IF you’d told former national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir when he resigned from the government at the start of Israel’s ceasefire with Hamas that, a month later, he’d be outflanked from the right by none other than the president of the United States, you’d probably have been flagged as ineligible to own a firearm for mental health reasons.
But that’s exactly what happened two weeks ago, with Donald Trump advising Netanyahu to demand the release of all the hostages by noon that Shabbos or Hamas would feel the full force of Israel’s wrath. Instead, Netanyahu opted to stick to the original plan to keep the hostage releases on track — a decision that opened Bibi to a firestorm of criticism from the right.
Trump’s comments surprised even Ben-Gvir, but what didn’t surprise him was Netanyahu’s reaction, which he took as proof that he was right to resign from the government. Nor was Ben-Gvir surprised by Hamas’s grotesque cynicism in releasing the bodies of the murdered Bibas children without their mother, nor by the explosive charges found on several buses in Bat Yam.
“What did we expect?” he asked me. “If we don’t change our perspective immediately and start fighting these modern-day Nazis instead of making deals with them, who knows where things will come to? Because my default assumption is that in the Middle East, surrender to terror only digs you into a deeper hole.”
Speaking of Nazis, though, all of us can see the state in which the hostages are returning. President Trump compared them to Muselmänner from the Holocaust. If we’d listened to you, and we hadn’t agreed quickly to a deal, the hostages couldn’t have survived.
On the contrary, if we’d listened to me, they would all be home by now! If we hadn’t made a deal with Hitler and brought everything to a halt, I can tell you, as someone who was a member of the security cabinet at the time, Hamas wouldn’t have survived, and that’s no secret. There were moments when they were out of oxygen.
Whose fault is that, given that the previous administration conditioned military and political support on the delivery of humanitarian aid?
You know what? I’m with you. That was the excuse. I was told that Gantz, Eisenkot, and Gallant were stalling the process, but the main argument was “Biden, Biden, Biden.” The problem is that the excuses have run out. Biden’s no longer in the White House, and Gantz, Eisenkot, and Gallant are no longer in the government. The current US president greenlighted us for ideas that got me called messianic and delusional. How can Israel let this opportunity pass by?
The political officials respond: We have an open check from President Trump. Let’s bring back the hostages and then cash the check.
How foolish it is to think that the proposal will wait for us until we decide to accept it at some moment in the future. We’re not up against suckers. You can call Hamas many things, Nazis, terrorists, scum — but stupid they aren’t. They won’t give back all the hostages and wait around for you to topple their regime, it doesn’t work that way.
We tried that for over a year in Gaza, and the hostages didn’t return.
That is absolutely incorrect. We didn’t try to run out their fuel supplies. We didn’t try to stop their “humanitarian aid.” Shamefully, I was the only one in the cabinet who opposed the transfer of humanitarian aid throughout the war. At the time, they told me that President Biden had demanded it. Well, now that President Trump is urging us to act differently, inaction is a historic mistake.
