There are some substantial misunderstandings on the nature of the Gilad Shalit exchange deal. I should stress that the list of those Palestinian prisoners being given in exchange for him has not yet been released. But note the following:
-The number 1000 is impressive but most will be chosen by Israel, meaning they will be prisoners with the lightest sentences and crimes – in other words, people who would have been released anyway during the next year or two.
-Israel rejected Hamas’s demand to release those being called “arch-terrorists” who were major organizers of attacks or responsible for a larger loss of life.
-Of the most serious terrorist prisoners, only a bit over 96 will be released into the West Bank and 14 to east Jerusalem where they could cause direct trouble for Israel. The rest will be sent to the Gaza Strip or deported altogether. Those with lighter sentences who live in the West Bank would have been sent there anyway when their sentences were finished.
-Hamas did a politically clever thing by demanding that half of the named prisoners be non-Hamas people. The goal is to make Hamas more popular among Fatah supporters and on the West Bank.
The plan is as follows:
After a 72-hour wait following the issuing of a list of those to be released – to let families of victims file petitions against it – the minister of justice will signal readiness to carry out the deal. Gilad Shalit will arrive in Cairo. At that point, Israel will release about 450 terrorists under heavy sentence.
Of these 450 prisoners:
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131 Gaza Strip residents will go there.
163 West Bank residents will be expelled from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip.
40 will be expelled overseas.
96 will return to their homes in the West Bank.
14 will return to their homes in east Jerusalem.
6 Israeli Arabs will be released to their homes.
At this point, Shalit will return to Israel.
Then Israel will release 550 prisoners of its choice.
To summarize: Shalit will be released in Cairo and then he can come to Israel. After Shalit arrives, 550 prisoners with lighter sentences, chosen by Israel, will be released.
As I noted earlier, this is a high price – though lower than many think – but the step is seen by most Israelis as a moral imperative even though it certainly can be seen as posing some future danger and rewarding terrorism.
Regarding the argument that this will encourage terrorism or kidnapping, however, it should be understood that terrorist groups always conduct the highest possible number of attacks and kidnapping attempts that they can try. The deal will not really have any effect on that, though of course individual terrorists released – especially those going to the West Bank – will pose an additional threat. They will be closely watched and some of them have no doubt been turned into sources of intelligence for Israel. Still, we know specific cases in the past in which freed prisoners have gone on to kill Israelis.
Here’s the brilliant Yossi Klein Halevi thinking out loud about the Israeli psychology and issues involved in this deal.
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For the last five years I have tried not to think of Gilad Shalit. I avoided the newspaper photographs of his first months as an Israel Defense Forces draftee, a boy playing soldier in an ill-fitting uniform. Sometimes, despite myself, I’d imagine him in a Gaza cellar, bound, perhaps wired with explosives to thwart a rescue attempt. And then I would force myself to turn away.
I tried not to think of Gilad because I felt guilty. Not only was I doing nothing to help the campaign to free him, I opposed its implicit demand that the Israeli government release as many terrorists as it takes to bring him home. Israel has no death penalty, and now we would lose the deterrence of prison: If the deal went through, any potential terrorist would know it was just a matter of time before he’d be freed in the next deal for the next kidnapped Israeli.
But the argument could never be so neatly resolved. Each side was affirming a profound Jewish value: ransom the kidnapped, resist blackmail. And so any position one took was undermined by angst. What would you do, campaign activists challenged opponents, if he were your son? “He’s everyone’s son,” sang rocker Aviv Gefen.
One day I passed a rally for Gilad in a park in downtown Jerusalem. Several counter-demonstrators were holding signs opposing surrender to terrorism. “I happen to agree with you,” I said to one of them. “But don’t you feel uneasy protesting against the Shalit family?”
“We’re not protesting against the Shalit family,” he replied. “We’re protesting to save future victims of freed terrorists. Those victims don’t have names yet. But they could be my son or your son.”
Every debate over Gilad ended at the same point: your son.
We never referred to him as “Shalit,” always “Gilad.” The Gilad dilemma set our parental responsibilities against our responsibilities as Israelis—one protective instinct against another. The prime minister’s job is to resist emotional pressure and ensure the nation’s security; a father’s job is to try to save his son, regardless of the consequences.
And so I tried, too, not to think of Gilad’s extraordinary parents, Noam and Aviva. Even when denouncing the government they spoke quietly, incapable of indignity. The best of Israel, as we say here, reminding ourselves that the best of Israel is the best of anywhere.
For more than a year the Shalits have lived in a tent near the prime minister’s office. When I walked nearby I would avoid the protest encampment, ashamed to be opposing the campaign. This past Israeli Independence Day, though, I saw a crowd gathered around the tent, and wandered over. “GILAD IS STILL ALIVE,” banners reminded: It’s not too late to save him. Inside the tent, Noam and Aviva were sitting with family and friends, singing the old Zionist songs. I wanted to shake Noam’s hand, tell him to be strong, but I resisted the urge. I didn’t deserve the privilege of comforting him.
