On the exchange rate - Eyal Weizman in LRB:

“In the spring of 1956, eight years into the Nakba, a group of Palestinian fedayeen crossed the ploughed ditch which was all that separated Gaza from the state of Israel. On one side of the ditch were 300,000 Palestinians, 200,000 of them refugees expelled from the surrounding area; on the other were a handful of new Israeli settlements. The Palestinian fighters attempted to enter the kibbutz of Nahal Oz, killing Roi Rotberg, a security officer. They took his body back with them to Gaza, but returned it after the UN intervened. Moshe Dayan, then Israel’s chief of the general staff, happened to be in the settlement for a wedding and asked to give the eulogy at Rotberg’s funeral the following evening. Speaking of the men who killed Rotberg he asked: ‘Why should we complain of their hatred for us? Eight years they sat in the refugee camps of Gaza, and saw in front of their eyes how we turned the lands and the villages in which they and their forefathers once dwelled into our homeland.’ It was a recognition of what Palestinians had lost that contemporary Israeli politicians can no longer afford to express. But Dayan wasn’t advocating the right of return: he ended his speech by arguing that Israelis had to prepare themselves for a permanent and bitter war, which would have a major role for what Israel called ‘frontier settlements’.”$$

(…)

“‘Absentee land’ was the tabula rasa on which Israeli planners drafted the blueprint of the Zionist settler project after the expulsions of 1948. Its chief architect was Arieh Sharon, a graduate of the Bauhaus, who studied under Walter Gropius and Hannes Meyer before moving to Palestine in 1931, where he built housing estates, workers’ co-operatives, hospitals and cinemas. When the state of Israel was established, David Ben-Gurion made him head of the Government Planning Department. In The Object of Zionism (2018) the architectural historian Zvi Efrat explained that, though Sharon’s master plan was based on the latest principles of modernist design, it had several other aims: to provide homes for the waves of immigrants who had arrived after the Second World War, to move Jewish populations from the centre to the periphery, to secure the frontier and to occupy territory in order to make the return of refugees more difficult.”

(…)

“Following Israel’s occupation in 1967, the government established settlements between the main Palestinian population centres in Gaza itself. The largest was Gush Katif, near Rafah on the Egyptian border; in total, Israeli colonies covered 20 per cent of Gaza’s territory. In the early 1980s the area in and around Gaza also absorbed many Israeli settlers evacuated from Sinai after the peace accord with Egypt. The first fence around the territory was built between 1994 and 1996 – a time seen as the height of the ‘peace process’. Gaza was now being isolated from the rest of the world. When, in response to Palestinian resistance, Israel’s Gaza colonies were dismantled in 2005, some of the evacuees chose to relocate to settlements close to Gaza’s borders. A second, more advanced fencing system was completed shortly after. In 2007, a year after Hamas took power in Gaza, Israel began its full-scale siege, controlling and limiting incoming flows of life-sustaining provisions such as food, medicine, electricity and petrol. The Israeli army calibrates the privation to a level that brings life in Gaza to an almost complete standstill. Together with a series of bombing campaigns, which according to the UNresulted in 3500 Palestinian deaths between 2008 and September this year, the siege has brought humanitarian disaster on an unprecedented scale: civil institutions, hospitals, water and hygiene systems are barely able to function, with electricity available for only around half the day. Almost half of Gaza’s population is unemployed and more than 80 per cent rely on aid to meet basic needs.”

(…)

