Tuesday, May 20`, 2025
Year : 2, Issue: 38
by Jonathan Dekel-Chen
As I write these lines, 21-year-old Israeli American Edan Alexander is enjoying his second week of freedom. He was released following 19 months of captivity after the United States negotiated an agreement directly with Hamas, a move that made the Israeli government extremely uncomfortable. The fact that the U.S. government did so reveals how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition has alienated itself from the Trump administration. That was only made clearer when President Donald Trump toured the Middle East last week without stopping to visit Israel, the country that has long been considered America’s closest ally in the region.
The Trump administration needs to apply the same pressure it did earlier this year to get a ceasefire deal if we’re going to see more of the hostages come home. But instead, Netanyahu has ordered a massive military operation in Gaza that endangers the lives of the living hostages and the ability to recover the remains of those already murdered. This flies in the face of a new ceasefire deal the Trump administration has proposed to secure their return.
I know how the Alexander family feels in these moments. In mid-February, I was fortunate enough to welcome home my son Sagui Dekel-Chen, who spent nearly 500 days as a captive in the hellish tunnels underneath Gaza. He came home through an agreement with Hamas negotiated through intermediaries – namely Qatar and Egypt – that freed 33 Israeli hostages. Watching Sagui’s reunion with his beautiful wife and three young daughters and the rest of our family has been joyous beyond words. My deepest desire is for the families of the remaining 58 hostages to experience the same peace and closure, whether their loved ones managed to survive more than 18 months of inhuman captivity or were murdered by Hamas and require a dignified burial.
The New York Times’ Tom Friedman recently wrote a column headlined: “This Israeli Government is Not Our Ally.” As a proud Israeli-American and father of a released hostage, I’ll go a step further: Netanyahu and his ministers have betrayed Israel’s national interests and are willing to sacrifice the remaining 58 hostages, which include four U.S. citizens believed to have been murdered on Oct. 7 or while in captivity.
Like the majority of Israelis, I was disgusted but not surprised that my government abandoned the ceasefire agreement with Hamas in March after the first stage that allowed the 33 hostages to return. The government could have continued to the next stage of the deal, in which all the hostages might have been released, but they opted instead to resume fighting. Negotiations stalled for months and suffering continued for our hostages, their families and millions of civilians in Gaza.
Now, the Netanyahu coalition seems to be doubling down by embarking on another major military escalation in Gaza, announced last Friday, without offering any “day after” plan. While no one knows what tactical gains might be made against Hamas by this escalation, the death of more hostages and Gazan civilians – hundreds of whom Hamas authorities have said were killed in recent days – is a near certainty.
I am not alone in my assessment that the Netanyahu government’s policy is bad for Israel. A number of IDF combat reservists and aircrews have published protests against the war since our government issued call-ups several weeks ago to renew the fighting against Hamas.
Though Trump denies it, his administration seems to have tired of Netanyahu’s avoidance tactics. The U.S. has already signed a separate truce with Yemen’s Houthis, an Iranian proxy, seemingly leaving Israel alone in its fight against this long-range terror threat. Similarly, the U.S. administration is relaxing sanctions on the new regime in Syria, which Israel considers a terror threat. The Trump team also looks ready to formulate a strategic cooperation pact with Saudi Arabia that doesn’t include Israel despite normalization between Jerusalem and Riyadh having long been a cornerstone of U.S. policy. Perhaps most troubling of all for Israel, Trump announced last week that he had launched negotiations for a new nuclear deal with Iran, apparently without involving Israel.
In other words, Netanyahu’s unwillingness to seriously engage in negotiations to return the hostages and his refusal to offer any plan for a post-war Gaza damages Israel’s security. By its diplomatic inaction, Netanyahu’s government de facto is allowing others to step in the void and decide what comes next. Netanyahu’s behavior threatens to write Israel out of the strategically crucial Iran talks and other key U.S. Middle East policies.
Polls show that at least 70% of Israelis believe that freeing our hostages far outweighs any other war goal our government has proclaimed since the brutal Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023. The mass national protests have illustrated this nearly every day for the past 19 months: Israelis want this war to end and for our hostages to come home, while our government and its small extremist base pursues a fantasy of “total victory” over Hamas and its fanatical Islamist ideology. Netanyahu is pursuing this policy despite knowing that Sagui, Edan and all the hostages who have returned from captivity have said that shelling by the IDF of Hamas targets in Gaza placed them in mortal danger.
Israelis are painfully aware that the Israel Defense Forces and the country’s intelligence services openly stated last year that continued fighting risks the lives of more hostages. This is the hard truth: Our government’s persistent drive to continue the war endangers hostages and does little or nothing to eradicate Islamist fundamentalism in Gaza. Yet the government has stated in recent days their readiness to sacrifice the remaining hostages as the IDF ratchets up its assault on Gaza.
The only way for Israel’s remaining hostages to be freed and for the madness in Gaza to end is for the Trump team to once again apply unrelenting pressure on all of the parties to end this war, which I and other hostage families watched them do to release Sagui and 32 other hostages. Trump must once again lean on Hamas, the Qatari and Egyptian intermediaries and, perhaps most importantly, on Netanyahu. Israel is most secure when it has the goodwill of the United States. Netanyahu and his government must be forcefully reminded of this.
Please do not give up on the hostages. Please do not give up on the citizens of Israel, whose government does not faithfully represent the will of the vast majority of its population. Please do not let Netanyahu’s failed, unaccountable government make you turn your back on all the victims in the tragedy unleashed by Hamas’s massacre on Oct. 7, 2023.
Jonathan Dekel-Chen is a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a member of Kibbutz Nir Oz, the home of 14 of Israel’s remaining 58 hostages in Gaza.
