The 4-day pause in fighting between Israel and Hamas is being met with mixed reaction by many displaced Palestinians.

Israel and Hamas agree on deal for release of civilian hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners and halt to war.

Early this morning, Hamas and Israel agreed to a hostage deal: 30 children and 20 women will return to Israel, in exchange for five days of cease-fire and 150 Palestinians who are in Israeli custody and have been accused or convicted of serious crimes. Each additional 10 Israeli hostages freed will buy another day of respite from fighting. In arguing for the deal, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the return of hostages “a sacred duty” and quoted the 12th-century sage Maimonides, to the effect that redeeming Jewish prisoners (pidyon shvuyim) is a great mitzvah. (Islam commands a similar duty to free prisoners.) Netanyahu omitted mention of the various restrictions on this blessed activity—the most important of which is not to overpay for hostages, or do anything else that might encourage more hostage-taking. The far-right segment of his government split on the deal, with three ministers from the very-very-far-right Otzma Yehudit voting nay and 35 others consenting. The only-slightly-less-far-right Religious Zionist Party eventually voted yes on the deal.

For the moment, the mood inside Israel is tentative relief—which will turn to immense relief the moment the children start crossing the border and running into their families’ arms. (Two of the Israeli children on the exchange list are relatives of Yifat Zaila, whom I spoke with in Israel a few weeks ago.) Under these circumstances, one understands why Netanyahu might have ignored the other part of Maimonides’s recommendation. Anyone who wants to think about cold calculus now, however, might consider a document that makes the case against paying for the freedom of hostages. “We maintain that no compensation should be given” for the freedom of the innocent, it says. To pay for freedom would be “a surrender of the great fundamental principle” that hostages are not the property of hostage-takers, and that “if compensation is to be given at all, it should be given to the outraged and guiltless” victims of the crime, rather than to the criminals themselves.

These lines appear not in a statement from Otzma Yehudit but in one of the great moral documents of the 19th century, the 1834 Declaration of Sentiments of the American Anti-Slavery Society. In it, William Lloyd Garrison rejected the notion that slaveholders should be compensated for the freedom of the roughly 2 million men, women, and children in American bondage. Even at the time, it was clear that paying off slaveholders might avert a civil war and hasten the freedom of many slaves. But to make a deal with slaveholders would, he reasoned, amount to a cease-fire with an enemy whose total, unconditional surrender was the only acceptable outcome.

[The Best of Bad Options for Recovering the Hostages]

Garrison’s colleague Frederick Douglass shared his distaste for buying slaves’ freedom but evolved a more Maimonidean outlook. He understood the economic arguments against buying slaves and feared that to do so “would be giving the slaveholder a stimulus to have such commodities for sale.” In 1849, he wrote that “every act of purchase enhances the market value of human chattels, and makes the monsters cling to their property with a more tenacious grasp.”

But Douglass did not demand that the buying of freedom stop, if that was the only way to achieve it. In 1846, Douglass had himself been bought by an English Quaker for $711.66 and freed legally, after claiming his freedom by escape in 1838. The payment bothered him, as the Israeli deal will surely gnaw at the conscience of Israelis for some time. He opposed buying slaves—and yet he knew that the value of his ability to travel freely in America, speaking up for abolition, was far greater than a few hundred bucks.

Eventually he came around to the idea that freedom might come through diabolical deals (“covenants with Death,” in Garrison’s famous phrase). In 1847, Douglass wrote that the payment for his freedom was made “not to establish my natural right to freedom”—that was inalienably his, and to buy it would be repugnant—“but to release me from all legal liabilities to, slavery.” He likened the sale to paying off a fraudulent debt collector who was hassling him for a debt he did not owe. Paying off such a villain would be an ugly business, but not immoral. “To say I sanctioned his right to rob me, because I preferred to pay rather than go to jail, is to utter an absurdity, to which no sane man would give heed.”

He drew a distinction that may be relevant to today’s swap, comparing deals cut between slaveholders and slaves and those between slaveholders and powerful benefactors who could haggle as equals. He reasoned that slaves need feel no scruple if a rich benefactor chose to buy and free them. That a slaveholder would be enriched was deplorable. But if the expense was paid by another, such as his Quaker patron, then the transaction was false on both sides: The slaveholder had no right to own him, and the Quaker had no right to buy him. It was a bullshit transaction from the start, a legal fiction that did not degrade his moral standing.

