Despite President Trump proclaiming repeatedly in his Knesset speech that the war is over, that is far from the case

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ike almost every Jew in Israel, and a great many around the world, my wife and I spent the morning of Hoshana Rabbah watching the return of 20 Israeli hostages to their loved ones with tears in our eyes. Actually, the tears began even before the first returning hostage appeared on the screen, so great was the feeling of relief.

And for religious Jews, the joy of the hostage release was heightened by the knowledge that it took place on Hoshana Rabbah, one of the two days mentioned by the Yerushalmi (Rosh Hashanah 4:8) as particularly auspicious for calling out in prayer to Hashem. The hostages have been at the forefront of our prayers and Tehillim since they were first taken captive.

The hostages were released from captivity precisely two years to the day since they were taken into captivity, just like Yosef Hatzaddik, who spent another two years in prison after he interpreted the dreams of the royal wine bearer and baker.

Clearly, this was no ordinary event. On Shemini Atzeres 5774, when 251 hostages were taken into captivity, the IDF told Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu that he should forget about ever securing their return, especially if he chose to pursue an all-out war on Hamas. Yet in the end, 168 out of those 251 hostages returned alive.

The euphoria of the day was inevitably tinged, however, with a large measure of sadness over the heavy price the events of October 7 and beyond imposed on Israel: more than 1,200 killed that day, the approximately 1,100 soldiers who fell in subsequent combat, and the dozens of captives who died or were murdered in captivity. And the numbers of the dead are only part of the story.

Beyond that are the thousands of injured, many permanently. The marriages stressed, not a few beyond repair, by the very long absences of reservist fathers, and the PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) that so many have returned with as a consequence of constant combat duty in the most perilous circumstances. And finally, the tremendous damage to Israel’s image around the world, no matter how unjustified.

DESPITE PRESIDENT TRUMP proclaiming repeatedly in his Knesset speech that the war is over, that is far from the case. The hostage release was but the first stage of the 20-point peace plan put forth by President Trump and endorsed by eight Arab states. That plan calls for the complete disarmament of Hamas, including the destruction of its tunnel network, the end of Hamas’s governmental rule, and the deradicalization of the Gaza Strip.

How any of these things will occur, however, is far from clear. Hamas went on a killing spree immediately after the hostage release, summarily executing those who had criticized Hamas on social media or in interviews, and entering into pitched battles with various Palestinian clans, who took advantage of the large-scale destruction of Hamas as a fighting force to assert their independence during the latter stages of the war.

Clearly Hamas has no intention of going quietly into the night. Former hostage Eli Sharabi, an Arabic speaker, who engaged in many discussions with his captors, has described in his memoir of captivity the time frame within which Hamas views the world: Perhaps we won’t destroy you, and perhaps even our children will not. But one day, we will wipe out the Jewish presence from our land.

The key to securing Hamas’s acquiescence to the hostage release appears to have been pressure from its principal funder, Qatar, coupled with the ongoing Israeli assault in the Gaza City. With respect to the former, Israel’s attempt to take out the senior leadership of Hamas, in Qatar’s capital city of Doha, appears to have been crucial. As Amit Segal, one of Israel’s leading journalists, who also appears frequently on US networks, put it, “As failures go, this may have been the most successful of all time.”

The strike alerted the Qataris that they were not immune from Israeli attack, and thereby drove the Qataris closer to the Americans, as their sole protector. President Trump’s pressuring of Netanyahu to half-heartedly apologize in writing to the Qataris for any collateral damage to Qatari civilians from the strikes was meant to demonstrate America’s protective shield.

The attempted elimination of the Hamas senior command also unnerved those leaders and pushed them even closer to Qatar as their protector. That thereby gave Qatar more power than ever over Hamas. To sum up, the Doha strike pushed Hamas into the arms of Qatar, and Qatar into the arms of the United States. That was the leverage that Trump used to pressure Hamas to give up what has always been its ultimate bargaining chip: the Israeli hostages.

So if Qatari and Turkish pressure was sufficient to persuade Hamas to give up its most prominent bargaining chip, could it also persuade Hamas to lay down its arms? Perhaps. But it is far from clear that doing so is either Qatar or Turkey’s intent. Both countries are aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood and have deepening ties with Iran, warns Khaled Abu Toameh of the Hudson Institute.

