Israel is in the midst of a perfect storm: an ongoing war whose end is uncertain, and which has serious consequences for Israel's deterrence power; an avalanche let loose on our international standing; loss of confidence in state institutions and the elected leadership; fierce internal discord between identity groups.
Each of these alone is enormous, but according to a significant swath of the public – and certainly most of the media – all these urgent matters are secondary to the fate of the remaining hostages. All these issues are intertwined, and the hostage situation cannot be isolated from all the rest. Yet it is worth noting that with all the troubles piled up on the national table, a deal to free the hostages is seen by many as ground zero.
The Israeli seismograph, in the last year and a half, has registered countless shocks beneath the ground we stand upon, but the thick and jagged fault line threatening a quake of enormous magnitude seems to run directly under the hostages – and their future.
We take extreme measures when our citizens are seized by our enemies: to redeem captives, the State of Israel sometimes acts with tremendous courage and determination (Operation Yonatan in Entebbe almost 50 years ago and Operation Arnon just last month are testament to this), while in other cases it has acted with kowtowing submission (the Jibril, Tenenbaum, and Shalit deals).
In 2006, Israel went to war over two captives (Regev and Goldwasser) in Lebanon and now refuses to stop the war for the sake of releasing 115 hostages. Israel is able to endure the loss of soldiers in battle – most Israelis, like the binding of Isaac, are willing to send their children into battle because they understand that is what sovereign national existence requires, but the capture of civilians or soldiers provokes a different, much more turbulent dynamic.
In general, the attitudes of different identity groups vary with respect to a hostage deal: religious nationalists tend to place the collective, national interest above the personal interest. And so it follows, according to their perspective, that winning the war is paramount and the release of the hostages is a secondary result. By contrast, the liberal public sanctifies the individual and believes that the state is meant to serve them, not the other way around. This is why the return of the hostages is a supreme goal.
The two positions are incoherent: As long as the release of the hostages is seen as essential to preserving Israeli "togetherness" – and there is no doubt that this is the view of many – then the religious nationalists, who are sensitive to the collective, should put a deal at the top of the priorities list. Solidarity and the covenant of fate come first.
And so it goes for the opposite position too: it is reasonable to assume, and the past proves it, that the release of hundreds of murderers as part of a deal will result in the loss of many lives later. The Shalit deal gave rise to Sinwar, who engineered the October 7 slaughter. Therefore, the liberals should oppose a deal if they sanctify the individual’s life (even if the identity of future murder and kidnap victims is unknown to us).
It is interesting, even moving, to see that the current discussion regarding the fate of the hostages also draws its strength from Jewish historical memory. The public space in Israel – bridges, fences, billboards – is awash in quotes from our sources, which are deployed as convincing evidence by both sides. While the religious nationalist public focuses on Mishna Gittin (4:6): "We do not ransom captives for more than they are worth, due to Tikkun HaOlam," the big hit of the liberal public, the dominant banner along the roads of Israel, is taken from the Rambam (Maimonides) on the Laws of Gifts to the Poor: "There is no greater mitzvah than the redemption of captives."
This distillation has great cultural and symbolic value. It is a cross-camp expression of the state's Jewishness on a "non-religious" level. It turns out that when a weighty dilemma is placed on the national scale, many seek to base their positions on precepts and ideas developed by the Jewish civilization over thousands of years.
It is likely that our acute sensitivity to the welfare of the hostages, which is difficult to find among other nations, is related both to the foundational story we tell ourselves every day – the Exodus from Egypt, from captivity to freedom, and to the tragic experience of life in exile, when the capture of Jews, usually to extort money, was a widespread phenomenon. Indeed, the Jewish bookshelf is filled with tragic precedents for the ways previous generations coped with captivity by non-Jews.
Prof Yedidia SternPhoto: Avia Stern But is it possible to conclude from our many illustrious sources how the dilemma of the captives should be handled today? The answer is no. Halacha does guide us to a high moral sensitivity toward the captives, but Halacha from the era of exile should not be implemented in the era of Jewish sovereignty. In exile, the considerations were "narrow": protecting individuals and communities from physical and financial harm by those who ruled over them. Today, in the nation-state of the Jewish people, the considerations must be "broad": national security objectives.
The attention and sensitivity to the mitzvot of redeeming captives must not be blunted. Captivity, in a certain sense, is harder than death, because the captive (and his or her family) are dying little by little, in a state of suspended animation. It is permissible to risk human lives – even many – for the sake of the hostages, but the decision for or against a deal must not stem from heartbreak, feelings of guilt ("we abandoned them"), sectarian preference, or religious imperative. The only criterion for the decision is rational thought, weighing the advantages and disadvantages from the aggregate perspective of national security.
Prof Yedidia Stern is president of the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI) and professor (emeritus) of Law at Bar-Ilan University.