Born into a Catholic family in a German-speaking village in southwestern Romania, Herta Müller won the Nobel Prize for her poetry and novels in 2009. Last month, Müller delivered a speech about the October 7 massacres, the Gaza war, and the escalation of anti-Semitism in which she displayed a moral clarity rarely heard from Europeans these days. Of the progressive-minded protesters eagerly repeating the slogans of bloodthirsty jihadists, she says:

I lived in a dictatorship for over 30 years. And when I came to Western Europe, I could not imagine that democracy could ever be called into question in such a way. I thought that in a dictatorship, people are systematically brainwashed. And that in democracies, people learn to think for themselves because the individual counts. Unlike in a dictatorship, where independent thought is forbidden and the forced collective trains people. And where the individual is not a part of the collective, but an enemy.

I am appalled that young people, students in the West, are so confused that they are no longer aware of their freedom. That they have apparently lost the ability to distinguish between democracy and dictatorship. . . . One wonders what is being taught at universities today.

She then turns to the specific consequences for the Jews:

In Thomas Mann’s novel Doktor Faustus, National Socialism is said to have “made everything German unbearable to the world.” I have the impression that the strategy of Hamas and its supporters is to make everything Israeli, and therefore everything Jewish, unbearable to the world. Hamas wants to maintain anti-Semitism as a permanent global mood. That is why it also wants to reinterpret the Shoah. The Nazi persecution and the rescue flight to Palestine are also to be called into question. And ultimately, the right of Israel to exist. This manipulation goes as far as to claim that German Holocaust remembrance only serves as a cultural weapon to legitimize the Western-white “settlement project” of Israel.

Even if the agreement with Hamas to secure the release of some, and possibly all, of the remaining hostages—and the bodies of those no longer alive—is a prudent decision for Israel, it comes at a very high price: potentially leaving Hamas in control of Gaza and the release of vast numbers of Palestinian prisoners, many with blood on their hands. Nadav Shragai reminds us of the history of such agreements:

We cannot forget that the terrorists released in the Jibril deal during the summer of 1985 became the backbone of the first intifada, resulting in the murder of 165 Israelis. Approximately half of the terrorists released following the Oslo Accords joined Palestinian terror groups, with many participating in the second intifada that claimed 1,178 Israeli lives. Those freed in [exchange for Gilad Shalit in 2011] constructed Gaza, the world’s largest terror city, and brought about the October 7 massacre. We must ask ourselves: where will those released in the 2025 hostage deal lead us?

Taking these painful concessions into account Michael Oren argues that they might nonetheless be necessary:

From day one—October 7, 2023—Israel’s twin goals in Gaza were fundamentally irreconcilable. Israel could not, as its leaders pledged, simultaneously destroy Hamas and secure all of the hostages’ release. The terrorists who regarded the hostages as the key to their survival would hardly give them up for less than an Israeli commitment to end—and therefore lose—the war. Israelis, for their part, were torn between those who felt that they could not send their children to the army so long as hostages remained in captivity and those who held that, if Hamas wins, Israel will not have an army at all.

While 33 hostages will be released in the first stage, dozens—alive and dead—will remain in Gaza, prolonging their families’ suffering. The relatives of those killed by the Palestinian terrorists now going free will also be shattered. So, too, will the Israelis who still see soldiers dying in Gaza almost daily while Hamas rocket fire continues. What were all of Israel’s sacrifices for, they will ask. . . .

Perhaps this outcome was unavoidable from the beginning. Perhaps the deal is the only way of reconciling Israel’s mutually exclusive goals of annihilating Hamas and repatriating the hostages. Perhaps, despite Israel’s subsequent military triumph, this is the price for the failures of October 7.