Yossi Alpher is an independent security analyst. He is the former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, a former senior official with the Mossad, and a former IDF intelligence officer. Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent APN's views and policy positions.
Q. At times it seems that neither PM Netanyahu nor Hamas leader Sinwar really wants a hostage-for-prisoner exchange deal. Why? What don’t we understand about their value systems?
A. Let’s start with Sinwar. Following Hamas’s barbaric October 7 attack on Israel’s Gaza Periphery, I assessed that Sinwar had a number of objectives. One was to restore the Palestinian struggle, led by Hamas, to a position of primacy in world public opinion. Mission accomplished. Another was to torpedo efforts to form a US-Saudi-Israeli-led front against Iran and its proxies, among them Hamas. Here the Iranian-led Resistance Front has a mixed record.
Yet a third objective was, in my understanding, to free Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails. Sinwar himself, after all, was freed in a 2011 prisoner exchange and had frequently expressed his commitment to freeing those left behind at that time. This was Hamas’s presumed reason for taking so many hostages on October 7.
Yet in the November 2023 exchange--the only one to date--Hamas released around 100 hostages in return for only Palestinian women and juvenile prisoners held by Israel. Currently Hamas has negotiated the release of hundreds of hard-core terrorists from Israeli jails in return for only a portion of the hostages (meaning yet another deal will still be negotiable), yet balks at fulfilling the deal due to objections regarding IDF deployment in the Strip and demands for yet more imprisoned terrorists.
Either Sinwar fancies himself a master negotiator, or the release of his fellow Hamas terrorists is less urgent to him than I thought. It can wait while Hamas’s Iranian and Hezbollah allies ostensibly craft an Islamist Resistance Front victory over Israel that dwarfs October 7. Alternatively, it can wait while Israeli society fragments even further.
Q. Meanwhile, how and why can Netanyahu ignore the demand of so many Israelis to soften some of his coalition’s conditions for a hostage deal?
A. Indeed, doesn’t Netanyahu share the Israeli/Jewish value system that prioritizes collective responsibility and return of the hostages, alive, above all else? Does his coalition really shrug indifferently and double down on its negotiating demands when six hostages are brutally executed? And doesn’t a sense of responsibility, even guilt, for the disaster of October 7 dictate to Netanyahu and his coalition an obligation to free the hostages without delay?
Sadly, the answer to these questions appears to be ‘No’. All 64 members of the coalition’s majority in the Knesset appear to reply in the negative. Their representatives in the Cabinet can raise their hands in support of Netanyahu’s deal-breaker insistence on maintaining a semi-permanent IDF presence along the Philadelphi Corridor (separating the Gaza Strip from Egyptian Sinai) because their value system enables them to. (The sole exception, Defense Minister Galant, does not support Netanyahu’s stance on Philadelphi and a hostage deal yet nevertheless does not resign.)
Q. What values does this attitude reflect?
A. First and perhaps foremost for at least some Likud ministers, pure opportunism, meaning a lack of any values. If a hostage deal means the fall of the coalition (because far-right messianist ministers leave it in protest), these ministers will lose their jobs, their perks and their prestige. They could conceivably lose new elections due to public anger that overrides, at least temporarily, their growing demographic advantage in Israeli society at large. For some, that is reason enough to mount obstacles to a prisoner exchange.
Then there are the ultra-Orthodox ministers, whose moral code is dictated by their rabbinical leaders. The latter value above all else the generous budgets the coalition allots for their educational institutions, their housing, etc., and the support they get for avoiding military service. Note that not a single hostage is an ultra-Orthodox Jew.
Look too at the messianist National Orthodox, led by key ministers Ben Gvir and Smotrich. They see this war as an opportunity to expand their ultra-nationalist influence in the army and the population at large, to incite violence in the West Bank and to prepare to expand settlements there and resettle the occupied Gaza Strip. For all this to happen, the war has to continue. A prisoner exchange that even temporarily stops the war is thus to be rejected. At least some Likud and ultra-Orthodox ministers are apparently also sympathetic to these pro-war, pro-settlement values.
Above and beyond all these particularist coalition values affecting the hostages, there is the presumed political affiliation and value system of most if not all of those hostages: kibbutzniks, leftists, secular Jewish nationalists. All the government-sponsored talk of national unity and solidarity in confronting Israel’s Islamist enemies cannot conceal the contempt that many in Netanyahu’s coalition, from the prime minister on down, have for the values represented by the hostages.
