Israel’s recent agreement with Hamas on the multistage exchange of October 7 hostages for Palestinian prisoners has brought to a roaring boil the public debate on the proper price of pidyon shvuyeem. That is, the redeeming of captives. It’s a Jewish commandment bolstered by the Zionist ethic that no Israeli, whether in uniform or not, can be left behind.
Since its inception in 1948, Israel has released thousands of enemy combatants in exchange for soldiers and civilians captured by enemy armies or by terrorists. Exchanging relatively small numbers of Israeli soldiers for many thousands of Arab prisoners of war, as Israel did after the 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973 wars, was not controversial. Once the wars were over, Israel wanted its soldiers back and had no interest in holding thousands of enemy combatants. After Israel’s 1956 Sinai campaign, for example, it exchanged more than 5,500 Egyptian soldiers for one IDF fighter pilot and three IDF soldiers, with broad public support.
During the 1970s, Palestinian organizations attempted to force Israel to negotiate swaps by launching “static” hostage-taking attacks inside Israel. Palestinian gunmen would capture Israelis, hunker down with them and attempt to negotiate their release. This granted Israeli leaders the practical option of attacking the terrorists rather than negotiating with them. And such leaders, mainly Moshe Dayan as defense minister and Yitzhak Rabin as prime minister, indeed opted to attack the captors, even at the cost of jeopardizing hostages’ lives. Such was the case with the attack on the hijacked Sabena airlines jet in 1972, the hostage taking of Israeli highschool students in Maalot in 1994 and the hijacking of an Israeli bus north of Tel Aviv in 1978.
A shift came in the 1980s, when Israeli soldiers kidnapped by terrorists were taken into enemy territory. Typically unable to launch heroic rescue operations across the border, Israeli leaders were forced to negotiate and release large numbers of Palestinians, some of them serving life sentences for murder, in exchange for a handful of Israelis or even just one.
In 1979, Israel exchanged 76 Palestinian prisoners for one reserve soldier held by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. In 1983, it released 98 prisoners and 4,700 detainees (held without trial) for six soldiers held by the Palestinian Fatah faction. In 1985,150 Palestinian prisoners were exchanged for three IDF soldiers in a swap with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, an organization headed by Ahmad Jibril. The swap was known as the “Jibril deal.” In 1996, Israel struck a deal with Lebanon’s Hezbollah to release 136 prisoners and detainees, as well as 123 bodies of Lebanese combatants, for the bodies of two dead Israeli soldiers.
Four more swaps with Hezbollah followed, in 1998, 2004, 2007 and 2008, in which Israel released some 500 prisoners, detainees and bodies of dead terrorists, for one Israeli civilian and a handful of bodies and body parts of dead Israeli soldiers.
Unlike the five deals with Hezbollah, which hardly raised public debate, the 1985 Jibril deal, signed by an Israeli national unity government, was controversial when negotiated and became even more controversial after the fact. Yitzhak Rabin, then a hardline minister of defense, justified the deal by declaring, in his characteristically laconic style: “The fate of every soldier is a supreme value.” He expressed the general view around the cabinet table. Indeed, only one cabinet minister was opposed, and he was not a Likud minister but rather the dovish minister of education and former president of Israel, Yitzhak Navon. “I thought it would send a bad signal to the enemies if we showed them that the best path for them is to kidnap soldiers and civilians, and in exchange achieve the release of hundreds of prisoners and terrorists,” Navon said in explaining his vote. “We must have the strength to tell the families of (our) prisoners that there is a line that the state cannot cross.”
While Navon was in the minority, many Israelis later came to agree with his position, after Palestinian prisoners released to the West Bank and Gaza Strip became glorified leaders, inspiring anti-Israeli activism and ordering or participating in violent acts. At the same time, however, many Palestinian prisoners swapped in the 1985 deal played an important role in shaping their public’s opinion in support of peace negotiations with Israel, and several were active in the Oslo process of the 1990s and closely cooperated with Israel to provide stability and security.
Even so, the Jibril deal galvanized a solid opposition to swaps that set free murderous terrorists who could easily return to violence, wielding their authority as respected leaders who were hardened by time served in Israeli prisons. Years later, Yitzhak Rabin said that nothing in his political career caused him greater frustration than the Jibril deal.
