Benjamin Netanyahu’s problem is his own moral cowardice
It appears that Hamas shot their captives because they feared the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) were closing in. The terrorists murdered the hostages to thwart their rescue before running to save their own skins. A section of the Israeli public has accused the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, of having signed the hostages’ death warrant by refusing to agree to a ceasefire deal that it is thought would have released them.
In Israel, where I am now, tens of thousands of people have been on the streets demanding an immediate ceasefire, while Israel’s main trade union called a general strike to ramp up the pressure. Yet a United States-brokered ceasefire deal has been on the table for months to which the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Netanyahu had agreed but which the Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar, then rejected.
Hamas is demanding that Israel leave the Philadelphi corridor, the strip of land on the Gaza-Egypt border under which Hamas has smuggled in weapons and equipment; leave Rafah, where the IDF is grinding down the remaining Hamas battalions; stop the war; and guarantee not to kill Sinwar. In other words, its ceasefire conditions are victory for Hamas and Israel’s surrender.
Netanyahu’s critics claim that he is motivated solely by venal political considerations. What planet are they on? Do they really think he can settle for a deal that would allow Hamas to recover and carry out its threat to repeat the October 7 pogrom again and again until Israel is destroyed? A deal that, by rendering worthless the supreme sacrifice made by the 700-plus Israeli soldiers who have been killed since October 7, would mean Netanyahu would never be forgiven?
Such an Israeli surrender would also galvanise and further empower Hezbollah and Iran, which have pledged to wipe Israel off the map.
You don’t have to be a Netanyahu fan to see that he had no other option. No prime minister would have agreed to such surrender terms.
Sinwar is persisting with the infernal strategy he has deployed ever since October 7: using the hostages’ plight as the supreme psychological weapon to force Israel to surrender.
Israelis are braced for what may follow: that Sinwar will steadily murder more and more hostages to tighten the screw. The more horror and outrage he provokes among the Israeli public, the more pressure will be exerted upon Netanyahu to surrender.
Given their unthinkable 11-month ordeal, no one should criticise the hostage families who are supporting this ceasefire campaign. However, other hostage families are urging the government to continue to victory. As they have observed, the “ceasefire now” protests have been organised by activists – including politicians, former army top brass and intelligence officials – who have been trying to lever Netanyahu out of power for years. And now they are weaponising the hostages’ plight to do so.
Monstrous as this campaign against Netanyahu is, there is a truth he has not had the guts to acknowledge. He has consistently set out two simultaneous war aims: to return the hostages and to defeat Hamas. But these aims were always in potential conflict with each other. From the start, Hamas used the hostages as leverage for victory. If the terrorists were trapped or losing the war, the hostages would no longer be useful and so Hamas would kill them.
The only reason Hamas agreed to the week-long ceasefire last November, when 105 hostages were released, was that they needed the time to regroup and re-equip themselves. So unless the IDF could rescue the remaining hostages, they were always – tragically – likely to be murdered.
The IDF has clearly been desperately trying to reach these captives to free them. It has either been unable to find them in the miles of underground tunnels or has been unable to mount a rescue that doesn’t get them killed.
From the start, Israel has faced a hideous dilemma: that winning the war would almost certainly entail the murder of most of the hostages, while prioritising the hostages’ freedom would mean Israel’s surrender to an enemy bent upon genocide.
As it was, America’s unrelenting insistence on a hostage deal put Israel under continuous pressure to surrender. Netanyahu has resisted that pressure, as a result of which Israel is winning the war in Gaza.
However, he made a bad mistake. He never told the public the truth – that his two war aims were in potential conflict with each other. He never told them that while he would do everything to save the hostages that wouldn’t further imperil the country, he could not sacrifice the country to save them.
It would have taken a leader of rare moral courage to have said that. Netanyahu is not that leader. He is a political and strategic genius; he is also a moral coward.
As a result, Netanyahu hasn’t taken the country with him, even though he has pursued a war strategy most people support. But they also want the hostages back home. With the discovery of the hostages’ bodies at the weekend, that dual pledge cruelly came apart.
Israel has no option but to press on until victory. Israelis, though, are braced for more unbearable agony to come.
The Times
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