While the more pragmatic Arab countries — e.g., the Gulf states — have made peace with the idea that Israel is in the region to stay, and have come to see Israel as the key to defense against Iran, that is not the case for the more theocratic Qataris and Turks. There is a reason that Turkey and Qatar have long provided refuge to senior Hamas officials, as well as the bulk of Hamas’s funding.

On a positive note, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Bahrain warned the Trump administration, following Hamas’s Gaza killing spree, that the Trump plan cannot succeed as long as Hamas remains part of the equation. They accused Qatar and Turkey of failing to hold Hamas to account.

The Saudis threatened to boycott next month’s planned conference on reconstruction, and the UAE told Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff that it will participate in rebuilding Gaza only in areas under Israeli security control, and only after Hamas is fully disarmed. The Saudis and UAE boycotted Trump’s post-Knesset summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, according to Israel Hayom, due to their anger over Qatar’s growing influence, and accused the Trump administration of elevating those who fund terror and hatred.

Clearly, Hamas’s disarmament is very much in doubt. And the Trump plan’s call for deradicalization of the Gaza Strip is no more likely to be realized anytime soon. Over half the Gaza Strip’s population is under the age of 18, and they have been thoroughly indoctrinated over the 17 years of Hamas rule.

DESPITE THE UNCERTAINTY surrounding the implementation of the Trump plan, Israel is nevertheless in a much better position vis-à-vis Hamas than it would have been had Prime Minister Netanyahu heeded the cries of the nonstop demonstrators chanting “Bring Them Home, Now.” Those demonstrators continually acted as if bringing home the hostages was entirely in Israel’s hands — all we had to do was to cave in to every Hamas demand, including a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and releasing any terrorists demanded. The latter would surely have included Marwan Barghouti, a charismatic leader, who would have proven even more lethal in the long run than Yahya Sinwar, the chief planner of the Simchas Torah massacre.

Israel is still in control of half of Gaza, most crucially the Philadelphi Corridor in the south, and the northern border crossings as well. Control of Gaza’s borders ensures that Israel can prevent Hamas from rearming via the underground tunnels along the length of the Egyptian border and enables it to inspect all humanitarian aid coming into the Strip for weapons or materials to rebuild destroyed tunnels.

At worst, the current ceasefire should put Israel in a position roughly parallel to that on the Lebanese border with respect to Hezbollah. Every time Hezbollah attempts to reestablish itself in southern Lebanon, Israel strikes it hard. As a consequence, the northern border remains quiet, and it is even conceivable that the Lebanese government might one day regain control of southern Lebanon from Hezbollah. Israel is now positioned to enforce the ceasefire with Hamas in roughly the same fashion.

Moreover, Israeli control over half of the Gaza Strip allows for some variant of what General David Petraeus termed the “Disneyland strategy” in Iraq. That strategy involved letting Iraq’s civilian population compare the benefits of living in areas controlled by pro-government forces to living under rebel forces. If reconstruction begins in areas controlled by Israel, while areas still controlled by Hamas remain rubble, it will not take long for the civilian population in Hamas-controlled areas to either evacuate or exert pressure on Hamas to comply with its commitment to disarm.

THE SIGNING OFF on the Trump plan by Israel dealt a major blow to the large and vocal Netanyahu Derangement Syndrome faction in Israel and its Trump Derangement Syndrome counterpart in the United States. The booing of Netanyahu’s name in Hostage Square at the celebratory Motzaei Shabbos gathering on the eve of the hostage release demonstrates the degree to which the hostage campaign was in reality a campaign to remove Netanyahu from power, at least on the part of its leaders.

As Gadi Taub points out in Tablet, the true nature of the campaign was always clear from the fact that it eschewed all efforts to pressure Hamas in any way. And it ignored the clear testimony of former secretary of state Anthony Blinken that it was Hamas, not Israel, which continually rejected or reneged upon ceasefire deals involving the return of hostages. Indeed the hostage campaign, according to the testimony of several released hostages, caused Hamas to raise the ante for hostage releases out of the belief that it was causing the Israeli body politic to fray by their retention.

