This is an expanded version of Melanie Phillip's column in Tuesday’s Times of London, 3rd September, reposted with permission from the author. Click read in app below to access all her writings.
As if the unspeakable evil of the murder of the six Israeli hostages in a Hamas tunnel under Rafah wasn’t hard enough to process, what happened in Israel following the discovery of their bodies at the weekend was shocking beyond belief.
It appears that Hamas murdered these hostages just a few days ago because they feared that the IDF were closing in. Their Hamas captors shot them at close range multiple times in order not to allow them to be rescued or released, and then ran to save their own skins.
Appallingly, however, a section of the Israeli public has blamed Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for the murders. These Israelis are accusing him of having signed the hostages’ death warrants by refusing to agree to a ceasefire deal that would have released them.
Last night, tens of thousands of Israelis were on the streets demanding that Netanyahu now do such a deal. Today the Histadrut, Israel’s trade union body, called a general strike to ramp up this pressure still further (it was not heeded by many and was called off when the Tel Aviv labour court ruled that it was illegal).
This is suicidal stupidity and moral perversity on a very high level indeed.
A US-brokered ceasefire deal has been on the table for months and agreed to by Netanyahu, even though it was in many respects a terrible deal for Israel. Hamas, however, have rejected it and renewed their unconscionable demands.
Today, though, US President Joe Biden said Netanyahu wasn’t doing enough to secure the release of the remaining hostages. Yet while Hamas claimed Israel was setting fresh conditions, Biden’s own administration had repeatedly said that Israel had agreed to the terms of the US ceasefire deal while Hamas had been making new demands.
On August 19, the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, said Israel had accepted a proposal to bridge the differences holding up a cease-fire and hostage release and he called on Hamas to do the same. AP reported:
“In a very constructive meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu today, he confirmed to me that Israel supports the bridging proposal,” Blinken told reporters, without saying what the proposal entails. “The next important step is for Hamas to say ‘yes.’”
The same day Hamas announcedit rejected Israel's proposal. So why is Netanyahu being blamed for refusing a ceasefire deal?
The answer is surely Netanyahu Derangement Syndrome. The hatred of Israel’s prime minister has reached such pathological proportions that it has caused thousands simply to lose their minds.
As for Biden, this volte-face seems to be a malevolent attempt to use the Israeli horror and the ensuing protests over these latest hostage murders to ramp up even further the pressure on Netanyahu to surrender to Hamas — pressure that the Biden administration has been exerting for the past eleven months.
Hamas says it will only agree to a ceasefire deal if Israel leaves the Philadelphi Corridor — the strip of land on the Gaza-Egypt border beneath which Hamas has smuggled in vast amounts of weapons and equipment; leave Rafah, where the IDF is currently grinding down the remaining Hamas battalions; stop the war; and guarantee not to kill Sinwar. In other words, its ceasefire conditions are victory for Hamas and Israel’s surrender.
That’s what “ceasefire now” means; that’s what the Israeli demonstrators are in effect demanding; that’s what the Biden administration and everyone calling for “ceasefire now” have been pressing for.
Netanyahu’s critics claim that he is motivated solely by venal political considerations. What planet are they on?
Those who think that he's prolonging the war to stay in power ignore the fact that most Israelis want the war to continue until victory. Right from the start of this crisis after the October 7 pogrom, Israelis said that Israel should never again merely inflict a "painful blow" against Hamas only for it to regroup; this time it had to be totally defeated — which it will be, as a military force, in the foreseeable future. So why should it be assumed that Netanyahu is perversely (and wickedly) prolonging the war to stay in office?
Do those who believe that Netanyahu is motivated solely by venal political considerations really imagine that he would save his political skin if he agreed to a deal which allowed Hamas to regroup in order to repeat October 7 again and again as they have threatened to do?
Do they really not grasp that, if Netanyahu stopped the war and left Israel defenceless against renewed Hamas attack, he would be rendering worthless the supreme sacrifice made by the 700-plus Israeli soldiers who have been killed since October 7 — for which he would never be forgiven?
Do they really not grasp that such an Israeli surrender would also galvanise and further empower Hezbollah and its patron Iran which have pledged to wipe Israel off the map?
You don’t have to be a Netanyahu fan to see that he had no other option but to continue the war. No prime minster would have agreed to such surrender terms.
