Is the hostage deal worth it? So far it looks disastrous ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Wednesday, January 15, 2025

Is the hostage deal worth it? So far it looks disastrous

13 years ago, as the Gilad Shalit deal was close to being finalized, I wrote that I was conditionally supportive of the deal. As I wrote then:

I'm seeing a number of people in the comments, on Twitter and on groups I follow who are against the Shalit deal if it means that hundreds of murderers are freed in exchange.

The argument has two components.

One is that they are likely to kill Israelis in the future - as we have seen happen in the past, many times. And families of victims of the murderers are understandably upset at the thought that the monster will go free.

The other argument is that these one-sided swaps encourage terror groups to kidnap more people to facilitate more swaps.

I am sympathetic to these arguments. I've even made these arguments. And from a utilitarian perspective, they make a great deal of sense - one person's life is not worth the lives of many possible future victims.

However, there is a flaw in this logic, one that to me can tip the scales towards supporting the swap.

The fact is that the terror groups are already filled with people who would kill Israelis at every opportunity. The fact is that these groups already have a strategy of kidnapping any Israelis they can. With a few exceptions, most of the prisoners are not the brains behind successful terror attacks - they were just facilitators, people who are interchangeable with hundreds and thousands of other members of Hamas and Fatah and Islamic Jihad.

The reason that there have been relatively few terror attacks over the past few years isn't because of a lack of trying - it is because Israel is better at defending herself. The number of potential terrorists has remained steady at best, and the ones being released would not change that appreciably.

Yes, statistically there is a good chance that there will be future attacks involving some of the terrorists in this swap. But chances are the attacks would occur anyway with different people. Brainless terror drones are a dime a dozen in the territories.

The organizers who actually dream up new ways of killing should not be released. But most of the terrorists in the swap, from what I can tell, do not fit that description.

We now have the benefit of hindsight. The Shalit deal was a disaster because one of the people released, Yahya Sinwar, was the mastermind of October 7.

At the time Sinwar was considered a monster - to other Palestinians. He murdered suspected "collaborators" with his bare hands. But he already was an organizer at the point of his second imprisonment, in charge of the program to find and execute these people for the entire south Gaza and he reported directly to Sheikh Yassin, the founder of Hamas. He was not a "brainless drone." He was a leader, proudly ruthless, and should have been recognized as such and never released.

Every single terrorist must be evaluated from the perspective of whether they are potential Sinwars or even potential third level leaders, not whether they have Israeli blood on their hands. The chances that there are no skilled and creative organizers among thousands of released terrorists are very low indeed.

Another point is that at this stage we don't even know how many hostages are still alive. No one wants to put a price on any human life, but if most of them are no longer alive, God forbid, then it makes no sense to trade living terrorists for bodies. Without an accurate list of the living ahead of the deal, there should be no deal, period.

Don't forget that Hezbollah used that ambiguity to great advantage. In 2006 Hezbollah abducted soldiers Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser specifically to get arch-terrorist Samir Kuntar released. This sparked the 2006 war, but in the end Nasrallah won: for most of the negotiations it was unknown whether Regev and Goldwasser were alive or dead and in the end it was a swap of their bodies for one of the most notorious and ruthless terrorists; Israel gained nothing.

If most of the prisoners are no longer alive, their corpses are not worth living terrorists. Not to mention that Hamas monsters can easily keep part of their bodies for future deals, forever.

Jewish law and tradition prioritizes saving captives a lot more than bodies.

The swap is only one problematic issue.

Andrew Fox wrote an excellent critique of the deal as we understand it now, and I agree with almost everything he says.

The main problem is not the prisoner release, as bad as that is. It is that Hamas remains in power in Gaza, from everything we can tell. One of the war's goals was to eliminate Hamas as a military threat and while it is weakened, it has shown the ability to fill in every vacuum in Gaza when the IDF leaves an area and continue to control the people and steal aid to cement its position.

Iran's loss of influence in Gaza is not as much of a loss for Hamas as it was for Hezbollah, because Hamas was always aligned more with the Muslim Brotherhood than the Shiites of Iran. Hamas will be rebuilt by money from Turkey, Qatar and the Egyptian MB. As Fox notes, "This deal exponentially increases the risk of a Muslim Brotherhood hegemony filling the void left by Iran’s Shia Crescent of proxies in Syria and Lebanon. Hamas’s reconstruction will take time, but Arab planning does not work in electoral cycles: it works in generations."

