David Lewis Schaefer is Professor Emeritus, Political Science at College of the Holy Cross.
Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince (1527) has typically been dismissed as a how-to book on how ambitious would-be tyrants can acquire and hold power. But before succumbing to this judgment we should bear in mind the praise the Florentine received from the great liberal philosopher Montesquieu, and above all the judgment of that partisan of democratic government Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who in his Social Contract called the Florentine’s treatise “the book of republicans.”
Close study of The Prince indicates that Rousseau’s observation has much to recommend it. This fact is particularly manifest when one considers the work’s relevance to Israel’s current war with Hamas, and the policies that led up to the Jewish state’s current crisis. It is often noted that a longstanding, cardinal principle of Jewish tradition has been that a country’s hostages should be redeemed. That general rule, however, does not specify what price should be paid for their redemption. The question becomes grave when we consider not the size of a monetary ransom, but a “price” that may ultimately result in a far greater loss of innocent lives.
Chapter 17 of The Prince draws a crucial distinction between “nominal” and “effectual” mercy. In the opening paragraph, Machiavelli contrasts the “nominal” mercy of the Florentine people, who refrained from cracking down on the factional disputes and riots that ruined Pistoia, a city they ruled from 1500 to 1502, so as “to escape a name for cruelty” (emphasis added), and the “nominal” cruelty of the notorious Cesare Borgia, who in Machiavelli’s (highly fictionalized) account hired a ruthless governor to bring law and order to the Romagna (a territory Cesare had been granted by his father Pope Alexander VI). As Machiavelli puts it, even though Cesare “was held to be cruel …. His cruelty restored the Romagna, united it, and educe it to peace and to faith.” Hence, “if one considers this well,” judging things by what Machiavelli calls the “effectual truth” of political life rather than people’s “imaginings” about it, he will see that Cesare “was much more merciful than the Florentine people.”
There is more to Machiavelli’s account of Cesare’s success than can be pursued here. It must suffice to note that a central goal of The Prince is to demonstrate the need for any effective government to overcome the utopianism to which human beings in collective bodies as well as individuals are commonly prone, that is, their tendency to believe that moral virtue as ordinarily understood will inevitably be rewarded, either in this life or a life to come. (See, on the self-defeating character of this popular gullibility, the first paragraph of Chapter 3.)
Now consider how this lesson applies to Israel’s situation. Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of the October 7 attacks, remains uncaptured. His plan murdered over 1,200 Israelis (including some Americans, Bedouins, and Thais) – including the brutal torture, rape, and execution of women, and the decapitation of babies, and seized some 250 hostages. A member of Hamas since the late 1980s, Sinwar had been sentenced to four life sentences in an Israeli prison in 1989 for having abducted and killed two Israeli soldiers. But he was released in 2011 as part of a prisoner “swap,” in which Israel exchanged nearly 1,100 Arab prisoners, largely terrorists and murderers, in exchange for the release of just one Hamas hostage, young Gilead Shalit, who had been kidnaped while serving as a soldier on the border with Gaza at the age of 19, and then held almost incommunicado (deprived even of visits from the Red Cross) for over five years. (Shalit’s kidnaping occurred less than a year after Israel, under the prime ministership of former military leader Ariel Sharon, voluntarily withdrew all its occupying army, and thousands of Israeli settlers, from Gaza, a territory over which it had exercised supervision in consequence of the defeat of the Egyptian army’s attack on the Jewish state during the 1967 war.)
Because Israel is a small country whose people share a strong sense of brotherhood(despite the sort of partisan rancor that commonly arises in a self-governing community).– Gilead’s imprisonment became a cause celèbre throughout the landHis picture wasplastered everywhere, with citizens of a variety of political orientations (albeit not all of them) and degrees of religious orthodoxy pressuring the government (led, then as now, by Benjamin Netanyahu), to secure his freedom.[KB1] But in consequence, Hamas’s leaders, taking advantage of the Israeli people’s compassion for one of their own, were able to impose a remarkable calculus in the exchange: by what known rule of justice or mercy is the price of one soldier’s freedom (one who had not been engaged in any sort of combat) equal to that of 1,100 murderers and terrorists?
Upon his release, Sinwar returned to Gaza and rose rapidly in Hamas, becoming known for the violent punishments he would impose on Arabs suspected of collaboration with the Israeli enemy. He then set about supervising the construction of hundreds of miles of tunnels, some of them large enough to enable the transport of military vehicles, financed by other Arab and Muslim governments, including Iran and Qatar, with much of the weaponry transmitted through the Philadelphia Corridor on the border with Egypt. And, for more than a decade, he plotted and planned for the October 7 attack, practically under the nose of the Israeli government and its long-renownedMossad intelligence service.
