JERUSALEM — In Israel, news of an imminent hostage deal with Hamas grips the country. Fifteen months after the attack of October 7, 2023, when Palestinian terrorists seized 250 civilians and soldiers from Israeli territory, nearly 100 hostages remain in Gaza. The oldest is 86. The youngest is 2. Most seem to be dead, murdered by their captors, or killed inadvertently by Israeli forces, but Hamas refuses to divulge how many. The hostages’ faces have become familiar to everyone in Israel. They’re on posters in bus stops, on telephone poles, hanging from highway bridges. We all feel we know them.

Even though not all details of the deal are clear, Israelis are broadly behind it—a poll on January 15 put the number at 69 percent, with 21 percent unsure and only 10 percent opposed. The mainstream Israeli position is that the government must make every reasonable effort to save the lives of captives, whether that means military operations if possible, or freeing jailed terrorists in exchange for hostages if necessary. Opponents of the deal, even if they’re tortured by the suffering of their fellow citizens in brutal conditions in tunnels under Gaza, see the deal as a form of surrender that rewards the tactic of hostage-taking and invites future attacks, saving people in the present while sacrificing people in the future. In my experience, most people actually hold parts of both positions, but when forced to choose, they tend to choose the first.

For external observers trying to understand the current debate here in Israel, the key is to realize that this is an argument that didn’t start with the current deal—or even with the current war. It’s impossible to understand the debate of 2025 without going back 40 years, to 1985. The debate is less about the details of this deal than about a basic question forced on us by the tactics of our enemies, namely: Does our willingness to assume grave risk to save individuals constitute an Israeli strength or weakness?

Prisoner swaps were a feature of all of the wars Israel fought against Arab armies in its first decades, but these tended to be standard prisoner-of-war swaps conducted along lines familiar to any army: soldiers for soldiers, once the fighting was done. By 1985, however, the threat to Israel had changed. Now it came less from regular armies than from what would now be called non-state actors, or what Israelis would call terrorists. In south Lebanon that year, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was holding three soldiers. The group’s leader, Ahmed Jibril, was demanding no fewer than 1,200 Palestinian prisoners in return.

Less than a decade had passed since Israeli commandos pulled off the famous rescue of hostages held by Palestinian and German hijackers at Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976. But since then, Israel had been forced to agree to a few less glorious negotiations and swaps. In 1985, too, the government, led by Prime Minister Shimon Peres, saw no military option. Under public pressure to save the lives of young men who had been conscripted and sent to fight for their country, and faced with desperate pleas from their families, the government took the bargain. It is still remembered here as the infamous “Jibril deal.”

Many government ministers had misgivings. A few refused to support the move, like the then-cabinet minister Yitzhak Navon. “I thought it was a terrible example to show all of our enemies that the best deal for them would be to kidnap soldiers and civilians, that it’s possible to trade them for the release of hundreds of prisoners and terrorists,” he declared. “We have to have the resolve to tell the families of captives that there is a line the country cannot cross.”

Auguring Israel’s behavior in the future, however, Navon was in the minority. Sympathy for the hostages and their families won out. This is a small country where people know each other, and one negotiator remarked that logical considerations were effective “until a mother faints on your desk.” Also present in the minds of Jewish Israelis were much older precepts, like the supreme value of life in Jewish tradition, and a sage’s millennium-old ruling—dating to a time when Jews were regularly seized for ransom in Christian and Muslim lands—that there’s “no greater commandment than the redemption of captives.”

Facing the hostage dilemma in 1985, some figures in government had to publicly, and embarrassingly, reverse earlier positions. Seven years before, for example, Yitzhak Rabin, had criticized a deal to free one Israeli soldier for 76 prisoners: By releasing terrorists guilty of killing Israelis, he raged, the government had “crossed the red line.” But at the time of that statement, Rabin was in the political opposition. When the Jibril deal came up for a vote in 1985, he was in power, and he said yes. One of the prisoners released was Ahmed Yassin, who later became the spiritual leader of Hamas.

Having leaders say one thing when in opposition, and another when in power, would become familiar to Israelis confronting the hostage dilemma in subsequent decades—and indeed this week. One outspoken critic of the Jibril deal, as it happens, was the young politician Benjamin Netanyahu. The future prime minister positioned himself as an expert on counterterrorism with books like A Place Among the Nations, from 1993, where he castigated the deal as a fatal blow to Israel’s efforts to forge an international front against terrorism. (The lone fatality of the heroic Entebbe raid that freed the hijacked hostages was Netanyahu’s brother Yoni, who led the rescue mission.) Netanyahu wrote that the Palestinian uprising known as the First Intifada, which began two years later, in 1987, was due in part to the irresponsible release of more than 1,000 prisoners by Israel’s leaders.

Just a year after the trauma of the Jibril deal, however, Israelis were presented with a tragedy that illustrated the opposite danger—that of failing to make a deal. In 1986 an air force navigator, Ron Arad, had to abandon his fighter jet after a technical malfunction over south Lebanon, and was captured by Lebanese Shia fighters. Arad was alive, and his captors named their price, but public opinion was still stinging from the previous year’s asymmetrical bargain. Attempts to win Arad’s release through military means failed, talks dragged on, and by 1988 the navigator had vanished, never to be found. To this day, the name Ron Arad is familiar to most Israelis, including millions who weren’t even born when he was taken prisoner. It’s one you hear frequently right now: Many Israelis say they fear that some of today’s hostages will become “Ron Arads,” the worst fate of all—people whose fates are never known.

Several decades and hostage swaps later, in 2011, Netanyahu was prime minister, and found himself facing the same dilemma he had written about with such assurance as a younger man. A tank crewman, Gilad Shalit, had been captured by Palestinian fighters on the Gaza border five years earlier. Nothing Israel had done brought him any closer to release, and his captors wouldn’t budge on the price. Public sympathy grew for the soldier and his parents, who conducted an effective campaign in favor of a deal with the backing of most of the Israeli press. Netanyahu found, as others did before, that it’s easier to stand on principle when you’re not facing public opinion or fainting mothers—and also understood that the majority of citizens, then and now, want to see their captives home even if the price seems reckless. With the support of most Israelis (though not all), Netanyahu made a deal that freed 1,000 Palestinian prisoners for the crewman—an exchange even more lopsided than the 1985 deal he had opposed.

Among the dangerous prisoners freed in Netanyahu’s deal was Yahya Sinwar. Sinwar went on to mastermind the October 7 attack, including the taking of the current hostages. He led Hamas in Gaza until, a year later, he was killed by Israeli troops amid the carnage of the war he started.

The first stage of the current deal, slated to last 42 days, is meant to release 33 hostages—although “release” is the right word only for the ones who are alive, and not all are. According to reports, Israel will release upwards of 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. The rest of the hostages are to be returned in a planned second and third stage, accompanied by Israeli withdrawals from Gaza and ultimately by the end of the war, but skepticism about these later stages is in order. Much can and will happen before then.

Israelis face the current deal with hope that at least some of the familiar faces from the hostage posters will finally return to their families after 15 months of horror, and also with relief at a pause in the Gaza fighting, which seems to be sinking into a war of attrition, exhausting our military reserves and delivering high Israeli casualties with diminishing returns. But the regional war that began on October 7, 2023 isn’t over, and neither is the terrible dilemma that faces Israel every time hostages fall into enemy hands. Yahya Sinwar might be dead, but the tactic that freed him, and which will now free his comrades, lives on.

Matti Friedman would like to thank Beit Avi Chai, in Jerusalem, which assisted with the historical research for this piece.