Sinwar is persisting with the infernal strategy he has deployed ever since October 7: using the hostages’ plight as the supreme psychological weapon to force Israel to surrender.
Israelis are braced for what may now follow — that Sinwar will steadily murder more and more hostages to tighten the screw. The more horror and outrage he provokes among the Israeli public, the more pressure will be exerted upon Netanyahu to surrender.
Given their unthinkable 11-month ordeal, no-one should criticise the hostage families who are supporting this ceasefire campaign.
However, other hostage families are urging the government to continue to victory. As they have observed, the “ceasefire-now” protests have been organised by activists — including politicians, former army top brass and intelligence officials — who have been trying to lever Netanyahu out of power for years. And now they are weaponising the hostages’ plight to do so.
Monstrous as this campaign against Netanyahu is, however, there’s a truth he hasn’t had the guts to acknowledge. He has consistently set out two simultaneous war aims: to return the hostages and to defeat Hamas.
But these aims were always in potential conflict with each other. From the start, Hamas used the hostages as leverage for victory. If the terrorists were trapped or losing the war, the hostages would no longer be useful and so Hamas would kill them.
The only reason Hamas agreed to the week-long ceasefire last November, which saw 105 hostages released, was that the paramilitary force needed the time to regroup and re-equip itself.
So unless the IDF could rescue the remaining hostages, they were always — tragically — likely to be murdered.
The IDF has clearly been desperately trying to reach these captives in order to free them. It has either been unable to find them in the miles of underground tunnels, or has been unable to mount a rescue that doesn’t get them killed.
From the start, Israel has faced a hideous dilemma: that winning the war would almost certainly entail the murder of most of the hostages, while prioritising the hostages’ freedom would mean Israel’s surrender to an enemy bent upon genocide.
As it was, America’s unrelenting insistence on a hostage deal put Israel under continuous pressure to surrender. Netanyahu has resisted that pressure, as a result of which Israel is winning the war in Gaza.
However, he made a bad mistake. He never told the public the truth that his two war aims were in potential conflict with each other. He never told them that, while he would do everything to save the hostages that wouldn’t further imperil the country, he could not sacrifice the country in order to save them.
It would have taken a leader of rare moral courage to have said that — especially to the faces of the hostage families.Netanyahu is not that leader. He is a political and strategic genius; but it seems that in this case, he is also a moral coward.
As a result, Netanyahu hasn’t taken the country with him even though he’s pursued a war strategy which most people support. But they also want the hostages back home.
At the weekend, that dual pledge cruelly came apart.
The Biden administration’s expressions of sorrow over the murder of the six hostages — who included an American citizen, Hersh Goldberg-Polin — are the rankest hypocrisy.
America could have stopped this war on day one. It could have told Hamas’s patron and sponsor, Qatar, that unless all the hostages were released unharmed within 24 hours it would take condign action against it— such as shutting down the US CENTCOM base there. As Yigal Carmon of MEMRI has remarked:
Without this base's presence in the country, Qatar would disappear within less than a week – its neighbours would eat it up.
But the US didn’t do anything of the kind. Instead, it constantly pressured Israel to agree to a ceasefire deal, with the result — just as Hamas intended — that the war was spun out, momentum was lost, the world piled more and more pressure on Israel to stop the war, Hamas dug in its heels and more hostages were murdered.
The bodies of the six captives were found in a tunnel below Rafah. Yet for three months, the Biden-Harris administration forbade Israel to go into Rafah by blackmailing it with the threat of withholding crucial weapons supplies.
The US pressure on Israel has greatly reinforced the Hamas strategy of using the hostages’ plight to force Israel to surrender. And the “ceasefire-now” mob in Israel are also doing Hamas’s filthy work for it.
Not to mention Britain’s Labour government, whose ineffable foreign Secretary, David Lammy, demonstrated prime minister Sir Keir Starmer’s unbreakable commitment to Israel’s self-defence by announcing, less than 36 hours after the shattering discovery of the six murdered Israeli hostages, of a partial British arms embargo against Israel — in order to pressure not Hamas but Israel to end its war of self-defence. Another victory for the forces of evil. For shame.
Melanie Phillips, is a British journalist, broadcaster and author. Her personal and political memoir Guardian Angel has been published by Bombardier, which also published her first novel, The Legacy. Go to melaniephillips.substack.com to access her work.