Another Terrible Hostage Deal
Joe Biden and Donald Trump both claim credit for Israel-Hamas ceasefire deal, which began to be implemented today. I suspect it has more to do with calculations made by the Israelis and Hamas themselves. But in truth, no one deserves credit, because the deal is terrible. The Israelis will release some 1900 terrorists and captured Hamas members in exchange for 33 mostly civilian Israeli hostages (some of whom are not even alive). Many of the terrorists scheduled for release have committed horrific atrocities. Like previous hostage deals with terrorists, this predictably incentivizes future terrorism. You get more of what you reward. Plus, the released terrorists are likely to kill again, as has happened with many of those released in previous deals.
It seems neither the Israeli nor the American backers of this deal have learned the terrible lessons of previous such exchanges. I summarized them in an October 2023 post, which also referenced a 2011 piece, in which I was critiqued the Shalit deal, which was a key factor in leading to the October 7, 2023 attack that started the current war:
The horrific Hamas terrorist attacks against Israel revealed a variety of weaknesses in Israel’s security policies, and perhaps those of some other Western nations, too. But one that has not gotten as much attention as it deserves is the folly of hostage deals with terrorists. Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, the likely mastermind of the [October] attacks, was one of 1027 Palestinian terrorist prisoners released by Israel in 2011, in exchange for a captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. And one of Hamas’s motives for the attack was to use the captured hostages to secure the release of other Palestinian terrorists held by Israel…
At the time of the 2011 agreement, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government was widely praised for demonstrating how much it values the lives of its people. I was one of the relatively few critics of the deal….
While it seems I was right to predict that the deal would cost far more innocent lives than it saved, I had no idea of the enormous extent to which this has turned out to be true. With well over 1000 dead, the terrorist attack in which Sinwar played a key role is by far the worst in Israel’s history, and one of the worst in the entire history of the world. It is also the biggest anti-Semitic massacre since the Holocaust….
Simple Economics 101 says you get more of the kinds of activities you reward. If you reward ho
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