A peace activist involved in previous hostage negotiations describes how Netanyahu will handle the release of abducted Israelis.
Gershon Baskin
Gershon Baskin is more familiar than most with Hamas and its hostage tactics, having helped secure the release of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit from the militant group more than a decade ago in one of the most high-profile negotiations of its kind during the yearslong conflict between Israel and Palestine. Baskin, the co-founder and former co-director of the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information, became an unofficial intermediary between Hamas and Israeli representatives, securing key breakthroughs in the negotiation process that ensured its success.
This week’s hostage crisis—in which Hamas abducted dozens of civilians from southern Israel—is unlike anything Baskin has ever seen, and he said the prospects for a negotiation like the one he brokered to bring Shalit home in 2011, five years after the soldier was captured, are slim.
Baskin spoke to Foreign Policy about the unprecedented nature of the current Hamas hostage situation, the likelihood of being able to secure the hostages’ release, and what might happen next.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Foreign Policy: From what you’ve seen so far, what stands out to you most about the current hostage situation compared to the others that you have dealt with in the past?
Gershon Baskin: Well, obviously, the enormous number of hostages that were taken, and the fact that many of them are civilians—women, children, old people. It’s not an abducted soldier; it’s not one person. It’s more than 100 people, maybe 150 people, maybe 200 people. We don’t even know how many people are being held. I think it was a surprise not only to Israel, but I think Hamas was surprised itself by the huge number of hostages that it succeeded in abducting.
FP: Would it be fair to call this unprecedented?
GB: I think it’s unprecedented in the whole entire world. It’s certainly unprecedented in this conflict, in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. [Previously, it was] prisoners of war, abducted soldiers like Gilad Shalit in 2006, the soldiers who were captured in Lebanon. We’ve never had a situation like this.
FP: How do you think the Israeli government and negotiators on both sides will be approaching this particular situation?
GB: Well, I think it’s important to understand that, as far as I can see, there is no such thing as an Israeli negotiator on this issue. Israel has no intention, at least not in any time in the near future, of negotiating with Hamas. Israel has no intention of giving Hamas a prize like it got from the release of Gilad Shalit—1,027 prisoners were released in exchange for one soldier.
I believe that the current war being waged by the Israeli government in response to the Hamas attack is to retake control of Gaza and to eliminate Hamas as a political and military functioning body in the Gaza Strip. And that means that it has no intention of negotiating.
Israel’s goal will be to try to rescue the hostages in military operations. There is no doubt, calculating the risks, that hostages will be killed in those military operations. My sense from trying to understand where the Israeli public is, it believes that we already paid with a thousand lives, and if some of the hostages have to get killed in order to release others, I think the public would accept that. It’s a very strange situation, because Israel has kind of an ethos that we don’t leave anyone behind. That’s not always true, but that’s the ethos of the country. Prominent people [are] speaking on Israeli television, saying, “If some of the hostages are killed, then that’s the price of releasing the others,” and it’s kind of accepted.
FP: How seriously should the threat of the hostages being killed in captivity by Hamas be taken?
GB: Well, I think that with Israel cutting the electricity, and cutting the water, and cutting the food, and cutting the medical supplies, and a massive bombing, and then the ground operation, Hamas could very well feel that it has its back against the wall and this is the only leverage that it has on Israel. So I think it’s very real.
Hamas, I think in general, will treat the prisoners, the hostages, well. I don’t think that they will go through physical abuse, except perhaps some of the younger people it captures, younger men who it captures who are obviously in the army. And presumably it has some officers who may experience some torture, but I think the general population that it’s holding, women and children in particular, they will not be tortured. They will be taken care of. It won’t be able to provide them with the medical care that they need, but they will get their basic needs—food, water, clothing, shelter. That, I think, could be expected, but we could reach a point where Hamas simply, in order to respond to the end of its existing situation, it starts to execute them.
FP: What does an expected timeline look like for this situation? What are the main signs that everyone who’s watching this situation should be looking out for?
GB: I don’t see any signs of any kind of negotiations in the near future, and by near future I mean in the coming months. We know where and how wars start; we never know how they develop. We don’t know what might happen on the northern border with Hezbollah, or with the West Bank exploding, or even among the Palestinian citizens of Israel. If things get really bad in Gaza with the humanitarian crisis there, there could be changes of relations in the region. I think the Israeli-Saudi normalization conferences are destabilized now. I think it’s impossible to predict. The mood, currently, is not to negotiate at all.
It’s such a new situation, and there are so many more unknowns than knowns. Nobody, including myself, has the ability to predict how this is going to unfold and what’s going to happen. Unfortunately, at this moment, I don’t see any happy end for this whole developing situation.
Originally Published at https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/10/12/israel-hamas-hostage-negotiation-gershon-baskin-interview/
