A Moral Case Against the Israeli Hostage Deal

Early this morning, Hamas and Israel agreed to a hostage deal: 30 children and 20 women will return to Israel, in exchange for five days of cease-fire and 150 Palestinians who are in Israeli custody and have been accused or convicted of serious crimes. Each additional 10 Israeli hostages freed will buy another day of respite from fighting. In arguing for the deal, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the return of hostages “a sacred duty” and quoted the 12th-century sage Maimonides, to the effect that redeeming Jewish prisoners (pidyon shvuyim) is a great mitzvah. (Islam commands a similar duty to free prisoners.) Netanyahu omitted mention of the various restrictions on this blessed activity—the most important of which is not to overpay for hostages, or do anything else that might encourage more hostage-taking. The far-right segment of his government split on the deal, with three ministers from the very-very-far-right Otzma Yehudit voting nay and 35 others consenting. The only-slightly-less-far-right Religious Zionist Party eventually voted yes on the deal.

For the moment, the mood inside Israel is tentative relief—which will turn to immense relief the moment the children start crossing the border and running into their families’ arms. (Two of the Israeli children on the exchange list are relatives of Yifat Zaila, whom I spoke with in Israel a few weeks ago.) Under these circumstances, one understands why Netanyahu might have ignored the other part of Maimonides’s recommendation. Anyone who wants to think about cold calculus now, however, might consider a document that makes the case against paying for the freedom of hostages. “We maintain that no compensation should be given” for the freedom of the innocent, it says. To pay for freedom would be “a surrender of the great fundamental principle” that hostages are not the property of hostage-takers, and that “if compensation is to be given at all, it should be given to the outraged and guiltless” victims of the crime, rather than to the criminals themselves.

These lines appear not in a statement from Otzma Yehudit but in one of the great moral documents of the 19th century, the 1834 Declaration of Sentiments of the American Anti-Slavery Society. In it, William Lloyd Garrison rejected the notion that slaveholders should be compensated for the freedom of the roughly 2 million men, women, and children in American bondage. Even at the time, it was clear that paying off slaveholders might avert a civil war and hasten the freedom of many slaves. But to make a deal with slaveholders would, he reasoned, amount to a cease-fire with an enemy whose total, unconditional surrender was the only acceptable outcome.

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Garrison’s colleague Frederick Douglass shared his distaste for buying slaves’ freedom but evolved a more Maimonidean outlook. He understood the economic arguments against buying slaves and feared that to do so “would be giving the slaveholder a stimulus to have such commodities for sale.” In 1849, he wrote that “every act of purchase enhances the market value of human chattels, and makes the monsters cling to their property with a more tenacious grasp.”

But Douglass did not demand that the buying of freedom stop, if that was the only way to achieve it. In 1846, Douglass had himself been bought by an English Quaker for $711.66 and freed legally, after claiming his freedom by escape in 1838. The payment bothered him, as the Israeli deal will surely gnaw at the conscience of Israelis for some time. He opposed buying slaves—and yet he knew that the value of his ability to travel freely in America, speaking up for abolition, was far greater than a few hundred bucks.

Eventually he came around to the idea that freedom might come through diabolical deals (“covenants with Death,” in Garrison’s famous phrase). In 1847, Douglass wrote that the payment for his freedom was made “not to establish my natural right to freedom”—that was inalienably his, and to buy it would be repugnant—“but to release me from all legal liabilities to, slavery.” He likened the sale to paying off a fraudulent debt collector who was hassling him for a debt he did not owe. Paying off such a villain would be an ugly business, but not immoral. “To say I sanctioned his right to rob me, because I preferred to pay rather than go to jail, is to utter an absurdity, to which no sane man would give heed.”

He drew a distinction that may be relevant to today’s swap, comparing deals cut between slaveholders and slaves and those between slaveholders and powerful benefactors who could haggle as equals. He reasoned that slaves need feel no scruple if a rich benefactor chose to buy and free them. That a slaveholder would be enriched was deplorable. But if the expense was paid by another, such as his Quaker patron, then the transaction was false on both sides: The slaveholder had no right to own him, and the Quaker had no right to buy him. It was a bullshit transaction from the start, a legal fiction that did not degrade his moral standing.

Moreover, he became open to the idea of public payment, on a sort of debt owed by society for having abided the existence of slavery. By the 1850s, Douglass supported the idea of mass emancipation by purchase. He endorsed a plan by the prolific abolitionist slave-buyer Gerrit Smith to pay slaveholders $400 million, roughly a tenth of the GDP at the time.

[‘THERE WILL PROBABLY BE A CEASE-FIRE. AND THEN THEY WILL JUST BE NAMES.’]

Here it may seem that the moral analogy favors those who oppose the hostage deal: Israel’s compensating Hamas for the kidnapping of Israelis would be a reward for a war crime—payment by the victims, for freedom that is the victims’ by right. Douglass found such transactions abhorrent. But one can see this situation another way—and in my conversations with hostages’ families, I have found that many do. Although they find the idea of Hamas’s compensation grotesque, they see the act of paying as a debt owed by Israeli society to the abductees and their families, for having left them defenseless against monsters. If the release of Palestinian prisoners and a hiatus in military operations is a bitter price, it must be borne by Israel as a whole, because otherwise it would be borne by the hostages themselves. Their pain must be nationalized.

In this view, Israel is collectivizing its own sin, the sin of rewarding hostage-taking. It is also taking on a collective burden to respond, to end the possibility of future hostage-taking. Most Israelis seem to believe that this collective undertaking should be military, and that huge civilian casualties, overwhelmingly Palestinian, should be budgeted into that military objective. One can doubt whether this response is wise, and still concede that Israel’s pain should be spread equally among Israelis.

If the deal goes through, expect scenes of joyful returns, as well as renewed outrage at Hamas as the hostages recount their ordeals. And this tranche of hostages is probably the easiest to negotiate for. Extending the cease-fire through future releases might get more contentious, if Hamas finishes letting out children and women and starts demanding more valuable Palestinian prisoners in exchange for military-age Israelis and soldiers.

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For many Israelis, the deal is already a matter of regret. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir wrote today that it sets a “dangerous precedent,” while acknowledging that it was one among many bad alternatives. He said the deal helped Hamas, not only by freeing its “terrorists,” but also by freeing it of international outrage over its keeping women and children in dungeons. The cease-fire, he wrote, will give Hamas air to breathe, when Israel should instead strangle it stone-dead without delay.

But for many more Israelis, jubilation at a partial and imperfect deal still overrides the pangs of conscience about its downsides. William Lloyd Garrison was similarly unable to maintain his objections to deals when faced with the possibility of freeing any particular individual. “To save a fellow-being,” he wrote in 1847, “it is no crime sometimes to comply with even unjust demands.”