A few thoughts on the hostage deal

It's wrong

Every thinking person has a stage in his life in which the old network of ideas and assumptions that constitute his mind falls apart and has to be pieced together again with new parts. I’ve had a few, but the most important one happened a decade and a bit ago. That’s when I eventually took my wife and son and packed up to live in the Holy Land. Things I read and learned during that period have a way of sticking firmly in the mind, even those that, in retrospect, seem quite basic, perhaps a little crude. One of those things for me is this (now once again timely) article, split into parts one, two, and three. I quote:

The recent deal concluded by the Israeli government with Hamas – an Islamo-fascist terror organisation that openly declares its purpose of bringing about Israel’s demise – has served to cast in sharp relief the greatest danger facing our nation today: the appalling lack of moral clarity, wisdom and courage which characterise those who would lead us.

The malaise is not limited to the political arena; it permeates the Tora world as well. HaRav ‘Ovadhya Yoseph, spiritual mentor of Shas, supported the deal. Referring to this support, the New York Times asserted: “In an unspoken, little-noticed way, religious tradition informed a real-world decision.” In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

Hazal taught that although pidhyon sh’vuyim (redeeming captives) is a misswa of inestimable importance, it is nevertheless context-sensitive. “CAPTIVES SHOULD NOT BE REDEEMED FOR MORE THAN THEIR VALUE, FOR THE GOOD ORDER OF THE WORLD [so that the captors should not demand excessive ransoms and be motivated to kidnap Jews]. CAPTIVES SHOULD NOT BE HELPED TO ESCAPE, FOR THE GOOD ORDER OF THE WORLD [lest captors put their captives in chains and otherwise maltreat them]” (Mishna, Gittin 4:6, TB 45a).

Ignore the ‘Islamofascist’ bit; it was 2011, and it didn’t seem cringe back then. Fourteen years later, this is still right on the money. Lopsided hostage deals - and, still more, ludicrously lopsided hostage deals - are simply forbidden. The logic is clear: rewarding hostage taking encourages hostage taking, and richly rewarding it encourages it even more. This a priori logic is confirmed ex post facto every single time and, even if you don’t agree with it, that’s the halacha. Of course, the seculars can think what they want, but, Jewishly speaking, this shouldn’t even be a matter of discussion. This hostage deal is forbidden, just like the last one and the one before that.

But that isn’t all there is to say. The article goes on.

The flaw in Rabbi Yoseph’s reasoning, however, runs much deeper. For even if none of the above were true, the Shalit deal would still be utterly wrong because our situation is fundamentally different from that discussed in the foregoing sources…

The lacuna in Rabbi Yoseph’s thinking stems from a mind-set: Galuth(Exile)-Mode Judaism. GMJ focuses on the individual and the community. It is never about the nation. Why? Because in Galuth there is no nation, only a collection of scattered communities and individuals. The issues pertaining to establishing and running a sovereign Jewish state in Eress Yisrael – something we are commanded by the Tora (Sh’moth-Exodus 19:6) to do – are simply not on GMJ’s radar. It is no accident that the return of Klal Yisrael to its homeland, with all the nearly insurmountable challenges that this entailed, not to mention the long dormant aspects of Jewish life that needed resurrection and revivification, could not be and were not undertaken by Jews steeped in the ways and modalities of GMJ, but rather by Jews who by and large had broken with that system…

The Mishna discusses two approaches to freeing captives, viz. paying ransom or aiding and abetting their escape: “CAPTIVES SHOULD NOT BE REDEEMED FOR MORE THAN THEIR VALUE, FOR THE GOOD ORDER OF THE WORLD [so that the captors should not demand excessive ransoms and be motivated to kidnap Jews]. CAPTIVES SHOULD NOT BE HELPED TO ESCAPE, FOR THE GOOD ORDER OF THE WORLD [lest captors put their captives in chains and otherwise maltreat them]” (Mishna, Gittin 4:6, TB 45a). There exists, however, a third option: military action.

