In the year since 7 October, a Hebrew song has emerged as an unofficial anthem.

The song is ‘Acheinu’, a prayer that appeared in a 12th-century prayer book and is sung during Jewish prayer services after the reading of the Torah. If you’ve ever seen clips of thousands of Jews singing at the Western Wall or at one of the far too many funerals over the last year in Israel, it is likely you have heard it. It is a beautiful haunting song, and without knowing Hebrew one can still register its plaintive pleas.

The song is about hostages. It is a supplication for ‘the whole house of Israel’ and requests God to have mercy on captives and free them, taking them swiftly from ‘suffering to relief, from darkness to light, and from oppression to redemption’. And indeed, Jewish people around the world have united over the last year in campaigning and calling for the release of the hostages abducted to Gaza on 7 October, of whom there were originally about 250, and 101 (dead and alive) now remain.

That Judaism has a special prayer devoted to the liberation of hostages, and that observant Jews pray three times a day in the prayer Amidah to praise God for ‘freeing the captives’, says much about Jewish history. The Jewish people were hostages of ancient kingdoms, including Egypt, Babylon and Rome. The Roman Colosseum, built by enslaved Jews from Judea, stands as a monumental reminder.

Modern Israel has also been plagued by hostage-taking like no other state, despite, or perhaps because of, its foundational promise of providing a sanctuary for Jews after millennia of persecution, and its sense of existential insecurity and self-doubt when that social contract is broken. Israel’s enemies understand the value that Israel places on every life, the constraints that international law and the hyper-scrutiny of an unsympathetic international community place upon it (and not its enemies), the lengths it will go to to save Israelis and how to exploit that commitment for their goals, which usually include prisoner exchanges and publicity.

The peak of this asymmetry was the exchange in 2011 of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who had been held by Hamas in Gaza for five years, for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners, including 280 serving life sentences for planning and perpetrating terrorist attacks. One of them was Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas and mastermind of 7 October. While at the time this exchange had popular support in Israel, in hindsight it exemplifies the cruel calculus imposed on decision-makers – between saving lives now and saving those in the future (by not releasing terrorists and not incentivising more hostage-taking).

Not all hostage sagas have ended by negotiation, and not all with hostages being saved, but many have become significant way points in the short history of the state.

To take one decade, in 1972, the Palestinian group Black September took 12 members of the Israeli Olympic team hostage in Munich. They were all killed during the rescue attempt by German police. In 1976, an Air France flight from Tel Aviv was hijacked by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and a German group. The hijackers released all the passengers except the Israelis, and, when the plane stopped for refuelling in Entebbe, Uganda, it was stormed by an Israeli squad. All hostages (over 100 of them) were saved, though the squad’s leader (Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother) was killed. During the ‘Coastal Road massacre’ of 1978, Fatah members hijacked two buses with 71 hostages in Israel, leading to a 10-hour stand-off. At the end of the rescue effort, 38 hostages, including 13 children, had been killed by the hijackers. In 1980, five Palestinian members of the Iraqi-backed Arab Liberation Front raided a northern kibbutz and held seven toddlers and babies hostage there. Israeli special forces rescued them the next day.

After this period, and largely as a consequence of the Israeli policy (what other state needs a hostage policy?) to undertake rescue operations to release hostages, even if the chance of securing their successful release was small, and even if casualties among the hostages or rescue team were possible, this form of ‘extortionist terrorist attack’ evolved to abductions, whereby terrorists kidnapped civilians or soldiers and held them in locations outside of Israel. Abductions of soldiers precipitated both the 2006 Lebanon War and the 2014 Gaza War.

However, the 7 October abductions were unprecedented in both scale (in terms of both the hostages and their captors) and method (such as taking whole families and the elderly and scattering them in urban settings and tunnels throughout Gaza).

Hamas took hostages not just as bargaining chips but as human shields and not just as human shields but as weapons of war.

Just as those charged with securing the release of hostages must undertake a trade-off, so must the captors. The calculus of Hamas was that the costs of taking and holding hostages would be outweighed by the ‘benefits’. Beyond the obvious tactical advantages of gaining power, one of the benefits is the internal disunity arising from that moral and strategic dilemma as to the price Israel should pay for their recovery. Another benefit is the ongoing psychological trauma inflicted on the hostages’ families and Israel as a whole.

The cost ledger includes the logistics of holding hostages and the military response of the IDF, although the latter, with the civilian casualties that results from Hamas’ use of human shields, has of course wrought opprobrium on Israel, and so has become another benefit for Hamas. In theory, another cost is the reputational risk, but seeing those who cannot conceive of Israelis being victims proudly rip down hostage posters and insist that those who were released or rescued had not suffered, suggests this is of limited effect. So too does the fecklessness (at best) of the Red Cross that has not once visited the hostages, and other NGOs and the UN, who cannot be relied upon to assist Israel, and usually can be relied upon to do the opposite.

The UN General Assembly has never condemned Hamas nor called specifically for the release of the hostages, but has just passed a resolution (which my country New Zealand shamefully endorsed) requiring Jews to be purged from Jerusalem within 12 months.

Maybe one day we can stop singing ‘Acheinu’, but we are not there yet.