The Secret Channel Is Not the Scandal
Jewish statehood does not require immunity from judgment. It requires the capacity to survive judgment.
The scandal is not that Israel spoke to Hamas. A state responsible for the lives of its citizens should use every available channel if that channel can help bring hostages home. The scandal begins elsewhere.
According to Channel 12, a direct channel between the Shin Bet and Hamas was established in August 2024, after six Israeli hostages were murdered. The network reported that the channel had Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s approval. Netanyahu’s office has denied this account, saying that negotiations with Hamas were conducted solely through mediators. Channel 12 nevertheless reported that dozens of direct calls took place, that Ronen Bar listened to some of them in real time, and that a source familiar with the mechanism said it helped overcome obstacles that eventually led to the January 2025 hostage deal. This means that the question is no longer merely whether direct negotiation with Hamas could work. According to the reported operational record, Israel tested such a channel, and a source directly familiar with it says that it worked well enough to matter.
Hypocrisy is therefore too weak a word. Hypocrisy means declaring one principle while acting according to another. What is at stake here is more serious: the possibility that the state operated within a broader field of options than the field publicly presented to its citizens.
That is not merely lying about an answer. It is constructing the available answers. If the government knows that a direct channel exists, authorizes it and receives evidence of its usefulness, while public politics continues to be organized around the opposition between “strength” and “surrender,” then political choice is being transformed into manufactured necessity.
First the visible range of alternatives is narrowed; then the chosen policy is presented as the only responsible one. Secrecy may be necessary, because negotiations involving hostages often require confidentiality. The problem begins when secrecy no longer protects an instrument but shapes public understanding of what instruments exist.
Channel 12 says it knew about the direct channel in April 2025 but was prevented by military censorship from publishing the story. Publication was permitted only on August 27, 2026. The same information in April 2025 and August 2026 is not politically the same information, because its capacity to affect accountability, public debate and political choice changes with time. Control over information is therefore also control over its political timing.
Yet secrecy alone cannot sustain such a mechanism. It requires a pedagogy: a political language in which intransigence becomes strength, compromise becomes defeat, negotiation becomes weakness and concession becomes betrayal. The strategic question “what works?” is displaced by the symbolic question “who gave in?”
Once that happens, effectiveness can be replaced by performance. The more expensive a policy becomes, the easier it is to argue that changing it would dishonor previous sacrifices. Cost no longer disproves the strategy; it begins to justify it. Failure can be redescribed as perseverance, prolonged war as resolve, and the absence of an achievable political end as proof that one has refused to surrender.
This produces a false measure of power. Real power consists in the breadth of available action: force, deterrence, negotiation, intelligence, mediation, coalition-building, compromise and tactical retreat when necessary. A strong state possesses multiple routes to its objectives; the pedagogy of intransigence does the opposite by removing options and then presenting the shrinking repertoire as increasing strength.
There is a further irony. This political grammar increasingly resembles the honor-based, zero-sum conception of conflict that Israeli discourse so often attributes to its regional adversaries. Concession becomes loss of face, compromise means that someone must have won and someone must have lost, and resolving a conflict becomes almost impossible because resolution requires precisely what the symbolic system forbids: recognition that the adversary also has interests and that durable settlements usually require partial concessions from both sides.
This is why the language of “educating” or “civilizing” the defeated opponent is so revealing. In that language, the Palestinian is no longer a political subject with whom a modus vivendi must eventually be constructed. He becomes the product of a defective culture, fanaticism or moral degeneration, and the victor therefore claims the right not merely to defeat him but to remake him before recognizing him as a legitimate political interlocutor. That is not conflict resolution. It is hierarchy disguised as political pedagogy.
The hierarchy becomes harder to sustain when the state looks at its own social field. Settler violence, attacks on Palestinians, theft, beatings and repeated attacks on Christians, including spitting and physical abuse, cannot simply be treated as marginal noise while the same society claims a civilizational right to judge the moral maturity of its opponent.
The point is not to equate Hamas with Israeli extremists. The point is equality of criterion. If killing civilians is barbaric, the identity of the perpetrator does not alter the criterion. If theft is criminal, nationality does not transform its meaning. If humiliating a person because of religion is evidence of moral degradation, it does not cease to be so because the aggressor belongs to one’s own group. Otherwise “civilization” is no longer a norm but a privilege to decide who is bound by the norm.
The same mechanism damages foreign policy. Every real alliance is an institutionalized compromise: allies do not merely support one another but accept obligations, limits, criticism and mutual constraint. A state that increasingly defines compromise as defeat eventually exports that problem beyond its borders. Criticism becomes abandonment, conditions become betrayal, and refusal to endorse a particular operation becomes evidence that “the world is against us.”
A state can still have arms suppliers, intelligence partners, sponsors and temporary coalitions of interest under such conditions, but it becomes much harder to have genuine allies. A self-confirming loop then emerges: intransigence damages relations, damaged relations produce isolation, and isolation is presented as proof that Israel has always stood alone and can trust only force. Politically produced loneliness is transformed into evidence of existential loneliness, so the system manufactures the reality that later justifies the system.
That is why the revelation of the direct Hamas channel matters. For a moment, operational reality breaks through the mythology. Israel could speak directly to its mortal enemy. It could argue, threaten, reject proposals, set limits and still negotiate. According to the source familiar with the channel, those conversations helped remove obstacles and contributed to a deal. Operational reality was more pragmatic than the public metaphysics of the conflict.
There is no need to claim that anyone wanted hostages to die. Such a claim would be impossible to prove and would weaken the argument. The harder question is sufficient: if decision-makers know that an instrument may increase the probability of bringing people home alive, and they restrict, marginalize or politically suppress that instrument, they must answer for the foreseeable risks produced by that choice. Human life does not have to be the objective of a political calculation in order to become its cost.
This is also why criticism of Israeli power cannot be converted into a judgment against Jewish political existence. Jewish statehood may be legitimate; precisely for that reason, no concrete form of Israeli power can be exempt from judgment. A state created to restore Jewish political agency cannot preserve that achievement by making criticism of its institutions suspect. The capacity to judge, revise and assume responsibility for one’s own forms of power is not the opposite of sovereignty. It is one of sovereignty’s conditions.
This is where the language of hypocrisy finally becomes inadequate. The deeper problem is a system capable of governing through the production of necessity: narrowing visible alternatives, moralizing intransigence, redefining compromise as defeat, treating the opponent as material for reeducation, criticism as betrayal and growing isolation as proof that the outside world is hostile.
Such a system may look like strength for a very long time, because eliminating alternatives can be staged as determination. But the strength of a state is not measured by how many possibilities it can forbid itself. It is measured by how many possibilities it can still preserve.
Yochanan Schimmelpfennig
