email #41 — a few very basic facts to remember about 'deal-making' on gaza

[Leon Kraiem]

Hi friends.

The hostages have been in captivity for 725 days.

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I don't normally get into too much analysis on these emails, but I'm going to lay out a few points that I think are both (a) incontrovertible and (b) often (implicitly) controverted. I've made these points before, but amid all the coverage and conversation of the last 24 hours, they bear repeating, I think. 

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1. The overwhelming majority of Israelis have never evinced any interest in taking over Gaza; a definitive majority of Israelis have long said they support ending the war, even knowing the probable cost of leaving Hamas in power, in order to get the hostages back. All Israel has ever wanted is for the hostages to be freed, and for Gaza to be governed by people who don't want to destroy Israel.

2. If Israel didn't care so much about getting our hostages back, we wouldn't be in a bind. We'd take over Gaza, defeat Hamas, and replace its government. Ideally, we wouldn't have to govern it, but we could if we had to. We can't defeat Hamas, however, because to do so we'd have to sacrifice the hostages in the process. And so we have refrained from defeating Hamas, despite all the rhetoric, to keep Hamas alive enough to keep the hostages alive. 

3. If, at any point over the last two years, Hamas had handed over the hostages and agreed to cede control of Gaza to people who don't want to destroy Israel — including the PA — the fighting would have ended within 24 hours of the first hostage's release.

4. Hamas has not only refused to do that, they've refused to hand over the hostages in a drawn out process, in exchange for thousands of Palestinian prisoners, in deals that would likely have left them ruling Gaza when all was said and done. The Biden administration repeatedly pushed deals of this sort. Israel generally refused at the decision-point, but if Hamas had unequivocally accepted, we'd have been in a very different place, and likely have been forced by the US to go with it anyway — after all, it's the US that supplies our ammunition. 

5. The reason Hamas has refused is that they know how much leverage they have so long as they hold our hostages. They know that Israel will pay unimaginable prices to get our people back — they know this because that's how this war started in the first place; we released 1,027 terrorists in exchange for one soldier, and one of those terrorists went on to mastermind October 7. 

6. If Israel were willing to get the hostages killed, then Hamas would release them. That would provide an upper limit to how much they can ask in exchange. Then it would be a structurally normal negotiation, just one that's horrific in its content. 

7. The right in Israel understands this, and Trump understands it. Hamas also understands it. They all think that the Israeli left — you could argue with my terminology here, but I think it's appropriate, and I think that all of Israel is, in its bones, leftist in this way, and I say this with no negative connotation — is crazy, because by prioritizing the hostages over winning the war, Israel is losing the war and losing the hostages both. 

8. However, Israel is basically willing to commit national suicide in order to return 20 living hostages and 28 dead bodies, and we cannot bluff as though we're not. 

9. The only party that has to agree to a deal is Hamas; the only thing that will cause them to agree to one is if the consequences of saying no are worse than the consequences of saying yes; those consequences can only be created by either caring less about the hostages, or finding new ways to hurt Hamas that won't get the hostages killed. 

10. If this deal accomplishes what others haven't — and I certainly hope it will — that won't be because of anything in the deal itself. It will be because circumstances on the ground have changed. 

11. They will either have changed because Israel has come to care less about the hostages, and/or because new ways of hurting Hamas, without killing the hostages in the process, have been unlocked, discovered, or invented. 

Donald Trump is not a master deal-maker, and this is not a master-deal. But he's not so smart as to be stupid in the particular ways that overeducated liberal Westerners are stupid. 

He lives in a world of fantasies and delusions, but even he is not so fantastical and delusional as to think Hamas wants peace. His brain is addled by conspiracy theories about voting machines and Tylenol, but even he is not so terminally conspiratorial as to blame Israel for October 7. He boasts about deporting peaceful people to megaprisons, and cut off lifesaving services to millions of people in poor countries, but even he knows that it's wrong to go on a murder, rape, and kidnapping spree and that it's right to fight to get your people back. 

He's a racist, who insisted on saying "Barack Hussein Obama" in the middle of bragging about how good his relationships are with Muslim leaders; but even he recognizes those Muslim leaders have free will and moral agency, and even he thinks Palestinian civilians deserve to be more than jihadist cannon fodder. 

It shouldn't be much, but it's more than can be said of the diplomats and college students and activists and influencers who have worked day and night for the last two years to keep this war going; to keep the bombs falling, and keep the kids dying, to keep those goosebumps coming and fill the hole in their meaningless, morally confused lives, consequences for the people on the ground be damned. 

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I am alive, and I am well, thanks to others, not all of whom are

Praying for peace
G'mar chatima tova. 

Leon