If Israel cannot fight a war to win due to concern for any hostages held by the enemy, then the price is too high

T

he news that Hamas had cold-bloodedly murdered six hostages, shooting them gangland style in the back of head, after holding them in inhuman conditions, hit Israel with a jolt. So many hopes, so many tefillos invested in their safe return were dashed forever. Their faces, and, in many cases, those of their parents, had become part of the background of our lives. They were not strangers to us. One might have expected those executions to unite the country in revulsion at Hamas for its heinous deeds in violation of every civilized norm. Yet the first reaction of too many Israelis, including the head of the Histadrut Labor Federation, who declared a general strike, was to blame Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu rather than those who ordered the assassinations or pulled the trigger.

Hamas, in the eyes of those who took once again to the streets, was irrelevant, lacking any agency. No, the problem was Netanyahu, who, it was charged, had failed to make Hamas a cease-fire offer it could not refuse. Yet as Netanyahu pointed out in a Monday news conference, no less of a Netanyahu critic than Secretary of State Anthony Blinken had characterized Israel’s cease-fire proposals as “extraordinarily generous” as long ago as April 27.

On May 31, Israel acceded to a proposal outlined by President Biden. And again, on August 19, Israel agreed to what was described as the United States’ “final bridging proposal.” “Now, Hamas must do the same,” declared Blinken. Finally, the deputy CIA director said on August 28, just days before the executions, that Israel had shown the utmost seriousness and urged Hamas to show the same seriousness.

In each instance, Hamas rejected the proposals and simply waited for further Israeli concessions. Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar knows better than anyone the extreme sensitivity of the Israeli public to every hostage and the high price that will be paid to secure their releases. After all, he and all the other masterminds of October 7 were among the 1,027 Palestinian prisoners, including many convicted of multiple murders, released by Israel in exchange for Gilad Shalit in 2011.

That one-sided exchange has already cost more than 1,500 Israeli lives and many times that number of those permanently wounded or emotionally scarred for life, not to mention a costly war and the indefinite evacuation of close to 100,000 Israelis from their homes.

THOSE MARCHING under the banner #Bring the Hostages Home rarely state what limits, if any, there are on the price that they would be willing to pay in terms of concessions to Hamas. The slogan places the onus for the failure to secure the hostages’ release squarely on the Netanyahu government, and, by implication, suggests that any price would be warranted.

That does not appear to be the opinion of most Israeli Jews — thankfully — but the margin is not large. A September 1 poll of the Jewish People Policy Institute found that 49 percent of those polled said that retention of the Philadelphi Corridor was more important than securing the release of the hostages, whereas 43 percent disagreed. In a Direct Polls survey taken after Netanyahu’s September 2 press conference, the margin was wider: 62 percent opposed a six-week withdrawal from the Philadelphi Corridor in return for between 18 and 30 hostages, while 35 percent approved.

Yet without control of the Philadelphi Corridor, which separates Gaza from Egypt, Hamas would assuredly rearm and import building materials to rebuild the tunnels destroyed by Israel over the past 11 months of intense fighting. The only way to defeat Hamas is to cut off its ability to rearm and to move its forces in and out of danger at will. Control of the Philadelphi Corridor is essential to the achievement of both goals.

Without that control, Israel will find itself back at war with Hamas again and again and again. And normal life will never return to the southern communities bordering Gaza.

THERE IS, HOWEVER, a more nuanced criticism of Netanyahu’s refusal to cede control over the Philadelphi Corridor at present — one, according to news reports, offered by Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Gallant was the only member of the security cabinet to have voted against Netanyahu’s insistence on retaining the Philadelphi Corridor. He argued that it would always be possible to retake the Philadelphi Corridor again at the completion of the six-week cease-fire envisioned in Stage One. By failing to agree to do so, Gallant is said to have urged, Israel was sealing the fate of the hostages.

Gallant’s argument, however, is far from airtight. For one thing, it is not clear that Hamas is inclined to agree to any deal. Axios reported on September 5 that the White House has begun to question whether there is any cease-fire and hostage deal that Hamas would ever agree to, particularly in light of new Hamas demands for the release of more terrorists from Israeli jails.

Why should Hamas ever sign on to a deal, when it sees how every refusal is only followed by additional pressure on Israel from the United States and the international community for further concessions, and how the process is tearing Israeli society apart?

Hamas and its immediate sponsor Qatar are treated as beyond pressure — even though, as former senior intelligence figure Col. (res.) Yigal Carmon argues, the Qatari regime would not last a day in power were the US to relocate its large naval base from Qatar.

Second, if complete Israeli withdrawal from the Philadelphi Corridor during the first phase of any cease-fire agreement is so crucial to Hamas, it obviously does not intend to do nothing during the cease-fire. It would use that time to rearm and to booby-trap what remains of the tunnels under the corridor. Thus the cost in terms of the lives of Israeli soldiers in any fighting to retake the corridor could be very costly indeed.

