For two years, I have made sharing the stories of the hostages who were taken on October 7th a central part of my advocacy. I did this for an obvious reason. Their stories matter. They are sacred. The hostages and their families deserve to be heard.
But there was another reason, one that is becoming more urgent by the day. I knew that the moment the last hostage came home, someone would try to twist their suffering into a political argument they never consented to make.
We are already seeing it. Almost immediately after the last hostage, Ran Gvili, z”l, was finally returned this week, public figures began warning that bringing hostages home was a mistake, because it will encourage the next hostage-taking attack. On the day a broken family was finally reunited with their fallen son—a hero who voluntarily fought and fell to save countless lives—they focused on how the Gvilis’ reunion forces future hostage families to pay an even higher price.
Interestingly, the voices spreading the anti-hostage deal messages are usually the loudest ones arguing that Israel must become more offensive in preserving its security post-October 7th. They argue that more preemptive military action is needed, and that we should never again show willingness to make hostage deals in the future. These strategies are presented as sober lessons learned from a tragedy.
In reality, these two arguments have little to do with each other. Together, they often function less as a unified military doctrine, and more as a politics of unaccountability. They are a way to avoid responsibility for the catastrophic failures of October 7th.
The idea that Israel shouldn’t always wait to be attacked to defend its security is not controversial. But no country’s security conception can credibly allow for a total collapse of border security next to civilian communities. No doctrine, no matter how hawkish, excuses the fact that terrorists crossed freely into Israeli towns, murdered families in their homes, and abducted civilians by the hundreds. That was not a failure of restraint or excessive compassion. It was a failure of basic defense that came from ignoring the voices who warned precisely against Hamas’s attack: the female lookouts, many of whom were murdered or taken hostage on that horrible day.
Instead of reckoning honestly with that failure, some are now attempting to displace blame onto the families and the hostages themselves and onto those who fought to bring them home. The implication is chilling. If only we were tougher, if only we valued deterrence more than human life, this would not have happened. This narrative asks the victims to carry the weight of the state’s mistakes.
That is why telling the hostages’ stories has always been more than an emotional act. Yes, it fills us with joy to see them reunited with their families. Yes, it restores something broken in our collective soul. But it is also a statement of refusal. We refuse to let their stories be buried or distorted to support a populist narrative that the hostages never agreed to endorse.
The hostage movement was, by any measure, a success. It deserves to be studied carefully. Its greatest victory was humanization. Through names, faces, birthdays, and family histories, the hostages became real to Jews and non-Jews around the world. They stopped being statistics and became people we felt we knew.
It is easy, in theory, to argue that making deals with terrorists is always wrong. It is much harder to say that when the person trapped in a tunnel feels like your cousin, your neighbor, or your childhood friend. That moral tension is not a weakness. It is a reflection of Jewish values, including the obligation to redeem captives.
The lesson of October 7th and its aftermath is not that our humanity led to our failure. It is that humanity prevailed, even under impossible conditions. Israel should never be shy about defending itself or protecting its interests in a hostile region. On that, there is broad consensus. The problem arises when calls for perpetual offensives are used politically to deflect scrutiny from defensive failures that made October 7th possible in the first place. The problem isn’t that we made a hostage deal, it’s that we are unwilling to honestly investigate why we had to make one in the first place.
The stories of the hostages include those failures. They speak of abandoned borders, forces deployed robustly in the West Bank yet sparingly next to Gaza, delayed responses, and systems that did not function when civilians needed them most. That is precisely why Israel needs a full, independent inquiry into what happened the days leading up to October 7th. Not to assign moral blame to Israel for the crimes of terrorists. Those crimes belong solely to their perpetrators. But to ensure that such a collapse never happens again.
Transparency is not a threat to security. Accountability is not a weakness. A willingness to study our mistakes and learn from them strengthens a nation far more than a rigid security concept that denies core Jewish values in the name of toughness.
The hostages came home carrying a truth with them. We owe it to them to listen, to protect their stories from political misuse, and to build a future where defending life and defending the state are never treated as opposing goals.
Hen Mazzig is a Senior Fellow at The Tel Aviv Institute (TLVi). He is a writer, digital communications expert, international speaker and LGBTQ+ advocate. His work focuses, among other topics, on the Jews from the Middle East and North Africa.