Mass protests in Israel give Hamas hope of ending the war on favorable terms.
On October 7 of last year, Hamas took more than two hundred hostages, rather than killing them, in the belief that holding live hostages would help it escape the full wrath of Israel. Hamas was mistaken.
Now, Hamas’ hope is that killing hostages will help it escape Israel’s further wrath via a favorable deal. The mass protests in Israel against the Netanyahu government following the killing of six hostages will reinforce that hope.
I’m not saying that Hamas killed the six for the purpose of turning Israeli opinion against the government. Maybe the killings were intended to discourage efforts to rescue hostage. Or maybe the terrorist monsters killed hostages for sheer pleasure and/or out of hatred of Jews.
But the effect was to generate renewed demands, backed by powerful protests, that Israel make a deal with Hamas — a deal that would enable these terrorist butchers to survive and eventually flourish once again.
Do I blame the Israeli protesters for playing so obviously and directly into Hamas’ hands? Not all of them. If I had a family member among the living hostages, I’d be in the street protesting, too.
But the other protesters have no excuse. They should know that a deal with Hamas will seriously jeopardize the lives of Israelis in the future by (1) granting concessions that will facilitate future terrorism against Israel (see discussion of the Philadelphia Corridor below) and (2) releasing hundreds of terrorists from Israeli prisons back into the fight to destroy Israel.
It’s worse than that, though. Forget the future for a moment. The mass protests jeopardize the lives of current hostages right now. They provide Hamas with a huge incentive to kill more of them in order to spark additional protests and increase the pressure on Netanyahu to make a deal favorable to the terrorists.
Fortunately, Netanyahu seems unmoved by the protests (though not, of course, by the deaths of the six hostages). Crucially, he insists that Israel will not negotiate away its control of the Philadelphia Corridor which separates Gaza from Egypt and through which Hamas receives the supplies that enable it to wage war against Israel.
Netanyahu called this corridor “Hamas’s pipeline for oxygen and rearmament.” Therefore, he said, Israeli control is necessary “to ensure that we don’t have another October 7 and another October 7 and another October 7, as Hamas has promised to carry out.” I’ve yet to see anyone persuasively argue otherwise.
And fortunately, Netanyahu’s cabinet stands with him. With only one dissent, it voted to uphold his negotiating position.
The lone dissenter was Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant. He predicted that the cabinet will eventually come around to his view that Israel should give up control of the Philadelphia Corridor in exchange for the return of the hostages.
That’s Hamas’ hope, as well. And if it keeps killing hostages and Israelis keep stupidly protesting against the government, Gallant’s prediction and Hamas’ hope may come true.
My hope, then, is that reports of an impending Biden-Harris administration final, “take-it-or-leave-it” ceasefire proposal to Hamas and Israel are correct. Presumably, one or both parties will reject that deal. Ideally, the U.S. would then bow out of the process, thereby diminishing the pressure on Israel to accept a bad deal. Israel could then continue the process of cutting off Hamas’ “oxygen” and exterminating its fighters and cutting off their “oxygen.”
But I have trouble believing that the alleged take-it-or-leave-it deal will be the Biden-Harris administration’s last bit of meddling in this war.
The whole thing is madness. The madness of the Democratic party (because let's face it its all them) is a given at this point and it has made Israel's task immeasurablu more difficult. But the madness in Israel? It's madness that Gallant can openly defy and attack and drum opposition to the policy of a government in which he serves. It's madness that Netanyahu's political rivals are drumming up public opposition and even calling for civil disobedience. I don't know why it is happening. I question whether Israel can survive when at least 40 percent of the country believes that Israel should essentially surrender to Iran/Hamas.
The anger of these protestors being directed at Netanyahu rather than Hamas is bizarre. Hamas could not have asked for a better outcome to their barbarity. For all the reasons you've articulated, this no doubt will give Hamas an added incentive to hang on and periodically kill hostages whenever it suits them. The irrationality and self-destructiveness of the new woke Left, as opposed to the older and more traditional Left, has apparently seeped into Israeli society. So sad. Also, another possible reason for Hamas killing these hostages as the IDF closed in might be to keep the six from telling the world all that they had to endure under Hamas captivity--especially the two women.