Amit Segal on Israel’s 60-Year-Old Prisoner Dilemma

On January 15, Israel and Hamas agreed to a temporary cease-fire. About 30 Israeli hostages would be released, each one in exchange for some 30 to 50 convicted terrorists in Israeli prisons. Of course, this is a controversial arrangement that sets a terrible precedent to incentivize future hostage-taking.

At the same time, imagine if your mother or father or daughter or friend were among the hostages. Then you wouldn’t really care about that future risk when confronted with the chance to return your own loved one to safety. As many have said, it is a very bad deal, and it is easy to understand why Israelis would support it, even in full knowledge of the risk.

There have by now been many discussions and analyses of this deal and what it means. I recently hosted one of those discussions with the former U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, and the former American special representative for Iran, Elliott Abrams. Today’s conversation is meant to be a little different. It takes a broader, more capacious historical view of how Israel has dealt with this tragic dilemma over the last five decades.

Israel for many years has insisted that it would not negotiate with terrorists. It said that when planes full of Israeli hostages were taken in the late 1960s and it has developed a reputation for this tough-minded, hard-headed position. At the same time, it has always negotiated with terrorists, starting with the planes full of hostages taken in the late 1960s. In this its rhetorical position and its actions have always been at odds and remain so today. That’s the messiness of practical, prudential judgment in a democracy when the lives of citizens are at stake. To understand this history, and unpack the dilemma at its heart, Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver is joined by the Israeli journalist Amit Segal, who can be seen on Israel’s Channel 12 and whose work can be read in the pages of Yedioth Ahronoth.