King David’s Hostage Negotiations

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At the end of this week, Jews around the world will celebrate the holiday of Purim. The annual commemoration of the divine salvation from extermination has a special resonance this year.

Haman, the Purim story’s central villain, the Persian Empire’s grand vizier, descended from the Amalekite peoples, has traditionally served as a stand-in for contemporary villains like Hitler, Stalin (Russian Jews celebrate a Stalin’s Purim marking the Communist tyrant’s death before he could execute his own holocaust in the USSR) as well as Hamas and other Islamic Jihadists.

But the events of Purim taking place some 2,300 years ago are also intimately linked to the exodus from Egypt, 3,300 years ago, and the establishment of the first Jewish monarchy several hundred years later under King Saul followed by King David and his dynasty.

And the very different styles of the two rulers.

After the miraculous exodus from Egypt, Amalek had defied G-d by ambushing and attacking the Jews. In response, G-d had commanded an eternal war against the nomadic bandit rovers (Exodus 17) and (Deuteronomy 25:19) and tasked every Jewish king with waging that war.

When King Saul receives the divine command to destroy Amalek, he flinches from the mission and loses his right to the monarchy. It falls to the aged Prophet Samuel to finish the job, confronting King Agag of Amalek and telling him bluntly, “as thy sword hath made women childless, so shall thy mother be childless among women” (1 Samuel 15:33) before striking him down. The story of Purim describes Haman as an ‘Agagite’ descended from that very king.

But it is King David who faces a crisis similar to the one that Israel is still living through.

After Saul and his army falls to the Philistines, the kingdom is in disarray. David and his small band of men return to their town only to find that the Amalekites had overrun it, “burned it with fire” and “their wives, and their sons, and their daughters, were taken captives”.

“David and the people that were with him lifted up their voice and wept, until they had no more power to weep” (1 Samuel 30:4). “The people spoke of stoning him, because the soul of all the people was grieved, every man for his sons and for his daughters” but David turns to G-d in search of answers. And G-d tells him, “Pursue; for thou shalt surely overtake them, and shalt without fail recover all.” David and his men chase after the enemy. A third of them cannot go on, but the rest continue. The Amalekites are overtaken “eating and drinking and feasting” with their spoils and David surprising them, strikes at twilight, defeats them and rescues all the captives.

In sharp contrast to Saul, King David puts his absolute trust in G-d, commits totally to a course of action, the destruction of the enemy and the rescue of the hostages, and follows through as rapidly as possible with no hesitation and no other considerations. Where Saul is held back by his insecurities as a leader, David inspires men who were on the verge of stoning him by rallying them to fight with him. Saul is stymied by political considerations while David trusts in G-d.

That incident has important lessons for the present day as Israel, after going to war nearly a year and a half ago, has once again been reduced to trading terrorists for hostages or their bodies. The initial courageous statements of principle after Oct 7 gave way to political pressure from the Biden administration, the EU, the UN, and other global forces, and then to domestic pressure campaigns insisting that hostage releases take priority over the destruction of Hamas.

What started out as a Davidic war of principle and courage gave way to a Saulite political slog. And this is what Hamas and its backers in the Muslim Brotherhood, Qatar and others around the world had been counting on. The more Israel tried to demonstrate that it was fighting a ‘just’ war as gently as possible, the more accusations of genocide and war crimes were hurled at it.

And Israel was back in the same familiar no-win scenario of fighting Islamic terrorism.

Saul’s mercy on Amalek was not a sign of his compassion, but his weakness and insecurity. In his desperate efforts to avert the prophecy and prevent David from succeeding him, he would violently lash out at everyone from his own son to the priests who had provided his rival with bread. This led the sages to warn that “one who is compassionate to the cruel will ultimately be cruel to those to whom he should show compassion”. A commonplace liberal pattern today.

Israel could learn a good deal from King David’s determined approach to ‘hostage negotiations’. He does not parley with the enemy or even waste time on internal debates before turning to G-d to determine what to do. It’s not that he doesn’t feel the agony of the losses. We are told that he wept along with his men until they could all no longer cry. But after that period of sorrow was done, he acted as quickly as he could, determinedly pursuing the enemy until they were his.

Today anyone who argues that the priority must be to destroy Hamas and win the war is accused of not caring enough about the hostages. The cycle of recriminations over what happened on Oct 7 and the fate of the hostages has been cynically exploited by Qatar, which has embedded its corrupt operatives among some of the families of the hostages, by the media and the Left, to undermine and divide Israelis. King David refuses to engage in recriminations or to be subject to them. His purpose during Israel’s ancient hostage crisis is not to debate the past, but to act resolutely. He also refuses to divide the fate of the captives from that of the war. Instead, he pursues the unitary purpose of destroying the enemy and saving the captives.

That is only possible because King David acts boldly, rapidly and unpredictably, following the Amalekite raiders at a faster speed than they ever expected and ambushing them. He does not come to negotiate, but to slay them and save the captives, and putting his trust in G-d, he has no moral qualms about his mission. A problem that continues to trouble Israel even after Oct 7.

There is much that Israel could have learned and still can learn from King David’s approach to hostage negotiations. The first thing is to eliminate moral doubt about its rightness through faith. The second is to act quickly and debate later about the ‘endgame’ of the conflict. The third is to pursue the release of captives through the destruction of the enemy and by no other means. And finally to recognize that wars are only won when the debate ends and the battle begins.

Hamas tactics, aided by Qatar, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the media, has been to delay Israel’s response, to stir up moral doubt using a propaganda campaign of fake atrocities and war crimes, with false accusations of genocide and constant lies about every military operation, and by demonstrating that it would kill hostages rather than allow Israel to rescue them.

That slowed down Israel’s response at every turn of the Oct 7 war. And the more the battles slow down, the more debates set in. Victory is the best answer to any argument. Israel would need to worry less about the opinions of every pro-terrorist institution from the UN to Haaretz if it delivered consistent mission-focused victories by acting decisively, accepting the risks and rebounding from losses with new operations rather than wallowing in the futility of disproving every lie and arguing over what could have been done differently. Doubt, moral and operational, is corrosive. It corroded King Saul’s nerve until he went mad while King David refused to doubt.

The secret of King David’s decisiveness was the same moral conviction that began when as a boy he confronted Goliath and told the Philistine giant, “You come at me with a sword, and with a spear, and with a javelin; and I come at you in the name of the LORD of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have taunted.” That moral certainty is sadly lacking today.

King Saul did not lack courage in response to some outrage, such as when Nahash the Ammonite besieged Jabesh Gilead and refused to accept their surrender unless each man agreed to have an eye put out. It’s only when the way was not clear, doubt set in and the people no longer seemed to be behind him that Saul tended to become insecure and lose his clarity.

That is still Israel’s problem today. Its men are courageous when facing armed assaults, but arguments, smears and accusations rob them of their certainty and their momentum. Israel doesn’t lose wars, instead it loses image campaigns and peace negotiations. And unless it reclaims the certainty that it had on Oct 7 and that Americans had on 9/11, that will continue.

Purim marked the return of certainty as the Jews of Persia who had become all too comfortable, who stayed in Sushan instead of returning to Jerusalem, were faced with sudden annihilation. Some blamed the small minority of Jews who had returned from exile to resettle Israel, others Mordechai for refusing to bow to Haman, but that distant descendant of Saul did not doubt. He had become a Jew, a Man of Judah, not by descent, but through the moral certainty of a David.

And an exiled and downtrodden people suddenly found the strength to fight for their survival.