But there is another aspect to the Sinwar story. During his imprisonment, in 2004, Sinwar had his life saved by an Israeli dentist, Yuval Bitton, who noticed that Sinwar was suffering from a life-threatening brain tumor that required immediate surgery, and arranged an immediate transfer to a hospital for emergency surgery. Upon his recovery Sinwar told Bitton that he would regard the dentist with eternal gratitude, since in Islam (so he claimed) the highest good deed one can perform is to save someone’s life!
So here was Sinwar’s payback: nineteen years later, Bitton’s nephew was killed by Hamas terrorists in the October 7 attack orchestrated by Sinwar. But while the attack stunned most Israelis, Bitton told CNN’s Christine Amanpour, he had foreseen such an event – and had known immediately who was behind it. As the prison dentist for several years, Bitton recalled spending hundreds of hours conversing with Sinwar, giving him rare insight into the latter’s way of thinking – as well as that of other Hamas leaders. Hence, Bitton remarked, it had long become “clear” to him that Hamas would plan an attack like this one. Machiavelli would not have been surprised, as he strongly advises against basing public policy on high moral expectations of human beings in general, or relying on their “love,” to induce them to act rightly (ch. 17).
What lessons might Israeli leaders, and their citizens, have learned from Machiavelli that could have averted the terrible events of October 7 and the ensuing, continuing war that has cost so many citizens of Gaza along with Israelis their lives? Most obviously, setting free hundreds of murderers and terrorists just to save the life of one sympathetic, innocent young Israeli was an exemplification of what Machiavelli calls “nominal mercy” that amounts in practice to “effectual cruelty.” Terrible as it would have been to contemplate the fate of Gilead Shalit permanently left to Hamas’s devices, how can one compare that to the misery and suffering that Israelis have suffered in consequence of letting Sinwar and his cohorts go free?
Standing behind that error one might also cite the mistake that Israel made under Ariel Sharon by withdrawing its troops and settlers from Gaza in the first place. The departure left – Hamas (which seized power soon after the Israeli withdrawal) free to arm itself for a future massacre, with little observation (given the use of tunnels leading through the Philadelphi Corridor and then throughout the territory) on Israel’s part. Of course, Sharon had his reasons: why continue to commit Israeli soldiers to the risks of being shot at, just to protect a few thousand Israeli settlers? But here is the answer that Machiavelli might have given him, using the policy of the Roman empire as a model: “war may not be avoided but is [only] deferred to the advantage of others.” (ch. 3). A peace-loving people, Israelis had no wish to be “occupiers” of a territory that seemed (unlike the West Bank) to pose little potential threat to them. But their withdrawal only provoked, rather than averting, war – on terms far less favorable.
But here we come to a likely error of Benjamin Netanyahu himself, who was Israel’s prime minister for most of the years during which Sinwar and his subordinates prepared for their attack, against which Machiavelli warns: not to be deluded by what a political leader sees “in quiet times.” It has been widely reported that Netanyahu, during his years in office over roughly the past decade, knowingly tolerated the shipment of considerable financial aid to Hamas via Qatar, believing that Hamas was too focused on peaceful economic development (just like Israelis) to use that funding for military purposes. (During 1970s, this was called “mirror imaging”: U.S. leaders deluded themselves that because Americans aimed at peaceful economic development rather than military conquest, this was likely the goal of Soviet leaders, so we could reduce our defense spending in favor of domestic “needs,” even as they increased theirs.)
If that was Netanyahu’s delusion, one can safely judge that he has been disabused of it since last October. In fact, Netanyahu has been admirably steadfast in resisting American pressure (along with that of some shortsighted Israeli demonstrators) for a “cease fire” deal with Hamas that would entail freeing another approximately 1,000 Palestinian killers in return for the release of what are probably no more than 50 Israeli (and American) hostages, along with a few Thais. And he has rightly been insistent that no deal can entail the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Philadelphi Corridor, which would enable Hamas simply to resume where it left off, using millions or billions of aid from Iran and various Arab regimes to rebuild its military. For fanatics (whether religious or ideological) like Sinwar, the risk that thousands more Palestinian lives will then be lost in the next war is insignificant compared to the goal of finally destroying the Jewish state.
But the dangerous delusion of ideological and religious fanaticism or utopianism against which Machiavelli warned is even more evident on American college campuses today, and elsewhere in our cities, where tens of thousands of demonstrators, most of them not Muslim or Arab, chant slogans like “From the River to the Sea” or “Intifada Revolution,” typically without even knowing what they’re talking about – that the former means obliterating Israel, and the latter a resumption of widespread suicide bombings. As a longtime teacher of political philosophy, I wish that the serious study of books by writers like Thucydides, Aristotle, Machiavelli, and the authors of The Federalist, along with the renewed study of political history (including international relations and war) could be made a mandatory part of the college and (in the latter case) high school curriculum.
(All quotations of The Prince come from the translation by Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985.)