Moreover, he became open to the idea of public payment, on a sort of debt owed by society for having abided the existence of slavery. By the 1850s, Douglass supported the idea of mass emancipation by purchase. He endorsed a plan by the prolific abolitionist slave-buyer Gerrit Smith to pay slaveholders $400 million, roughly a tenth of the GDP at the time.

[‘THERE WILL PROBABLY BE A CEASE-FIRE. AND THEN THEY WILL JUST BE NAMES.’]

Here it may seem that the moral analogy favors those who oppose the hostage deal: Israel’s compensating Hamas for the kidnapping of Israelis would be a reward for a war crime—payment by the victims, for freedom that is the victims’ by right. Douglass found such transactions abhorrent. But one can see this situation another way—and in my conversations with hostages’ families, I have found that many do. Although they find the idea of Hamas’s compensation grotesque, they see the act of paying as a debt owed by Israeli society to the abductees and their families, for having left them defenseless against monsters. If the release of Palestinian prisoners and a hiatus in military operations is a bitter price, it must be borne by Israel as a whole, because otherwise it would be borne by the hostages themselves. Their pain must be nationalized.

In this view, Israel is collectivizing its own sin, the sin of rewarding hostage-taking. It is also taking on a collective burden to respond, to end the possibility of future hostage-taking. Most Israelis seem to believe that this collective undertaking should be military, and that huge civilian casualties, overwhelmingly Palestinian, should be budgeted into that military objective. One can doubt whether this response is wise, and still concede that Israel’s pain should be spread equally among Israelis.

If the deal goes through, expect scenes of joyful returns, as well as renewed outrage at Hamas as the hostages recount their ordeals. And this tranche of hostages is probably the easiest to negotiate for. Extending the cease-fire through future releases might get more contentious, if Hamas finishes letting out children and women and starts demanding more valuable Palestinian prisoners in exchange for military-age Israelis and soldiers.

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For many Israelis, the deal is already a matter of regret. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir wrote today that it sets a “dangerous precedent,” while acknowledging that it was one among many bad alternatives. He said the deal helped Hamas, not only by freeing its “terrorists,” but also by freeing it of international outrage over its keeping women and children in dungeons. The cease-fire, he wrote, will give Hamas air to breathe, when Israel should instead strangle it stone-dead without delay.

But for many more Israelis, jubilation at a partial and imperfect deal still overrides the pangs of conscience about its downsides. William Lloyd Garrison was similarly unable to maintain his objections to deals when faced with the possibility of freeing any particular individual. “To save a fellow-being,” he wrote in 1847, “it is no crime sometimes to comply with even unjust demands.”

Israeli PM clinched deal with support of far-right coalition partners, who severely criticised move.

Of all the cataclysmic events I have ever experienced, October 7 affected me like no other. The videos of hateful protests and bloody or charred bodies unearthed memories I’d long kept buried. In one, I am a girl standing in the doorway of our home in Tehran, staring at graffiti that appeared overnight on a neighbor’s wall. Punctuated by a Swastika—something I had never seen before—were three words, scrawled in black paint on red brick: Kikes get lost.

This was in January 1979, just a few weeks before Iran’s Islamic Revolution, and nothing was as it had been. The rest of the world saw the revolution embodied in the figure of the ascetic cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, seated cross-legged on a cot in a spartan room in the suburbs of Paris. But for those of us in Iran, its signs were uncomfortably close, ubiquitous, and inescapable. “Allahu akbar!” was its soundtrack—an all-purpose call that was at times a plea, at other times a call to arms. The streets were ablaze with bonfires that winter, tires and much else set aflame. Whatever harm the Great Satan, America, and the Little Satan, Israel, had allegedly inflicted on the nation before, at least in those few weeks of a nationwide oil shortage, those countries’ burning flags kept the protesters warm.

Finally came the revolution’s most indelible sign of all: the Islamic dress code forced on women, who could wear only black, gray, brown, or navy blue. The mandatory hijab drained a once-colorful capital of its vibrant hues, casting half of the population into shadow. Women demonstrated in opposition to the order, but they had few allies. Even the secular intelligentsia banded with the ayatollah, dismissing the protests and the blatant anti-Semitic and anti-feminist character of the new leadership as a few minor quirks upon which the great revolution could not afford to dwell.

