Why Hamas Agreed to Release the Hostages

Yes, the arguments went from, as you said, “Well, actually, the school or hospital had to be bombed for military reasons, and it was a legitimate military target” to, on the starvation issue, just outright denial. There was a little of “We don’t want to give Hamas food,” but really the argument was “People just aren’t starving.” It was just denial of reality.

Yes, it was about Hamas propaganda. It got to the point where even Donald Trump said, Sorry, you can’t fake this. This is real starvation. You can’t fake this sort of thing. So I think that really moved people, and once you realize that Israel maybe isn’t this light unto the world that you had been raised to believe it was, I think that changes something—and it’s irreversible. So you don’t see the effects now, but over time we’re definitely going to see the effects in terms of the politics, and eventually the policy. Now, that’s only if our democracies mean anything,

So we won’t see it.

If we go the authoritarian path, then, yeah.

In the past week, it felt to me that, when it became clear that Hamas was going to give up the hostages, the momentum shifted in favor of this deal getting done, and even Netanyahu could not back away. I’m curious why Hamas did not just give up the hostages a while ago. Let’s put aside the moral case. I don’t think Hamas was too concerned about that. But, in a practical sense, I don’t totally understand why they didn’t try this strategy. It felt as if the hostages weren’t gaining them that much. And so much of the case for the war continuing was about the hostages, even when it was clear to people paying attention that the Israeli government and Netanyahu did not care about the hostages. It was the only justification the Israelis had left.

I also wondered about that. It became clear in my mind, too, that if the hostages are their sole piece of leverage, well, it’s really not much leverage anymore, because Netanyahu has made it clear he’d much rather have his forever war than the hostages. So why don’t they just call his bluff and say, “O.K., here are all the hostages”? They could have done that. I don’t know why they didn’t. Maybe they just never came to that conclusion—they probably still clung to the idea that this was their last piece of leverage, and if they gave it up, then they’d literally have nothing, and maybe they thought that would look like surrender. I don’t know. But I think you’re right. I don’t think it really was leverage anymore. It was just this talking point for the Israelis. The whole discourse was so cynical.

Do you have any optimistic take on what this deal will mean for Gaza in the medium term? I hope that the short-term truce will mean food and aid entering in much more sufficient quantities, but beyond that do you have any hope?

I think it’s going to be a very difficult road ahead. I haven’t been on the ground in Gaza in the past two years, but, from everything that I’ve seen and read, it’s going to be hard. I don’t know that Gaza is even a place where humans can continue to live in any meaningful way. Almost everything has been destroyed. There’s almost nothing left, even of Gaza City. All the hospitals are basically not functioning. There are no universities. There are no schools. There are no roads. There’s no sewage-treatment plants, and there’s no infrastructure. Everything has been destroyed. What will it take to rebuild? Obviously, it will take massive resources, and I just don’t know if they’re going to be there. There might be some kind of donor conference and all kinds of pledges, but will those materialize? If history is any indication, probably only a fraction will actually be put up.

I worry that, in the medium to long term, people will just leave. If people are able to leave, those who can will leave, and who could blame them? People just want to have normal lives. They will be saying, “I have no business and my home is gone. My workplace is gone. There’s no place to send my kids to school.” So it would not surprise me at all if we saw a kind of exodus over the next several years, just because people have to live. They will go wherever they are allowed to go. I’m sure a lot of European countries and the United States will close their doors to people fleeing Gaza, but they’ll go wherever they can.

So I just don’t know that Gaza can recover. It makes me incredibly sad to say that, because we’re talking about a society of two million people. Gaza City is the largest city in Palestine. It’s one of the oldest places on earth. There’s just so much that has been lost. Beyond just the basic immediate subsistence, can Gaza survive? I don’t know.

And what about the possibility of Hamas disarming, and Israel really pulling back its troops?

Those two are linked. They’re very much connected. It’ll be very hard to disarm Hamas under any circumstances, because that is its raison d’être. It is a resistance movement, and to give up its weapons before there’s an end to Israel’s occupation, before the Palestinians have achieved a state, looks like surrender. So that, on its face, is going to be very difficult, but it will be especially hard when we know that there’s going to be an indefinite Israeli military presence on the ground in most of Gaza—or at least very significant parts of it, right up to the edges of the population centers, assuming that people are allowed to go back to the north.