But whatever was paid to make that happen was too high a price.

We must always take into account what such a response teaches the world of terrorism about the success-rate of hostage-taking as a strategy. Every time it works, you should assume it will result in ten more identical or escalating uses of the same tactic.

Let us say that Israel traded one jailed terrorist for one hostage. Sounds like a fair deal?

No. No, it wasn’t, because that wasn’t the deal at all. The real deal was: “You give us our captured comrade, and we give you back the hostage now, and ten more kidnappings later.”

(That hypothetical deal doesn’t look so sweet once all the terms are spelled out. And of course the real deals made by Israel are usually far worse than 1-for-1 trades.)

I have told my family — sure, sure, it’s easy for me to say because it’s vanishingly unlikely the situation would ever arise, but still, I told them — that, in the event that I am ever taken hostage in a situation like that, my dearest and firmly hoped-for wish is to have the spot where I am being held hit with the fiercest possible airstrike. I would never want the terror felt, or the abuse endured, by the next ten hostages to be on MY conscience, because someone made the mistake of encouraging kidnappings on my account.

And anyway, the airstrike would probably take out at least a few of the kidnappers. Killing one terrorist is a high-value win, due to all the saved lives resulting from cutting short that terrorist’s future career. The death of each terrorist — and thus the saving of those other innocent lives — far outweighs the less-significant collateral damage of, well, me.

Again, easy for me to say, given the unlikelihood of such a scenario. But I do think it is the right call, as a matter of moral reasoning.

The Bataan campaign was not primarily a tank battle. The clash of tanks to which I referred was a relatively brief (albeit violent and highly kinetic) engagement in northern Bataan that took place as Fil-American army was conducting its strategic withdrawal from north and south Luzon into the Bataan peninsula. The American tanks units were basically fighting a rear-guard action to delay the Japanese and buy time and breathing room for the Fil-American forces to dig in on Bataan.

I didn’t know that Bataan had been primarily a tank battle, the Imperial Army and Navy had some talented officers, like Yamamoto and Yamashita they were the more professional ones and many who were selected for their ideological zeal

I certainly didn’t mean for a moment to suggest that Israel doesn’t care about its soldier-hostages. It does, and in the past was willing to give up the sun, moon, and stars to get them back. But the hostages taken on October 7 nevertheless upped the ante considerably.

Otter: good point about the Japanese way of war. Furthermore, those transports weren’t just carrying Allied POWs. They were also carrying Japanese soldiers, munitions, and other war materiel. They were legitimate targets. The question is, Would we have attacked them if we had known for certain that POWs were also on board? From what I have read about the Pacific war–a “war without mercy” in historian John Dower’s words–and what I was told by my father and other veterans of that theater, I think we would have. You say not. You may be right.

Thanks for the background on your Bataan book and your conversations with Iris Chang. I was working at UIUC when her book on Nanking was published. As a hometown girl, she and it got a lot of attention in the local media. That was probably unavoidable, but it may not have been a good thing. I’m sure that the subject matter of her books–and her unsuccessful campaign to get the Japanese government to acknowledge the Imperial Japanese Army’s atrocities–contributed to her depression. It sounds like there were other, additional factors that pushed her to suicide.

I understand that Bataan was the site of the U.S. Army’s first tank battle of WWII. Not the place most people would think of.

Neo: yes, many of the Israeli hostages from October 7 are/were civilians–women, children, and old people. Not military men and not POWs. But the Israelis have historically been extremely reluctant to sacrifice POWs as well. My point was that they may have to run that risk if they want to destroy Hamas and the Hamas leadership.

I’ll skip over the ethical questions with that idea and just get to the practical problems that made it different from the Soviet and Lebanon in the 80s. Hamas and company are far less interested than the kidnappers in 1980s Lebanon were in whether their own families live or die. Whether that’s true or whether it’s just their repeated rhetoric I’m not sure; maybe not true although they couldn’t care less about the Palestinians in general. But at any rate I have read that the Hamas jihadis’ families are down in the tunnels with them, for protection. So either they don’t much care, or they have anticipated the problem and protected their families at least to a certain extent.