The Real Price of Shalit

Followers of this blog know where we stand on the Shalit travesty, obviously we were against the outside trade. So when we read the following post, we  had to post it.

Please understand that we are not against 1-10 terrorists exchanged for a soldier but not 1000 plus. This will only encourage future kidnapping with even more outrageous terms.  Somewhere it must stop and we believe the time was before the Shalit trade.

Here is the article:

 

When will the Israelis awake to the reality of Gilad Shalit?

BIBI’S HISTORIC SURRENDER TO TERRORISM

(With the support of 79% of the Israeli electorate and a huge majority of the Knesset)

Redacted from a courageous, politically incorrect, article by Uri Kaufman

The Jewish Press, October 21, 2011

In March 1978, at the conclusion of the Litani Operation in South Lebanon, five Israeli soldiers and a civilian jumped into a car and decided to go on an outing. The group took to the road in defiance of army regulations and somehow got waived through a forward checkpoint. Moments later they found themselves surrounded by heavily armed Palestinians. Four of the five soldiers were killed instantly, while the civilian miraculously made it back to Israeli lines the next day.

The fifth soldier was taken captive by the PFLP-GC, the Palestinian terror group headed by Ahmed Jibril. Up to that point, Israel had a firm policy of trading soldiers for soldiers. Terrorists sentenced to life in prison were expected to spend life in prison. Exchanges with terror groups sometimes occurred in hostage situations, but they were rare and always premised on trading one for one.

In 1970, an Israeli farmer in the northern village of Metulla was kidnapped by Palestinians and taken to Lebanon. The Palestinians demanded the release of dozens of jailed terrorists. The Israeli government held firm, and in the end the farmer’s release was secured for just one terrorist.

With this in mind, a team was assembled in Jerusalem in 1978 to negotiate the release of the soldier. A terrorism expert named Ariel Merari, circulated a memo that concluded the captured Israeli had “no market value.” Accordingly, he advised the government to set a low value and stick to it. Above all, he urged political leaders not to meet with the soldier’s family. Both pieces of advice were ignored. The family of the soldier first met with Defense Minister Ezer Weizmann. Merari later remembered that “Weizmann had a hard time standing up to the pressure, he folded, he promised and he declared that they had an open line to him whenever they wanted.” The same thing happened when the family met with Prime Minister Menachem Begin.

The initial offer from the Jibril camp was to swap the soldier for 19 Palestinians captured during the Litani Operation plus another six or seven in Israeli jails. It was deemed a reasonable offer. The 19 captured in the field were combatants, not terrorists, and the six or seven were all low value prisoners that were either sick or wounded.

Merari advised going slow. This was, after all, the way it worked in the Arab souk (market place). You showed little interest for what the other side was offering and then slowly negotiated your way to the finish line. Were Israel to accept the first offer, it would send the message that it would pay more. The general placed in charge of the negotiations wanted to wrap up the talks quickly and ignored this advice as well. With that, Merari tendered his resignation.

A year later, Merari was asked to return. Every dark prophecy of his had come true. The price from Jibril had climbed to the original 19 Palestinians captured in the field plus 76 terrorists held in Israeli jails, many of whom were murderers. Merari couldn’t believe his ears. He advised walking from the negotiating table, breaking off all contact. His advice was ignored once again. In the end, Jerusalem released the 19 combatants together with the 76 terrorists. Merari later calculated that the freed Palestinians had combined sentences remaining of over 2,800 years.

Ahmed Jibril had learned a valuable lesson. You didn’t need to hijack an airplane to free jailed terrorists. In fact, not only was it unnecessary, it was undesirable. When the Palestinians held large numbers of hostages, the Israelis sent in commandos to free them. When they held a single soldier, the Israelis refrained from any heroics because of the inevitable loss of life. The Israelis took four killed to free 106 hostages in Entebbe. But they wouldn’t take four killed to free just one soldier. Instead they gave in.

This logic, if one could call it that, was carried to a further extreme just a few years later. At the conclusion of the First Lebanon War in 1982, eight Israeli soldiers were captured by a smaller number of Palestinians. There was clear dereliction of duty on the part of the soldiers. A little over a year later they were traded for 4,700 Fatah fighters who had surrendered during the war plus 63 terrorists in Israeli jails.

The remaining two Israeli soldiers had the misfortune of falling into the hands of Ahmed Jibril. He already held a third soldier named Hezi Shai who had been captured after fighting with great valor in an unrelated battle. Jibril knew from his previous experience that Israel would pay dearly to win the release of three soldiers so he held out for more.

