It Was Always About the Hostages

Readers who have seen the film Defiance will know of the Bielski brothers, Belarusian Jews who took to the forest during the Nazi occupation. Tuvia Bielski famously said: “I would rather save one old Jewish woman than kill ten Nazi soldiers.” By the end of the war, the Bielskis had saved more than 1,200 innocents from the Nazi death squads, many of whom were Jewish children or elderly.

I thought of his words when I read the parameters of the Israel-Hamas agreement to end the war in Gaza. In exchange for 48 Israeli hostages (most of whom are believed to be dead), Israel will release roughly 2,000 Palestinian inmates – including potentially hundreds who are serving life sentences for terrorist atrocities.

Reading many Western commentators over the past two years, one is left with the impression that Israel’s operation in Gaza was about politics, punishment, or a purposeless response to a massacre. But the details of the ceasefire agreement show something else: Israel’s mission was always about the fate of the hostages.

This is not a marginal concern, but the moral crux of all that has happened since the October 7th massacre. The war could not end until Israel brought its citizens home, because the very identity of the Jewish people is bound up with the value they place on each person.

The late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks described Judaism as “a religion of life, in love with life, revering life.” The Torah instructs, “Choose life, so that you and your children may live.” Jewish tradition instructs that nearly every commandment may be broken if a life can be saved. Fasting on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year, is suspended if eating is medically necessary. Sabbath prohibitions can be set aside to rush an ill person to the hospital. Life is not an abstract value but the supreme imperative.

And yet, Israel’s commitment to its hostages, even those murdered in captivity, shows that this story goes deeper still. It is not only about life narrowly defined, but also about dignity, family, and peoplehood. Judaism teaches respect for the dead, obliges families to bury their loved ones, and commands acts of kindness toward those who cannot repay them. To bring home a fallen son or daughter is to say: no one is forgotten, no one is abandoned, no one is expendable.

That ethic explains why the return of hostages has always been a national red line for Israel. The state has gone to extraordinary lengths to free them, trading hundreds of convicted terrorists for one soldier, or risking military operations to rescue a single captive.

This is why any deal brokered today – Trump’s or anyone else’s – begins and ends with the hostages. They are not bargaining chips or political trophies. They are sons, daughters, grandparents, neighbors—each embodying Israel’s moral core. To forsake them would be to forsake the Jewish commitment to the worth of every individual and the wholeness of every family.

Set against this ethic is the grim record of Israel’s enemies. Hamas and Hezbollah use human shields, placing rocket launchers in hospitals and schools. Suicide bombers are lionized as martyrs, their deaths exalted rather than grieved. For many years, the Palestinian Authority has been running a “pay-for-slay” program, sending stipends to families of those who murder Jews.

In this worldview, life is expendable. Death is not a tragedy to be prevented but a currency to be spent, a spectacle to be celebrated, a tool for propaganda. Where Judaism insists that almost no cause justifies the loss of life, Islamist movements insist that no life is too innocent to be sacrificed for the cause.

This is why it is so misguided to frame the war as Netanyahu’s project. Politics in Israel are always fraught, and Netanyahu’s motives are debated fiercely among Israeli voters. But the survival of the hostages transcends politics. It is not about left or right, coalition or opposition. It is about whether Israel can remain true to its foundational ethic: to be a nation that preserves the dignity and worth of its people in the face of enemies who desecrate it.

Across the Jewish world, that conviction resonates.

When the hostages are finally returned, Jews everywhere – from Toronto to Paris, from Melbourne to Buenos Aires – will be glued to their screens. Many will weep for people they have never met, yet feel as if they were their own children, grandparents, or siblings. Because in a very real sense, they are. The Jewish people, dispersed yet bound together by memory, covenant, and fate, will see in those homecomings the reunion of their own family.

Judaism has never been a faith of conquest or domination. It is, at its heart, supremely a religion of life – and also of human dignity, family, and peoplehood. That is why Jews raise their glasses with the simplest of blessings: to life. And that is why this war, despite the fog of politics, despite the noise of debate, has always been about the hostages.

It was always about the hostages: each one irreplaceable, each one needing to be brought home.

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Sheryl Saperia is CEO of Secure Canada, a non-profit organization dedicated to combating terrorism and extremism and strengthening Canada’s national security and democracy.