Netanyahu was forced to enter into a deal that comes with great dangers for Israel

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December 2, 2024, then president-elect Trump supped at his Mar-a-Lago resort with Sara Netanyahu, wife of Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, and the Netanyahus’ wayward son Yair. The next day, Trump tweeted that there would be a heavy price to pay if those held hostage by Hamas were not returned by Trump’s January 20 inauguration.

The irony is that Trump’s threat, despite being understood as being directed at Hamas, may have created more difficulties for Sara’s husband’s government than for Hamas.

That tweet itself was typical Trump bombast, unaccompanied by any indication of what Trump planned to do if his demands were not met. Trump sought to reprise Iran’s release of 53 American hostages held in captivity for more than a year on the very day President Ronald Reagan entered office on January 20, 1981. The difference, however, is that Iran was a large nation, with a wide variety of assets, and highly vulnerable to an American attack.

But with what could Trump threaten Hamas? That he would give Israel a green light to lay waste to Gaza? Not likely, because Israel would never do that. That Israel would be allowed to cut off electricity and end all aid deliveries to Gaza? Again, while Einat Wilf may be right that so-called “humanitarian aid” should have been called by its proper name from October 8 onward, “supplying the enemy in a time of warfare and while they hold hostages,” Israel has normalized the provision of aid for so long that it could no longer be cut off.

Perhaps pressure on Hamas could be brought via Qatar, its principal financial backer, and maybe it was. In order to secure the ceasefire deal signed last Friday, which was substantially the same as Israel offered as long ago as last May, Hamas had to give up on its demand that Israel immediately withdraw entirely from Gaza, including from the crucial Philadelphi Corridor, through which much of Hamas’s weaponry is smuggled, and its demand for a permanent end to the war with Hamas still in power in Gaza. And while Gazan refugees will be allowed to return to their homes in northern Gaza, that return will not be unrestricted, in order to prevent the smuggling of arms back to the north.

Yet as always, American intermediaries — both the Biden and Trump teams — found that it is far easier to pressure America’s ally Israel than Hamas. When, because it was Shabbos, Netanyahu demurred from meeting with Trump’s Middle East envoy Steven Witkoff after the latter’s arrival from Qatar, Witkoff informed him in the most dismissive possible terms that he could not care less about Shabbos.

ONE THING IS FOR CERTAIN: All the hostages did not return by Inauguration Day. Over the first stage of the agreement, Israel will receive no more than 33 of the remaining 98 hostages, and it is not even known how many of those are alive and in what condition they are. In return, Hamas will receive close to 2,000 terrorists, many of them serving multiple life terms for the murder of Israelis. Those released will be allowed to return to Gaza rather than being forced to go elsewhere, as Yasser Arafat was in 1982 when his PLO left Beirut for exile in Tunisia.

Whatever pressure US negotiators did or did not bring on Qatar, in which the US maintains a large naval base, it did not succeed in forcing Hamas to provide Israel with a list of hostages still alive or to permit the International Red Cross to visit the prisoners and assess their condition, as required by international law. Not that the IRC ever tried very hard to gain access.

At least in part to salve now President Trump’s ego, Netanyahu was forced to enter into a deal that comes with great dangers for Israel and that threatens his own coalition.

A large percentage of the terrorists released will return to terrorism — over 50 percent by historical precedent — as soon as they are released, and reenergize Hamas. Israelis will not soon forget that one of the 1,027 terrorists released in exchange for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2011 was Yahya Sinwar, the author of the Simchas Torah massacre.

Though approximately 70 percent of Israelis support at least the first stage of the hostage deal, it will still come with a heavy price for Netanyahu politically. Internal Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has already taken his Otzma Yehudit party out of the government, and Bezalel Smotrich, head of the Religious Zionist Party, will be under pressure to follow suit.

The widespread reports that the present agreement is essentially the same as that offered by Israel last May renders Netanyahu vulnerable to the charge that he could have secured the same deal months sooner, when more hostages were still alive and those still living in far better condition.

That is not true. Hamas is far weaker today than it was then. Since May, Israel has eliminated Sinwar and much of Hamas’s senior military command. None of its original 24 battalions remain intact. And it can no longer maintain hope of being rescued by a posse of allies. Hezbollah has been thoroughly degraded; Syria is totally out of the picture; and Iran is highly vulnerable as a result of Israel destroying its air defenses.

As a consequence, Hamas gave up on a number of its previous demands. Those demands, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has stated numerous times, not Israeli reluctance, were the reason that no deal was concluded earlier.

Finally, the staged nature of the deal means that Netanyahu has retained a great deal of flexibility going forward, and likely with the backing of the United States for whatever he chooses to do.

