Quotable Words on Gilad Schalit

1.

“...this is not a day of smiles. Besides the Shalit family, which is reunited with its son, there are hundreds of families whose loved ones will never return. Women, babies who were burned, slaughtered and butchered, and that the State of Israel, in the euphoria of the Shalit deal, forgot them this week. Families that no one bothered to update as to what is going on. Orphans who had to surf the internet to find that their parents’ killer is going home, and that nobody thought of a better way to tell them about it.”

Kalman Liebskind
(in Hebrew)

2.

So now Israel will have hundreds of terrorists literally just down the road, presumably poised to strike yet again and murder more Israel innocents.

Either way, this was a terrible decision to have to take.

On the other hand, once Shalit comes home the Hamas in Gaza will have lost their most valuable human shield of all. For five years, they have used their young Israeli captive -- whose fate has been the focus of such public agony within Israel -- to tie the Israelis’ military hands. Now, it would seem, all such bets will be off.

Melanie Phillips

3.

Just off the bus in Gaza after six years in an Israeli prison, one of hundreds traded to Hamas for an Israeli soldier, Wafa al-Bass declared her next goal: abduct more Israeli soldiers. Others who returned said they could not feel satisfaction until the thousands of remaining Palestinian prisoners were freed.

NYTimes

4.

...For by making this deal with Hamas, Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu has effectively buried Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas, already weakened by the failure of his UN ‘Palestine statehood’ stunt. For Israel, that stunt marked the end of the illusion that Abbas was a genuine partner in any peace process. Now Hamas has been strengthened by this deal. That is, to put it mildly, unfortunate; but now at least the illusion of a moderate Palestinian leadership is over...

...at a deeper level still, it is the fact that an obscene moral equivalence has been established by this deal between the innocent and the guilty.

This equivalence is being played out in the coverage which describes the deal as a ‘prisoner swap’ or ‘prisoner exchange’ – more than 1000 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails for one Israeli prisoner held by Hamas. But Shalit was a hostage, kidnapped in an act of illegal aggression by an organisation whose aim is the destruction of Israel and which allowed him not one visit by the Red Cross during his five year incarceration.

By contrast, the released Palestinians have not just been tried and punished according to due process of law, but include among their number not just those who have committed some of the worst terrorist atrocities in Israel’s history – such as the blowing up of Sbarro’s pizza restaurant in Jerusalem, where 16 people were murdered including five members of the Schijveschuurder family -- but even worse, some of the masterminds behind such atrocities.

Melanie Phillips


5.

In the Israeli public there is a clear division of roles: The left wants everything here and now, the right is the responsible adult. It is the one that says "no." It is the one that demands that we wait. It is the one that circles above the immediate situation and points out the dangers of the proposed solution.  The problem is that nobody acknowledges the right wing as the adult. Nobody wants its authority. What child wants his life to be run by someone else?

The child by nature wants to act as he wishes, to try things out and get banged up and to be independent. From the age of 2, you will hear the words "by myself." That's what the child wants, to be allowed to make his own mistakes.

The right cannot tolerate this approach because it knows that there is no such thing as "by myself." It knows that in spite of the terrible hatred between the two poles of the nation, we are still the same body...

Karni Eldad
 
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