Hostage dilemma reveals Netanyahu’s top priority – himself

Many Israelis believe that Benjamin Netanyahu has blood on his hands. Since the release of 105 hostages through negotiations last November, the Israeli government has chosen the priority of destroying Hamas rather than securing the release of the remaining hostages. 

The families of the hostages have been calling for negotiations for almost a year – their pleas have fallen on the deaf ears of Netanyahu’s coalition. No wonder the families of the murdered hostages have refused to meet him.

Jonathan Dekel-Chen, the father of a hostage, recently told a London radio station: “I think that in a perfect world, (a release) could happen but there is no army in the world that is capable of retrieving hostages who are being held underground in booby-trapped terror tunnels, being used as human shields by terrorists who have no regard for human life – both Jewish life and Palestinian life. There is no choice other than coming to an agreement with Satan.”

Netanyahu, however, has form in moving the goalposts by adding another issue to hitherto completed negotiations. As early as 1998 at the Wye Plantation talks, Netanyahu surprised and infuriated President Clinton by throwing in the release of the American spy, Jonathan Pollard, into the debate. The false news that Pollard would be accompanying Netanyahu back to Israel had already been leaked to the Israeli media. Clinton refused point-blank to release him.

This time, the new additive to the mixture is that Israel must control the 14km-long Philadelphi Corridor which separates Egypt from Gaza. Last week, Benny Gantz, the IDF Chief of Staff from 2011-15 commented: “The Philadelphi Corridor is an operational challenge but it isn’t an existential threat to the State of Israel”.

Yet this spin of an external danger frightens many Israelis after the events of October 7. In a poll, the Israel Democracy Institute noted that 51% of respondents agreed with Netanyahu’s insistence.

In the Diaspora, Jewish leaders have buried their heads in the sand when it comes to officially and publicly criticising Netanyahu. They refer questioners to those who have already condemned the Israeli government while remaining non-committal themselves. Last week, the Institute for Jewish Policy Research in London released a survey which showed that 71% of British Jews believed that Netanyahu had not done enough to rescue the hostages.

This important survey of almost 4,000 respondents indicated that representative bodies of the community are actually unrepresentative. Moreover, many British Jews have come to the realisation that the only way to defend Israel in the public arena is to differentiate between supporting the state and supporting the government.

In the UK, this traditional entrapment of leadership has once again divided British Jews – and in particular those who are campaigning for the release of the hostages. There are some who follow the official line in “Bring them Home” protests and prayer gatherings and tie yellow ribbons around local lampposts.

But there is an expanding group of UK Israelis and British Jews, called “We Democracy UK”. They have demonstrated in Parliament Square, Oxford and Cambridge and in Jewish areas of London in condemning Netanyahu and his far-right coalition.

In Israel, there is a similar split: 90% of the hostages’ families support the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, which has implicitly called for a negotiated deal with slogans such as “Time is Running Out”. Yet they have moved recently towards a bitter denunciation of Netanyahu, following the discovery of the bodies of six murdered hostages two weeks ago.

There is also a much smaller group of hostages’ families, the Tikva Forum, composed of mainly religious Zionists – many of whom live in the West Bank. Some of its members were involved in stopping humanitarian aid from reaching Gaza by holding up trucks and lorries.

The Tikva Forum argues that the deal in securing the release of Gilad Shalit, imprisoned for five years in Gaza, in exchange for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners, was a mistake of huge proportions. Last week, the Tikva Forum called for an end to negotiations, aimed at resulting in a ceasefire and the release of the remaining hostages.

The Tikva Forum agrees with the Likud line that Hamas will not agree to any deal and opposes the Biden plan. The Likud itself regards the growing protests against Netanyahu as dishonest politics by dyed-in-the-wool leftists – after all, many of those killed on October 7 were kibbutzniks.

Despite his absurd comparison of his actions today with Churchill in 1940, when Britain stood alone after the Nazis had conquered much of mainland Europe, Netanyahu hopes to drag out any decision on the hostages until November, when a resurrected Donald Trump might be elected. If Kamala Harris wins, she has indicated a tougher policy towards the current Israeli government than President Biden, while remaining passionately supportive of the Zionist ideal of a Jewish state.

Above all, Netanyahu wishes to remain in office until October 27, 2026 – the scheduled date of the next Israeli election. The collapse of his coalition – perhaps through a deal to secure the release of the remaining hostages – would be an unmitigated disaster for Netanyahu.

According to opinion polls during the last 18 months, his coalition has consistently been unable to attain and surpass the figure of 61 seats in the Knesset required to form a governing body. Likud currently polls around 22 seats out of 120, while a combined opposition can muster well over 61 mandates. It is worth noting that despite the opprobrium directed at Ben-Gvir, according to the polls, his far-right party will do well in the next election.

It is also significant that Naftali Bennett appears to be positioning himself for a comeback if Netanyahu falls. According to the polls, a new party led by Bennett would overtake the Likud but take its constituents mainly from the Centre and the Left – and not from the Right.

In an interview in the New York Times in mid-August, Bennett offered what he believed should have been the conduct of the war after October 7: Seize Gaza’s peripheries without trying to occupy its cities. Provide Gazans with food, water, medicine and safe havens but not the fuel that Hamas needs to operate its tunnels. Use an “ongoing and persistent series of targeted ground raids” to gradually degrade and destroy Hamas’s military over months or years. Offer safe passage out of Gaza for Hamas fighters willing to surrender, probably in exchange for the release of Israel’s hostages.

However, on the US ABC channel in the US last week, Bennett took a much harder line. He claimed that the IDF was only operating at only 5% intensity and that Israel should apply “tremendous pressure”. He then telescoped Hamas and the Palestinians, opposed a Palestinian state and argued that fuel deliveries to Gaza went straight to Hamas.

In general, Bennett’s potpourri of ambiguity, deflection and omission appears to be directed at weaning away Netanyahu supporters and fragmenting the solid wall of Likud supporters.

For many Diaspora Jews, standing silently as the caravan of Netanyahu’s duplicity passes by, passivity is clearly no longer an option.

Above all, Netanyahu has perverted the Diaspora’s understanding of Zionism. According to one of Zionism’s greatest thinkers, Ahad Ha’am (1856-1927), Zionism was also the creation of a Jewish society, unlike the ones left behind - as well as a Jewish state. Ahad Ha’am, Chaim Weizmann’s mentor, argued that there was a vast difference between “a state of the Jews” like any other, and “a Jewish state” based on Jewish values. It is a profound difference which has never occurred to Netanyahu.

We can only hope that in a post-Netanyahu era, the adage of the third century sage, Shimon ben Gamliel, who argued that the three foundations of society were truth, justice and peace, will firmly take root.

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