Making a painful trade

Opinion: October 18, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

By Uri Dromi

McClatchy Tribune

The news that, after almost six years in the hands of his Hamas kidnappers, Sgt. Gilad Shalit will return home as a free man at last sparked a spontaneous celebration in Israel.

However, as always in our country, joy was quickly mixed with gloom.

In exchange for Shalit, Israel will release 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, some of them being responsible for the death of hundreds of innocent Israeli citizens, slain in vicious terrorist attacks. Since the record of releasing Palestinian prisoners shows that many of them return to their macabre business of murder, the life of Gilad Shalit may have been saved; the lives of many other Israelis, on the other hand, will now be threatened.

Indeed, while people hugged and kissed the parents of Gilad Shalit at the tent in Jerusalem, where they had been staying for months, vowing not to leave until their son was freed, others were upset. Not far from the jubilation in the tent, Benzi Ben-Shoham was protesting against what he felt was the surrender of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the terrorists.

Taking it personally

Ben-Shoham had a personal stake in this painful issue: He was carrying the picture of his sister Limor, who had been killed in 2002 when a suicide bomber blew himself up next to her while she was celebrating her 17th birthday at Cafe Moment in Jerusalem. It is in such moments that one is reminded how small Israel actually is. The tent of the Shalits is just few yards away from Cafe Moment, which was closed down after the attack and reopened as Restobar.

Netanyahu, when he was in the opposition (and as such, a vocal opponent of any deals with the terrorists), used to sit with his wife, Sarah, in Cafe Moment. Their private home is just few steps away. Now, as prime minister, when his official mansion is even closer, he cuts a deal with the people who sent the suicide bomber on his deadly mission. In such a small space in Jerusalem, then, everything connects: life, terror and a government that has to lead us through these awkward partners.

Nobody envies Benjamin Netanyahu today. The decision he made is contrary to everything he believed in. In the books he published and in the speeches he made, he has always been closer to the American position: Zero tolerance to terror, no negotiations with the terrorists.

Even when looking at the way Israel dealt with terrorists who held Israeli hostages, he would certainly prefer a rescue mission over a negotiation; a glorious Entebbe raid rather than a notorious 1985 Jibril swap deal, when 1,150 Palestinian prisoners were exchanged for three kidnapped Israeli soldiers.

Knowing the risks

And nobody can blame Netanyahu for underestimating the risks involved in such aggressive policy: When the C-130 transport aircraft took off from Entebbe airport in July 1976, they were not only carrying the rescued Israeli hostages, but also the body of the commander of the elite unit that had freed them, Col. Yoni Netanyahu, the brother of the prime minister.

If there was a chance, the IDF would have tried to rescue Gilad Shalit. It seems, however, that either there wasn’t enough intelligence about his whereabouts or the assumption was that his captors might kill him instantly when attacked. This was the case with Nachshon Waxman, an Israeli soldier held by Hamas in 1994 and killed by his captors the second the Israeli soldiers stormed the place.

In the meantime, Gilad Shalit was rotting in his cave — not in Entebbe, thousands of miles away, but somewhere in Gaza, so close to his Israeli brothers and sisters, who couldn’t rescue him. This is the crux of the matter: Israelis are not used to this kind of helplessness. If all other options were exhausted, they reason, let’s do something, anything, to save the boy.

Uri Dromi writes about Israeli affairs for The Miami Herald. Distributed by MCT Information Services.