‘To everything there is a season,” reads the Book of Ecclesiastes, “and a time to every purpose under heaven.”
“A time to weep, and a time to laugh,” the verses continue. “A time to mourn, and a time to dance.”
This creates a dichotomous paradigm, where each purpose has its own separate season. There is a time for one thing, and another time for its opposite.
But life often defies such tidy divisions, and emotions are not so easily compartmentalized into separate, distinct seasons. Sometimes, the time to weep and the time to laugh happen simultaneously. Sometimes, the time to mourn and the time to dance share the same season.
Israel has entered just such a time.
Thursday’s long-awaited news of a hostage deal finally hammered out thrust the nation into a whirlpool of mixed emotions.
There is elation, of course, that after nearly 500 days in captivity, the hostages will start coming home. There is despair that some of them will not come home alive. Joy for the families who will be reunited with their loved ones, and sorrow for those who will not.
And this is only the start of what will be an intense season with interwoven and conflicting emotions.
The tears shed while watching the images of the homecomings will soon give way to the bitterness of seeing pictures of murderous Palestinian terrorists released from prison and welcomed back home as heroes. The heart will ache at the pain this must cause the relatives of the terrorists’ victims.
The relief that this long war appears to be winding down will be tempered by anxiety that the terms of this deal may have planted the seeds for the start of the next one by incentivizing hostage-taking (the only tactic that seems able to force Israel’s hand) and by allowing Hamas to claim victory simply by surviving 15 months of war without waving a white flag or fully surrendering.
Over the next 42 days – the length of the first stage of the hostage deal – split-screen images will fill television screens across the nation: of homecomings and funerals, prayers of thanksgiving and the recitation of kaddish, soldiers leaving a devastated landscape in Gaza and enemy leaders boasting of “victory.”
These split images will vividly illustrate that joy and sorrow, pride and humiliation, rejoicing and mourning, are not confined to separate seasons; they often commingle and collide.
The nation is entering a time of entangled emotions, and it won’t be easy. Here are a few key points to keep in mind:
Remember the sacrifice of the soldiers
The media focus over the next few weeks will naturally be on the families of hostages and the hostages themselves: what they went through, what they are feeling, what they think.
Less attention will be paid to the tens of thousands of IDF soldiers, regular soldiers and reservists, who have been fighting in Gaza for the last 15 months, many of them with pictures of the hostages in their vests or pinned on the walls of their rooms to remind them what they are fighting for.
Those who have advocated forcefully for the hostage deal have said that it is essential to bring them back home for the country’s solidarity, that one of Israel’s fundamental strengths is the feeling of mutual responsibility – that the state will never abandon its citizens. The argument is that if this ethos is lost – if the country shows that it will not go to any length and pay almost any price to rescue its citizens – then its resilience and ability to withstand the adversity it faces will be weakened.
Tens of thousands of soldiers fighting in Gaza, Lebanon, and elsewhere – many of them doing so voluntarily – demonstrate the power of this solidarity. It was there on October 7, and on October 27, when the IDF ground operation in Gaza began.
Just over 400 IDF soldiers have been killed in Gaza to bring the hostages home. That is why they were there – and to dismantle and topple Hamas – and that is why they died.
This needs to be remembered amid irresponsible statements that the state abandoned its citizens or that specific segments of the population are callous to the fate of the hostages.
The state failed its citizens miserably on October 7, and – as President Isaac Herzog said in his speech Wednesday night – failed in its most basic responsibility: to provide security. But it didn’t afterward abandon its kidnapped citizens to their cruel fate. Rather, it sent troops in – and many died – to bring them home.
At this time, their sacrifice and the sacrifice of their families need to be acknowledged. Hamas did not release the hostages out of the goodness of its heart. Hamas released the hostages because of the efforts of the soldiers fighting and dying there since October 27, 2023.
Israel won
Israelis have a knack for beating their chests in self-reproach.
An outstanding example of this is the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
On the last day of the war, October 25, 1973, Israel found itself positioned on the Egyptian side of the Suez Canal, with the entire Egyptian Third Army surrounded and Cairo just a 100-kilometer tank ride away. In the north, the IDF had crossed the Golan Heights and was 32 kilometers from Damascus – the distance from Jerusalem to Beit Shemesh.
Yet, up until recently, the collective memory has been that the war was a colossal failure. Considering how the war started – with the country caught entirely by surprise, outmanned, and outgunned – the way it ended was a head-spinning victory. But many refuse to see it that way.
Why? Because of an Israeli tendency to judge a war by its first day, not its last. The first day of the Yom Kippur War was an unmitigated disaster, but the last day was not.
