By Madeline Brooks | Am Thinker | Jan 20, 2025
Image: Exultant Gaza residents call for the slaughter of the Jews. X screen grab
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.
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.
Madeline Brooks, M.A., is the former head of the New York chapter of ActforAmerica and is a conservative and counter-jihad writer. Her articles have been published in AmericanThinker.com, CanadaFreePress.com, FamilySecurityMatters.org, and elsewhere. Her book, What You Need To Know About Islamic Jihad: Information The Main Stream Media Is Not Giving You, is available on Scribd. She can be reached at ResistJihad@aol.com.
UNLESS-
Netanyahu had a damned good reason, beneficial to Israel, and Not from US pressure, this “DEAL” will spell “finis” to his storied PM reign.
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I don’t know who’ll succeed him, but it will need to be a person capable of standing up to huge International pressures without “blinking first”.
I don’t think that such a person is presently in Israeli politics.
Maybe one who lives in remote parts of YESH, since to live there and be successful, a strong self-worth and unconquering spirit is needed.
In my opinion, for what it’s worth, there won’t be another “Netanyahu” for 50 or more years…-if ever.
@Adam
And 66 are going to J&S, 14 to Jerusalem, only 9 going to Gaza and 21 going elsewhere…
Yes, many many Jews will die because of this oturage.
Israel to release 110 terrorists, 33 serving life terms, including Zakaria Zubeidi
In exchange for the 3 hostages who will be returned tomorrow, dozens of terrorists serving life sentences for murder will be set free from Israeli prisons. Among the released terrorists will be Zakaria Zubeidi.
Israel National News
Israel National News
Jan 29, 2025, 9:32 PM (GMT+2)
Infamous. Many Jews qill be murdered because of this deal. Perhaps hundreds of lives will be lost.
I think executing prisoners is one way, another way is to let Hamas know that every inch of land the IDF takes in Gaza, will belong to Israel and never again to Hamas.
The IDF must make a plan to advance and hold with whatever ground force is necessary to achieve that goal.
Losing property in Gaza may also be enough of a goad to get release of hostages without releasing a single Palestinian murderer from prison.
Exactly