How did we come to the situation when live Shalit is worse to Israel than dead one? The kid has nothing to do with the problem, but the government created a truly Orwellian dilemma. One more dead Jewish soldier, a corporal, is a regrettable thing, but frankly a passing occurrence. Soldiers die; it is heart-breaking when the dead soldiers are Jews, but somehow we got used to that. But if Shalit is alive, Israeli media turns his case the way that many more Jews will be killed. Most Israelis are sensible; few if anyone beyond the immediate circle of friends and relatives want his repatriation at any cost. But Shalit is a boon to media which practice fake compassion. I don’t believe that anyone in Israeli media, immoral characters as they are, care about Shalit, but fake tears about him sell newspapers. Here the government jumps in. It reasoned correctly that media would hail bringing Shalit back, and will ignore releasing a thousand terrorists in exchange. Stories of Shalit’s return would go on for months while the terrorist exchange will be reported matter-of-factly and soon forgotten. Even when a right-wing Internet site would report that the released terrorists are back to their trade, killing Jews, the mainstream media will ignore the problem.
Shalit’s issue brings a stark moral dilemma: is it better for one innocent soldier (?) to suffer than a thousand guilty terrorists remain insufficiently punished? Even hard-core Christian forgivers would agree that 1:1000 ratio is probably too much. In fact, it’s much more than that: prisoner exchange sends tens of thousands of terrorists an explicit message that they, too, would be exchanged. Besides leaving those already guilty insufficiently punished, the exchange actually invites others to incur the same guilt. So it’s not really a question of exchanging one live Jew for memory of the hundreds of murdered ones; it is rendering one live Jew now at the cost of increasing chances for many other Jews to be murdered in future.
You may not like it, but Hamas was acting within the international law when it kidnapped Shalit. Even among Jewish liberals, Professor Walzer, an eminent scholar of the moral theory of war, concedes that soldiers are not innocents. Once they take up arms, they become legal target for their opponents. Israel was at war with Hamas at the time of kidnapping. Since the West Bank is “occupied” and not liberated and annexed, the war goes on. A country should be mad to consider exchanging one non-innocent person for a thousand guilty ones.
Israel never takes so many measures to protect her soldiers as to return the kidnapped ones. Dead soldiers constitute no political problem, but media cries over kidnapped Jews are ongoing. So we want to bring Shalit back, fine. What’s the problem with that? Israel has plenty of such experience. In the days of the Wild West Zionism, Jews kidnapped Jordanians and Syrians to exchange for Israeli POWs. Now, too, drive into the West Bank, enter any Hamas charity and round up its officials; repeat fifty times, then offer to exchange them for Shalit. If that doesn’t help, raze every Palestinian Authority’s building in Gaza to the ground. If that doesn’t do the trick, assassinate a few of the well-known Hamas donors in Egypt; a good thing, in any case. And go on with such commonsense measures.