For the freedom of just three soldiers, Ahmed Jibril received 1,150 convicted terrorists including some 400 murderers, many of whom were among the most notorious in Israeli history. One of those freed was Kozo Akimoto, who together with two others carried out the 1972 Lod Airport massacre in which 26 people were killed. The victims in that attack included Aharon Katzir, one of Israel’s most prominent scientists and brother of Israeli President Ephraim Katzir.

The Gemara (commentary on the Oral Laws furthering the Hebrew Torah) states in Gittin [45A] that “it is forbidden to redeem hostages for more than their value because of the common good.” After Rabbi Meir from Rottenberg was kidnapped by a medieval king, he commanded the local Jewish community not to pay any ransom on his behalf. Instead, he spent the last seven years of his life in captivity, dying in prison in 1293.

Professor Merari summed it up as well as anyone in a newspaper interview. “The moral obligation of the government,” he said, “is to act so that the fewest possible number of Israelis get attacked. The defense minister is charged with protecting the entire country, not any particular family. If you free 500 terrorists, you do so knowing that you are sentencing dozens of Israelis to death.”

The Israelis of an earlier generation that had actually experienced the Holocaust never caved in to similar pressure. Ben-Gurion, Dayan and Eshkol had plenty of opportunities to engage in similar arrangements, but they never did. They only traded soldiers for soldiers and they always kept the price within reason.

That Israel invariably pays a terrible price in blood when it lets terrorists go is a fact acknowledged by all. SHABAK, the Israeli equivalent of the FBI, performed a study and found that fully two thirds of those freed go right back to terrorism. Some 6,912 terrorists were freed between the signing of the Oslo Accords in September 1993 and the outbreak of the al-Aksa Intifada in September 2000 – mostly as good will gestures to the Palestinian Authority, though some had served out their term. A victims group called Almagor released a study that found that in the first five years of the al-Aksa Intifada the freed terrorists killed at least 177 Israelis.

In January 2004, Israel turned 435 terrorists over to Hizbullah to win the freedom of a kidnapped drug dealer named Elchanan Tenenbaum. So far, those freed terrorists have killed 27 Israelis.

And those were just the direct costs. The indirect costs were incalculably higher. And yet, time and again the Israeli public supported lopsided exchanges, even as the price climbed ever higher. Somehow, the Israeli public internalized nothing but the pain of the families in a hostage predicament.

Other democracies learned the futility of negotiating with terrorists and ceased the practice. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration swapped hostages for arms, only to see more Americans snatched off the streets of Beirut. Washington no longer negotiates with terrorists, and so Americans are no longer kidnapped.

All of which brings us to the sad story of Gilad Shalit.

Since his kidnapping by Hamas in June 2006, the floodgates of Israel’s emotion have burst open, submerging and overwhelming any attempt at a rational response. The mainstream Israeli media have abandoned any pretense of objectivity, condemning any refusal to free terrorists as cowardice and praising every concession as courageous. One popular news show ends each daily broadcast with an update of how many days Gilad has spent in captivity.

And so last week over 500 Israeli families received notices from the Defense Ministry: those who had murdered their loved ones were about to be freed. The final tally in this latest exchange dwarfs every deal that came before it. In return for a single soldier, the State of Israel has agreed to free 1,027 convicted terrorists.

One woman, Ahlem Tamimi, drove the suicide bomber who killed 15 in the Sbarro Pizzeria in Jerusalem. She has already been seen on Israeli television smiling and saying she has no regrets. And why should she? She has served only ten years in prison and she will soon be free to plan the deaths of more innocent people.

Don’t believe a word of the fashionable nonsense pulsating through the Israeli media in praise of Netanyahu. The likely price yet to be paid for this historic blunder is too painful to contemplate. Either way, we are witnessing a complete victory for Hamas and the forces of terror.

Uri Kaufman is the author of “Low Level Victory,” to be released shortly by Harmony Books.

Anti Semitism Dead--Hardly

One of England's newspapers, the Guardian, published this article last week.  If read with a casual eye, it would appear harmless. However, if one reads it for content and innuendo, you will see it is a vile anti-Semitic piece.  We have copied the story as it appeared and in the lower part of this blog, we have published an article that illustrates the anti-Jewish view of the author. 

Our question is, how many upon reading this would agree with the idea expressed by the author, Deborah Orr?  Unfortunately, we are concerned there are many! So we are taking the effort to show the light of day on this commentator with the hope that others who read the article will be as repulsed as we are.