Those who refuse to give Netanyahu any credit claim that he could have secured the same agreement a year ago. But that is ridiculous. Any such deal would have minimally required Israel to completely withdraw completely from Gaza and left Hamas securely entrenched in power and able to plan its next assault on Israel. As noted above, Israel’s current control of half of the Gaza Strip and all of its borders creates a completely different reality.

Moreover, that claim ignores the dramatic changes in the security of Israel’s citizens over the last year of fighting: Hezbollah still exists, but its ability to threaten Israel has been sharply reduced and it has been pushed away from Israel’s northern border; Assad has been removed from power in Syria, and as a consequence the country no longer serves as a transit point for Iranian arms to Hezbollah. And while Iran remains determined to obtain nuclear weapons, and is already receiving Chinese assistance in rebuilding its air defenses and nuclear installations, its nuclear program has been set back at least two years, and likely much more, by Israel’s 12-day war on Iran and the American bombing of the Fordow nuclear reactor.

The Washington Post did not deny that President Trump had succeeded where all his immediate predecessors have failed. But it offered a laughable explanation for that success: Clinton and Biden were so emotionally tied to Israel that they could not bring the requisite pressure to bear on Israel. Trump the transactional businessman, by contrast, bore Israel no such affection and was thus able to turn the screws.

It would be hard to imagine a more backward argument. For one thing, it is irrelevant to President Clinton. It was Arafat, not Ehud Barak, who walked out of Camp David, in response to an offer from Barak far beyond the Israeli consensus then or now, and thereby turned Clinton, in his own words, into a “failure.”

For his part, Biden continued the openly pro-Iranian foreign policy of Obama. At every stage of Israel’s Gaza campaign, the Americans were urging greater restraint. They told Israel not to go into Rafah, and warned of enormous civilian casualties if it did. Those casualties never materialized, as Israel evacuated the civilian population — something the Biden administration said was impossible — and captured the crucial Philadelphi Corridor.

Further, the Biden foreign policy team continually tried to use the Gaza negotiations as an opportunity to push for a two-state solution, with Gaza and much of the West Bank under Palestinian Authority control. The vast majority of Israelis have long since abandoned hopes for a two-state solution.

The Abraham Accords of Trump’s first term, by contrast, disproved the longtime lodestar of American foreign policy — i.e., that peace between Israel and the Muslim world depended on the creation of a Palestinian state. And the Trump plan pushes the issue of statehood into the distant future.

Unlike the Biden administration, which continuously broadcast its differences with Israel, even withholding armaments, Trump allowed scant daylight between the American and Israeli positions. He green-lighted Israel’s assault on Hamas last redoubt in Gaza City. Above all, he did something no other American president would have ever done in bombing the Fordow reactor. Without that action, opined former Israeli ambassador to the US Michael Oren, the hostage release and the Trump plan would never have come to fruition.

To the extent Trump was able to twist Binyamin Netanyahu’s arm at any point, it was not due to his disregard for Israel but because of his very closeness to Israel, as should have been obvious to anyone who watched his Knesset speech.

By signing onto the Trump plan for the rebuilding of Gaza, Netanyahu gave lie to the charge that Israel engaged in genocide in Gaza. Rebuilding and genocide do not go together. In any event, the genocide charge was always baseless. No one has yet offered a single alternative to the way that Israel conducted its war on Hamas, which was fully embedded among civilians and in underground tunnels.

Even facing unprecedented military challenges, Israel achieved civilian to military casualty rates unprecedented in urban warfare. And as Haviv Rettig Gur points out, genocide is a matter of intent, not the numbers of those killed. Photos of Gaza today resemble those of Hamburg and Berlin at the end of World War II.

Meanwhile, haters of Israel have gone on with their violent pro-Palestinian protests in Barcelona, London, and New York City, even with the cessation of hostilities and the beginning of the ceasefire they have long claimed to seek. Students for Justice in Palestine (of which Zohran Mamdani founded a college chapter) has dismissed those executed by Hamas as “collaborators.”

In short, the hostage release and ceasefire has exposed the one and only goal behind the protests — not protecting Palestinian lives, but destroying Israel. A valuable lesson in and of itself.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1083. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)