What are Israelis thinking trading hostages for terrorists? I consider it a mistake. But nevertheless, and partly in consequence, I want to focus on one excellent reason for it. It’s something hidden in plain sight, something we all understand so instinctively we can easily forget it, and with it what the conflict is all about.
First, channelling my inner Richard Nixon, once you have paid the Danegeld you will never be rid of the Dane. And if you’re going anywhere near geopolitics, you want to have such an inner voice and listen to it. I still say this deal was an error, and will cost them.
Bad as the Danes raiding England in the Dark Ages were, raping and slaughtering in the name of a demonic pantheon, Hamas and its sacrifices to Baal are worse. Had any Israeli asked me, I’d have said last time you traded one good person for thousands of monsters they included Yahya Sinwar, architect of the October 7 atrocity. You just did it again.
The deal was also a dud because Hamas and its wicked western supporters, as deluded as they are maniacal, are already claiming victory. They’re out there chanting that the arc from October 7, 2023 to January 2025 is yet another glorious triumph in their Allah-given mission to exterminate the Jews and then move on to all the other infidels.
They don’t care that Gaza has been trashed and its people are suffering. They welcome it. Unlike Israelis. And you cannot deal with such people because you cannot reason with them. #HamasDelenda.
There. Had to say it. Still do. But I admire even Israel’s errors precisely because it’s not a prisoner exchange. Both sides know it’s an unequal exchange of a handful of innocents for a horde of killers, with even the “women and children” released by Israel involved in terrorism, though legacy media downplay or deny it.
So why do it? Israelis aren’t stupid. They and the Islamists alike know incentives matter, and if the former will trade on these lopsided terms over and over the latter will keep kidnapping. But Israelis are driven by something far deeper than the superficially practical: a fundamental and abiding conviction that human life is precious.
The contrast with their adversaries could not be clearer or more vital. Both sides know they’re trading the blameless for the vicious. And both are celebrating.
A minor consideration is that Israelis are all in this together, including if they risk their lives in the Israel Defense Forces their government will move heaven and Earth to get them back alive or dead. But the key is a saying that takes us to the heart of the modern Middle East, and beyond: “Whoever saves one life, it is written as if he has saved all humanity.”
Naturally it’s a Jewish saying. And naturally Muslims now claim it as theirs; Chapter 5, verse 32 of the Qur’an says (translations vary) “we have ordained for the Children of Israel that whoever kills a person, unless it be for manslaughter or for mischief in the land, it as though he had killed all men. And whoever saves a life, it is as though he had saved the lives of all men.”
Chapter 5 mostly drones on about how Jews and Christians stink and Islam is the real Israel. But even it specifies the children of Jacob, not Ishmael, as considering every life sacred. And what drives this hostage deal is that, for Jacob, every person is a unique child of God, made in His image and experiencing the universe from their own irreplaceable vantage point, so each must be treated as sacred.
Christianity shares this view. And so, as historian Tom Holland argues in his book Dominion, its spread caused a dramatic, if slow and sinfully imperfect, revolution in how everyone including the state treated the poor, sick, weak, meek, young, old etc. It was so transformative that westerners now mistake for “universal human rights” things that stand on a very particular intellectual and metaphysical foundation and fall without it.
Thus Holland also catalogues statements by, for instance, influential Palestinian scholar Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi that there are no human rights or natural law in Islam, just Allah’s edicts that authorize slavery and offensive war. And ISIS deliberately used crucifixion to show they despised the meek as thoroughly as pre-Christian Romans.
Israelis don’t. They aren’t all paragons of virtue, and theirs isn’t a religious society in the traditional sense; observant believers are minority, if highly influential. But even their secular or perfunctory fellows are mostly very Jewish in ways that include valuing human life profoundly, unlike those who would destroy them and the faith they rode in on.
If you’re having trouble choosing a side in the conflict, or have chosen the wrong one, this mistaken deal should set you right.
National Post