“Do not make covenants with evil people.”
Exodus 23:32-33.
Empty Chairs/ Broken Hearts-Oct 2023
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A better way to free the Israeli hostages
by Madeline Brooks
January 20, 2025
There can be a moral perspective on how one deals with terrorists. Rabbi Manis Friedman says that negotiating with terrorists rewards and encourages them. According to him, it is wrong—indeed, it is definitely immoral—to reward terrorists with commuted prison sentences. Boldness, not bribes, is how one must deal with them, as the Bible instructed millennia ago.
He brings up the daring hostage rescue in 1976 in Entebbe, Uganda. Israeli commandos violated all sorts of international laws and killed the captors of the hostages—but the world celebrated the soldiers anyway because they did not negotiate with terrorists. They did the right thing, states the Rabbi. I would add that the world was also amazed by the boldness and skill of the rescue team. As for more raids in Gaza to free the captives in today’s war, since there were some successful raids, there are reports of suicide bombers surrounding the hostages, cutting short a direct approach.
Suppose your child was kidnapped, Rabbi Friedman ventures. Would you offer the criminals a reward or show them fake compassion to get your child back? No! You would have a right to be outraged. Period. The rabbi has moral clarity. He can call evil evil—and can tolerate knowing that evil exists—unlike many people who try to wish it away or explain it as a misperception or a mere reaction to a bad environment.
Image: Exultant Gaza residents call for the slaughter of the Jews. (X screen grab)
Ari Abramowitz, in the YouTube video The Israeli Guys, references the Bible on the current Israeli hostage problem. “Do not make covenants with evil people.” No deals, no negotiations. Exodus 23:32-33.
In the Biblical Messianic age, the hope is that all will live in peace and fellowship. But we are not there now, and it is a grave mistake for tender-hearted Jews, beleaguered as they are, to imagine otherwise. Acknowledging the bloodthirsty ways of Hamas, Abramowitz comes up with a novel way to get the hostages back home. Israel has hundreds of prisoners: murderers, rapists, beheaders, etc. All it has to do is make very public announcements in Gaza that every hour, a prisoner will be executed in a public and humiliating way until all the hostages are released. This makes sense to me because it plays to the fact that Israel has the upper hand by dint of its military might, even though, sadly, it is not using it.
And what can Israel do about changing the culture of violent Hamas? Forget curriculum changes in children’s textbooks. The problem is deep-rooted, even spiritual. It goes all the way back to warlike Ismael, Abraham’s illegitimate son.
Abromowitz states that Muslims must be proven wrong through military defeat. As Muslims expand their territory, their conviction grows that their god is strong and favors them. So they have to experience that their god is weaker than the Israeli God to accept defeat. That can happen if Jews totally crush Hamas and take Gaza back again. Here, too, Israel does have the upper hand, but it holds back out of a twisted sense of pity for the enemy.
I would add that the books of Deuteronomy and Joshua command the Israelites as they emerge from the desert to take the land of Canaan, which includes Gaza. The Lord ordered every single inhabitant killed to prevent His people from participating in the Canaanites’ “loathsome” customs. (If this sounds mean, you can argue with God, not me.)
Practically speaking, negotiating with terrorists who vow to return to jihad just as soon as they can makes Israel look dangerously weak, as if it devalues itself, inviting new attacks. The United States demanding negotiations looks weak, too. And for every Jew living in the diaspora, our lives are now even more devalued, more threatened. This can and should change.
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