A bereaved father’s plea, a PM beyond salvation, and a bid to rescue Israel
Netanyahu and his current coalition are apparently undeflected by Hamas’s murder of six hostages and the likely prospect of more such horrors. Can saner voices enter the fray?
David Horovitz is the founding editor of The Times of Israel. He is the author of "Still Life with Bombers" (2004) and "A Little Too Close to God" (2000), and co-author of "Shalom Friend: The Life and Legacy of Yitzhak Rabin" (1996). He previously edited The Jerusalem Post (2004-2011) and The Jerusalem Report (1998-2004).
This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.
After months of his toxic public appearances, scorning his critics as Hamas facilitators and falsely asserting his peerless capacity to save Israel from the ongoing October 7 catastrophe he failed to prevent, you don’t need to listen to much of the conversation between Benjamin Netanyahu and bereaved father Rabbi Elhanan Danino to have reconfirmed, yet again, that the prime minister is beyond salvation and entirely capable of taking Israel down with him.
He was actually on his best behavior when confronted with Danino’s anguished pleas for unity, an end to petty politics, and the prioritizing of the divine Jewish value of saving the hostages’ lives. He was trying to empathize when he told the mourning family — whose 25-year-old Ori was captured on October 7 trying to save his friends at the Supernova festival, abducted to Gaza, held for 11 months in unthinkable conditions, and finally murdered by his Hamas captives — that he had been injured in a hostage rescue attempt during his army service at age 22 and that he knew what it was like to lose a brother. “No,” one of Ori’s brothers interjected, “you don’t understand. You built your career on your brother’s back… Your brother was a true national hero. Where did that get lost?”
“You people on high have to stop dealing with nonsense and stirring up fights and disagreement,” Rabbi Danino implored him. “We don’t deserve this land without unity… Shut down your office for 10 minutes a day and think about where your Jewish values are…”
Netanyahu is clinging desperately to a job in which he has failed his country and his people with uniquely disastrous consequences, and is being enabled by 63 lawmakers who are a mixture of cowards, self-interested egotists, anti-Zionist Jewish supremacists and fools.
He was unsurprisingly unmoved even by the pleas on behalf of the rest of the hostages by Danino — an ultra-Orthodox rabbi who had never spoken at a hostage families’ rally, who apparently never even joined the main forum representing the families, and who graciously consented to host Netanyahu at his shiva while other families of the six newly murdered hostages had refused to so much as take the prime minister’s calls.
Netanyahu evidently also remains undeflected by the video from the tunnel where the six were held and murdered, produced by the IDF and shown to cabinet ministers on Sunday before it was publicly screened on Tuesday. Along with other ministers in the dismal coterie he has assembled, he apparently is unpersuaded by the security establishment’s insistence that the moment for at least trying hard for a deal is being missed — and that the tragedy of the six was an almost inevitable consequence of the current stage of the fighting, with Hamas captors, seeing their own deaths approaching, killing hostages and attempting to escape.
Tackling a vast Hamas tunnel network in Rafah’s Tel Sultan neighborhood, the IDF rescued hostage Farhan al-Qadi on August 27, and killed three Hamas terrorists fleeing the tunnel complex that day and the next. Danino, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Almog Sarusi, Alexander Lobanov and Carmel Gat were being held some 700 meters away, unbeknown to al-Qadi or to the IDF. On August 29, the six were shot dead in cold blood by their Hamas captors, who then fled. On August 30, the IDF killed two terrorists coming out of the tunnel complex, who it now thinks may have been the murderers of the six. On August 31, the IDF found and entered the tunnel where the six were held and killed, and their bodies were brought back to Israel overnight.
The cabinet was shown the tunnel footage on Sunday at the urging of families of the hostages, who hoped that it might prompt the government to push harder for a deal, with the support of the IDF. Presenting the material to the public on Tuesday evening, Hagari said ominously that other hostages are believed to be languishing in similarly dire and potentially deadly conditions.
After ministers had watched the film, however, Itamar Ben Gvir, the hard-right national security minister, declared that it showed the IDF must “increase the military pressure on a large scale, so that Hamas will get down on its knees and beg to return the hostages.” A Channel 12 report claimed that other ministers echoed the sentiment.
