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Sherwin Pomerantz

Chamberlain Pays a Visit to Israel  

The news was all abuzz last night with the announcement that Israel and Hamas have agreed to the terms of a cease fire and prisoner release deal that, presumably, will be approved by the Israeli government today.

While it is always nice to hear that fighting will stop and the hostages will be returned, I don’t have any faith at all that both of these will happen as planned…..that the fighting will indeed end and that all of the remaining 98 hostages being held by Hamas in Gaza will be returned to Israel.  Sadly, the agreement may not be worth the parchment on which it is written and is reminiscent of Chamberlains return from his meeting with Hitler when on September 30, 1938 he landed in England and declared “peace in our time.”  And we all know how that turned out.

Before I say why this is a bad deal, please note that I have said for months any deal to get the hostages back is worth the price.  Getting them back is what our government owes our people.  But the odds of getting them back the way this deal is structured are pretty low indeed.

So, why is it a bad deal?

  1. The hostages are scheduled to be returned in phases, the first 33 over the next 42 days with 3 the first week, possibly as early as this weekend. However, we are dealing with a terrorist group, not a government, and experience should have taught us that such an extended release of hostages will never make it to the end as planned. Hamas will always come up with some excuse as to why they cannot meet the terms of the agreement.
  2. During this six-week period negotiations will continue for the extension of the cease fire and the continued release of additional hostages. If we cannot come to terms the cease fire will continue until we can come to a further agreement.  However, in the interim, no more hostages will then be released and, of course, Hamas will find a way to continue rebuilding their arms cache to be able to attack us once again.
  3. In this first stage we will be releasing 1,000 Palestinian prisoners being held in Israeli jails, including 100 serving life sentences for murdering Israelis. Was it really necessary for us to agree to such a huge release in exchange for 98 hostages being held in Gaza for no other reason than that they are (for the most part) Jews.
  4. Hamas gets to remain in Gaza. We all recall the commitment of our government here that we will fight until we achieve victory and victory was defined as the elimination of Hamas from Gaza.  While many of us questioned whether eliminating Hamas was a realistic possibility, that was the promise made but sadly, not kept.
  5. At the end of the day, we lost almost 900 of our best and brightest, injured almost 20,000 of our soldiers, diminished our economic strength, created massive mental health issues that will have to be addressed as we move forward, created thousands of widows, orphans and bereaved parents and relatives, while tens of thousands of Gazan residents died as well as a result of their own leadership who could not have cared less about their welfare. And yet, we still don’t have peace and don’t have the hostages back.  All we have is politicians, here and in the US, arguing over who can rightly take credit for this “achievement?”  One can only ask:  Was it worth it?

I wrote previously that we should have made a deal with Hamas much earlier in the war, gotten back the hostages while more of them were still alive and limited the release of Palestinian prisoners to some more sensible ratio of hostages to prisoners.  If, after we got the hostages back and decided that we had not done enough in Gaza to reduce the fighting capability of Hamas, we could then break the agreement and re-enter Gaza.  Why not?  Our enemies do it all the time.  Do we really need to be “holier than the Pope?” as the saying goes.

However, for that to have happened, we would have needed strategic thinking at the top, cooperation between all factions of our government, a well-funded first class public relations campaign to tell our story to the world, and leadership willing to have been honest with us from the get go.   In retrospect we fell short in every one of those categories.  While there were moments when we thought the light had finally shown through (e.g. our actions last year against Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iran) in the overall we handled this badly.  Lordy, we cannot even agree on the need for a Government Commission of Inquiry to determine what went wrong on October 7th.

Add to this mix of elements that brought us to where we are today, our “friends” around the world who extorted pressure only on Israel and almost never on Hamas.

At the end of the day, it was an Israeli prime minister who, after the country’s sacrifice of so much over 467 days of war, a war which we did not start and did not want, who had to give up his and our principles in order not to anger an incoming US president.  This is the same prime minister who had no problem at all not bending to the pressure applied to him by the outgoing US president, you remember, the one that gave us the weapons and ammunition to fight this war in the first place.

The ghost of Chamberlain did, indeed, pay a visit to the Middle East this week and shame on our government for cowing to the pressure.

About the Author
Sherwin Pomerantz is a native New Yorker, who lived and worked in Chicago for 20 years before coming to Israel in 1984. An industrial engineer with advanced degrees in mechanical engineering and business, he is President of Atid EDI Ltd., a 32 year old Jerusalem-based economic development consulting firm which, among other things, represents the regional trade and investment interests of a number of US states, regional entities and Invest Hong Kong. A past national president of the Association of Americans & Canadians in Israel, he is also Former Chairperson of the Board of the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies and a Board Member of the Israel-America Chamber of Commerce. His articles have appeared in various publications in Israel and the US.
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