But one thing the agreement has made clear is the tension between the Israeli government’s enunciated war goals: On the one hand, the destruction of Hamas as both a military force and as the ruling party in Gaza; on the other hand, the return of all the hostages. The hostages have always served as Hamas’s ticket to survival. Hamas would never willingly give up its insurance policy, and certainly not in an agreement that cedes its ability to rearm and start over again.

And from Netanyahu’s point of view, there is no possibility of leaving Hamas in control of Gaza or able to rearm. To do so would enrage all those who have fought and sacrificed so much in Gaza over the past 15 months, including the families of the hundreds of soldiers who lost their lives and the thousands badly injured and, in many cases, maimed for life. No Israeli prime minister can survive the stain of having sent Israeli soldiers into battle for no purpose, as Ehud Olmert did on the last day of the second Lebanon War, when over 20 soldiers were lost, even though a ceasefire agreement was already on the verge of ratification.

The irreconcilability of Hamas’s desire to survive and Israel’s demand that it not means that the second stage of negotiations over a final Israeli withdrawal from Gaza will almost certainly prove fruitless. But unfortunately, that also means that Hamas is unlikely to return any more hostages during the second stage — a very bitter pill for Israeli society to swallow.

DESPITE ISRAEL’S INABILITY to achieve its enunciated goals — at least as of yet — it would be a huge mistake to declare the war a failure or the ceasefire agreement a mistake. Israel’s geopolitical position has not been as strong as it is at present in a long time. The threat hanging over our heads from Hezbollah has largely been eliminated — at least for the time being. The rule of the mullahs in Iran is tottering, and the degradation of the country’s air defenses by Israel has left the regime highly vulnerable, including to an attack on its nuclear facilities. The Houthis remain a nuisance — probably even more for Egypt, which depends upon revenues from the Suez Canal, than for Israel — but they have no defense against the Israeli air force.

Most important, there is a new government in Washington. Each of the major architects of foreign policy in the new administration — Secretary of State-designate Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense-designate Pete Hegseth, and Trump’s choice for national security advisor, Mike Waltz — is an ardent supporter of Israel. Hegseth spoke at his confirmation hearings of his desire to see Israel kill every last member of Hamas. And Rubio made clear that no nation-state can be expected to coexist with “savages like Hamas” on its borders.

On a podcast with Dan Senor, coauthor of Start-Up Nation, Waltz stated unequivocally that Gaza must be fully demilitarized and Hamas left unable to reconstitute itself as a governing force. He also made clear that Iran, which has referred to Israel as a “one-bomb country,” can never be allowed to attain nuclear weapons. When he spoke of the need to bring back “our” hostages, it was clear that he was referring to Israeli hostages, and not just those with dual American citizenship.

Trump’s ego needs make him more unpredictable. And the possibility of his seeking to prove himself the ultimate dealmaker by entering into his own agreement with Iran to restrict its nuclear program cannot be dismissed out of hand. But that unpredictability, and the danger that others less well-disposed to Israel in the MAGA orbit might gain his ear, made it crucial that Netanyahu not alienate him and deny him the credit for pushing the ceasefire agreement across the finish line.

While we would be well-advised, as former Israeli ambassador to Great Britain Mark Regev put it, not to view President Trump as some sort of messiah, so too would we be wise to give Prime Minister Netanyahu a bit of credit for knowing what he is doing. Right-wing commentator Ruthie Blum admitted last week, in the midst of expressing her grave misgivings about the hostage deal, that many times since October 7 she has been highly critical of Netanyahu only to realize in hindsight that he was right.

Netanyahu’s famed caution is in fact a strategy: Let the situation develop, without committing to any particular course of action, in order to retain the latitude to act when the opportunity arises. Armin Rosin, writing in Unherd, after detailing many of the potential pitfalls of the ceasefire agreement, speculates that it is part of Netanyahu’s assessment since October 7 that “a long war would ultimately advantage Israel, a socially cohesive modern state with a strong military and a robust belief in its own survival.” The latter is reflected in the 10 percent increase in the Israeli birthrate over the past year.

Critics of Netanyahu have ceaselessly accused him extending the war to remain in power. But in Rosin’s view, he anticipated that “an extended conflict, punctuated by timely concessions, might create its own unpredictable logic, leaving opportunities for the IDF to seize when the time was right.” And if so, the strategy has worked well until now.

The current agreement responds to the urgent desire of the Israeli public to bring home as many hostages as possible — hostages betrayed by the state security echelons, who unfathomably chose to ignore concrete warnings of an imminent attack that could have been easily prevented. And it offers a six-week respite from any large-scale ground operations for the first time in more than a year.

At the same, it paves the way for cementing Israel’s relationship with the incoming administration and perhaps preparing the way, in tandem, for the one result that would make Israel “an unambiguous winner... the further destruction of the regime that theorized, planned, armed, and financed the slaughter of October 7 and everything that’s come after it.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1046. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)