexamine this and other old positions.

There were three principal reasons that stood as an iron wall against any thought of resolving some of our problems by expelling murderous and hostile Arabs. These hold in many circles even now, when it is clear to all that had Gaza not been full of Arabs 16 months ago, Israel would have enjoyed security and growth, and would certainly not have had to undergo the horrors of Oct. 7^th.

The three are: alleged rights, morality, and the U.S. position.

Rights: It is claimed around the world, with very little to back it up, that "the Arabs in Israel have the right to unite as a Palestinian nation," that "they were here before us and they therefore have national rights to the land," and that "there is a national Palestinian history and legacy." For years the world has been discussing the question of which of the two "peoples" – Jews and Palestinians – have more substantial rights to this land. [This of course ignores the Balfour Declaration, which specifically mentioned only the "civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine;" no national or political rights were accorded them. -HF]

By the time of the Oslo Accords, in the early 1990's, the world had already made up its mind: There is a Palestinian entity and it has the right to be sovereign over a large part of the "contested" territory, if not the entire State of Israel (as in the widespread "Free Palestine" chants). Israel stands in the face of a "conventional wisdom" that determines that it must cede large pieces of its territory, despite the great dangers, in favor of a recently-invented Palestinian people.

However: Even assuming that this people has certain rights (which the pro-Israel side has still not quite signed on to), the murderous path by which this collective has chosen to actualize them over the years must establish clearly for all that the Palestinians have lost any claim to rights in this land.

After all, rights are acquired and can be lost. A murderer and other criminals lose their natural rights to freedom; they are placed in prison until they die, even if they maintain that their victims did them wrong.

Yes, a collective can become a nation on its own recognizance. However, the enlightened world can also, and is even obligated to, dismantle this entity - if it turns out that murder and evil are the basis of its nationhood. As the Mishna teaches: "Gathering wicked people together is bad for them and bad for the world; dispersing them is good for them and good for the world" (Sanhedrin 8,5).

The second element that negates a political Palestinian presence in the land is morality, or the lack thereof. Do Arabs who commit crimes of terrorism deserve to remain here? It is precisely those who insisted on seeing the Arabs of the Land of Israel as a national collective who relate to its terrorist organizations as individual and isolated instances. They refuse to attribute any nationalistic motives to these terrorist groups. Have they forgotten that these acts are not just neighborhood crimes or gang fights, but rather full-fledged acts of war that must be responded to as such?

The widespread lie that "aside from some bad terrorists, the Arab populace in general wants only peace and a comfortable life" – was totally shattered on Oct. 7^th. "Regular" citizens joined gleefully in the atrocities, and our soldiers later found guns and other weapons in cribs throughout Gaza (and in Judea and Samaria). They also found that the walls in every children's room feature the pictures of child-killers and other terrorists, as a basic part of the educational curriculum over there.

Nationalistic terrorism is war. And because of the important role played by the local Gaza population in encouraging and enabling the terrorists to kill Jews, this supportive populace may not be considered "uninvolved," but must rather be dealt with forcefully and severely.

In fact, the "ethical" argument must actually be reversed, as follows: "It is not ethical towards us, nor towards the world, not to deal with this murderous and ideological hornets' nest, and to let this abominable collective continue to exist while we deal only with the murderers themselves. This is simply not moral!"

In the case of Gaza, there is no doubt: A mass evacuation of the population to Arab countries will dismantle the collective murderous demon that the Palestinian people, and its supporters around the world, have become.

And finally, the third reason for not deporting or expelling the Arabs of Gaza: "We can't buck the United States, which wants a two-state solution and nothing else. We can't afford to disagree."

Even if this argument is worthy of consideration, and even if one might want to check from a historical standpoint whether it was the U.S. that led us into surrender, or perhaps it was we who got the Americans to force us to supply the terrorists with "humanitarian aid" – either way, it appears that the point is now moot. It's President Trump himself who is leading the charge to empty Gaza of Arabs!

In the light of the collapse of the third argument against transfer, we would be wise to "collapse" the other two as well, and go full-steam ahead towards the only solution that will enable our children to grow up in peace and security in their land: the dissolution of the Hamas-Gaza populace. This plan has the best chances for success – and could even win President Trump a Nobel Peace Prize.

One thing is certain: The Nation of Israel, including international Jewry, will receive the great prize of all: the prize of life. This means the ability of Jewish parents like me to see their children grow up alongside them without fear of death by war, or murder, rape and kidnappings by our bloodthirsty enemies.

It has to be done now – right now. We can't lose the momentum.