Is an Israeli life really more important than a Palestinian's?

The transfer of prisoners tacitly acknowledges acceptance of that obscene idea

• • 
    

• 
• • Deborah Orr
  • guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 19 October 2011 15.00 EDT
  • Article history

Wafa al-Biss, one of the freed Palestinian prisoners, on her return to her home in the northern Gaza Strip. Photograph: Mohammed Salem/Reuters

It's quite something, the prisoner swap between Hamas and the Israeli government that returns Gilad Shalit to his family, and more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners to theirs. The deal is widely viewed as a victory for Hamas, the radical Islamist group that gained power in Gaza after years of frustration at the intractability of the "peace process". Conversely, it is being seen by some as a sign of weakness in Israel's rightwing prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

All this, I fear, is simply an indication of how inured the world has become to the obscene idea that Israeli lives are more important than Palestinian lives. Netanyahu argues that he acted because he values Shalit's life so greatly.

Yet who is surprised really, to learn that Netanyahu sees one Israeli's freedom as a fair exchange for the freedom of so many Palestinians? Likewise, Hamas wished to use their human bargaining chip to gain release for as many Palestinians as they could. They don't have much to bargain with.

At the same time, however, there is something abject in their eagerness to accept a transfer that tacitly acknowledges what so many Zionists believe – that the lives of the chosen are of hugely greater consequence than those of their unfortunate neighbours.


Now for the response:

The Guardian’s Anti-Semitic Explanation For Shalit Deal October 24, 2011  by Simon Plosker

Over the years, we’ve covered some vicious and despicable pieces in the media, many of them published in The Guardian. But amongst the many commentaries and analyses of the Gilad Shalit prisoner deal, one by Deborah Orr in The Guardian’s print edition really plumbs the depths.

Orr writes:

All this, I fear, is simply an indication of how inured the world has become to the obscene idea that Israeli lives are more important than Palestinian lives. Netanyahu argues that he acted because he values Shalit’s life so greatly.

Yet who is surprised really, to learn that Netanyahu sees one Israeli’s freedom as a fair exchange for the freedom of so many Palestinians? Likewise, Hamas wished to use their human bargaining chip to gain release for as many Palestinians as they could. They don’t have much to bargain with.

Is Orr really suggesting that Israel’s desire to get back one of its soldiers at such a high price is driven by some racist sense of valuing Israeli or Jewish life above all others? Apparently so:

At the same time, however, there is something abject in their eagerness to accept a transfer that tacitly acknowledges what so many Zionists believe – that the lives of the chosen are of hugely greater consequence than those of their unfortunate neighbours.

The abuse of the concept of the “chosen people” refers specifically to Jews and is commonly employed by anti-Semites to falsely assert that Jews claim to be superior to non-Jews not only in a theological sense but also in a racial one.

As Joseph Telushkin asks:

Does Judaism believe that chosenness endows Jews with special rights in the way racist ideologies endow those born into the “right race”? Not at all. The most famous verse in the Bible on the subject of chosenness says the precise opposite: “You alone have I singled out of all the families of the earth. That is why I call you to account for all your iniquities” (Amos 3:2). Chosenness is so unconnected to any notion of race that Jews believe that the Messiah himself will descend from Ruth, a non-­Jewish woman who converted to Judaism.

The fact that Israel values the life of a solitary individual so much that it is prepared to release hundreds of Palestinians responsible for some of the most appalling terrorist outrages instead tells us how much Israel values human life. This overwhelming desire to return one of its own people is a value to be proud of.

Deborah Orr

Orr appears to be distressed at the implication of a deal that sees one Jew as the equivalent of 1000 Arabs. If this is the case, then Orr would be better directing her ire at Hamas for demanding and setting such an unbalanced equivalance.

That Deborah Orr is prepared to descend to the depths of anti-Semitism to claim that Israel is motivated by racism says much about her own warped values. That The Guardian was prepared to publish such an obscene commentary merely confirms the publication’s vicious anti-Israel bent

A British View of The Schalit Exchange

Followers of this blog know that we were not in favor of the exchange even though we understand the emotional human reasons for the trade.  So when I read the following posting, I thought that it should be posted here as it brought forward some ideas that we had not considered.


Please let us know what you think.

No decent person can fail to be moved by the return of Gilad Shalit. Yet this deal ultimately represents a triumph of heart over head.

by Melanie Phillips

I have been watching on TV the drama unfold in Israel and Gaza as the kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was released after five years in Hamas captivity in exchange for the release from Israeli prisons of more than 1000 Arab terrorists.