This is a major reason I support the UAE as a key player in the "day after" Gaza scenario. It is the least bad of all options to fill the governance gap, outside of annexation by Israel which is a headache no one wants.

Fox also points out that Hamas being allowed to exist makes it the clear winner in the cognitive war. The terror group gained support internationally from the war, and the only thing that could turn that around would be a perception of utter defeat. We see that the Arab world has turned against Hezbollah and the reason isn't a change in philosophy - it is because no one wants the shame of being associated with a loser.

This deal enhances Hamas' perception in the Muslim world. That is unacceptable.

From the Israeli perspective, Fox points out what most were not willing to admit: Israel's war goals were incompatible.

A key problem was Israeli selection of military-strategic aims. Their goals of dismantling Hamas and restoring Israeli security were arguably mutually exclusive to the aim of returning the hostages: only a handful have been freed by military force. The whole IDF campaign plan was designed around the first two, but the Israeli government has ultimately prioritised the third. This strategic disconnect leaves Gaza in ruins, over 400 IDF soldiers dead and over 2,500 wounded. Hamas is degraded but still in control and able to rebuild. Palestinian hatred of Israel unabated and exacerbated. Israel’s international reputation is destroyed, and they have very little to show for any of it.

I'm not sure about the last sentence. As I noted, Israel's reputation in the Arab world has gone way up since last fall with the pager attack, Nasrallah's assassination and Israel's destruction of Iran's air defenses. They don't like Israel any more, but they respect it, and that's the best anyone can hope for.

That respect would disappear if Israel allows Hamas to continue to exist, since most Arab leaders hate the Muslim Brotherhood inspired Islamists.

Finally, Fox addresses one of the worrying aspects of how he deal appears to have been allowed:

The reason behind this ceasefire is possibly more worrying than the ceasefire itself. It is not dictated by the achievement of any strategic or tactical goals; it is dictated by Trump. Last year, I was barracked on X when I urged caution in Israeli jublation over Trump’s election. Sadly my pessimism has been validated, although I did not expect Trump to throw Israel to the wolves so soon. Israeli media reports that Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Middle East envoy, is the one who forced Netanyahu to agree to the deal.

(As an aside, Witkoff has had financial dealings with global malign actor Qatar numbering in the hundreds of millions, possibly billions of dollars.)

Far more seriously from an international perspective, as with his Doha deal with the Taliban that needlessly betrayed NATO’s Afghan allies, Trump has shown himself to be a feckless and untrustworthy ally. We know he is going to force a similar surrender on Ukraine. This should send a rocket through Western militaries reliant on American support—which is no bad thing. A truly bad thing, however, is the message China will receive. As the Afghan shambles encouraged Putin in Ukraine, so this betrayal of Israel will encourage China to invade Taiwan. Globally, this deal places the world a significant step closer to World War Three.

We don't know if there is something going on behind the scenes, like a quid pro quo for the US to support an attack on Iran in exchange for this deal. But how the deal got to this point is indeed worrying.

The deal is no different than the deal the Biden administration has been pushing and Israel has been rejecting. Bibi was prepared to push back against Biden but he does not want to do the same against Trump. It appears that Trump did not care much about the details of the deal, he just wants to get American hostages home and gave Witkoff a lot of latitude as to how to get there - and that pushed Israel from the "destroy Hamas" priority to the "release hostages" priority.

It is a strategic blunder.

We don't know what we don't know, and maybe Israel has an ace in the hole to ensure that Gaza can never return to October 6 Gaza. From what we do know, the deal negates most of Israel's strategic gains in Gaza. We still don't know exactly how the Philadelphi Corridor will be administered, how the aid will be vetted, how much of a buffer zone Israel will maintain, all of which are critical. At this point it seems unlikely. Somehow I also doubt that every prisoner has been implanted with an explosive next to their brains that can be remotely detonated.

We all want the hostages to come home, but not at any price. It is easy to say that the value of human life is infinite but every hostage deal puts a price on life whether we like it or not. This price is way too steep.

The deal all but guarantees the death and kidnapping of more Israelis (and Jews) worldwide in the future.