Not Ending the War May Have Saved Israel
Ending the war to bring home the hostages held the moral high ground—now we see what it might have cost us.
We are the narrators of our own lives, endlessly retelling our stories with each passing year. What once seemed like misfortune may, in hindsight, become a turning point; what once felt like triumph may fade into irrelevance. As our understanding deepens, we recast past events not as fixed truths, but as scenes whose meaning shifts in light of what follows. In this ongoing act of narration, we make sense of who we are becoming by reinterpreting who we have been.
What is true for the way we construe the events of our individual past is no less true for how we reinterpret the events of our country’s history. Israelis who supported the 2005 Disengagement from Gaza might have once viewed it as a bold and painful step toward securing Israel’s future—reducing friction with the Palestinians and preserving a Jewish democratic state. At the time, it may have felt like a necessary sacrifice for the greater good. But in the wake of October 7th, those supporters might now retell the story as one of strategic miscalculation—a decision made in hope that instead ushered in greater insecurity.
It is time now to retell the story of our 20-month long war against Hamas and the calls to end this war and bring home our hostages. Consider the story many of us told ourselves about the war 10 months ago, on August 31st, 2024, the day that six of our brothers and sisters were discovered murdered by Hamas in a tunnel in Rafah. The cries for an end to the war were great. Force wasn’t saving the hostages; it was killing them. “Total defeat” over Hamas seemed (and perhaps still seems) unachievable. Many believed (perhaps correctly) that the prime minister’s policies were driven by coalition politics. And ever since then, polls have shown that a large majority of Israelis believed that it was time to bring home the hostages and end the war.
With the conclusion of what is now dubbed “The Twelve Days War” in Iran, the story of our war and our hostage crisis takes on a different hue. While most Israelis were calling for an end to the war, Iran was ramping up its preparations for our annihilation and was perhaps weeks away from a nuclear weapon. We now have the benefit of hindsight and understand how our achievements in Iran, were born out of a string of military and diplomatic events that have transpired since that horrible day the bodies of the six murdered hostages were recovered. The Plague of the Exploding Beepers in September ushered in a two-month decapitation and defanging of Hezbollah and its feared arsenal of 120,000 missiles and destruction of its Redwan assault force. That in turn triggered the toppling of the Assad regime and the crumbling of the Ring of Fire that Iran had built around us.
Let us now imagine that the war had ended last summer amid the prevailing moral calculus: When a country pays ransom for its hostages, it affirms a core social contract: that no citizen is ever truly abandoned. The individual’s life holds value beyond strategic calculus. The state’s legitimacy rests, in part, on its willingness to bear costs for the sake of its people. Had that thinking prevailed, Hezbollah would still retain its missile arsenal. Its Redwan force would still be poised to invade the Galil and inflict exponentially more damage and suffering than we endured on October 7th. Would Israel have dared to attack Iran under these circumstances? Would the United States have joined Israel, and risked an unimaginable conflagration?
The retelling of the story of our war and the continued suffering of our hostages is as painful as it is sobering. Had we ended the war last summer and brought the hostages home, we would never have had the pretext and international legitimacy to later dismantle Hezbollah its missile arsenal and its forces. Assad would still rule in Damascus. We would stand today before a nuclear armed Iran. It must be stated bluntly: our decision to continue to prosecute the war, even at the cruel expense of our hostages has likely saved us from nuclear holocaust.
Let no one on the right gloat, “we told you so.” Raise your hand if last summer you envisioned the stunning string of events that unfolded because of our decision to keep the war going.
The achievements of the Twelve-Day War beckon us to rethink the dilemma that has plagued us since Oct 7th: Do we bring home the hostages at all costs, or do we prosecute the war? Man plans and God laughs. And then sometimes God laughs so hard, because he will see to it that the plans of man will deliver dividends far greater than the ones he ever imagined.