To what extent will attitudes toward this ‘bunch of lefties” and “goyim” who have ‘forgotten Jewish values” (it’s all on the record) and once actively sought peace with their Gazan neighbors affect the priority attached to ransoming them? To be sure, many secular, left and centrist Israelis evince similar contempt for Haredim and messianist settlers as well. Israeli society was fragmenting even before this war. But note: the right-religious are clearly winning the demographic battle of the ballot and their values will almost certainly win the electoral battle in the years ahead.
Note the key contrast here with the United States. The US is also a critically fragmented and divided society, but one where right-religious-racist elements are demographically a shrinking minority who can only fall back on unfounded and incendiary claims of electoral fraud. But wait? Won’t an ongoing Gaza war help boost right-Republican chances in US elections on November 5, and isn’t this in Netanyahu’s interest?
The late Haim Peri, artist, kibbutznik and hostage, summed it up in a conversation with fellow hostage Adina Moshe, both from Kibbutz Nir Oz, in a Gaza tunnel shortly after their abduction by Hamas on October 7. We’ll be freed within two months, Moshe argued. “We have a country [that looks after us]”.
“We have Bibi and we’re leftists”, Peri replied. “It will take two years.”
“But I’m not a leftist,” Moshe protested. “Yet you’re from Nir Oz,” Peri replied. Moshe returned to Israel in the November exchange. Peri has died in captivity.
Q. Can this get more cynical than that?
A. Yes. Dead hostages appear to serve the interests of both Netanyahu and Sinwar. It is certainly possible to assess that, the smaller the number of live hostages in Hamas’s tunnels (probably no more than 60 until and unless more are reported dead or their bodies found by the IDF)), the lower Hamas’s bargaining power to stop the IDF offensive and release its prisoners from Israeli jails.
That means, correspondingly, the weaker is pressure by the Israeli public on Netanyahu to stop the war and do a deal, and the lower the likelihood that messianist warmongers Smotrich and Ben Gvir will bring down the government in protest. Ergo (according to this reasoning), let the hostages die and proceed with the war.
Meanwhile, Hamas is apparently killing Israeli hostages not only to prevent their liberation by the IDF. It reportedly does so to signal Israel to make concessions for their release, or out of anger at Netanyahu’s insistence on holding onto the Philadelphi Corridor.
Hamas has punished hostages both in retribution for reported Israeli mistreatment of Hamas prisoners, and after the rare successful IDF rescue operation. Note that only eight Israeli hostages have been freed by the IDF, while 105 hostages, some non-Israeli, have been repatriated through exchange deals. At least 27 who entered the Strip alive on October 7 have died in captivity.
Then there is what can only be described as Israel’s growing preoccupation with dead hostages. The IDF endangers soldiers’ lives to disinter the bodies of hostages in Hamas-held territory and bring them to burial in Israel. Rare is the family of the dead hostage that openly speaks out against this practice with its toll in casualties. TV news and the web are dominated by funerals, eulogies, interviews with anyone even remotely related to a dead hostage.
Q. Surely at least some pragmatic cost-benefit calculations are involved in decisions leading to dead hostages . . .
A. There is a school of thought in Israel that argues that the presence of hostages held by Hamas, whether on October 7 when withdrawing from Israel to Gaza, or today, should not be allowed to dictate the course of a war that has taken so many lives and whose outcome could affect Israeli security for a generation. The IDF has its ‘Hannibal’ directive to target terrorists fleeing with hostages at the risk of killing the hostages. If the IDF bows to the hostage families’ demand--made following Hamas’s execution of six hostages before IDF rescuers could reach them--that the IDF refrain from further rescue attempts, the war, so the argument goes, may be extended endlessly.
Q. Bottom line?
A. The presence of dead Israeli hostages in Gaza has become an unintended strategic dimension of this conflict. In contrast, the presence of live Israeli hostages in Gaza is being systematically downgraded in significance by a cynical Netanyahu and his coalition of fanatics and sycophants.
Israeli values of solidarity and providing a safe refuge for all Jews dictate that the government make all concessions needed to rescue the remaining live hostages. Hamas can (again) be dealt with when the smoke clears. Hamas is an evil Islamist-extremist organization that can be counted on to provide ample justification.