Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Reuters)

Imperialism invented the "functional state" of Israel, providing it with all the means to survive in the face of "human animals" that "must be defeated or destroyed to preserve civilization," according to the American philosopher Judith Butler.

Israel's survival depends on this support, says the thinker Abdel Wahab al-Messiri, because it suffers from mortal weaknesses as if they were the "heels of Achilles," as the ancient Greek legend says, and the "flood of Al-Aqsa" made this weakness visible, especially to Western public opinion. These consequences include those who are affected by the arrows of external enemies (the Palestinian resistance), and some of them are ensured by the nature and composition of the entity.

We will only talk about "one dimension", which is the issue of Israeli prisoners held by the Palestinian resistance, which Tel Aviv insists are "hostages", and show how the religious is employed to serve the political, an employment used by Israel, which was based mainly on the Zionist movement's use of religion, to achieve its goals.

As soon as Israel woke up from the shock of the seventh of October, the controversy raged inside Israel regarding the prisoners of the resistance, a controversy in which religious and political were mixed, and this confirms the nature of this entity, as well as the great importance it attaches to its prisoners in the hands of enemies for political and security purposes, and not in compliance with religious orders.

Israel has strived to make the issue of the prisoners the cause of the whole world and not the West, led by the United States, which has struggled to resist and is throwing it off one bow.

Arab-Israeli prisoner exchange deals began after the Israeli occupation of Palestine in 1948, and the resulting wars with Arab countries and popular resistance operations, which led to the fall of thousands of Arab and Palestinian prisoners and detainees into the hands of the occupation authorities.

Arab states and resistance movements captured more than 1000,38 Israelis. Between 1948 and 2011, there were <> prisoner exchanges between Arabs and Israel.

Five Israeli academics, Davidovich Eshid, Haim Weiss, Ishai Rosen Zvi, Yuval Rotman, and James Adam Redfield, summed up Judaism's "Torah, Talmud, and the literature produced by Jewish rabbis about Jewish captives held captive by their enemies" in an article entitled: "Why Hostages Should Be Redeemed. A historical look", published in Commentary on October 20, 2023, 13 days after the "Al-Aqsa flood".

They say that Jews are commanded to work to redeem their captives, and that doing so is a very valuable and noble work.

Given the historical circumstances under which Jews, a cultural and political minority, lived, the treatment of captive Jews, as well as the community's concern for its family members, has always been of great importance, causing members of their community to refuse to remain idle and do everything in their power to secure the redemption of their loved ones.

The five academics argue that with the establishment of the State of Israel, the commitment to the release of prisoners has changed and intensified in many ways because this religious commandment suddenly became ingrained in the national spirit.

The commitment to free the prisoners—even at a high price, which has cost society dearly—has become a real test of Israeli solidarity and a key element of the social contract between the state and its citizens.

Israel or "contracting" – as the late Moroccan anti-Zionist Jew Abraham Serfati calls it – has a history of killing its subjects and trafficking in their tragedies without regard for any religious values

They turn a blind eye to the rift that the prisoner issue has caused among the Palestinian resistance in Israeli society, and claim that the discussions surrounding the prisoner – whether in the history of Jewish law or in Israel today – have always been essential elements of Jewish social solidarity.

Israeli academics invoke history to implicitly argue that Israel does not accept "the use of hostages as a means of political and economic pressure," as was done during the revolts of the Jews, when they lacked sovereignty, against the Roman Empire, which turned the prisoner into a test of community cohesion and self-reliance.

The five academics employ a number of religious texts—from the Torah, the Talmud, and rabbinic literature—emphasizing the importance of redemption for "hostage" captives, including Talmudic Rabbi Johanan's commentary on verse 2 of the fifteenth chapter of Jeremiah: "And it shall come to pass, if they say to you, 'Where shall we go out?' you say to them, 'Thus saith the Lord, 'Those who have death are to death, those who have the sword are to the sword, those who are hungry are hungry, and those who are exiled are exiled.'" The Book of Jeremiah (15:2), in which it says, "Every element that follows in this verse is worse than the previous one. The sword is worse than death... Famine is worse than the sword, and captivity is worse than all of them."