The first pictures of him in a brief interview on Egyptian TV were unsettling, even if not surprising: painfully thin, pale and with deeply sunken eyes, he looked very different from the smiling 19 year-old that became the iconic image of the campaign to secure his release.

Relief that he appears to be physically unharmed - he says he was treated well - must be tempered by concern for the psychological damage he may have suffered.

One can only hope (doubtless fruitlessly) that he will now be shielded from intrusive media attention to afford him the privacy he undoubtedly needs in which to start the long process of adjustment and recovery.

Shalit told his Egyptian TV interviewer that he hoped his release would further the peace efforts and help end the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

What a burden this poor boy now carries from this deal with the devil that has been done to secure his release. But it will not bring about peace; indeed, one might even say that it marks the collapse of the ‘peace process’ and makes war even more likely.

Related Article: A Mother’s Pain

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.

Jubilant Arabs are celebrating their released killers as returning heroes.

That is, to put it mildly, unfortunate; but now at least the illusion of a moderate Palestinian leadership is over. Israel has brought its hostage home; and now, with Hamas poised to relocate to an Egypt which is itself on the brink of descending into Islamic radicalism, Israel faces squarely the true face of genocidal Arab rejectionism.

Nothing illustrates this better than the obscene joy which has erupted in both Gaza and the West Bank, where jubilant Arabs are celebrating their released killers as returning heroes.

This was how the so-called ‘moderate’ Mahmoud Abbas addressed the murderers of Jewish innocents at a mass welcoming ceremony for the released prisoners:

‘Your sacrifice and hard work were not in vain... We thank God for your return and your safety...You are freedom fighters and holy warriors for the sake of God and the homeland.’

Hamas is also presenting as heroes to cheering Gazan crowds the terrorists in charge of guarding Shalit during his time in captivity:

‘Shalit's captors will take the stage alongside the freed prisoners during the Gaza celebrations to be held upon their return to the Strip.

The released prisoners will be first received by Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, government ministers, Legislative Council members and other figures. Next, the detainees would meet with relatives.

One of the freed prisoners is Muhammad Zufi, who assisted Shalit's abductors in videotaping the abduction operation.'

According to Israeli opinion polls, the deal has overwhelming Israeli public support.

But away from the mainstream media which has been gloating over its role in creating the public pressure for such a deal to be done, an anguished debate has nevertheless been under way for days now about the terrible price Israel has paid for the release of this one soldier and the incalculable consequences of such a deal.

It is not merely the grossly disproportionate numbers involved, which no other country in the world would even contemplate for one moment. It is the fact that the deal declares in effect that terrorism works.

It is the fact that trading one innocent life for more than 1000 guilty lives hands a sickening victory to terrorists, making it much more likely that they will kidnap more soldiers to trade for yet more jailed murderers.

This deal makes it almost inevitable that yet more Israeli families will end up mourning the loss of loved ones.

It is the fact that this deal makes it almost inevitable that yet more Israeli families will end up mourning the loss of loved ones who will be murdered as a result by Palestinian terrorism.

It is the fact that it underscores the shattering weakness of the Israel Defence Force in having failed to rescue Shalit during the five years he was held.

What has happened, many Israelis are asking themselves, to the country that produced the daring and heroic raiders of Entebbe who managed to defy all odds in rescuing Israeli hostages from a hijacked plane?

And 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

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.

Some families who have lost loved ones in these terror attacks have welcomed the deal; they say they did not want the Shalit family to suffer as they themselves have suffered. But for other families bereaved by these murders, the anguish is unbearable.

Watching the murderers of their loved ones walk free to a rapturous reception in Gaza and the West Bank and listening to their gloating satisfaction at having taken the lives of Israeli innocents, these families feel as if they have been brutally abandoned by a society for which justice cannot be allowed to get in the way of emotion.

For these suffering relatives, it is almost as if today they are being forced to endure yet another bereavement.

But then, the equivalence being drawn in the coverage of this deal reflects in turn the morally bankrupt ‘tit-for-tat’ analysis of the Arab war against Israel employed by so many in Britain and the west.

For whenever Israel points out that any military action against the Palestinians is only in response to Palestinian attacks, many in Britain claim that those Palestinian attacks were only in response to previous Israeli attacks. Thus Israel is always painted as the ultimate aggressor.

This is entirely false. From the moment Israel was re-established in 1948, it has only ever launched military operations against the Arabs in response to actual or imminent Arab attacks. Yet many in Britain refuse to acknowledge the difference between murderous aggression and the defense against it.