Fast-forward 52 years. There will be those who say that because Israel failed to topple Hamas in Gaza completely – not only to decimate its military capabilities but also to remove it from power (one of the aims of the war) – then it failed, the war was a loss, and those soldiers who died did so in vain.
That’s a mistake.
Israel won this multifront war, and for the sake of the country’s morale and resilience, this needs to be acknowledged. Just because unconscionable mistakes were made that led to the unmitigated disaster of October 7 does not mean that what has resulted since then – including in Gaza – has also been a disaster.
Don’t take my word for it – just listen to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. In a speech this week to the Atlantic Council in Washington, Blinken summed up the current situation in the Middle East.
“Now, more than 15 months later, Hamas’s military and governance capacity has been decimated, and the masterminds behind the attack have been killed,” he said.
“Tehran is on its back foot,” he continued, adding that Iran’s air defenses have been demolished and its sensitive military sites exposed and vulnerable.
In addition, Hezbollah “is a shadow of its former self,” with its leadership eliminated, its terrorist infrastructure of tunnels and weapons manufacturing ravaged, and its battered forces retreating north of the Litani River. He could have added that with the election of a non-Hezbollah-affiliated Lebanese president and prime minister, the organization has also lost its grip on Lebanon’s politics.
And in Syria, Blinken continued, “after Iran spent decades pouring billions of dollars into propping up [president Bashir al-]Assad’s murderous machinery, the Assad regime has fallen, and Tehran has retreated from Syria.”
That is an accurate description of the big picture. And even with the images we will see next week of released Hamas terrorist prisoners feebly waving a “V” sign from buses taking them into Gaza, it is a huge Israeli win.
“Could have” speculation is useless
News of the hostage deal was accompanied this week by a chorus of people saying that if not for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political calculations and intransigence, this same deal could have been sealed in May when US President Joe Biden first proposed it.
Critics argue it takes a microscope to distinguish the current agreement from the one on the table last summer. They lay the blame for the delay – and the additional deaths of soldiers and hostages – squarely on Netanyahu’s shoulders.
However, the American administration, not exactly a bastion of pro-Netanyahu sentiment, has consistently said that Hamas – not Netanyahu – was responsible for the failure to reach a deal earlier.
As recently as Wednesday night, minutes after the deal was announced, White House Communications Adviser John Kirby told Channel 12 that Hamas had been the primary obstacle to negotiations.
“What has changed is that Hamas now seems to be more willing to move forward,” he said. “Up until now they have just been throwing up roadblocks after roadblocks, and moving the goalposts time and time again. The problem certainly wasn’t the Israeli side, who has been willing to compromise and been willing to stay at this task very, very hard.”
Beyond being factually dubious, indulging in “what if” speculation achieves little, because no one really knows what might have been.
The conditions Hamas faced in May differ starkly from those it faces now. In May, Yahya Sinwar – still alive – apparently believed he could sustain a war of attrition with Israel that would eventually lead to massive international pressure on Jerusalem and eventually more active military intervention by Hezbollah and Iran.
Today, Hamas’s military strength lies in ruins, Hezbollah has been decapitated, Iran badly weakened, and even Syria is a different entity than it was when Sinwar thought time was on his side. Perhaps changing conditions in the region compelled Hamas to agree now to terms that it rejected in May.
American officials involved in the negotiations, from Kirby to Blinken to National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, have all stated that Hamas’s intransigence, not Israel’s, was the real barrier.
Insisting that Netanyahu alone bears responsibility ignores this fundamental point.
This reflex to blame ourselves for something we do not entirely control reflects a broader Israeli tendency to play chess with itself, as though whatever we decide among ourselves guarantees success in negotiations with adversaries who play by a different set of rules. The world doesn’t work that way.
The claim that Netanyahu blocked the deal for political reasons gained additional traction this week after National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir boasted on social media, “In the past year, using our political power, we managed to prevent this deal from going ahead, time after time.”
What deal he is talking about and how he prevented it is unclear. His self-serving statements are more likely an attempt to shore up support from the hard Right than a credible recounting of events. Why believe his bluster, for instance, over Kirby’s recounting of events?
Israel urgently needs a state commission of inquiry to investigate the catastrophic failures of October 7 and learn the necessary lessons. What it needs less is endless, fruitless speculation about how things might have been different.
The hard truth is that no one knows what Sinwar’s calculations were in May or whether he would have accepted any deal. Humility demands we acknowledge that.
Fixating on hypotheticals won’t change reality. What matters now is learning from mistakes, not rewriting history to fit convenient narratives.
Jesus Christ is King
