Immediately after the horrors of October 7, Edward Rothstein thought some things might change about the way the West saw Israel. Not only was he wrong, he soon realized, but he was wrong in almost the exact same that he had been wrong in the days after September 11, 2001:

As it turned out, in the aftermath of 9/11, the doctrines of the intellectuals became even more . . . doctrinaire. In the following decades, the “root-causes” argument was heard anytime a particular kind of terrorism was confronted. The extremism of a terrorist act was taken to be proportional to the size of the grievance. Think of what awful things had to have been done to inspire that kind of primordial fury!

Not only that, but as has been reiterated again and again over the decades, if you respond to terror in any combative way without addressing the purported injustice, then clearly you are becoming part of a “cycle of violence.”

What has been made clear over the past month is that under current ideological conditions, anything done to the Jews in Israel would be justified. Anything. And that something very close to nothing would be tolerated in response.

Ron Ben-Yishai explains Hamas’s current calculations:

Strategically speaking, Hamas is hoping to add more and more days to the pause currently in effect, setting a new reality in stone, one which will convince the United States to get Israel to end the war. At the same time, they still have most of the hostages hidden in every underground crevice they could find, and hope to exchange those with as many Hamas and Islamic Jihad prisoners currently in Israeli prisons, planning on “revitalizing” their terrorist inclinations to even the odds against the seemingly unstoppable Israeli war machine.

Chances are that if pressured to do so by Qatar and Egypt, they will release men over 60 with the same “three-for-one” deal they’ve had in place so far, but when Israeli soldiers are all they have left to exchange, they are unlikely to extend the arrangement, instead insisting that for every IDF soldier released, thousands of their people would be set free.

In one of his last speeches prior to October 7, the Gaza-based Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar said, “remember the number one, one, one, one.” While he did not elaborate, it is believed he meant he wants 1,111 Hamas terrorists held in Israel released for every Israeli soldier, and those words came out of his mouth before he could even believe he would be able to abduct Israelis in the hundreds. This added leverage is likely to get him to aim for the release for all prisoners from Israeli facilities, not just some or even most.