They cannot fail to quote the greatest Jewish philosophers under Islamic civilization, as one of them said: "No man like Moses appeared from the days of Moses except Moses, and what is meant is Maimonides, who gives precedence to the redemption of prisoners over feeding and clothing the poor, and that there is no commandment greater than the redemption of prisoners, because the prisoner is considered hungry, thirsty, naked and standing on the brink of death."

The five academics noted that Israel had paid a "heavy price" for the release of its prisoners, without elaborating.

They stated that the Mishnah, the second part of the Talmud, encompassing all the unwritten law that appeared until the end of the second century CE with the aim of balancing the concerns of the present and the future, never specifies the price, leaving it to standards accepted in every time and place.

What are the current "acceptable criteria" for the release of prisoners held by the resistance? No answer. But the answer is found in one Israeli journalist: Israel has in the past broken several sacred rules in exchange deals.

The five academics believed that the best thing to conclude their article with is a quote from the book "Shulhan Aruj": (The Table of the Table), which is the main jurisprudential and legal reference for the Jews since its appearance in 1564, by Rabbi Yosef Karo (1488-1575), who says: "All those who turn their eyes away from the redemption of captives violate prohibitions. Every minute that one is late in freeing the prisoners, by all available means, it is as if blood is shed."

The "available means" are well known when it comes to Israel. The Israeli journalist and writer Ronen dedicated a book to her entitled: "By Every Necessary Means."

Do Israeli politicians weigh any weight on religious orders regarding prisoners? The answer is definitely no, there is no regard for sacred rules, although the Israeli government is made up of extremist religious parties, why?

What academics have said about the status of the prisoner already confirms that for Israel one of its weaknesses (one of the Achilles heels) because, according to them, his status highlights the tension between the interests of the individual (prisoners and families) on the one hand, and competing interests within society on the other. The crack and loss of confidence in Israeli society today because of the prisoners' issue are the best proof of this.

Even members of the mini-war government have no say on prisoners; Gantz and Eisenkot put the recovery of the kidnapped at the forefront, Gallant and the military see the main goal as "hitting Hamas," and Netanyahu seeks to prolong the war if he finds only a way to save himself from the guillotine.

The founding fathers of the entity were atheists who employed religious myths, and these myths – refuted by the French thinker Roger Garaudy and new historians such as Shlomo Sand, Ilan Pappe and Avi Shlaim, continue to guide the policy of this entity from its founding to this day.

For the Zionists, religion is used to shed blood and annihilate enemies; in one of his speeches, Netanyahu invokes Joshua Ben-Nun and the Amalekites, referring to the Palestinians as Israel's eternal enemy: "You must remember what the Amalekites did to you, as our Bible tells us. We already remember that, and we are fighting with our brave soldiers, our divisions who are now fighting in and around Gaza and in all other areas of Israel. They join a series of Jewish heroes, which began 3000,<> years ago with Joshua in Lebanon."

Israel, or "enterprise" – as the late Moroccan anti-Zionist Jew Abraham Serfati calls it – has a history of killing its nationals and trafficking in their tragedies without regard for any religious values, let alone the Gentiles (Gouyim).

The Zionists contributed to the killing of the Jews of Morocco (sinking of the ship Ekoz), in Iraq (Operation Farhud), and others to get the Jews to emigrate to Israel to become second-class citizens, and this is what made the Moroccan Jewish writer Yaakov Cohen say: "I feel closer to my Moroccan compatriot than to an Ashkenazi Jew."

The history of prisoner exchange deals between Israel and its enemies reveals that they paid a heavy price: it was forced to release the captivity of soldier Gilad Shalit – who was captured by the Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas in 2006 – to release more than 1000,<> Palestinian prisoners, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, at the time, justified the conclusion of the deal by saying that the people of Israel are "unique in its kind", it is "Jewish privacy", which is a Zionist myth.

What uniqueness is there for a people whose army bombards them until they are charred? According to this protocol, "a dead soldier is better than a prisoner", meaning that the protocol authorizes the army to kill any captured soldier, and this is what happened to Lieutenant Hadar Goldin, who was captured by the resistance in Gaza in 2014. What is currently going on in the war on prisoners is in the hands of the resistance.

The protocol reflects some of the moral contradictions that Israel suffers, as it tries to understand its people and the world that the souls of its soldiers are sacred and ready to offer precious and precious to break their captivity and do what is necessary to protect them from being captured, even by killing them. It is the spirit of "enterprise".