Steve Witkoff, Israel looks to you
To drag us out of this unforgivable limbo, in which Hamas is rearming and no hostages are going free, your first task is ensuring that Netanyahu is more afraid of you and your president than he is of his coalition partners
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.
Dear Special Envoy Witkoff,
You have thrown yourself into your role as Middle East envoy with clarity and compassion. The Israeli public, and most especially the families of the 59 hostages still held by Hamas in Gaza, now look to you to ensure they are brought home, and fast, before more of the 24 we believe are still living join the 35 we know are dead.
Our people look to you because our prime minister is hesitant, his judgment clouded by his political interests. Most Israelis want him to resign — he presided over the October 7, 2023, catastrophe, but refuses to internalize that the buck stops with him. Most Israelis are adamant that we need a powerful state commission of inquiry to establish the fullest picture of what went so terribly wrong, how our political and military leaders let down their guard and enabled Hamas to carry out its massacre, but he refuses to sanction that kind of probe because he knows its conclusions would be politically terminal for him. Half of Israelis believe that your boss, President Donald Trump, cares more about the hostages than he does. As you know, many released hostages and the families of hostages strongly share that assessment.
Almost two months ago, you helped finalize our deal with Hamas that, in its first phase, ensured the release of 33 hostages — 25 living and eight dead — and that was intended to continue to a second phase, in which the rest of the living hostages would be released in return for another vast quantity of mass-murdering Palestinian terrorists, the full withdrawal of the IDF from Gaza, and a permanent end to the war.
Our prime minister, who signed off on this deal and conveyed it to your predecessors last May, subsequently sought to amend it and chose for months not to push for its implementation, manufacturing pretexts such as the claim that Israel would never be allowed to resume fighting Hamas if it agreed to a full halt, and that Israel’s very existence depends on the IDF’s presence along the Gaza-Egypt border. And then, after you helped make certain that the first, 42-day phase went ahead, he refused to honor the deal’s provision to begin negotiating phase two.
Why the prime ministerial hesitancy? Because Netanyahu fears that, were he to accept phase two’s commitment to ending the war, his coalition would collapse and he would lose power. He’s wrong on both counts. His endlessly threatening far-right coalition partner, Bezalel Smotrich, loudly insisting on a return to the war and no phase two, will not easily bring down the government — he knows his voters would never forgive him. And the opposition will provide a parliamentary safety net for Netanyahu so long as he takes the necessary steps to get all the hostages home.
Netanyahu also fears that one or both of the ultra-Orthodox parties will doom his government if he does not pass legislation enshrining their community’s indefensible exemption from military service — an always outrageous inequality that has become corrosive in a nation defending itself on multiple war fronts with insufficient troops and a colossal burden on the reservists. But here, too, he is mistaken.
The ultra-Orthodox extortionists know full well that there is no possible potential alternative coalition that would be more accommodating to their demands, more susceptible to their political blackmail. But as he has done since he established this government — the most out-of-touch and fatally incompetent in our country’s history — when he gave immense power and authority to the far-right and ultra-Orthodox parties, Netanyahu, terrified of losing his majority, continues to act like a supplicant to those who need him more than he needs them.
Netanyahu might change his stance on the hostages and the direction of the war at the end of this month, once he has got the 2025 state budget voted into law and avoided the automatic collapse of his government that a failure to do so by March 31 would trigger. But that deadline is almost three weeks away, and, until then, he has plunged Israel and, most specifically, the hostages into an unforgivable limbo.
We know, first hand now, from heroic survivors of captivity such as Eli Sharabi, that every day is potentially the last for hostages who are chained, starved, tortured and abused in the Hamas tunnels. And yet, every day for almost two weeks and counting, Hamas is enjoying the benefits of the ongoing ceasefire — reorganizing, recruiting and rearming, with the sole, relentless goal of killing more of us — while under no obligation to release any hostages. As my colleague Biranit Goren noted two days ago, Netanyahu has publicly insisted throughout the war that intensive, sustained military pressure is vital to both destroy Hamas and enable the release of the hostages. Yet he has chosen to abort both of those processes — to lift the military pressure and delay the freeing of the hostages.
Your colleague Adam Boehler demonstrated in his lamentable series of television interviews on Sunday that he understands less than almost anybody what Hamas stands for and aims for — his declared strategy was “to identify with the human elements of those people and then build from there”?!? — and was radically unsuited for the high-stakes, ultra-sensitive direct talks with Hamas with which he was tasked. It’s not much of a compliment to say you most certainly know better.
And therefore, an Israel surrounded by depraved, cynical, cunning, dead-serious genocidal enemies, and simultaneously ill-led by self-interested politicians who are again, with every lesson unlearned, gearing up to tear the country apart with a resumption of ultra-contentious legislation that aims to defang our judiciary — well, our Israel looks to you, Mr. Witkoff.
Do in Qatar today what you have already proved once that you can do — finalize the terms of a deal, the best deal you can, to get the hostages out of hell. Hamas claims to be committed to the framework that was agreed to in your presence in January, but you know that it will breach the ceasefire, and thus give Israel every legitimacy to resume the effort to destroy its military capabilities once the hostages are returned. Come the day, you can also coordinate a regional process to prevent genocidal terrorists again ruling Gaza — though exporting Gazans en masse to Egypt and Jordan, as you probably realize, is not the best idea.
Right now, however — today! — your first priority needs to be ensuring that Netanyahu is more afraid of you and your president than he is of his coalition partners — the far-right Jewish supremacists and the non-Zionist ultra-Orthodox. That he and they recognize that freeing the hostages will not signify the end of the battle against Hamas and, in fact, will make the battle less complex, since there will no longer be no-go areas where the IDF cannot venture for fear of killing our own. That Hamas will have nowhere to hide. That the Israeli leadership that failed to protect its citizenry on October 7 will at least have saved all the lives that were left to save, brought home the dead for burial, and enabled the start of our national healing.
And that the White House, as Trump made explicit a week ago after hosting eight released hostages in the Oval Office and hearing their horror stories from captivity, will keep “sending Israel everything it needs to finish the job.”
Thank you for listening.