To sum up: in exile we had no choice, by virtue of our weakness, but to suppress our natural instincts of compassion and refrain from freeing captives at an excessive price lest we encourage more of the same in the future. Now, as a free nation in our land, we can - and therefore we must - escape this terrible choice through military action. Which is great except it isn’t true.

Before Israel released a thousand unrepentant, fanatic ethnonationalist murderers, to the jubilant applause of the deeply sick Palestinian civil society, in return for Gilad Shalit, the IDF had of course tried to release him by military means, and failed. The story from the Right went that this was because of our lamentable failure to tolerate Palestinian casualties; if we just learned to blast through their human shields then we could release anyone we wanted cost free. As theories go, it sounded plausible enough, and we got a chance to try it out this last year and it turns out, that, no, it’s not true.

Of course, the Rightoid will just claim that we still haven’t killed enough people. Before he said 30,000 would be more than enough; now he says 60,000, perhaps in time it will be six gorillion, who knows, but reasonable people of all nations and creeds agree that Israel had a good crack in the Gaza strip of taking the gloves off. Perhaps we stayed within the bounds of international law, perhaps not, but we definitely didn’t stay very far within those bounds. And yet, we’ve managed to kill around as many hostages as we have rescued, with the one effective method of setting them free being exactly the same as it was in November 2023, namely not fighting.

So we’re still stuck with boring old exilic Judaism, which says no deal minus the victory copium. Could I, in a position of authority, look the hostage families in the eye for even one moment and say that? Obviously not. Our hero Bibi can’t manage it, so what hope do we men of mere flesh and blood have? A rat’s chance in a blender. But it doesn’t change the fact that it’s the right thing to do.

Get more depressed

But I am understating the case quite drastically. It is not merely that Zionism has failed to free us from terrible burdens of choices such as these, it is precisely because of Zionism that we must now face them. Captives are taken not in spite of the state of Israel being constructed where it was and when it was, but because of it. Like, duh. There can be no lie more offensively preposterous than the claim that Zionism makes Jews safer, which is, naturally, why so much effort is invested in proclaiming it. It is obvious - it could not be more obvious - that the only reason we have to discuss now whether and how to free Jewish captives is because of Zionism. It is not merely that the dangers faced by Jews outside Israel are trivial in comparison to those that are there, it is that even these are overwhelmingly a result of Zionism. Ilan Halimi was tortured to death by vermin. These vermin should not be in France; it’s dubious whether they really should be anywhere at all, but there’s a reason they were so desperate to kill a Jew and not someone else. What was it? ANTISEMITISM? Shut up.

There is a pervasive mental sickness that Zionism imposes upon us, an auto-retardation in which identification of simple cause and effect becomes impossible. You set up tent in a cave; there is a nest of killer bees in the cave; the killer bees keep stinging you. What do you mean? Do you love killer bees? Don’t you know killer bees have been stinging people for centuries before I entered this cave? Why are you apologizing for killer bees? Shut up.

But I am still understating the case. Zionism does not only impose upon us the burden of this decision, it ensures we will make it wrongly. The primitive looks at power and equates it with freedom; he sees the king and his magic stick and says ‘if I had that magic stick, I could do whatever I want’. But the man with the stick knows better. ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown’ or, translated into modern English, ‘it’s tough out there for a pimp’, or, in Nerd, ‘a wide range of social and economic factors impose systemic constraints on elite political actors, which means that they tend to do similar things in similar situations regardless of ideology, which, if it presents too much of an obstacle, will be modified until it doesn’t’. You wouldn’t do this hostage deal; I wouldn’t do this hostage deal, but no-one asked you to do a hostage deal because you’re not in a position to do it or not. And if you would be, you would.

(Here ends the coherent part of the article. The rest is kind of meandering nonsense, but I typed it out now, and I’m not going to delete it. Content go brrr.)

You looked in the mirror, and an Arab was staring back

Deal or no deal, every war ends. There are many reasons why this war has to end eventually. The obvious ones are economic, social, diplomatic etc. But there are more. Here’s a video: