BICOM

Key Points

• The high degree of public support for the campaign within Israel to bring about the release of Gilad Shalit, led by his family, reflects the considerable sensitivities of the issue within Israel.
• The family members of Shalit, a 19 year old conscript when he was taken, have become household names and faces in their long battle to bring about Gilad’s freedom.
• Despite the very strong desire throughout Israeli society to bring Gilad home, the quid pro quo – releasing hundreds of convicted terrorists – is highly controversial, and presents Israeli decision makers with the most acute of dilemmas.

Introduction

Egyptian mediated talks relating to the release of Gilad Shalit have intensified in the last few days, leading Ehud Olmert to postpone by one day a special Cabinet meeting to address the issue. This coming Saturday, 21 March, will mark a thousand days since Shalit was kidnapped by Palestinian militants on the Israel-Gaza border. Last week, his family moved into a protest tent outside Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s residence in Jerusalem, to increase pressure on the government to secure his release. They want Israel to conduct a prisoner exchange with Hamas. If concluded, via the Egyptian-brokered deal currently being formulated, this would bring the release of hundreds Palestinian prisoners, including many murderers and coordinators of terror. Throughout Israeli society, people are deeply sensitive to the issue of the captured soldier and express solidarity with the suffering family, but there is a controversy about the price of his freedom. This analysis sets out the context of the intensified media focus and addresses the tough questions facing Israel’s political leadership.

Context and latest developments

Since Gilad Shalit was kidnapped on 25 June 2006, Israel has been actively trying to secure his release. In August 2006, Ehud Olmert appointed Ofer Dekel, former Deputy Head of the Shin Bet (Israel’s equivalent of MI5) to coordinate efforts. With senior defence official Amos Gilead also heavily involved, negotiations have ebbed and flowed, but there are signs of current progress. Dekel has made three recent visits to Cairo for talks with Egyptian Intelligence Chief General Omar Suleiman. Notably, the serving Shin Bet chief, Yuval Diskin, has also been assigned to the case.

Last Thursday, Israel reportedly agreed to release “all 450 of the prisoners demanded by Hamas in exchange for Shalit.”[i]  It seems that the dispute now concerns Israel’s insistence that certain high-risk prisoners be deported rather than allowed to return to Gaza or the West Bank.  Whilst it remains unclear whether a deal can be struck this time round, a special Israeli cabinet session that was scheduled to take place today, possibly the last of the present government, has now been postponed until Tuesday, presumably in the hope that it will be able to vote on a deal if one is reached. If they do not, it is not known how the process will move forward.

Mounting pressure for a prisoner exchange

A well-organised Free Shalit campaign in the closing stage of Ehud Olmert’s premiership has intensified media focus on the issue. Gilad was a 19 year-old-conscript when he was captured. His youthful image is now instantly recognisable to all Israelis, as his picture can be seen on T-shirts, car bumper stickers and posters across the country. A song written in his honour, ‘Return Home’, is frequently heard on national radio stations. His time in captivity is updated daily in newspapers and on popular websites, often with the message: ‘Gilad is still alive’. A story about peace that he wrote at school when he was 11 has been turned into a popular illustrated children’s book. In the latest public campaign, a single word has been taken from a handwritten letter released to his family and blown up on billboard posters. The word is ‘hatzilu’, meaning ‘save me’.

His father Noam and his mother Aviva are now well known public figures in Israel. Noam Shalit appears in the media on an almost daily basis. Since he and his family moved to the protest tent last week, they have met with President Shimon Peres, Defence Minister Ehud Barak and other leading politicians, such as Shaul Mofaz and Dalia Itzik from Kadima and Shas’s Eli Yishai.  They have been joined by hundreds of ordinary people from all walks of life wishing to show their support.  Images of members of Israel’s ultra-orthodox and secular communities together in the Jerusalem tent are an expression of the deep yearning for Gilad Shalit’s safe return felt throughout Israeli society.

Other high profile individuals also play an instrumental role. They include Karnit Goldwasser, the widow of one of two soldiers abducted by Hezbollah in 2006 (their bodies were returned in a prisoner swap last summer), and the family of missing airman Ron Arad, shot down over Lebanon in 1986.  Though the family tends not to speak openly about these issues, Arad’s wife, Tammy, last week said that she supported freeing “Palestinian murderers” for Shalit’s release.[ii]  Some (though by no means all) of those left bereaved by terror attacks also show their solidarity with the Shalit cause. Internationally, due to the fact that Shalit also holds French citizenship, Nicolas Sarkozy has also played a diplomatic role, and Shalit was recently named as an ‘Honorary Citizen of Paris’.

It is the sense that the clock is ticking in the face of political developments in Israel that concern the Shalit family and campaign activists.  They fear that the present transition of power could lead to Shalit being ‘lost forever’. This trepidation is fuelled by Israel’s failure, to this day, to discover the fate of Ron Arad who, like Shalit, was known to have been held alive for several years after his capture, before the trail of efforts to bring his release ran cold.  Olmert’s associates say he is keen to “clear his desk” before he leaves office by resolving the Shalit case.[iii]  Ironically, though, if he brings forward an agreement now, the question will be asked as to why the terms of such a deal were unacceptable a year ago or longer.  Shalit campaigners, meanwhile, are trying to remain focused on the present and to pressure Olmert to put an end to the matter which arose on his watch.