Breaking the impasse
There are believed to be dozens of October 7 hostages still alive. (In all, 101 hostages are held in Gaza, four of them for the past decade; 35 of them are confirmed to have been abducted dead or to have died in captivity.)
The terms of the stalled deal to try to bring home some or all of them are staggeringly problematic for Israel. As I wrote here in May as regards an earlier version of the deal, Hamas has sought an arrangement whereby “hundreds of the most dangerous and iconic terror chiefs and murderers, including at least 150 serving life terms” would be released into the West Bank in the very early days of any agreement, in return for female hostages it holds — in a transparent gambit to set the West Bank alight.
The IDF and other security chiefs are adamant that the price is worth paying — even though these freed prisoners will certainly return to terrorism (as some of those released in November have done) — and that they can and will be rearrested (as some of those released in November have been).
Strikingly, this aspect of the deal was not resisted by Netanyahu in the war cabinet-approved May proposal, and has not been highlighted by the prime minister in his subsequent hardened demands. Perhaps he believes that to oppose the release of hundreds of security prisoners in order to secure the freedom of up to 97 hostages would turn a harsh spotlight on his 2011 decision to release 1,027 security prisoners, including Yahya Sinwar, in order to secure the freedom of a single Israeli soldier.
By contrast, his recent obsessive focus on the ostensible existential imperative to retain the Philadelphi Corridor along the Gaza-Egypt border is clearly cynical. He had a decade and a half to retake the corridor if, as he now claims, it is central to Israel’s very future. And yet he didn’t even prioritize sending the IDF there for the first seven months of the war. Now, though, he claims he dare not relinquish control of it for even the first 42 days of a deal.
Despite the widening crisis since October 7 — with no strategic goal and mounting losses of hostages and soldiers in Gaza; Hezbollah firing relentlessly on the north; escalating terrorism in and from the West Bank helped along by Ben Gvir’s Temple Mount Jewish prayer pyromania; Iran closing in on the bomb; and economic, social and psychological meltdown at home — the notorious 63 steadfastly sustain Netanyahu in power.
All of which is why a fresh effort by at least some of the hostages’ families to push a very practical aspect of Rabbi Danino’s plea for unity — the establishment of a genuine national unity government — requires serious consideration. Netanyahu is not willingly going anywhere, and his coalition acolytes won’t make him. But maybe a “deal government” can take shape, genuinely committed to a hostage-ceasefire agreement, that “in the end will also lead to true unity in the nation,” as one hostage relative, Sharon Sharabi, has reportedly put it.
Just possibly rescuing the hostages, that is, and just possibly rescuing Israel too.
The likes of Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid will not join a coalition that merely adds their dissenting voices to a chorus still dominated by Bezalel Smotrich and Ben Gvir. Gantz’s National Unity party already came to feel it was serving in the fig-leaf role — from October 2023 to June. But as things stand, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant is the lone voice of Zionist sanity in the Israeli leadership, and, if Netanyahu thinks he can get away with firing him a second time, Gallant could be gone soon.
It’s worth noting, in this context, that were Netanyahu — 74, with a heart condition, an impossible workload and no formally designated acting PM in his absence — to fall ill or be otherwise unable to serve, the cabinet would vote in a temporary replacement by simple majority. There’s really no telling who that might be. But Yariv Levin, the man who still wants to destroy our independent judiciary, even after his efforts to do so last year ripped Israel apart and emboldened Hamas and all our other enemies, is in pole position as the sole current deputy prime minister.
Putting the nation back together
Explaining his pleas to the prime minister in a subsequent interview, Rabbi Danino said he hoped Netanyahu understands that “outside, there is a nation that is waiting for those 101 hostages, to end this terrible thing. That’s what will put this nation back together — to bring them home, to finish this terrible nightmare.”
He said he did not believe he had said anything the premier had not heard before: “I told him what a lot of people think. To my sorrow, I said this as a bereaved father who has lost his firstborn son.”
Asked whether he thought he managed to “crack some kind of wall” in Netanyahu, Danino said he greatly hoped so, “for the sake of the 101 families and for the people of Israel, who must, must unify and reconnect.”
