Did Israel sacrifice security for the hostage deal?

Bonnie K. Goodman
9 min readJan 18, 2025

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By Bonnie K. Goodman, BA, MLIS

Israel and Hamas signed a ceasefire agreement this Friday, ending the 470-day Gaza War that started with the October 7, 2023, attack. However, barely 24 hours later, Yemen launched a missile at central Israel, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem. While Yemen’s attacks are becoming commonplace, what was new with this attack was that the sirens rang at 10:19 am on Shabbat while the majority of Israelis were in services, most at the Torah portion. With so much taking place in makeshift places rather than the synagogue buildings that are the norm in the Diaspora, many Israelis went scrambling. I felt lucky to be home sick because I didn’t have to fight the crowd at my shul’s gym. Did the agreement embolden Israel’s enemies? Two days ago, I expressed to a friend in Montreal my belief that Yemen would interpret the ceasefire as an invitation to intensify their attacks. Sadly, I was right, and you do not have to be a diplomatic or military analyst to make the same conclusion.

While in Israel, the majority supports the agreement. The Israel Democracy Institute’s December 2024 Israeli Voice Index indicates that most Israelis favor a comprehensive agreement with Hamas that would involve a hostage exchange for a ceasefire. Fifty-three percent support the deal, down from 60 percent in July. Fewer than 50% of the public backs a restricted hostage agreement, whereas more than 66% advocate for sustained military pressure on Hamas to secure a more favorable future arrangement.

After teasing a hostage deal for weeks, this week negotiations were in earnest. The three-phase agreement will initiate with a six-week military withdrawal and the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. The upcoming phase, still under negotiation, aims to facilitate additional troop withdrawals and cessation of hostilities; in return, the remaining Israeli hostages will be freed. The final stage will include the completion of military withdrawals and the commencement of reconstruction efforts in Gaza.

During the Friday meeting, the Security Cabinet vote passed with nine in favor and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir voting against the deal. Ben Gvir has threatened to remove Otzma Yehudit from the coalition if the deal passes, and he is sticking to his word. Security cabinet observers David Amsalem (Likud) and Orit Strock (Religious Zionism) also voted against the agreement, but they do not have sway. Netanyahu’s government would collapse if Religious Zionism also leaves. The agreement was passed through a cabinet vote during Shabbat, following seven hours of debates, during which religious members cast their votes in absentia. Haredi leaders supported the deal, but Otzma Yehudit and Religious Zionist Party ministers voted against it, including two Likud members, David Amsalem and Amichai Chikli, who also voted against it. Twenty-four cabinet ministers voted in favor, with eight in opposition; the meeting ended at 1 am.

The Israeli public, particularly the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, has distorted political reality, asking Israel’s government to sacrifice security for a group. Israel will set free thousands of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for 98 hostages. Fighting will stop, and Israel will withdraw from most of Gaza. The agreement is disproportionate. The first of three phases will see the release of 33 Israeli hostages and 1,904 Palestinians, including murderers. This consists of 737 jailed Palestinians with 250–300 serving life sentences, 1,167 detained Gazans after October 7, 47 rearrested prisoners from the 2011 Gilad Shalit deal, and Fatah terrorist Zakaria Zubeidi.

The Israeli government and the IDF still do not know how many of the hostages are alive; the IDF believes 34 are dead. We will release three female soldier hostages on Sunday morning, followed by the release of the Palestinian prisoners in the afternoon. Each Saturday during the 42-day period, we will release the remaining 30 hostages, who include women, children, elderly individuals, and the infirm. The ceasefire will take effect on Sunday morning.

On Wednesday, there was a small protest of not even 10 people at Emek Refaim in front of the gym that Minister of Strategic Affairs and former Israeli Ambassador to the US Ron Dermer attended close to his home. When I asked about the agreement’s disproportionality, a local protest leader said Israelis are worth more than Palestinians, which is why the numbers are so different. Ironically, most people passing by the protest ignored it. The protest doesn’t particularly resonate with the general public. Using the Jewish legal argument of the value of life equally seems ironic, since if a mother’s life is in danger during a pregnancy, the child is always sacrificed while the mother should be saved. The agreement appears to be in reverse; saving the children puts the mother and the rest of the country at risk. With both deals to release the October 7 hostages, the religious have cited medieval scholar Ramban, who claimed, “There is no greater commandment than the redemption of hostages.”

What are the security risks? Are we setting ourselves up for another October 7 attack? I covered every detail of President Barack Obama’s attempts at a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians. Israelis were not willing to risk releasing Palestinian prisoners for peace, and the final release of 400 Palestinians was part of negotiations collapsing in 2014. They did not trust the Palestinians, as subsequent events proved they were right not to. November 2023 was the last time the Israeli government traded Palestinian prisoners. In exchange, Hamas released 105 civilians and four hostages before the weeklong truce in late November. Since then, eight more hostages have been rescued alive, and 40 bodies have been recovered, including three mistakenly killed by the IDF.

This was particularly true following the prisoner swap for Gilad Shalit, which granted Yahya Sinwar the freedom to plan the October 7 attacks. In October 2011, Netanyahu and his government agreed to release 1,027 prisoners in exchange for Shalit’s freedom. Former Member of the Knesset and scholar Einat Wilf told JTA “So many of us felt relief at the Shalit deal, and we know how that ended. 1,027 terrorists. Can we be sure that what was, will not be again?” The impending release of Palestinian terrorists has sparked significant concern. Udi Goren, a cousin of hostage Tal Haimi, expressed his disapproval of the deal, labeling it a “really bad deal,” while also recognizing the perilous nature of the prisoners involved. Goren expressed, “Do I like it? No. They’re insane jihadist murderous terrorists. Is there another way? No, there isn’t. And this is how negotiations work. You need to give something in order to get something. And because we are, at the end of the day, a Western democracy that values human lives, we will give whatever is needed in return in order to get our people back.”

