Itamar Ben-Gvir and his Otzma Yehudit Party left the government, rejecting the heartbreaking, frustrating, yet unavoidable ceasefire-for-hostages agreement.
Many of us don’t regret this national in-security minister’s resignation. Yet, Ben-Gvir’s rationale for resigning is regrettable. Leading the party pursuing an “uncompromising, Jewish-Zionist agenda,” Ben-Gvir should have quit long ago, protesting the greater affront to Israeli nationalism: ultra-Orthodox draft dodging.
As a party representing religious Zionists, Otzma Yehudit ignored its constituents’ growing fury over burying so many holy warriors since October 7, while too many ultra-Orthodox rabbis sanctify treason, not self-defense.
It’s a dramatic shift. For decades, religious Zionists indulged ultra-Orthodox exemptions, feeling mitzvah-shamed by haredim. And, deluded into trusting Israel’s fancy-pants hi-tech army, many waved it off, figuring “we” didn’t need “them.”
Well, “we” do. With terrorists metastasizing in Lebanon, Gaza, Judaea, and Samaria, more boots on the ground deter attacks and save lives. More ultra-Orthodox should enlist, respecting pikuah nefesh, Leviticus’s imperative to save life. And, as the number of religious-Zionist graves grows, as more soldiers face permanent disability, yesterday’s indulgences become today’s betrayals.
Protested the ceasefire
Yet rather than resign on these morally clear grounds, Ben-Gvir protested the Hamas ceasefire. It’s clever politically, allowing him to out-hawk Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – but irresponsible existentially. True leaders stand with the people on clear moral issues like serving together, and sit with the people in anguish over morally ambivalent murderers-for-innocents exchanges.
Only demagogues stir the pot when their allies make painful calls.
Admittedly, Ben-Gvir’s many objections to the agreement are valid. I don’t share many American friends’ ceasefire-induced euphoria. This angels-for-devils swap is about appealing to many Israelis as a presidential pardon for Osama bin Laden would have been on 9/12.
Once again, yet another government claiming “we don’t negotiate with terrorists” negotiated and capitulated. It’s painful to watch the world’s silence normalize the cruel strategy of hostage-taking.
It’s hard to know what’s worse: freeing hundreds of murderous Palestinian terrorists who killed our friends to kill again; prolonging the hostages’ agony by drip-drip-dripping freedom for three innocent, long-suffering, innocents week by week; worrying about the 60-plus hostages beyond the first 33 whose fates Hamas will keep toying with indefinitely; or knowing that this evil game puts a “KIDNAP ME” sign on every Israeli’s back – again.
Alas, for Israel, the only option worse than saying “yes” to this arrangement was saying “no.”
Four realities trumped all these legitimate worries:
First, every hostage freed is a blessing – which is why it’s so heartbreaking to endure this schlepped-out psychodrama of weekly minimal releases. Negotiations following the 1973 war freed Egypt’s Israeli prisoners of war over eight days, and Syria’s Israeli POWs over six days.
Still, most Israelis support this abomination because we value life. The hostages and their families have suffered for too long – and most keep suffering.
Second, Donald Trump made it clear: Netanyahu had no choice. We don’t know what Trump promised to secure Israel’s agreement, but we feared Trump’s wrath if Israel resisted.
Third, although Hamas “played the spoiler” in negotiations since May, as former secretary of state Antony Blinken acknowledged, that Palestinian intransigence benefited Israel. Blinken and ex-president Joe Biden falsely claim that today’s deal is unchanged since May.
Reports suggest that this dehumanizing, agonizingly slow, hostage release rate nevertheless is better than initially proposed. And by now controlling the Philadelphi Corridor between Egypt and Gaza during this first phase, Israel has a better chance to slow Hamas’s rearmament.
Finally, most importantly, the context changed. Israel is in a much better position to make this deal with the devil. The war isn’t over. Hamas remains too entrenched in Gaza. But Israel restored what it most lacked October 8: deterrence.
A deal in May would have been before Yahya Sinwar’s death, Hezbollah’s collapse, Iran’s weakening, Bashar al-Assad’s flight from Syria, and the IDF’s disciplined, day by day grinding down of eight-months’ more worth of Hamas terrorists and Gazan munitions dumps. It would have made this horrific war feel like yet another exercise in “mowing the lawn.”
Since last spring, Israel has won decisively, making this war a game changer that again confirmed Israel’s power. That only happened because Netanyahu resisted the Blinken-Biden just-stop-now pressure.
Of course, the two American leaders took credit, as they retired, for Israel’s achievements. Blinken boasted: “The balance of power in the Middle East is shifting dramatically, and not in the way Hamas and its backers hoped or planned.”
Multiple decisions
DECISIONS ABOUT war and peace, ceasefires and hostages, are often as murky as the smoke still choking Los Angeles. Many worried in November 2023 when Israel’s generals insisted the IDF could pause in its efforts – their confidence saved 100 hostages.
As the Talmud advises, “From a debtor, take straw.” In war, as in business, you often have to settle for less. And, as the Scottish guitarist David Russell teaches, “The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross – and which to burn.”
Rejecting this deal, days before Trump’s inauguration would have burned bridges with the mercurial, yet enthusiastically pro-Israel-anti-Hamas-at-this-moment new president, Donald Trump.
Israel is now crossing a smoke-choked, rickety bridge. We have to trust the IDF’s power to redeploy if necessary. We have to trust Trump appointees’ vows that Hamas won’t govern and Iran won’t go nuclear. And we have to trust that each hostage saved, each innocent’s fate clarified, will represent one more step toward the post-October 7 healing Israel needs.
That communal recovery will occur faster, the less we hear from Ben-Gvir and his flame-throwing, tough-judgment-call-dodging, comrades, too
The writer, a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute, is an American presidential historian. His latest book, To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream, was just published.