For 40 days the media in Israel acted with maturity and now it has returned to its improper ways. In recent weeks, the terrorist organization Hamas published a series of videos of abductees with dictated messages - the absolute majority of the media in Israel showed maturity and decided not to broadcast them.
We mentioned that this is one of the most effective tools of terrorism - spreading messages among the population, and the media in Israel did not cooperate. It did not broadcast the videos of the abductees criticizing Netanyahu, it did not broadcast the video in which Noa Marciano asks to stop the bombings, nor the video in which 13-year-old Yagil Yaakov accuses Israel of the fact that he may die because of Israel's aggression.
But this week, all this maturity has expired, and a series of articles by senior newspaper officials in the various systems demand that the Prime Minister go to a prisoner exchange deal, even at the price of stopping the ground attack, for a limited time. They are calling one after another to go all out for a deal with Hamas and release male and female prisoners in exchange for the release of the women and children who were kidnapped on Simchat Torah.
Each such column is of course attached to the position of a "senior security official" who supports the deal or the "families of the abductees" who want to see their loved ones at home already.
What those journalists don't understand is that you don't make deals with the devil. Until the 1980s, a prisoner exchange deal with a terrorist organization was not at all on the agenda. The IDF sent hundreds of soldiers as far as Uganda to free hostages in Entebbe, embarked on heroic operations in the Sabena plane, on route 300, in the children's home in Misgav-am and in the battle to liberate Nachshon Wachsman.
Only in the eighties, the picture changed. In the Jibril deal, thousands of PLO terrorists were released, and then came other reckless deals such as the Tanenbaum deal, and the climax was the Shalit deal. Israel actually re-established the terrorist array who it fought against and in exchange for a few dozen Israelis paid the price of the lives of thousands of Israelis who were murdered in the first and second intifadas, in the Second Lebanon War, in the war in the Gaza Strip in the last decade that ended in the massacre of Simchat Torah led by the freedmen of the Shalit deal.
It seems that after a month and a half of understanding who Hamas is, journalists have returned to the concept that it is possible to make reasonable deals with a murderous terrorist organization. and that if we just give up we will get concessions from the other side. On October 7, this entire conception collapsed at the heaviest blood price paid by the country. And yet they continue.
And not only that, every Israeli voice in the media in favor of a deal raises the price of Hamas a little more. Sinwar knows that the Jewish sentiment can be squeezed more and more. Every article in a newspaper in favor of a deal will cause further hardening of the conditions, additional clauses, additional demands. And the journalists don't learn.
The media systems that acted with maturity for 40 days, are becoming a servant of Hamas in the psychological war it is waging against Israel.
