[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
Dr Hagai Ben-Artzi is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother-in-law. And he is deeply critical of the deal Netanyahu has agreed to with Hamas, believing that the exchange of nearly 2000 Palestinian prisoners, 250 of whom are convicted murderers serving life sentences, for 20 Israeli hostages, will only lead in the future to hundreds or thousands of Israeli victims of those prisoners being freed today.
More on Ben-Artzi’s scathing remarks can be found here: “Dr. Hagai Ben-Artzi: We are signing off on the next massacre and kidnappings,” by Uzi Baruch, Israel National News, October 9, 2025:
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother-in-law, Dr. Hagai Ben-Artzi, spoke in the Arutz Sheva – Israel National News studio Thursday, offering scathing criticism and dire warnings regarding Israel’s agreement with Hamas.
When asked if he also feels a sense of joy at the news, Ben-Artzi replied: “There is always joy. I rejoiced when the three soldiers were freed in the Jibril Deal, and I rejoiced when Gilad Shalit returned. But at the time, even back then and even more so today, I knew that with our own hands we were signing the next kidnapping, the next massacre, and the next murders.”
Ben-Artzi noted that when he opposed the Shalit deal in 2011 and was labeled a “spoilsport,” he never imagined that its price would ultimately be “around two thousand dead and murdered, and thousands more wounded. And even now, we cannot fathom the scale of the next disaster we are signing onto at this very moment. We don’t yet see the faces or the names, the towns and the homes — but for me, it’s already real. For forty years already, I’ve fought against the moral abomination of releasing terrorists.”…
How many Israelis will be murdered in the future by the prisoners who are to be freed on Sunday? One thousand? Two thousand? Many more, one can be sure, than the 20 Israeli hostages who will be freed.
“[US] President [Donald] gave us the right solution immediately after taking office – ‘conquer and we’ll start a process of emigration.’ But because of our hostage psychosis, we wanted another ten or twenty hostages freed and lost the chance for a strategic solution. The only solution is removing the refugees. If they are not removed, they’ll march on Ashdod, Ashkelon, and Be’er Sheva, because in 1948 they were expelled from there. Now that they’re in tents, they have nowhere to return to — and what will the State of Israel do when faced with them?”
He also cited Supreme Court rulings that prohibit firing on civilians—something, he said, that would prevent Israel from responding to a mass civilian march from Gaza….
But the Israeli Supreme Court did not prohibit non-lethal methods of crowd control, including tear gas, tasers, rubber bullets, and smoke bombs. What the Supreme Court had in mind were domestic protesters holding demonstrations. A mass march by millions of Arabs from outside Israel, hoping to storm into Israel to physically claim their “right of return” is something else; it’s a quasi-military act, and should those non-lethal weapons be insufficient to stop the marchers, only then should the IDF use live fire, including live fire directed at their lower legs, in order to inhibit their moving, should tear gas, rubber bullets, tasers, and smoke bombs not be enough.
Ben-Artzi was virtually alone among prominent Israelis in opposing the 2011 trade of 1,014 imprisoned terrorists for a single Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit. But his Cassandra-like warnings then proved prescient: many of those freed went on to kill more than a thousand Israelis. And just one of them, Yahya Sinwar, was the mastermind of the Hamas atrocities carried out on October 7, 2023. He recognizes the deep relief felt by the hostage families, and all Israelis, upon learning that all 20 of the hostages not murdered by Hamas in captivity would be coming home. But he also knows the terrible future price that Israelis will pay for this trade of hundreds of murderers for 20 innocent civilians. Ben-Artzi wants Israelis to know the real price of this Phase One of the deal. And once they realize its cost, they should be far less enthusiastic about agreeing to Phase Two of the agreement, which Hamas has already been demanding be modified so that the terror group can keep some, though not all, of its weapons.
