The Abominable Hostage Deal

If you play the barbarians' game, the barbarians have already won.

Paul took apart the hostage deal with his usual refinement and analytical skill. My sophistication is nothing like that (and wasn’t in law school, either). I have more of a cracker barrel take on it: The deal is disgusting and dangerous and, while not a surrender per se, buys into the paradigm of surrender.

Let me start with a couple of paragraphs I saw this morning from Jim Geraghty in National Review:

It is not much of an exaggeration to say that almost everything Hamas does is a war crime. Just about every choice Hamas leaders make blurs the distinction between themselves and the Palestinian civilians they claim to be fighting for, and maximizes the chances of Palestinian civilian casualties instead of minimizing them. Hamas’s philosophy is abundantly clear: a belief that a lot of dead Palestinian civilians is worth it if it gets Israel denounced on the world stage. (The world stage, infuriatingly, plays along almost every time, blaming Israel and hand-waving away Hamas’s role.)

There is no conceivable peaceful coexistence with Hamas, any more than there could have been any peaceful coexistence with al-Qaeda or ISIS. The entire purpose of the organization is the destruction of innocent civilians that it deems its enemies. We can welcome the release of some hostages and the temporary respite in the fighting to help bring in humanitarian relief. But the overall task, needed for a safer world, remains.

Even Geraghty’s take is too optimistic. Israel is in a war for its survival, a war started by a savage sneak attack from Iran’s Gaza stooge, Hamas. There is (at this stage) only one objective of the war, namely, to wipe out Hamas root and branch. Doing anything less will simply mean there will be another war later, complete with the atrocities of October 7, only worse.

So here’s the deal: Anything that contributes to Israel’s success in the war is good and anything that complicates it is bad.

This ceasefire, advocated by, among others, Rep. Tlaib and others who like her think the Nazi ovens didn’t go far enough, is bad for Israel’s war effort. The whole purpose is to allow Hamas to regroup, re-arm, and refortify their tunnels (now denominated by the MSM as, ummmmm, just the “basement” of a “hospital”).

That by itself demonstrates that the deal is all wrong: It makes less likely the achievement of the paramount end. But if, perversely, the disgusting currency of hostage trading is now to be foremost in our thinking, the deal is still vile. It leaves the great majority of the present hostages still captive in God-knows-what conditions. Far worse, both strategically and morally, it all but assures future hostage taking for the simple reason that, as is now obvious (though conspicuously unspoken by Biden or Blinken or their pals in the media) it shows that hostage taking pays. When X pays, X gets repeated. Everyone knows this but few have the (minimal) guts to say it because it is really, really inconvenient to the appeasement crowd.

The hostage-as-commodity extravaganza, now begun with Israel’s foolhardy (although I strongly suspect, forced) acquiessence, will be gamed to the hilt by Hamas. As the Wall Street Journal notes today:

Expect Hamas to drag out the cease-fire in hopes of making it permanent. Dribbling out 10 hostages a day, Hamas could stall for a few weeks. Or what if it claims after day two that Israel has broken the deal and hostage releases will continue only after Israel holds off for another few days? What if it pulls that trick over and over?

The domestic and international picture will become more complicated for Israel. At home a nation united will be divided over how long to wait. Abroad, the pressure to continue the cease-fire indefinitely will grow, and Israel can expect harsher criticism when it resumes fighting. Israelis know all this, but they are willing to accept the costs to retrieve the captives.

Like everything else Hamas does when it’s not raping and murdering, this deal is a scam, wonderfully designed by it to stage a weeks-long or months-long maudlin spectacle, eagerly abetted by a complicit Western media, featuring one sentiment-oozing story after the next about the hostages and their families and their hellish plight — a plight for which Hamas/Iran alone is responsible, but which is certain to be portrayed in these stories as Israel’s alone to fix.

And let’s not forget this either, as the WSJ also notes:

Every Israeli also knows that Hamas’s leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, was among the 1,027 prisoners Israel released in 2011 in exchange for one kidnapped IDF soldier, Gilad Shalit. In that deal, 280 of the released Palestinian prisoners were serving life sentences for heinous crimes. This time Israel says none of the prisoners it will release have been convicted of murder.

Oh, yes, that makes it swell!

The deal again shows the moral gulf between the two sides. Hamas kidnapped Israeli children as young as nine months to use as hostages and spring its jihadists who have been arrested or convicted in a fair trial for their crimes. Israel takes military risks to save its citizens. Hamas risks Palestinian civilians to save itself.

Even as Israelis rejoice for the women and children who will return home, they know Hamas is rejoicing too. Its war crimes have been rewarded. It will steal fuel from its own people to power its terror tunnels. Its shattered northern Gaza brigades will use the cease-fire to regroup, escape from weak positions and set more ambushes for Israeli troops. Israel’s leaders made this deal knowing that their soldiers will pay for it.

Now I expect some readers might agree with my view so far, yet still ask: “But what about the hostages? Can Israel just walk away from them?”

The answer is no, you don’t walk away from them. You do everything you can to bring them home consistent with the overriding imperatives of the war.

That would mean two things, neither of which entails paying off the barbarian enemy. First would be military rescue. That is very hard, however, because it risks the lives of your servicemen and women; diverts from other strictly strategic goals; requires intricate intelligence; and has a good chance of many of the hostages being killed in the effort. Still, I suspect there are multiple components of the IDF up to the task — and who would volunteer for it.

The second and better way would be this: Mindful that there are American as well as Israeli hostages, Biden and Netanyahu would deliver the following message to the mullahs in Iran, who are certainly behind this, and to the leadership of Hamas: For every day starting tomorrow that the hostages are not released, every single one of them, one of you is going to be killed. There will be no warning. Whether by bombing, poisoning by one of your staff we’ve compromised, by drone, by sniper — that’s for us to know.

Then do it and keep doing it. When the leadership’s skin gets put in the game, their behavior will change (notice that the suicide bombers they deploy are mentally challenged chumps, never themselves or someone they care about).

I have no illusions about whether this is going to get done. It won’t. Biden is the rightful heir to the original Coward-in-Chief, Jimmy Carter. But it’s the only honorable way — not to mention the only effective one consistent with victory.