Until the West breaks free from its artificial constraints on how ruthless it should be in dealing with Hamas, the cycle of sham negotiations and grinding war will continue.
Until the West breaks free from its artificial constraints on how ruthless it should be in dealing with Hamas, the cycle of sham negotiations and grinding war will continue.
S ham negotiations have restarted, but the ordeal of the hostages taken on October 7 remains unresolved. More than a year after being stolen in Hamas’s brutal assault on southern Israel, dozens of captives — men, women, children, and the elderly, Americans among them — remain held as bargaining chips in Hamas’s evil gambit to survive the resulting war.
The imperative to bring the hostages home by any means necessary has only grown in light of the horrifying revelations, compiled in an Israeli Health Ministry report, of the torture that hostages have suffered at the hands of Gazan captors. Negotiations, subject always to Hamas’s constantly shifting terms, are once again floundering. Last week, Hamas leaders once again claimed not to know how many hostages are alive, claimed they are unable to locate others, and dangled ever-changing numbers to prolong negotiations. This is nothing new. Each time progress on a deal seems within reach, Hamas retracts, tightening its grip on the hostages it sees as its ultimate leverage. The group’s backers urge it to hold firm, ensuring that this human tragedy continues to serve the broader aim of increasing global pressure on Israel to stop short of defeating its enemies.
The West’s sense of urgency in securing the hostages’ release only leads Hamas to double down on its strategy, knowing that its enemy, a nation that values human life, grows more likely by the day to devalue the effort to destroy Hamas if it is convinced that such destruction is an obstacle to the effort to get the hostages out. Hamas’s entire strategy is thus to put Israel’s two main — and legitimate — goals, of prosecuting a war against a genocidal enemy and freeing the hostages, at odds with each other.
In a New York Times interview published on January 4, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken acknowledged precisely this dynamic, noting that one of the “major impediments” to getting the hostages home is that “whenever there has been public daylight between the United States and Israel and the perception that pressure was growing on Israel, we’ve seen it: Hamas has pulled back from agreeing to a ceasefire and the release of hostages.”
Meanwhile, families in Israel live in unrelenting anguish. It often turns into misdirected political pressure against Israel’s leadership, as if Israel could take unilateral action that would solve the crisis. But Israel is constrained by the West’s lack of appetite for swift military victory and for relentless pressure on Hamas. The people of Gaza, too, face a grim reality as long as Hamas clings to power at their expense.
The entire region is being held hostage — not just by gunmen in Gaza but by a geopolitical dynamic that rewards Hamas’s intransigence and allows it to frame Israel’s choice as being between achieving its military objectives and its humanitarian priority. Western nations have the power to change that dynamic, by liberating Israel to beat Hamas at its own game. Assuring Israel that it will retain Western support even if it makes and then breaks shambolic promises to Hamas would break this cycle of tragedy and farce. In other words, while Blinken framed the United States’ position as one of disappointment in Hamas’s choices, he and the administration he represents could have taken an entirely different, more active, posture all along. The U.S. could have liberated Israel to achieve its dual war aims in a way that would have made the diplomatic conditions for hostage negotiations significantly more favorable.
Imagine, for a moment, if Israel were to confide in its closest ally, the United States, a radical plan: accede to every demand Hamas makes to bring the hostages home safely. Then, as soon as the last hostage crosses the border, unleash its full military might to restart its still-justified goal of eradicating Hamas once and for all. Such a scenario is far-fetched, not because it lacks logic or justification but because it would provoke discomfort among Western policymakers.
Why? Because Western democracies are bound not only by rules but by norms of conduct that reflect the moral aspirations of liberal societies. These norms, however, do not constrain malevolent actors like Hamas. On the contrary, Hamas exploits our adherence to such principles to advance its own wicked agenda. Our sense of decency becomes their tactical advantage. Yet we are unwilling to beat Hamas at its own game, even for the paramount goals of freeing hostages and defeating the organization that perpetrated the October 7 massacres.
This moral asymmetry paralyzes the West. It disarms us from taking the steps necessary to secure the outcomes, like a just and lasting peace, we say we want. Though our leaders claim to fully support Israel in its mission to dismantle Hamas, they restrain Israel from exploring out-of-the-box options for doing so, worrying about the optics of deception even as Hamas flagrantly employs every deceptive tactic it can in service of evil goals. Generally, we abide by those norms because they are morally right and we need our counterparts to trust us. But neither justification obtains in this case. The morally right outcome is to free the hostages and destroy the terrorists. And retaining Hamas’s trust means nothing to us.
The asymmetry is stark. While Israel agonizes over civilian casualties and global censure, Hamas uses civilians as pawns — human shields, hostages, and propaganda tools. Its plainclothes fighters, hunkered down in hospitals and hiding hostages, have no compunction about violating the most basic tenets of decency. And yet, much of the West remains fixated on getting the hostages back the “right” way.
Until the West breaks free from its artificial constraints on how ruthless it should be in dealing with Hamas, the cycle of sham negotiations and grinding war will continue. Those are difficult chains to break, because it is hard to accept that Hamas’s strategy is to meet decency with proportionate indecency, and that it is simply not “negotiating” in good faith. Of course, that does not mean being flippant about Israel’s war conduct or efforts to protect Gazan civilians. But it does mean being willing to double-cross Hamas and threaten its backers with severe consequences, not further negotiations, if it does not return all the hostages immediately.
For all the talk about being tireless in our efforts to resolve this horrifying episode, the truest test of whether we mean it will be whether we can overcome our own hostage mentality to free our fellow Americans among all those held beneath Gaza today — by any means necessary.