What brought these memories back on October 7 was a single video on social media. In it, a Hamas terrorist dragged a battered Israeli woman, the 19-year-old peace activist Naama Levi, by the hair out of a pickup truck, chanting “Allahu akbar!”—that ominous, familiar call, as yet another woman suffered at the hands of men who bore an uncanny resemblance to their Iranian precursors. Levi’s blood-soaked pants suggested that she had been assaulted—a tragedy that would bond her to women prisoners in Iran, where, in the aftermath of the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests, many women who had been arrested for violating the Islamic morality code were raped by their captors.

[Read: How to be a man in Iran]

Experts have pontificated over whether Iran had a hand in planning the October 7 attack. But perhaps more significant is the common ideology that Tehran’s rulers and Hamas share, composed of equal parts misogyny, anti-Semitism, and Islamism. Death, to them, is an aspiration rather than a destiny to forestall. And so their subjects become expendable pawns whose demise is never a loss. Sadegh Khalkhali, the Islamic Republic’s Sharia judge from the early revolutionary era, was once asked how he had so swiftly issued orders to execute so many political prisoners. He breezily replied that either the prisoners were guilty, in which case they’d received their due punishment, or they were innocent, in which case he had simply hastened their ascent to paradise.

Both Hamas and the Iranian regime are at war with the West and, as such, with all the laws devised in the West, including the laws of war. The most brutal of the Islamic Republic’s anti-riot thugs do not come to the scene of demonstrations dressed in the uniforms of the police or the Revolutionary Guard Corps. They come as what the protesters call “civilian dressers,” just as Hamas terrorists have done throughout this war to blend in with the public. Both use ambulances to penetrate the ranks of their opponents, to snatch prisoners, or to get away from hostile crowds. They share not a secret manual but a playbook of the lawless, in which nothing is forbidden if it advances the cause of the “righteous,” among whom Tehran and Hamas count themselves.

And yet, what Iran’s regime has done for more than four decades to create a new crop of zealots in its own image has backfired. Iran’s younger generations show a moral clarity that other nations in the region, and even the throngs on the streets of London and New York, do not demonstrate with regard to Hamas’s malevolent program. If Iranians have always been distinct from their predominantly Arab neighbors by virtue of race, religion, and language, now they are distinct in a new way: They are the only people in the region among whom such a large number reject the call for Israel’s destruction. Even a host on one of Iran’s official television broadcasts had to make this admission last week: “The people of Iran have been the greatest supporters of the Zionist regime in the world and by a large margin.”

Diasporic Iranians have been marching alongside supporters of Israel throughout Europe, the United States, and Canada, and a few have been physically attacked while doing so. In Iran, students refuse to stomp on the flags of the United States and Israel that have been painted on the ground at the entrances of their schools. When a Palestinian flag was raised at a soccer stadium in Tehran last month, the spectators began chanting profanities to express their indignation.

Iranians began distancing themselves from the regime’s propaganda nearly two decades ago, when the revolution’s fever had cooled and its promises remained undelivered. The distance only grew as the regime invested more and more in proxy groups throughout the region. The crowds at the annual Qods Day rallies began to thin, and protesters at various demonstrations chanted: “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon. I sacrifice my life for Iran.”

The significance of this shift in attitude among Iranians transcends Iran. If Ukrainians’ fight against Russia is about the future of democracy in Europe, then the struggle of Iranians against their regime is about the future of the Middle East without radicalism. For 44 years, Iran has been the region’s political laboratory for Islamist governance. The country gave theocracy a try, and it failed: A country with immense promise only 50 years ago is now a menace to people within its borders and beyond them. The narrative that the regime has peddled about itself—a religious utopia fighting for the well-being of downtrodden Muslims—has no currency among its own subjects. What Iranians have learned the hard way is what others around the world who dream of living under an Islamic state have yet to discover.

[Read: Forget the bomb and help Iranians fight their regime]

One of the most poignant moments of Iran’s 2022 protests came when a Palestinian woman named Rasha, moved by the uprising, recorded a statement saying that the demonstrations had made her see through the lies she had been told since childhood about Iran’s regime: “I now see that a government that kills its own people, oppresses its own people, cannot help liberate my people, cannot help liberate me.”

In 1978, Iranians euphorically followed a Shiite cleric in pursuit of what they thought was a noble cause and staged a popular resistance that was to deliver greater freedom and democracy to them. But he quickly led them into war, chaos, global isolation, and economic ruin. This is the dark legacy of Hamas’s chief patron. Those who have embraced Hamas have yet to know this truth—that their heroes are not liberators but brutal tyrants detested by their people.

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Israel and Hamas have a truce deal after 47 days of fighting. Here is a rundown of what happened in Gaza since October 7