In recent days, the incisive discourse on the social networks about the continuation of the ground campaign in Gaza has suddenly resumed. It is not clear where it came from: perhaps from anonymous sources who claimed that Hamas was offering a comprehensive deal to release the hostages in exchange for a cessation of hostilities.
"Their hourglass is running out": The abducted sisters at a press conference // Photo: Moshe Ben-Simhon
That was enough for a line of tweeters to scream and threaten. As always, they were headed by the minister of national security, who threatened to topple the government.
Let's leave aside for a moment the degree of credibility that should be attributed to him and his threats, but we have to wonder: this is a cabinet member who can make one phone call to the prime minister's military secretariat to find out whether this is truth or nonsense. This is what any reasonable person, certainly any reasonable minister, would do.
Nothing really likely
Unfortunately, nothing here is really likely. Certainly not the aforementioned minister. Even though this is the life of all of us, and certainly of those held in Gaza, he and some of his colleagues continue to behave as if they were contestants on a reality show.
They are not interested in the lives of the abductees or the future of the evacuees, but in preserving the coalition and the next elections. In the virtual world in which they operate, everything is simple: with the wave of a cliché or a tweet, everything is solved.
Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, photo: Oren Ben-Hakon
The real world is more complicated, unfortunately. It is necessary to maneuver between complex tensions and enormous forces: abductees on the one hand and the continuation of the campaign to crush Hamas on the other, legitimacy for action in the face of a growing humanitarian difficulty, Western and Arab countries vis-à-vis Iran, and the option of a multi-front campaign.
Responsible leadership must balance all of these, with all the possible and impossible, and try to achieve the best result.
It's a choice between bad alternatives, trying to get the least bad among them. My colleague Hanan Greenwood wrote here yesterday, and rightly so, about the security difficulty raised by the release of terrorists into Judea and Samaria. The past teaches us that most of them sooner or later return to terrorism, and therefore their release now – as part of a deal with Hamas that brings abductees home – increases the danger from Judea and Samaria.
The security prisoners who were released are greeted with cheers, photo: None
But the leadership, unlike the press, cannot be satisfied with presenting problems alone: it is also required to provide solutions, certainly after abandoning its residents to Hamas on Black Saturday.
Israel cannot leave the abductees behind. It can delay the continuation of the campaign. If it gives up efforts today to bring them back, it could lose them tomorrow.
I don't know what happened to the Bibas family - we have to hope that Hamas lies and abuses us all, and they are still alive. I do know that if all efforts are not made now, there will be many more Bibs here, and a government that cannot look their families in the eye and honestly say that it has turned every stone to bring them home.
Israel does well to try to exhaust the current process. I wish he would allow all the abductees to be brought home, dead or alive, down to the last one. Then there will be time to fight.
The prime minister declares that it will happen, the defense minister declares that it will happen, the chief of staff declares that it will happen (and yesterday also approved the operational plans for the next moves). We must believe them: they know better than all of us that if no victory is achieved, defeat will be registered in their name.
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