The Missing White Flag

At a ceremony in Gaza, three emaciated Israelis were forced to publicly thank their captors — the ones who murdered their families and tortured them in tunnels for sixteen months — before being transferred into Israeli custody. 

In clean uniforms with bright green headbands, Hamas officials stood before a banner that read “We Are the Flood,” a reference to the Al Aqsa Flood, Hamas’ name for their ongoing war against Israel; and “We Are the Next Day,” a reference to the much-discussed “day after” the war in Gaza.

Two days later, this same terrorist organization announced that it would be halting hostage releases until further notice, citing alleged Israeli violations of the ceasefire. 

Is this the behavior of a vanquished force? Is this a movement that has been chastened by over a year of hard losses? Hardly. Amidst ruins, graves, and groans of human agony, Hamas is gleeful, grandiose and cruel. 

They have lost this war in almost every way that a war can be lost. Their territory has been reduced to rubble. Their leaders and their allies have been killed. Their infrastructure has been laid waste. And yet, the one way in which they have not lost may prove to be the most significant of all: They have not been forced to surrender. 

Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza has been one of the most divisive events to ever occur on the world stage. Every episode has been fiercely debated in the media, on the streets, on campuses and in the halls of the U.N. But the one issue about which we’re all mysteriously on the same page is that Hamas is not expected to surrender. 

Israel’s opponents, obviously, have believed from the start that it is Israel, not Hamas, who ought to surrender. Since Oct. 8, they have demanded that Israel end the war with no conditions — not even the return of the hostages.  

Israel’s opponents, obviously, have believed from the start that it is Israel, not Hamas, who ought to surrender. Since Oct. 8, they have demanded that Israel end the war with no conditions — not even the return of the hostages.

But even Israel itself and her allies have failed to take the idea of Hamas surrender seriously. Netanyahu has called for a “total victory,” but has been hesitant to tie this to an explicit Hamas declaration of surrender. 

As for Biden, when he dropped his plan for a three-phase hostage/ceasefire deal back in May, he suggested that Hamas was “no longer capable” of carrying out further attacks on Israel and, therefore, the war could safely end. 

But “total victory” is not the same thing as surrender. Neither is being “no longer capable” of attack. Surrender is the acknowledgement that one has lost, and that the war is over. 

Perhaps a surrender was impossible in this war. If we had waited for a white flag, we may not have been able to secure a deal in time to save any of the hostages. After all, a group like Hamas is uniquely immune to pressure to surrender. In World War II, Germany and Japan’s surrender meant giving up on the war, but it did not mean the end of their existence. Hamas, on the other hand, has no meaningful existence beyond its struggle against Israel, and thus surrender — as a concept — poses a more truly existential threat to Hamas than any weapon in Israel’s arsenal. 

That doesn’t mean, however, we should lose sight of Hamas surrender as a goal—even if we realize that it is, for now, far off.

Ceasefire and peace may seem vaguely synonymous to some observers in the West, but for Hamas these are opposites. A ceasefire is a chance to rearm and regroup for continued war. On the far side of every ceasefire in the past twenty years, we have discovered, is another attack. 

But what lies on the other side of surrender? 

For Israel, peace. For the Palestinians, whatever they want. Look at Germany. Look at Japan. Peace, security, a thriving economy, tourism, and good neighborly relations with their former enemies. This is not a fantasy. It’s history. And it can be Gaza’s history too.

For now, however, with hostages still in Gaza, and having seen the dire state that they’re in and heard the abuses that they’ve endured, a ceasefire will have to do.

Matthew Schultz is a Jewish Journal columnist and rabbinical student at Hebrew College. He is the author of the essay collection “What Came Before” (Tupelo, 2020) and lives in Boston and Jerusalem.