Knight Of The Old New Republic

Wouldn't have bet on Beinart becoming one of the very few good ones from that era.

Not only did the mainstream media mostly ignore Israel’s denial of Palestinian freedom, it also mostly ignored the contradictions in Israel’s military strategy. From the beginning of the war, Israeli officials insisted that only military pressure would convince Hamas to return the hostages it had abducted. And, from the beginning, many Palestinian commentators disagreed. In October, the Palestinian author Iyad el-Baghdadi warned that Israel’s invasion of Gaza would “sacrifice the hostages”. In January, the Gaza-born writer Muhammad Shehada argued that “a permanent ceasefire” was “the only way to free the hostages alive”. Many hostage families agreed. In late October, the Times of Israel reported that representatives of the hostages had urged Netanyahu to accept Hamas’s offer to return all the captives in exchange for all the Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.

It’s now clear that Baghdadi, Shehada and the hostage families were right. Israel has dropped more bombs on Gaza since 7 October than the Allies dropped on Germany in the second world war. Yet, it has not forced Hamas to relinquish the remaining hostages. In August, Amos Harel, the longtime defense analyst for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, declared, The Claim That Only Israeli Military Pressure Can Free Hostages Was Always Wrong. Many Palestinians and Israelis knew that all along. But they had little influence in official Washington. Which meant they had little voice in the American public debate.