The culmination of these painful experiences was the harsh debate, lasting five and a half years, regarding the terms of the deal that Israel eventually reached with Hamas in 2011 to release one Israeli soldier, Corporal Gilad Shalit, in exchange for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners.
Shalit was snatched from his tank in 2006 and rushed to the Gaza Strip through a tunnel that Hamas combatants dug deep into Israeli territory. Stunned and humiliated by Hamas’s spectacular attack, the Israeli public was split between two camps. On one side was the Campaign Headquarters for the Release of Gilad Shalit, a movement championing the Jewish-Zionist ethic of pidyon shvuyeem. On the other, opposing his negotiated release, was Almagor, an organization formed by families of terrorism victims following the Jibril deal.
The sharp public debate stunted negotiations over Shalit’s release. Hamas refused to compromise, and managed to withstand a five-month Israeli military campaign aimed at releasing Shalit. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signed the Shalit deal not only under public pressure—79 percent of respondents supported the release it in a survey published on the eve of the deal—but also under pressure of the socioeconomic “tent protest” of 2011, when tens of thousands of Israelis protested the high cost of living in the country. For the first time, many Israelis accused their prime minister of being influenced by political considerations of personal popularity rather than considering only security and ethical aspects of the dilemma.
Some of the prisoners released in the Shalit deal had been perpetrators or masterminds of deadly attacks etched in the traumatized memory of the Israeli public. Upon their release, they refused to sign statements committing to reject violence. And many indeed returned to armed struggle against Israel. Among them was Yahya Sinwar, who went on to become Hamas’s leader in the Gaza Strip, later masterminded the October 7 attack, and was killed by Israel in October 2024.
Partially prompted by Shalit’s kidnapping and the public debate that ensued, the government in 2008 appointed a committee, headed by former Supreme Court Chief Judge Meir Shamgar, to determine principles for negotiating the release of Israeli hostages and prisoners held by the enemy. No Israeli government had ever adopted a set of guidelines for such negotiations, and the topic was controversial. Defense Minister Ehud Barak determined that the commission’s recommendations would be published only after Shalit’s release, so as not to prejudge the ongoing negotiations.
The commission submitted its highly classified recommendations to Barak in 2012. The Shamgar report, as it was called, was never officially published, but some of its recommendations were leaked—among them a recommendation to adopt stricter criteria when considering the release of enemy prisoners, particularly those with “blood on their hands.”
The Shamgar report was never discussed by the cabinet, and its recommendations were never brought to a vote. In fact, Israel’s state comptroller in January 2023 criticized the government for ignoring the report and for not devising a set of principles for hostage negotiations.
The shocking, humiliating fiasco of October 7, in which Hamas violently snatched 251 people and took them into Gaza, unified the Israeli public for a short period. But soon, the question of the hostages—not the merits or character of the Gaza war—became the chief issue dividing the Israeli public.
Without a formal set of policy guidelines on this matter, as recommended by the Shamgar Commission, Netanyahu and his government have operated in a gray area. Moreover, they found themselves facing a dilemma of unprecedented proportions.
On the one side, a well-organized and extremely dedicated coalition of friends and family members of the hostages, backed by prominent opinion leaders, many former security officials and politicians, and the majority of the Israeli public, contended that a government responsible for the greatest fiasco in Israel’s history does not have the moral mandate to forsake so many citizens, held in horrific conditions.
On the other side, many Israelis, including former security officials and many opinion leaders from the religious right, pointed out that an immediate deal, complying with Hamas’ demand of an end to the war, would sabotage the war’s objective of demolishing Hamas and achieving a decisive victory. Regardless of legitimate accusations that irrelevant considerations were likely involved – namely the political future of Netanyahu – no Israeli government has ever faced such a grave decision involving a hostage deal.
As Israel and Hamas approach the second stage of the deal, and Israeli (and American) officials publicly question the implementation of future aspects of the agreement, the deal may very well collapse before all Israeli hostages are released, further continuing and complicating this never-ending debate.
Top image: Doron Katz Asher and her two daughters Raz, 4, and Aviv, 2, are reunited with husband and father Yoni, on November 25, 2023 at the Schneider Children’s Hospital (photo credit: IDF Spokesperson’s Unit (CC BY-SA 3.0)).