Third, the proposed six-week cease-fire would not bring back even a majority of the hostages believed to be still alive. (Hamas has yet to allow the Red Cross to visit the hostages or even provided lists of whom is still alive.) At most, we are talking about 18 to 30 “humanitarian” hostages. The rest would, at best, be released in dribs and drabs, each time after further negotiations and additional cease-fires. So, in the best case, Israel would not retake the Philadelphi Corridor any time soon after withdrawing.

Finally, we have heard the old song about how “we can always go back in” too many times before. In the wake of the 1993 Oslo Accords, we were told that if the Palestinian Authority did not prevent terrorism from territories under its control, Israel could once again take responsibility. Yet in March 2002 alone, over 130 Israelis were killed in 15 suicide bombings by perpetrators emanating from areas under Palestinian Authority control. That led to a month of fierce fighting in the West Bank in Operation Defensive Shield, and another year and a half before Israel managed to gain full security control.

The same mantra about how we can always go back in if need be was repeated when Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000. And UN Security Council Resolution 1701 at the end of the Second Lebanon War in 2006 provided for a demilitarized zone from Israel’s northern border to the Litani River. Today, there are an estimated 150,000 Hezbollah rockets and missiles in that “demilitarized” area.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon promised that the first rocket from Gaza after Israel’s 2005 withdrawal and evacuation of 8,000 citizens would result in Israel going back in. Well, the first rocket landed within weeks, but Israel never returned, though it fought four military engagements in Gaza prior to October 7.

Defense Minister Gallant and the senior echelons of the IDF ask the Israeli public to trust their professional expertise about Israel’s ability to return to the Philadelphi Corridor and their assurances that troops on the ground are no long needed to secure the border — smuggling can be prevented by high-tech sensors.

Unfortunately, trust in the expertise of our generals and reliance on our technological wizardry are at a rather low ebb. IDF intelligence repeatedly scoffed at the idea of a Hamas attempt to breach the border, even though it had Hamas’s plans in its possession; the IDF took almost eight hours to arrive in the southern border communities, after receiving the first reports of the Hamas slaughter taking place; and the billion-dollar border fence was simply flown over by primitive flying machines.

And former vice-commander of the Israeli police Avi Weiss has now revealed why it took the Israeli Air Force over 12 hours to seal off the border from Gazans rushing in and Hamas fighters taking hostages back. The IDF legal corps, acting in deference to the attorney general, denied Netanyahu the right to call in the Air Force until he could gather the security cabinet the evening of October 7 to declare war.

And the IDF deferred to them. The legal advisors were more concerned, apparently, with the lives of Gazan “civilians” plundering southern settlements than with the lives of those dying of asphyxiation in their bomb shelters, being murdered in cold blood, or being assaulted. Thus, those who marched against judicial reform, including limitations on the power of the attorney general, and today marching against the prime minister for not having saved the hostages, themselves bear substantial culpability for the large number of hostages seized.

MOREOVER, AS THE PRIME MINISTER stressed in his press conference, the issue of whether the IDF could return to the Philadelphi Corridor, and at what cost in lives, is not primarily a tactical one dependent on militarily expertise, but a strategic one that requires placing the issue in a larger diplomatic context. Once Israel leaves the Philadelphi Corridor, writes Bret Stephens, a frequent Netanyahu critic, “international pressure for it not to re-enter for nearly any reason short of another October 7 will be overwhelming. And Hamas will ensure that any Israeli effort to retake the corridor will be as bloody as possible, for both Israelis and Palestinians.”

The Biden-Harris administration is desperate to bring the war in Gaza to an end and to prevent its spread to the entire region, including Iran. Cease-fire does not mean for the Americans a temporary cessation of hostilities but the end of the war, with Hamas still in place. It is all very well for Haviv Rettig-Gur and others to argue that Netanyahu should just stand up to American pressure, but that ignores the American trump card: Israel still relies on the United States for critical armaments. And in a major war with Hezbollah and perhaps Iran, Israel will need both American arms and missile defense.

Another point of context: Israel must absolutely lower the price of hostages. If it does not, it can never again win a war, even an existential one. Hezbollah has an extensive tunnel network in southern Lebanon, and quite likely tunnels leading into Israel. Its first step in any ground war with Israel — and it has far more troops, and better-trained ones than those of Hamas — would be to capture a few Israeli civilians or soldiers.

Israel has to absorb the age-old wisdom of the Maharam of Rothenburg, arguably the foremost Torah scholar of his era, who refused to allow the Jewish community to ransom him from the first Hapsburg emperor, Rudolph I, during more than seven years of captivity, lest the kidnapping of Torah scholars become an everyday occurrence.

If Israel cannot fight a war to win due to concern for any hostages held by the enemy, then the price is too high. For as Stephens reminds us, “the highest justification for war, besides survival, is to prevent its repetition. [W]ars will be worse, and come more often, to those who fail to win them.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1028. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)