November 23, 2023

For the first time since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, a temporary ceasefire has been announced, and the details confirm everything we knew or suspected about the contradictory cultures of the Israelis and the so-called “Palestinians.”

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It has been reported that the deal was brokered by Qatar.  Not a quite a client state of Iran, Qatar is nevertheless one of Iran’s few friends and is often therefore not on speaking terms with its other muslim neighbors.  When we refer to Hamas as a client terror group of Iran, they like to protest that they’re really an independent group, but whom do they turn to whenever a mediator is needed?  Funny how often it’s either Qatar or some other country in Iran’s orbit.

What are the terms of this alleged deal?  Desperate to free as many suffering hostages as possible, the Israelis have agreed to a three-to-one swap: three jailed “Palestinians” to every one hostage, plus an agreement to have some daylight hours without air attacks every day for some time.  In addition, the agreement requires again allowing the flow of food, fuel, and other humanitarian aid into Gaza.

The mere fact that Israel would consider such an agreement shows how much more Israel cares about the individual human lives in question.  The Israeli negotiators are putting themselves in the shoes of the hostages, imagining how awful their circumstances must be, chained or strapped into underground makeshift tunnels for over six weeks straight now.  The Israelis think of what condition some of them were in when they were taken, and what condition they must be in now, after over six weeks underground. 

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The Israelis know the danger to Israel posed by any ceasefire, but Israel values these specific human lives, and it is doing whatever it can to get as many out of there as possible — even though this current agreement frees only less than a quarter of the innocents kidnapped and dragged underground on October 7.

What if the situation were reversed?

Would Hamas put its best interest aside, in the same way, for fifty of its own innocent civilians?  I think we all know the answer to that.  For decades now, Hamas has raised its children to become suicide bombers.  Hamas has located its rocket launch sites in or under clinics, hospitals, apartment buildings, nurseries, aid offices.  Wherever innocent non-militants might be, Hamas locates a munitions cache, a tunnel entrance, an artillery depot there, intentionally turning it into a military target, intentionally turning its most innocent children into human shields.

When the world has seen prisoner swaps in the past, such as the swaps between the communists and the West during the Cold War, or the POW swaps of our own 18th-century War of Independence, they have traditionally been exchanges of equals: “a thousand of your soldiers for a thousand of ours,” or “five of your spies for five of ours.”

But that’s not how it works with Hamas — or with any of the other jihadist groups of recent generations, for that matter.  The side of decency doesn’t imprison innocent civilians, so we wouldn’t have any to release anyway.

The side of decency — the side of Western civilization — imprisons murderers, robbers, rapists, drug-pushers, and terrorists.  That’s the kind of people in our penitentiaries, not innocent families, schoolchildren, or music festival attendees.  So it is that when Hamas says it will give back our innocent civilians in a prisoner exchange, it’s not remotely a matter of exchanging equals.