By Gadi Taub, JNS
The “Bring Them Home, Now!” campaign was never really about the hostages. It was about ousting the prime minister. It failed.
If you hadn’t known anything about the huge crowd that gathered in Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square two days before the actual return of the rest of the living hostages, you’d have thought you stumbled into a rally of the Israeli chapter of MAGA. The banners celebrated U.S. President Donald Trump as the godfather of the hostage deal, and Trump’s personal representatives—Steve Witkoff, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner—were warmly welcomed.
The atmosphere was festive, even ecstatic. These have been two long years, during which massively long tables with empty chairs, each bearing the name of a hostage, were set up, and vows to see them all back with us were taken. And here we were on the eve of the realization of that ardent wish.
All seemed to go well until Witkoff thanked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. At the sound of the name, the crowd erupted with spontaneous boos and whistles, forcing Witkoff to plead with them to let him finish. Witkoff himself was understandably baffled. Why would the people who most vocally demanded a hostage deal boo the prime minister who delivered it?
Of course, Israelis understood full well what was going on. The event was not what it seemed. This was not just any celebration. It was a left-wing political rally in the very venue where the “Bring Them Home, Now!” campaign held countless anti-Netanyahu rallies.
And this crowd’s newfound love for Trump was not just spontaneous gratitude for the American president’s role in brokering the deal. It was a calculated anti-Netanyahu move, and an indirect expression of anger. It had a very specific domestic political purpose: giving Trump and only Trump all of the credit as a way to deny Netanyahu any of it.
If you follow the Hebrew-language X feeds, you would have been alerted to what was afoot. After left-wing journalists, politicians and influencers fell over each other to praise Trump for the deal, right-wing feed retorted with a barrage of screenshots showing how the very same people once used the worst invectives to describe Trump; how they mourned Kamala Harris’s defeat; and how they retweeted such iconic signs of the anti-Netanyahu protest as the AI-generated picture of Trump, Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin in orange jail overalls.
One of the chief architects of the “Bring Them Home, Now!” campaign, controversial political strategist Ronen Tzur, who now calls Trump “Israel’s hero,” had previously called him “Donald Adolf Trump.”
To read this crowd, you needed to understand the paradoxical nature of its celebration. The hostage deal was a realization of its declared aim, but it was also the painful defeat of its larger political strategy—because the main goal of the “Bring Them Home, Now!” campaign was never really the hostages. It was designed to harness the raw pain felt by a whole country in the service of the continued effort of the lavishly funded permanent protest to oust Netanyahu.
In fact, when you look at the way the campaign was managed, an even darker picture emerges: It was an attempt to remove Netanyahu from power at the expense of the hostages and their families.
One telling sign is that the campaign refrained from any demand to put pressure on Hamas. The first hostage deal was achieved by withholding aid while stepping up military pressure.
The campaigners never demanded the use of these effective tools to achieve another deal. They never even campaigned for Red Cross visits to the tunnels where our hostages were held in subhuman conditions.
Its strategists, advisers and supporters, including the chorus of the press that was its de facto PR service, advocated consistently against military pressure, based on the premise that hostages would be at risk of execution by their Hamas captors if the Israel Defense Forces closed in on where they were held.
This became an article of faith, despite its refutation by both logic and experience. It made no sense for Hamas operatives to discard their insurance policy, which is why, as released hostages reported, they were kept alive in tunnels, even as IDF forces were heard operating overhead.
Then there was the constant pressure from the campaign to make concessions to Hamas. Naturally, this encouraged Hamas to persevere in the hope that the demonstrators would force the government to capitulate, or at the very least, exacerbate the rifts in Israeli society, weakening its resolve. You don’t need to be an expert on game theory to understand that shouting “now, now, now” to your own side’s negotiators only encourages the other side to raise its price.
Even the campaign’s slogan designated the Israeli government as the culprit. Unlike the 1970s’ “Let My People Go!” campaign, which directed its slogan at those holding Jews captive—in that case the Soviet Union, which refused to grant them exit visas—the “Bring Them Home, Now!” campaign addresses its slogans to the Israeli government, not Hamas, implying that it was actually up to us, had we really wanted a deal. Which was clearly not the case.
Why was all this not obvious to the rank-and-file who attended the anti-Netanyahu rallies? The answer lies with the press’s impressive persistence in sustaining the lie that Netanyahu, not Hamas, kept sabotaging the deal.
Despite clear evidence that Hamas demanded conditions no Israeli government could acquiesce to, and in the face of repeated testimonies from both Biden administration and Trump administration officials, who laid the blame clearly at the feat of Hamas—and even in direct contradiction to the fact that Netanyahu had managed to return most of the hostages long before the final deal—the campaigners clung to the refrain that the prime minister had decided to “forsake the hostages.”
Of all the cynical political campaigns this country has seen, surely this was the most cold-blooded. Had the government yielded to the pressure and agreed to Hamas’s conditions, we might have brought back a handful of hostages at the cost of losing all leverage for returning the rest. Which means that this reckless strategy for defeating Netanyahu would, in reality, have sacrificed hostages for the cause.
The rank-and-file in the streets and on social media are, for the most part, true believers. They did not make these calculations. They probably believed former prime minister and longtime Netanyahu rival, Ehud Barak, when he said that “toppling Netanyahu is a necessary precondition for the return of all the hostages.”
But they were also not totally naive. Because they were never single-issue demonstrators. The hostage issue was, for them, only one among many reasons to oust Netanyahu. They knew full well that a hostage deal was not just an end, but also a means to defeating Netanyahu’s coalition. For them, toppling Netanyahu is the magic cure for all our ills.
One can thus understand their frustration: The deal had delivered the hostages without ridding the country of Netanyahu. Worse, it deprived them of their most potent political weapon against him.
What could they do now, in Hostages Square, except vent their frustration by booing the prime minister who brought the hostages home and called the lie in the name of which they had been swearing for two long years?
