I’m afraid that Yaakov Katz, a friend for whom I have great respect, has it upside down. In his article in The Jerusalem Post on August 22, he asks why the demand of the hostage protests has been for Israel to “Bring Them Home” and not for Hamas to “Release Them Now.”
“The reason,” he writes, “is obvious: some people saw an opportunity to use the hostages as a political weapon against [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu.”
To prove this, Katz points to the lack of religious Zionists who attend or support the protests, quoting polls noting that “only 13% of religious Zionists support ending the war in exchange for all the hostages if it means that Hamas remains in Gaza,” as opposed to polls that found that “74% of Israelis support ending the war in exchange for the release of the hostages.”
However, if you take a moment to think about what these figures mean, and they have been remarkably consistent throughout the course of the war, you realize that they actually prove that in this presentation, Katz has flipped cause and effect.
Prioritizing the war over hostages
It is not the politicization of the protests that causes religious Zionists not to support prioritizing the goal of returning the hostages over continuing the war. Rather, it is the ideological stance prioritizing continuing the war over returning the hostages which created the inherent politicization of the hostage issue.
Since the very beginning of the war, many have argued that the goal of freeing the hostages and the goal of total defeat of Hamas contradict one another. There is also a debate regarding what total defeat of Hamas means, and how feasible it is, but we will leave that aside for now.
In the very first meeting of the government on October 7, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich advocated to “strike Hamas with cruelty, and not to weigh the hostages as a significant factor.” He has maintained this position with absolute consistency, stating again and again that as important as the hostages are, what is more important is the defeat of Hamas.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and his party share this stance, and, as the polls quoted by Katz show, these positions accurately reflect the majority of their constituency. While this constituency comprises a minority of the Israeli public, their representatives hold decisive power over the survival of the government and have made it clear, with absolute consistency, that they will topple the government if Netanyahu chooses the hostages over their vision of decisive victory.
Politicization of the hostage issue
This is the reality that politicized the hostage dilemma for Netanyahu, forcing him to try to square the circle and insist that both goals could be accomplished, which has meant accomplishing neither fully and leaving both sides unsatisfied.
I was a firsthand witness to the great efforts made by the hostage families and the Hostages and Missing Families Forum to make the hostage issue apolitical. I was at protests at Hostage Square in the early days of the war, when even a single person shouting “Shame” – a mere hint to the pre-war protests – was immediately silenced by the organizers. I saw how the leaders of the protest movement, even if they identified with the cause, made a conscious effort to step back and not to lead.
The hostage families can testify better than I how, from the very beginning, their protest for the government to take responsibility and return their loved ones was painted, against their will, in political colors. Indeed, with time, more and more family members came to the conclusion that, because of his political predicament, Netanyahu has repeatedly torpedoed hostage deals that were a threat to the survival of his coalition. With this realization, they adopted more blunt political messages.
Which brings us to the point about messaging, and why the hostage movement chose to call, first and foremost, on Israel to “Bring Them Home.” It is insulting and absurd to suggest, as Katz does, that people whose lives have been torn apart by Hamas’s evil cruelty for the last 700 days could possibly “forget who the real enemy is in all this.” Indeed, the hostage families have spent the last two years investing tremendous energies to demand of world leaders to pressure Hamas.
Yet part of the very raison d’etre of Zionism is the idea that by founding a sovereign state, we will not be dependent on the graces of the nations of the world, that we will have the power and agency to be responsible for our own fate. Sometimes determining that fate means making hard decisions, and there is a legitimate debate about which decision to make regarding the conflict between the hostages and the war.
The conviction of many families and many of their supporters, confirmed by multiple investigative reports, is that Israel has had multiple opportunities to bring the hostages home that it decided not to pursue.
These decisions have certainly benefited the continuing survival of the government, and have ensured that the war against Hamas continues, but as long as they fly in the face of the will of the majority of Israelis, supported by Israel’s professional military leadership, the address for our demand will be, first and foremost, our government.
The writer is a co-founder and director of Yanshoof, an educator at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, and an activist on behalf of the hostages.