Current Events, Episode 165
israel at war, EXPLAINED: the hostage deal
November 27, 2023
BLOG VERSION below | PODCAST VERSION HERE
After seven weeks of fighting, Hamas and Israel agreed to a deal to release some of the Israeli hostages, who have started returning home to great joy and relief. How can we understand this deal in context? What should we make of the role of Qatar as mediator? What does it tell us about Hamas? What are the dilemmas facing Israel going forward?
Every time I start writing an in-depth episode, something more urgent comes up. Such is the occupational hazard of writing about the Middle East. The big news right now, of course, is the ongoing deal to release some of the Israeli hostages in exchange for a pause in fighting.
In accordance with the deal, 50 Israeli hostages were released, almost all of them women and young children. Israel had to release 150 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails, also all women and teens, as well as deliver hundreds of trucks of fuel and aid to Gaza. All of this took place over a four-day pause in fighting. There was also an option to extend the deal: no fighting for each day that Hamas releases 10 more hostages. That extension seems to be happening now, as well.
Every hostage that returns home to their families and their country is an extraordinary blessing. But it’s also bittersweet. Most of the children so far returned are coming home to at least one of their parents murdered. A few hostages are reported to be sick or injured, at least one of them in critical condition, but most seem to be relatively physically healthy. Their safe return is the fulfillment of the most profound wish one could possibly have, and we can only hope that these be the first days of a brighter future for them. Hundreds of trucks loaded with fuel and aid have gone into Gaza. Israel is upholding its end of the bargain.
Hamas is, too, but in a way designed to psychologically torment Israel. They delayed the first hostage release by a day. Then on the second day Hamas delayed the release of the hostages for hours, falsely accusing Israel of not supplying the aid and of not releasing the right Palestinian prisoners. So agonizing was the wait that President Biden had to step in, and Israel had to threaten to start fighting again. The hostages were released to Israel at almost the last minute. Hamas seemed to breach the deal when it released a young girl without also releasing her mother, in violation of the agreement. Hamas has released propaganda videos with each group of returning hostages, showing them smiling and happily waving at their captors. This, writes the journalist David Horovitz, is what you can expect when you are “dealing with an amoral, savage terrorist regime…that is trying to destroy your country.”
The pause in fighting is holding, too. Note that this is not a cease-fire. A cease-fire implies a cessation of fighting that leads to a peace agreement or an end to hostilities, and that’s not what is happening. There is every expectation to resume fighting once this round of exchanges is over.
So this deal was weeks in the making, brokered through Qatar, a small Arab country on the Persian Gulf. I’ve been meaning to talk about Qatar for weeks, so we’ll get to that today. Are they a good guy? A bad guy? Somewhere in between? Why are we hearing so much about them? We’ll discuss.
There are clear benefits to this deal for both Israel and Hamas but it also sets up further dilemmas. The joy in the hostages’ return is marked by the reminder that about 183 still remain. And the deliberate delays show just how much Hamas is still in control of both Gaza and this war. Despite Israel’s air campaign and ground invasion, Hamas is still in fighting shape, still launching rockets at Israel, and still able to determine the fate of the hostages. This is not the one-sided war that the media and the left would have you believe.
So today, talking about the hostages and the pause in fighting. I’m your host, Jason Harris, and this is Jew Oughta Know.
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Negotiations to release the hostages began almost immediately after Hamas’ massacre on October 7. There was Israel and Hamas, of course, and also the United States, Egypt, and Qatar. Those first four are obvious, but what about Qatar? Who are they and why are they involved?
Qatar is a tiny desert country 1,000 miles from Israel. It sticks out into the Persian Gulf like a thumb jutting from Saudi Arabia. It has a population of 3 million people, but only about 10% of them are actual Qatari citizens: the rest are migrant workers from Asia and the Middle East. Like most other Arab countries, Qatar is an oppressive Islamic autocracy with a bad record on human rights, limited political freedoms, and an economy dependent on oil and natural gas. For awhile Qatar was the richest country in the world, and it still has the fourth highest GDP per capita. In recent years it has been trying to improve its reputation through sports, arts, and tourism.
On the one hand Qatar is a bad actor. They’ve long supported radical Islamic movements and terrorist groups, like Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas’ top leaders live in luxury in Qatar and are given free range to manage their terrorist group from afar. Qatar has provided probably close to $2 billion dollars to Hamas over the years. Their news network, al-Jazeera, routinely spreads anti-Israel and antisemitic coverage, and celebrated the October 7 massacre as a great victory. While Qatar and Israel used to have official relations, Qatar broke it off during a previous war between Israel and Hamas in 2009. So while there is officially no diplomatic relationship, the two countries do deal with each other behind the scenes.