They fear that Israeli Prime-Minister designate Benjamin Netanyahu will not want to be seen making a major concession to Hamas upon taking office. Hamas would certainly declare the deal as a major victory over Israel. That Hamas has reportedly demanded freedom for Marwan Barghouti, a prominent political figure and potential rival to Hamas, who was convicted on five counts of murder in 2004, shows how it is trying to use this issue to improve its support across Palestinian society.

It seems that Olmert’s associates are pushing the ‘tough Netanyahu’ image in order to try to pressure Hamas into seeing current talks as a ‘last chance’ to reunite Palestinian prisoners with their families; Noam Shalit has similarly appealed to Hamas along these lines. It is also in Netanyahu’s interests to see the issue resolved before his government is formed. He would certainly prefer not to be dragged into an Egyptian mediated negotiation over this issue, which would diminish his uncompromising image vis-à-vis Hamas. But it would be almost impossible for him to avoid undertaking efforts to bring about the return of a kidnapped soldier.

The price of freedom

There is a consensus in the country, and within the major political parties, about the responsibility of the state to the soldiers risking their lives for it.  Yet at the same time, Israel knows how conscious its enemies are of its vulnerability, due to the high value it places on bringing its soldiers home. This paradox is at the root of the controversy over the price to be paid for securing the release of missing servicemen.

Those in Israel who advocate paying a heavy price for Gilad Shalit’s return cite a history of disproportionate prisoner exchanges going as far back as the 1956 Sinai Campaign. More recently, in January 2004 a reserve Israeli Colonel kidnapped in Dubai and the remains of three soldiers ambushed by Hezbollah in 2000, were returned to Israel in exchange for 429 prisoners, and the bodies of 59 Lebanese fighters. In July 2008 the bodies of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev were sent back to Israel in return for the freeing Lebanese terrorist Samir Kuntar, four other Hezbollah fighters and the bodies of 199 more. Many Israelis who support such exchanges see them as the unfortunate but inescapable consequence of many years of conflict. It is argued that the release of prisoners does not significantly alter Israel’s military superiority over Hamas and its other enemies.

The converse view is encapsulated by the words written on a banner at a small, separate demonstration set up for a brief period last week, near to where the Free Shalit campaigners are encamped.  It read: “Yes to freeing Shalit, no to freeing terrorists.”  This argument challenges the rationality of exchanging a single soldier for hundreds of prisoners, including those with ‘blood on their hands’.  The risk, as the intelligence community points out, is not only that releasing terrorists threatens the loss of further civilian lives, but that by negotiating such deals, it rewards the captors, and creates an incentive for future hostage taking. 

But since neither military operations nor economic sanctions are likely to lead Hamas to surrender the soldier, adopting a stance which rejects the return of prisoners would effectively kill any chance of a deal. Ultimately though, politicians in a democracy have wider responsibilities. They cannot unthinkingly put the interests of a uniformed soldier, or even an entire military brigade, before the protection of the civilian population.  As such, in the face of uncertainty, the degree of risk to Israeli security as a whole falls to their judgment.

In security terms, Ofer Dekel and Yuval Diskin are tasked with determining not only the quantity and identity of the Palestinians that would be released in return for Shalit, but their destination upon being freed. Allowing militants to return to the West Bank could destabilise the relative calm that Israel, the PA and the international community have achieved there, in contrast to the Gaza Strip. Lethal bombings and shootings of Israeli civilians are more easily perpetrated from the West Bank than Gaza, and Israel wants to avoid a scenario where a major prisoner release in exchange for Shalit leaves more bereaved families in its wake.  As such, the acceptable conditions for a deal, from Israel’s point of view, may rest with whether agreement can be reached over the deportation of prisoners.

Conclusion

The ongoing captivity of Gilad Shalit haunts Israeli society. For a country where most families have members serving as conscripts or reserves in the army, the return of kidnapped soldiers touches most individuals on a very personal level. When the bodies of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev were returned from Lebanon last year, the grief that they were not returned alive was palpable. But so was the sense of relief that the doubt about their wellbeing had been taken away and that the episode had been concluded. Nevertheless, in deliberating Gilad Shalit’s return, Israeli decision makers are forced to calculate the value of human life in the starkest terms by making a judgement about the risk to Israel’s security.

The public pressure on the government to resolve the issue also has broader implications. The problems resulting from Hamas’s rule in Gaza would not disappear with the resolution of the Shalit affair. But for as long as Hamas continues to hold the abducted soldier, the horizon will be that much bleaker, because Israel will never give up its efforts to retrieve him. The people would not allow it.

---

[i] This is according to Cairo-based Palestinian sources, first quoted by Haaretz, and subsequently by the Ma’an Palestinian News Agency.  See Avi Issacharoff and Yoav Stern, ‘Sources: Israel agrees to free all 450 Hamas prisoners for Shalit’, Haaretz, 13 March 2009.

[ii] ‘Ron Arad’s wife: Free all 450 prisoners Hamas is demanding for Shalit’, The Jerusalem Post, 10 March 2009.

[iii] Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff, ‘Olmert wants Shalit deal before he leaves office’, Haaretz, 8 February 2009.