They refuse to acknowledge that Hamas sets out to murder as many young Israelis as possible, whereas Israel goes to great lengths (not always successfully) to avoid civilian casualties.

They refuse to acknowledge that the aim of every single military operation by Israel in Gaza is to defend and protect itself against attack by a fanatically Jew-hating enemy pledged not only to destroy Israel but to wipe out every single Jew on earth.

The refusal to acknowledge this crucial moral difference has meant that many in Britain and the west view Israel as the aggressor in the conflict, and the victimization of Israelis is largely glossed over.

So just as the anguish of Israeli terror victims’ families over the Shalit deal has been minimized by the media coverage – particularly in Israel itself, which reflects the malign nature of its own left-wing media class -- so the anguish of Israel itself as a state under permanent existential siege is routinely ignored, and Israel instead grotesquely portrayed as the aggressor in the region.

What too many in Britain and west still don’t understand is that what Israel is up against is what Britain and the west are now up against – not a violent campaign by people fighting for a state of their own but an Islamist cult of death, in which the murder of innocents is a cause for exultation and mass killers are lionized as heroes and religious martyrs, not just by Hamas but by the Fatah leadership in the West Bank too.

The five-year Shalit drama and its disturbing resolution have therefore come to symbolize the toxic cocktail of ignorance, misunderstanding, naivety, malice, cowardice, cynicism, incompetence and moral muddle by the so-called civilized world - including Israel itself - that has actually served to perpetuate the Middle East impasse.

No decent person can fail to be moved by the return of Gilad Shalit to Israel. Few eyes will have been dry at his reunion with his family. Yet it has to be said that ultimately, this deal represents a triumph of heart over head and sentimentality over realism.

The Shalit family did what many of us hope we would have done in similar circumstances – fought a tenacious and brilliant campaign to sustain public pressure on the government to secure their son’s release.

It was, however, emotional blackmail – and the Israel government should have resisted it. Shalit came to be regarded as every Israeli’s son.

Tragically, however, in the years to come Israel may come to realize that it paid for the life of Gilad Shalit with the blood of further murdered Israelis and the lifelong torment of their families.

Yet no-one should underestimate the extreme difficulty of the decision Netanyahu was forced to take in this case.

However Netanyahu resolved the Shalit dilemma, it would have been a terrible decision.

As so often in Israel, he was between a rock and a very hard place. However he resolved the Shalit dilemma, it would have been a terrible decision.

For Jews, the diabolical nature of this kind of choice – weighing up the sacrifice of one of your own against the sacrifice of others of your own– has a terrible historical resonance.

For during the Holocaust, a particularly sadistic torment inflicted by the Nazis upon their Jewish victims was to force them to choose which of their children or loved ones to sacrifice in order to save others from gas or bullet.

The Holocaust happened because the world looked the other way until it was too late. It abandoned the Jews to meet their fate and be forced to make these infernal choices alone. And now the world is abandoning Israel to meet its fate and be forced to make these infernal choices alone.

Sure, America helps arm Israel in order that it may defend itself against otherwise insuperable odds. But at the same time, the west forces Israel to remain trapped in a permanent war that the west ensures Israel cannot win.

For Israel’s fate is to live cheek by jowl with people pledged to destroy it. Armed to the teeth, Israel will however never unleash its full military power against those people because it is constrained by Jewish ethics.

The result is that it deals more scrupulously and humanely with its mortal enemies - and takes more punishment as a result - than any other nation on earth.

The Arabs know this and take full advantage of it, launching attacks in order to present Israel with the choice between abandoning its own victims - as has effectively largely happened in the rocket-bombarded south of Israel - and taking military action, which will inevitably result in some civilian casualties and thus not only earn the opprobrium of the double-standard applying world but, more lethally, destroy Israel’s own belief in itself.

To their eternal shame, Britain and the west have allowed themselves to be manipulated by this cynical strategy in the cause of genocide.

These false friends leap to defame, demonize and delegitimize Israel by denouncing its military actions as illegal, aggressive or disproportionate – thus in effect trying to paralyze its attempts to defend itself against attack, while simultaneously forcing it to surrender to its enemies through the appeasement process.

The outcome is that Israel is now trapped between Hamas, Fatah, Hezbollah, Iran, Syria, Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea – and yet is blamed for preventing peace by building apartments in the suburbs of Jerusalem.

The infernal choice it was forced to make over Gilad Shalit was thus but the latest and most dramatic example of how the west has abandoned Israel to swing in the wind.