When it comes down to it, we are sacrificing 10 million lives for 98, and how many of the hostages are alive? How many will Hamas let leave alive? Hamas is already threatening to kill more before their release. According to reports on Saturday afternoon, Abu Hamza, representing the Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s Al-Quds Brigades, called on Israelis to halt IDF strikes on Gaza before the ceasefire’s implementation, warning that such actions could endanger or result in the deaths of Israeli hostages before their anticipated release. “The people of the enemy prisoners must demand that the Zionist army stop the bombardment of the last hours, which is the reason for the killing of your children while the resistance is making the final field arrangements for their release. The intensity of the Zionist bombardment leads us towards two paths, the first of which is that the families of the Zionist prisoners receive their children in coffins or [safely] in their homes, and the choice of the last hours is in the hands of the Zionist army alone.”

The United States has a very good policy; they do not negotiate with terrorists, but American presidents have no problem contradicting that principle when it comes to Israel. I care about the hostages’ plight; nothing hurt me more than seeing Hersh Goldberg’s parents, especially his mother Rachel, at the funeral and Shiva, but will a deal like this only put thousands of Israelis in the same place they were as sirens blared on October 7? The weekly protests in Jerusalem, where demonstrators screamed down King George Street and in front of the Prime Minister’s residence, seemed as futile as the anti-Vietnam War movement of the sixties. There was a lot of noise that barely got any coverage even in the Israeli press. So what forced Netanyahu’s hand? It was not the hostage families or the protests.

This time the United States successfully spearheaded an agreement that was against Israel’s best interests. With outgoing President Joe Biden on one side trying to secure a win for his legacy and the strong arm and threats of incoming Republican President Donald Trump, is Israel’s best friend? If you ask protesters on the right against the deal, they blame Trump. Trump has promised to renew arms shipments stopped by Biden, which must have also influenced Netanyahu. No matter which president, Netanyahu is clearly under American influence, rather than the weekly cries from the hostage protesters.

Not all hostage families support the agreement. On Thursday evening, approximately 1,000 right-wing demonstrators convened in Jerusalem to oppose the Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, an event orchestrated by families in mourning and relatives of hostages. Calls were made for Israel to persist in its military actions against Hamas in Gaza until victory, accompanied by some signs of “conquest, expulsion, [and] settlement.” These Israelis on the right are the ones most supportive of Trump.

Netanyahu has always stated that the war’s primary goals are to defeat Hamas and free hostages, but this week his statements do not mention Hamas. However, he supposedly guaranteed his cabinet that Israel has “received ‘definitive guarantees” from both President Joe Biden and President-elect Donald Trump that ‘if the negotiations on phase two of the deal fail, and Hamas does not accept our security demands, we will resume intensive fighting with the backing of the United States.”

Already, the President of Iran was declaring the ceasefire a victory for Hamas, and Hamas allies are behaving the same way. This morning’s missile was the fourth coming from Yemen in the past week. Yemen’s Houthi leader later threatened to watch Israel and keep us in line with the ceasefire agreement; then, in a bold move, they shot a second missile toward the Eilat area in the afternoon. Then a terrorist went on a stabbing rampage in Florentine, Tel Aviv. The attacker was a 19-year-old Tulkarm resident who was in Israel illegally. He stabbed several people, including one seriously, before a citizen shot him dead; witnesses described the chaos at the scene near a busy restaurant in central Tel Aviv.

Even Hamas is balking at naming the three female hostages they will release tomorrow, leading Netanyahu to declare he will not implement the ceasefire until Hamas complies. In addressing the nation Saturday evening, Netanyahu dialed back calling it a “temporary ceasefire” and promising Israel will not stop until “all of its war goals are completed.” History keeps repeating itself; will we ever learn? The agreement is a day old and not even in effect. The backlash and terrorist threats are already intensifying, raising the question of how many more lives will be lost for the 98?

The article used news reports from the Jerusalem Post, The Times of Israel, and the Jewish Telegraph Agency (JTA).

Bonnie K. Goodman, BA, MLIS, is a historian, librarian, journalist, and artist. She is pursuing an MA in Jewish Education at the Melton Centre of Jewish Education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author of the recently released “On This Day in History…: Significant Events in the American Year,” and “A Constant Battle: McGill University’s Complicated History of Antisemitism and Now anti-Zionism.” She has a BA in History and Art History and a Masters in Library and Information Studies from McGill University. She has done graduate work in Jewish history at Concordia University as part of the MA in Judaic Studies, where she focused on Medieval and Modern Judaism. Her research area is North American Jewish history, and her thesis was entitled “Unconditional Loyalty to the Cause: Southern Whiteness, Jewish Women, and Antisemitism, 1860–1913.”

Ms. Goodman has been researching and writing about antisemitism in North American Jewish History, and she has reported on the current antisemitic climate and anti-Zionism on campus for over fifteen years. She contributed the overviews and chronologies to the “History of American Presidential Elections, 1789–2008,” edited by Gil Troy, Arthur M. Schlesinger, and Fred L. Israel (2012). She is the former Features Editor at the History News Network and reporter at Examiner.com, where she covered politics, universities, religion, and news. She currently blogs at Medium, where she was a top writer in history, and regularly writes an “On This Day in History (#OTD in #History)” Feature. Her scholarly articles can be found on Academia.edu.

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Bonnie K. Goodman
Bonnie K. Goodman

Written by Bonnie K. Goodman

Bonnie K. Goodman BA, MLIS (McGill University) is a historian, librarian, and journalist. Former editor @ History News Network & reporter @ Examiner.com.

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