Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute and co-host of its podcast, For Heaven’s Sake. He is writing a book about the meaning of Jewish survival.
On Saturday, day two of the phased release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas, an inexplicable delay occurred. An entire nation kept vigil by watching the TV commentators struggling to fill the airtime. Six long hours later, the emotional news anchor announced, “They’re coming home.” She meant: home not only to their immediate families, but to all of us, the Israeli family.
Never before has Israeli society experienced anything quite like the emotional intensity of this moment. For Israelis, freeing hostages is the litmus test of our credibility as a Jewish state. The religious imperative of pidyon shvuyim, redemption of captives, helped Jews survive through thousands of years of exile and vulnerability. Diaspora communities that lacked military power to rescue fellow Jews from imprisonment or slavery would raise exorbitant funds to buy back their freedom from blackmailers.
Israelis in enemy captivity are an unbearable reminder of the helplessness of exile, a threat to the Zionist promise of Jewish self-defence. In 1976, Israeli commandos freed a hundred Israelis held prisoner by hijackers in Uganda’s Entebbe Airport. By transforming a hostage crisis into a reaffirmation of Zionist empowerment, the Entebbe rescue became emblematic of the Israeli approach to hostage-taking.
Today, though, there is no Entebbe-like rescue. Instead, we have been forced to temporarily suspend the war against Hamas and to release prisoners held for security reasons, some who are terrorists, receiving in return only a partial release of the 240 hostages seized by Hamas. Our inability to rescue them only prolongs the agony – and the shame – of the Oct. 7 massacre.
Israel’s covenant with the Jewish people was to provide it with safe refuge. But on Oct. 7, we failed to save more than a thousand Israelis within our own borders. Nowhere else in the world today are masses of Jews likely to be burned alive with their hands bound behind their backs – or kidnapped by a murderous antisemitic regime. With the Hamas massacre, Israel has become the most dangerous place in the world to be a Jew.
For all the relief at the return of hostages, especially the children among them, there is little celebration. Instead, we watch the hostage releases with a mixture of joy for the reunited families and anxiety for those left behind – and an acute awareness of our failure as a nation to prevent their captivity in the first place.
Most of all, we are tormented by the dilemma of how to proceed. Should we allow Hamas to dangle hostages before us and grant it additional ceasefires, endangering the momentum of the war, or continue fighting until the Hamas regime is destroyed? Is our first priority the return of hostages or removing the threat of a genocidal regime on our border?
That dilemma pits two core Israeli values against each other. Israelis know that our long-term survival in a hostile region depends on military deterrence. Oct. 7 was a fatal blow to Israel’s deterrent credibility, precisely because we were dealt the worst defeat in our history by our least formidable enemy. That signal of weakness invites aggression along our other borders.
Yet Israel not only needs to restore its military credibility in the region. It also needs to restore, within its own society, the credibility of the ethos of solidarity, undermined by the army’s failure to save the massacre’s victims. In placing the well-being of the hostages above other considerations, we affirm that Oct. 7 was an aberration and that we remain committed to each other’s protection.
Our dilemma was summed up for me in two recent conversations with friends. “If we don’t destroy Hamas after what it did to the Jewish people,” one said, “then we have no future here.” Another said with equal passion: “If we don’t prioritize the hostages and uphold our solidarity, we will lose faith in ourselves and Israelis will stop fighting for this country.”
On walls and railings around the country hang posters with rows of little photographs of smiling faces, and the words, “Look Them In the Eyes.” The implicit question is: If your mother or son was a hostage, would you hesitate for a moment to place their well-being ahead of national concerns like “deterrence?”
For the past four days, Israelis have answered that question by remaining riveted to the hostages’ return. In our obsession with every detail of their homecoming is a reaffirmation of our solidarity, a recognition that only by loving each other like family can we survive in a region that sees us as the hated stranger.