That’s because Qatar also sees itself as a close ally of the West. It hosts the United States Central Command at a huge airbase, the branch of the U.S. military responsible for the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia, and the key force that fought the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Qatar sees itself as an essential mediator; they like to be the go-to guy when warring parties need a place to talk. Everyone from the United States to Sudan to the Taliban and the Palestinians and Iran use their services, which is why they see themselves perfectly placed to mediate the current hostage situation between Hamas and Israel. Hamas talks to Qatar, and Qatar talks to the United States and Israel, and back and forth they go. The real power is Iran, but as an intermediary, Qatar is certainly useful.
A handful of Qatari officials recently flew in to Israel as part of the negotiations. But since Qatar doesn’t have official relations with Israel, and therefore didn’t want to set the precedent of a direct flight between the two countries, the private jet first flew to the island of Cyprus, landed, and then took off again for Israel. Such is the ridiculousness of the Middle East.
The point is that, for now, Qatar is a useful go-between between the various stakeholders. President Biden has spoken directly with the emir of Qatar; the directors of Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad, and the CIA have traveled there; and it has been up to Qatar to up the pressure on Hamas to make the hostage deal. So do we trust Qatar? Not really. They’re playing both sides. But like so much else, they are who we’ve got at this moment, and to the extent they’ve helped free the hostages so far, we can be thankful.
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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said something subtle but very interesting in his announcement about the hostage deal. In speaking with the hostages’ families, he told them that “returning our hostages is a sacred and supreme task — and I am obligated to it together with my colleagues.” Then he cited the 12th century Jewish philosopher Maimonides, by saying, “there is no greater precept than redeeming captives.”
So let’s look at this from a Jewish lens for a moment, because it has bearing on the situation Israel finds itself in. Not surprisingly given Jewish history, Jewish texts have much to say about hostages and the price to free them. Maimonides writes that redeeming captives takes precedence over supporting the poor or clothing them. That’s because the problems of being a captive include being hungry, thirsty, unclothed, and in danger of their lives. He writes that ignoring the need to free captives violates the Torah and misses the opportunity to perform positive deeds. The Book of Deuteronomy warns not to harden your heart or shut your hand against your needy kin. The Book of Proverbs admonishes not to refrain from rescuing those taken off to death.
So we have a solid Jewish grounding for the importance of freeing hostages. But it isn’t absolute. Writing around the year 200 CE, the sages argued that for the purposes of tikkun olam — the betterment of the world — it is not permissible to redeem captives for more than their monetary value, or to help them escape. For both actions might prompt the captors to treat the other hostages more harshly, which would increase their suffering. The Babylonian Talmud, a separate text, agrees with this position. Why? To spare the community the burden of an excessive ransom which could lead to its impoverishment; and to deny the captors an incentive to take more captives and increase their ransom.
We’re all familiar with this latter dilemma, as it forms the basis of the maxim “we don’t negotiate with terrorists.” And, of course, hostages should be freed because they shouldn’t have been taken in the first place. The expectation that Israel should have to give up anything to get back children who were brutally stolen from their homes is absurd, and shame on the world for not at the very least paying lip service to this. Paying Hamas suggests that the hostages were somehow rightfully theirs.
Yet there is philosophy and then there is reality. We don’t leave four year olds with terrorists when we can get them back. Israel has been in utter agony since October 7. The country has placed an existential level of importance on getting the hostages home. People even talk about Israel’s legitimacy as a nation-state resting on this goal. So getting any hostages back is a huge victory. And while the pause in fighting means that Hamas has time to regroup, making the Israeli army’s job that much harder, that’s what the army is there for: soldiers take the burden of risk away from civilians and onto themselves. It’s another reminder of what Israel’s soldiers are doing in Gaza. And the opposite of Hamas, which is unwilling to do the same for the Palestinians.
So the benefit of this deal for Israel is clear: the return of hostages. But what’s in it for Hamas? This is where the dilemmas start revealing themselves.
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The hostage release deal is a sign of both Hamas’ strength and its weakness. Hamas still holds around 183 hostages. That’s 183 opportunities to manipulate the Israeli public and the conduct of this war. The scholar Daniel Gordis writes that Hamas’ deliberate delay in releasing the second batch of hostages on Saturday, “reminded Israelis that we’re in control of very little right now.” He quotes a member of one of the hostages’ home kibbutz waiting for hours in front of the TV. “Nothing has changed. For twenty years, Hamas has decided everything. When they’ll fire rockets. When they’ll fire grenades. When they’ll light fires with balloons. When they’ll attack. They’ve been in charge for decades, and even this war has changed nothing.”
