Two people made a major contribution to Israel’s public discourse this week: Avinatan Or and Brett McGurk. One spent the war in Hamas’s tunnels, the other in the White House. Both laid out this week, in plain language, from right inside the events themselves, two positions that had until now been dismissed here as a desire for death, cynical politics and abandoning hostages. Or, held for two years in Gaza’s tunnels, explained in simple Hebrew why disproportionate deals with Hamas would only bring more kidnappings in the future. McGurk, Joe Biden’s senior adviser, explained in simple English that no such deal was ever really on the table anyway, until the military sword was at the terror organization’s throat.
I watched Avinatan Or on the Israeli 60 minutes, “Uvda” and felt ashamed all over again at how his mother, Ditza Or, was treated in real time for daring to say the same things. She and other parents from the Tikva Forum were portrayed as having abandoned their children, while those pushing for capitulation were cast as something like adoptive parents of our hostages. It was one more example of the distortion by which the people credited with bringing the hostages home aren’t the soldiers who risked their lives in Gaza, but those who protested demanding that Hamas’s demands be met (demands that, as noted, never actually crystallized into a real proposal). I also thought of Elchanan Kalmanzon, who fell in Be’eri on the morning of October 8, and who, months earlier at one of the Kaplan protests, had someone shout “you draft-dodger” at him, just because they saw his kippah. Certain elements on this side of the debate put no effort into actually arguing the case—only into trying to frame the opposing view as illegitimate.
I listened to Brett McGurk across a series of interviews and was reminded again how shallow, how skewed our discourse here really is. Only in a world like this could Nitzan Alon, who headed the IDF’s directorate for the hostage issue, toss out quotes like “they could have freed everyone earlier” into the public sphere without having to answer to the facts. In a world like this, you can publish books and “investigations” that portray Hamas as eager to make a deal and Israel as the hard-hearted, indifferent party determined to fight forever. Hostage families are allowed to say absolutely anything in real time (unless, of course, we’re talking about the Or and Mor families). But for commentators and experts, telling the truth is also an option.
Judged by results, and contrary to every accusation and prediction, every time a hostage deal was put forward, Israel’s government approved it by an overwhelming majority. The moment a proposal to end the war on terms Israel could live with landed on the table, the government backed it. The polls—in which Benjamin Netanyahu actually hit a high right after the deal was signed—also show just how foolish the claim was that Netanyahu wanted an endless war because it was the smart political move for him.
Until October 2025, and no amount of lying will change this, no proposal was ever put forward that would let Israel both get back all the hostages and avoid retreating to the old, bleeding border. As McGurk explained, patiently, as if to a struggling child, every framework involved an immediate withdrawal from Gaza down to the last Israeli soldier, with the hostages released in an agonizing drip-feed that, according to Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, was never meant to end. Anyone who claims there’s no difference between a Gaza with hostages and no IDF and a Gaza with no hostages and an IDF presence is either ignorant or a propagandist and ought to be kept as far from public platforms as possible.
I also suspect the public has noticed—despite every attempt to muddy the waters—a strange pattern: the same people who argued for two years that Hamas had been defeated and the war could therefore end are now the ones arguing that Hamas is stronger than ever and the war is a failure. Voters will make Netanyahu pay for the gap between his promise of total victory and the reality on the ground. But if forced to choose at the ballot box between two ways of describing the situation in the Middle East—total victory or total failure—they won’t choose failure.
This is an excerpt from my weekly column in Israel Hayom.