“However the conflict ends, with or without Hamas in power (and I bet on the former), Israel won’t be able to avoid negotiating over the exchange of prisoners. For Hamas, the starting point will be the six thousand Palestinians currently in Israeli prisons, many of them held in administrative detention without trial. The capture of Israelis has had a central place in the Palestinian armed struggle throughout the 75 years of conflict. By obtaining hostages the PLO and other groups aimed to force Israel into an implicit recognition of Palestinian nationhood. The Israeli position in the 1960s was to deny that there was such a thing as a Palestinian people, which meant that it was logically impossible to recognise the PLO as their legitimate representative. The denial also meant that there was no need to recognise Palestinian fighters as legitimate combatants under international law, and therefore no need to grant them POW status in line with the Geneva Conventions. Captured Palestinians were held in a legal limbo, much like the ‘unlawful combatants’ of the post-9/11 era.
In July 1968 the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked an El-Al flight and landed it in Algeria, inaugurating a series of hijackings whose explicit aim was the release of Palestinian prisoners. The Algeria incident led to 22 Israeli hostages being exchanged for sixteen Palestinian prisoners, though the Israeli government denied that there had been a deal at all. Sixteen for 22: such an exchange rate would not hold for long. In September 1982, after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, Ahmed Jibril’s PFLP-General Command captured three IDF soldiers; three years later, in what was known as the Jibril agreement, Israel and the PFLP-GC finally reached a prisoner-swap deal: three soldiers for 1150 Palestinian prisoners. In the 2011 deal to release Gilad Shalit, captured by Hamas in 2006, the exchange rate was even more favourable to the Palestinians: 1027 prisoners for a single Israeli soldier. In anticipation of being forced to make many more such deals, Israel began arbitrarily to arrest more Palestinians, including minors, to increase its assets for future exchange. It also kept the bodies of Palestinian fighters, to be returned as part of any exchange. All of this reinforces the perception that the life of one of the colonisers is worth a thousand times more than the lives of the colonised. This calculation inevitably brings to mind the history of human trading. But here the exchange rate is mobilised by the Palestinian resistance to invert the deep structural colonial asymmetry.
Different states deal with the capture of their soldiers and citizens in different ways. The Europeans and Japanese usually engage in secret prisoner exchanges or negotiate ransoms. The US and UK claim in public that they don’t negotiate or comply with captors’ demands, and although they haven’t always strictly adhered to this, they have favoured inaction and silence when a rescue operation has seemed impossible. This is seen as the ‘lesser evil’ and is part of what military game theorists call the ‘repeated game’: every action is evaluated in relation to its possible long-term consequences, with the benefits of securing a prisoner’s release weighed against the chance that the exchange will result in more soldiers or civilians being captured in future.”

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“In 1986, in the wake of the Jibril deal, the Israeli army issued the controversial Hannibal Directive, a secret operational order designed to be invoked on the capture of an Israeli soldier by an irregular armed force. The military has denied this interpretation, but it was understood by Israeli soldiers as a licence to kill a comrade before they were taken prisoner. In 1999, Shaul Mofaz, the then chief of the general staff, explained the policy: ‘With all the pain that saying this entails, an abducted soldier, in contrast to a soldier who has been killed, is a national problem.’ Although the military claimed that the directive’s name was randomly selected by a computer program, it is an apt one. The Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca killed himself in 181 bc in order not to fall into Roman hands. The Romans had shown similar resolve thirty years earlier: when Hannibal tried to secure a ransom for the soldiers he had captured in his victory at Cannae, the Senate, after a heated debate, refused and the prisoners were executed.
On 1 August 2014, during the offensive on Gaza known as Operation Protective Edge, Palestinian fighters captured an IDF soldier near Rafah, and the Hannibal Directive came into effect. The air force bombed the tunnel system into which the soldier had been taken and 135 Palestinian civilians, including entire families, were killed in the bombardment. The army has since cancelled the directive. But with the current indiscriminate bombing of Gaza, the government seems not only to be bringing unprecedented destruction on the people of Gaza but to be returning to the principle of preferring dead captives to a deal. Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, has called for Hamas to be hit ‘mercilessly, without taking into serious consideration the matter of the captives’. Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, has said that the hostages ‘would not prevent us from doing what we need to do’. But in this war the fate of the civilians in Gaza and the captured Israelis is closely entangled, as is that of both peoples.”

Read the article here.

There are too exchange rates between prisoners and the exchange rate that follows the logic of deterrence, how many dead Palestinians are needed in order to restore deterrence. I mentioned somewhere five and fifteen times more dead Palestinians than dead Israelis.

The question is the ground offensive. Is it postponed because of Biden, because of the hostages, because of other strategic considerations (the IDF doesn’t have a plan)? Will it start?

Hamas just has too many prisoners, for that reason the exchange rate of Shalit won’t work.

We don’t know how many of these prisoners are still alive. Many assume that prisoners with a non-Israeli passport will be released sooner or later, but we don't know. Since the IDF is acting from a position of weakness, the trust of the own population in this institution has been diminished, negotiations at this point will only enforce the perception of Israel as weak.
Israel is willing to kidnap the population of Gaza in order to pressure Hamas into releasing (some) prisoners. I’m not sure if Hamas is impressed, the liberation and dead go hand in hand, in the philosophy of Hamas.

The matter of the captives and the matter of the population in Gaza seem to be for the main actors a detail. The exchange rate counts, and the repeated game, Israel is willing to bomb Gaza relentlessly in order to avoid a repetition of October 7, even if that means sacrificing your own prisoners. Restoring deterrence is a costly hobby.