The Israeli military estimates that while a great deal of Hamas’ infrastructure has been destroyed, most of its fighters remain alive, including its top leaders. David Horovitz reports that the estimates are 5,000 gunmen killed, leaving another 20,000-25,000. There are still hundreds of tunnels left. Hamas continues firing missiles into Israel, suggesting that plenty of its military capabilities remain. And so this pause in fighting has a huge benefit for them. Hamas has been trapped underground for weeks now, relentlessly pounded and pursued by the IDF. This pause gives them a desperately needed break: the opportunity to live another day, regroup, resupply, rearm, shore up their defenses, and get organized for another round with Israel.
It also gives Hamas another opportunity: the ability to flee from northern Gaza, where the Israeli army is, to the southern end of the Strip. This is going to hugely complicate things for Israel. The Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur writes that Hamas will still be trapped, but this time “it will have far more troops available, a clearer understanding of IDF strategy and Israeli implacability, and a longer time to have readied the battlefield.” And remember that the south is where hundreds of thousands of Gazans fled from the north when Israel invaded. Hamas will be even more embedded amongst the civilian population than it is now. It will, says Gur, “drive a whole new potential civilian humanitarian crisis.”
And so the question becomes what Hamas does with the hostages. And, here again, we find the terrorists infuriatingly in the driver’s seat. The general thinking is that Hamas will hold on to some amount of hostages until the bitter end. They’ll keep trading the hostages for more pauses in fighting, buying themselves more time. And when they’re down to their last bunker and their last men, they’ll trade the remaining hostages for safe passage out of Gaza.
But there are other ways this could go. Hamas knows that Israel is willing to trade hostages for a pause. The going rate seems to be 10 per day. Hamas still has roughly 183 hostages. That could buy them 18 days. But what if Hamas drops the number down to 5? Now it’s 36 days. What if it’s just one per day? That adds up to six months. What if it’s just a few hostages but only once a week, with the stipulation that Israel has to maintain a week-long pause? You can imagine a scenario in which Hamas drags this out as long as possible, postponing the fighting while they work to rebuild themselves. The question is at one point will Israel’s patience run out?
What if Hamas announces they’ll free half the hostages now in exchange for an end to the war, but will keep the remaining half as insurance against further Israeli attacks? Hamas could continue attacking Israel with impunity, while Israel would be helpless to respond.
What if Hamas uses the hostages to force a stalemate? Israel will then have achieved neither of its two goals: eliminating Hamas and freeing all the hostages. And as Daniel Gordis wonders, what if Israel can’t achieve either one? “Will Israeli citizens move back to the kibbutzim along the Gaza border, where they can be shelled again? Will Israelis move back to the north, which is now emptied of civilians? Or will Israel have ceded territory without even a single enemy boot on our ground? And if we have…in what way has Zionism really changed the existential condition of the Jewish people, which is what it had promised to do?”
As the journalist David Horovitz writes, “To put it in the starkest terms, Israelis know this country has no future if the fighting ends with Hamas still a threat, [Hamas leader Yahya] Sinwar still standing, Hezbollah laughing from across the northern border with 10 times the military muscle, and Iran arming, training and inspiring its proxies while proceeding toward the [nuclear] bomb.”
So let’s not fool ourselves into offering Hamas any goodwill here. They still have hostages, of course, having murdered 1,200 people in cold blood. There are lots of ways Hamas can use the captives to their advantage. It’s a complex chess game played with an implacable foe who knows no boundaries, recognizes no rules, is dedicated to the destruction of human life, and knows how to push Israel’s buttons. The clock has run out on the current exchange. What happens next is anyone’s guess.
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We’re seeing the destruction in Gaza and thinking that Israel is the overwhelming power here, that this is a one-sided war. The hostages are a reminder that it is a far more level playing field than the media and the protestors and the left would have us believe. And as so many have pointed out, the ball is in Hamas’ court, and they can dole out the hostages as slowly and tortuously as possible, or, of course, not at all. Israel is faced with agonizing dilemmas.
Qatar has announced an extension of the deal, which both Hamas and Netanyahu have been supporting. The details aren’t yet finalized, but it will probably be two days with the same 3-to-1 ratio of Palestinian prisoners to Israeli hostages, and continuing fuel and humanitarian aid. The original deal allows for a maximum of ten days of fighting pause, after which Netanyahu and the IDF insist the war will resume. So let’s not get complacent: the hostage deal is not the beginning of the end. There is a long and bloody way to go. 183 innocent people remain in Hamas’ hands.
If your community or institution or local news outlet is looking for a speaker or explainer, you can find me at jewoughtaknow.com and jewoughtaknowpodcast@gmail.com. Thanks so much for your emails and for listening and for telling everyone you know about this podcast. Am Yisrael Chai — the Jewish People live.
© Jason Harris 2023