Humiliated, seething, and frustrated, Adolf Hitler hoped to retrieve from Soviet captivity Friedrich von Paulus, the field-marshal who surrendered at Stalingrad and, if sent back to Berlin, would certainly have been executed.
The Germans thought they could get von Paulus in return for Joseph Stalin’s son, Yakov Dzhugashvili, who fell captive as an artillery officer, but Stalin rejected the proposed deal outright. All Soviet troops were his sons, he claimed, though what he really thought was that they were all deserters, as his wartime Order #270 made plain.
It’s now 18 months since this column cited that precedent, noting that Stalin’s attitude was the opposite of our Jewish attitude, which sees hostages’ redemption as a supreme value. At the same time, we drew two red lines for a hostage deal: Hamas be removed, and the IDF remain free to fight (“Red line in Gaza,” January 19, 2024).
Now the same rationale should mean signing one full deal to free all the hostages.
Israel must now liberate all hostages because leaving some of them captive, at this stage, will condemn them to disappearance and death. After having returned 148 hostages alive and 57 dead, the remaining 50 hostages can no longer be released in multiple installments through multiple negotiations. If not now, we will never get them back.
What, then, about the principle of not letting a deal prevent the IDF from fighting? Well, that’s where the good news comes in.
Since we drew those red lines, the IDF floored Hezbollah, bludgeoned Iran, and dismembered the Syrian army. All this happened far from Gaza, putting paid to Hamas’s original scheme to unleash on us all the region’s fanatics, simultaneously.
Seen through this broad lens, Hamas’s war has already ended, and it ended in grand defeat. Then there is the view from the narrow lens, the war within the Gaza Strip.
Has the IDF’s delivery in Gaza been as elegant as its delivery elsewhere? It hasn’t been. There was no equivalent of the beeper attacks in Gaza, nor of hundreds of warplanes descending on Iran’s nuclear program, air force, missile launchers, and anti-aircraft batteries.
Even so, Hamas is down on its knees, its commanders are mostly dead, its hardware is decimated, and the Gaza Strip is largely leveled. Moreover, the psychological barrier, which previously prevented Israel from entering the depth of Gaza’s urban thicket, has disappeared. Thousands of Israeli troops have fought across the Gaza Strip, above and underground, and will return there if required.
This is Hamas’s biggest failure, and this is why Israel can now sign an end-of-war deal.
Everyone, particularly Hamas, now knows that even if the war is declared over, Israel will respond immediately and wildly should any jihadist militia try to regroup, or even just dig one tunnel or fire one Kassam. The party is over.
The best proof of this realization was Hamas’s flip-flop this week, when its response to the IDF’s preparations to seize Gaza City was to suddenly accept the latest American hostage-deal proposal.
Yes, Hamas was referring to the kind of partial deal that Israel should not accept. But Hamas now has the lower hand. Too many players have lost patience for this war: America, Europe, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the rest of the Arab world. The fighting can only last that much longer, and the question therefore is only how much more time will be wasted and how many more people will die before the war’s end is declared.
The obstacle preventing a ceasefire
Hamas may not like a full hostages-for-ceasefire deal, but when forced by the leaders of the Arab world, it will give in. However, for this to happen, Israel needs to actively accommodate the same Arab governments’ design for a Palestinian successor to Hamas. And that – the Netanyahu government is mentally incapable of doing.
The mental block that prevents a breakthrough in Gaza is nearly 90 years old.
It was born in 1936, when Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the leader of the Revisionist Zionist movement, rejected the first partition plan; it continued the following decade when Menachem Begin opposed the second partition plan; and it continued in 1980, with Begin’s rejection of Anwar Sadat’s demand that the peace agreement with Egypt be followed up by a deal with the Palestinians.
The pattern then proceeded to Yitzhak Shamir’s rejection in 1987 of the London Agreement between Shimon Peres and King Hussein, shortly before the outbreak of the Palestinian uprising that has been raging intermittently from then to this day.
Countless pens have been broken about the consequences of all these rejections, all of which happened before the Oslo Agreements, which were signed with terrorists because the alternative deal, with Jordan’s King Hussein, had been killed by Shamir.
Now all this is history. Gaza, however, is not history. It’s reality, and it must be addressed, here and now, by Benjamin Netanyahu, who has an opportunity not only to release the hostages and end the war, but also to part with his predecessors’ legacy; to build on Gaza’s rubble a model for Palestinian self-rule.
The key to this transformation lies between Cairo and Riyadh.
Unlike the widespread Western delusion that Hamas’s cause is nationalism, the Egyptian and Saudi governments know its cause is jihadism. And that ideology threatens Arab countries exactly the way it threatens Israel. That’s where Arab and Israeli interests meet, and Middle Eastern opportunity beckons.
It is therefore not enough for Netanyahu to demand an immediate and full release of all hostages. And it is also not enough to agree to declare the war over. For all this to work, Israel must actively encourage the assembly of a pan-Arab forum that will design and build postwar Gaza’s government, economy, education, and police.
That’s how Israel will see its hostages retrieved from Gaza’s tunnels, and Gaza will see the light at its tunnels’ end.
www.MiddleIsrael.net
The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of Ha’Sfar Ha’Yehudi Ha’Aharon (The Last Jewish Frontier, Yediot Sefarim 2025), a sequel to Theodor Herzl’s The Old New Land.