I wanted to tell Noam what we shared. As it happens, my son served in the same tank unit as Gilad, two years after he was kidnapped. I wanted to tell Noam that that was the real reason I couldn’t bear thinking about his family. That in opposing the mass release of terrorists for Gilad, it was my son I was betraying.
Now, inevitably, the government has given in to the emotional pressure. Inevitably, because we all knew it would—must—end this way. A few months ago, as part of its psychological war against the Israeli public, Hamas released an animated film depicting Gilad as an elderly gray-haired man, still a prisoner in Gaza. No image tormented us more.
Still, there are few celebrations here today. Even those who supported the campaign to free Gilad must be sobered by the erosion of Israeli deterrence. And those who opposed the campaign are grieving for Gilad’s lost years. All of us share the same unspoken fear: In what condition will he be returned to us? What have these years done to him?
Hamas leaders are boasting of victory. If so, it is a victory of shame. Hamas is celebrating the release of symbols of “resistance,” not of human beings. Hamas’ victory is an expression of the Arab crisis. The Arab world’s challenge is to shift from a culture that sanctifies honor to a culture that sanctifies dignity. Honor is about pride; dignity is about human value. Hamas may have upheld its honor; but Israel affirmed the dignity of a solitary human life.
In recent months the campaign to free Gilad demanded that the government worsen conditions for convicted terrorists in Israeli jails, to psychologically pressure the Palestinian public. So long as Gilad was being held incommunicado, activists argued, Palestinian families should be barred from visiting their imprisoned sons. While Gilad’s youth was wasting away, terrorists shouldn’t be allowed to study for college degrees.
The government promised to oblige. But as it turned out, there were legal complications. A newspaper article the other day noted the results of the government’s get-tough policy: Imprisoned terrorists would no longer be provided with the Middle Eastern delicacy of stuffed vegetables.
How is it possible, Israelis ask themselves, that so-called progressives around the world champion Hamas and Hezbollah against the Jewish state? Perhaps it’s because we’re too complicated, too messy: a democracy that is also an occupier, a consumerist society living under a permanent death sentence. Perhaps those pure progressives fear a contagion of Israeli ambivalence.
For all my anxieties about the deal, I feel no ambivalence at this moment, only gratitude and relief. Gratitude that I live in a country whose hard leaders cannot resist the emotional pressure of a soldier’s parents. And relief that I no longer have to choose between the well-being of my country and the well-being of my son.
Yossi Klein Halevi is a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and a contributing editor at the New Republic.
When a political imbecil like Ehud Barak, who lately kowtowed and apologized to Egypt for the killing at the hands of IDF soldiers of 5 Egyptian border guards who were helping Hamas, is still being given responsibility for the Defense of Israel, nothing should surprise for the Israeli government ineptitude and appeasement.
I think this article is wrong as broadcasters on Israeli tv last nite told us how many of them had blood on their hands by the heinous murders they had committed. This is by no means a release of “moderate” prisoners.
a soldier is sent to war knowingly risking his life to protect his nations population. In this topsy turvy Phenomenon Israel is risking the lives of its civilians to protect one soldier. The problem starts at the beginning wit policies of restraint and proportionate response. The arab/muslim culture understands disproportionate response and would be deterred; they also understand appeasement andd take advantage of it. Had the Israelis bombed gaza mercilessly every day demanding Schalits release he would have been released for one prisoner. the Israeli leadership that imagined and created Entebbe have degenerated into a bunch of bazaar merchants making “deals”
1000 for 1 sounds like a stupid swap to me, considering that each of those 1000 will do their damndest to kidnap other Israelis. I have an ancestor, who was a mercenary pirate for the Arabs. He used to kidnap entire communities, then sell the people back for a pretty profit. He died healthy, of old age. He would have been absolutely ecstatic at the prospect of kidnapping modern Israelis. None of this makes sense. We live in an age where men are marrying men, and people are being called “war criminals” for adding a room unto their houses. By contrast, Chelm seems like a University of Common Sense. 1000 for 1? 1 for 1000? 1/1000 for 1/1? No matter how you shuffle the numbers around, they don’t make sense. Maybe this is something relitavistic. How about, 1/infinity => 0, and 1000/infinity => 0, so they’re somehow equivalent. Maybe to Jews, it’s all logical. Maybe the ones who want to do this will get Nobel prizes. But to me, it sounds pretty stupid.
Over the past few months, each of these “prisoners” should have been “chipped” in order for future tracking – even by satellite. Then in certain circumstances they could be dealt with by necessary means.