This article originally appeared in Melanie Phillips' blog at dailymail.co.uk

Egypt Violates Peace Terms

Even before Shalit is released, Egypt broke the terms of the Sinai Peace agreement by conducting military operations in the peninsula.  This is meant to stick a  finger in the eye of Israel and to say to the world that the Peace Agreement is dead. Additionally, the new Egyptian leaders hosted Hamas in Cairo which to us is an indication of their future stand in the region.

In other words, Egypt wants to be a power broker in the region and will take all steps to disassociated itself with the past.  Mubarak may not be dead, but the peace his administration negotiated definitely is.

What is the next step, the next shoe to fall? A military build up in the Sinai? Military support to Hamas? Another war?

Additionally, the United States pressure on Israel is getting heavier as the article that follows indicates. My question is, will the US be there if there is another war? Or will Israel have to stand alone?

You tell me--I am guessing now, but all the answers are pretty scary.

Egypt Defies Sinai Peace Terms, Hosts Hamas in Cairo Before Shalit's Release

DEBKA Staffers - DEBKAfile Exclusive Report,  October 13th, 2011

     Thursday, Oct. 13 Cairo took two steps inimical to Israel. Egyptian Air Force Chief Gen. Reda Hafiz said to the official MENA news agency: “Sinai is our land and we do not need permission to increase our forces on our land” in direct contravention of the 1979 peace treaty signed with Israel which demilitarized Sinai by common consent. He added: “Egyptian planes conduct patrols without Israeli consent to secure Egypt's borders, including the eastern (Israeli) border.”

     Furthermore, without waiting for Hamas to open the prison doors for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit after five years of captivity in the Gaza Strip, Cairo let his captors cash in on the prisoner exchange deal by providing the first Damascus-based Hamas leaders with a home in Cairo.

     DEBKAfile reveals that Wednesday, Oct. 12, Khaled Meshaal's deputy, Mousa Abu Marzuk, won permission from Egyptian intelligence director Maj. Gen. Murad Mowafi to relocate from Damascus to a permanent home in a luxury villa provided him in Cairo.

     Meshaal, who arrived in the Egyptian capital Wednesday, was assured of the same privileges along with the staff of his Damascus politburo, if the new round of Palestinian unity talks launched between Hamas and Fatah in Cairo Thursday progressed satisfactorily.

     Egypt claims that Meshaal arrived to oversee arrangements for the handover of Gilat Shalit next week in return for the first batch of 450 jailed Palestinians. The remainder will be released at a later stage.

     According to our sources, he came to supervise the transfer of his command center from the Syrian capital to Cairo.

     Nonetheless, the Shin Bet director Yoram Cohen denied Wednesday that there were any political strings attached to the prisoner swap transaction that were hidden from the Israeli public. The information about the Hamas move to Cairo contradicts this assertion and also puts a question mark over Cohen's statement that the Shin Bet is capable of containing any security threat posed by turning loose 1,027 convicted Palestinian terrorists under the accord for recovering Gilad Shalit.

     DEBKAfile reports deep resentment in senior military circles over Defense Minister Ehud Barak's message to Cairo of “apologies and deep regrets” as well as condolences for the families of the six Egyptian security personnel “who were killed by Israeli fire.”

     He was referring to an incident at the scene of a terrorist attack, launched from Egyptian Sinai, on buses and cars on the Eilat highway which left eight Israelis dead.

     No inquiry has ever established who caused the deaths of the six Egyptian police officers. Israel thoroughly investigated the incident in response to American and Egyptian demands and decided in the interests of good relations with Cairo to cover up testimony by witnesses on the spot that the six Egyptian officers died while shooting at the Israeli vehicles alongside the terrorists and were in fact indistinguishable from them.

     Furthermore, the terrorists had made all their preparations for the attack on the Sinai side of the border under the eye of an Egyptian police post.

     Neither Netanyahu nor Barak checked with Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz before inculpating his troops for the killing of the Egyptian policemen in an official statement to Cairo.

     All this backdoor dealing has not been brought to the public notice. All other news items are snowed under the emotionalism and drama of the soldier's imminent return which fill all Israel's TV screens and front pages.

     Missing therefore is any disclosure of how the US and Egypt used the Shalit case to legitimize Muslim Brotherhood participation in the Egyptian government, the establishment of ties between the Brotherhood and Washington and the Egyptian Brothers' expanding clout in Ramallah and Gaza.

     The Palestinian Authority's ties with the rejectionist Hamas-Gaza were one of the stumbling blocks which held Israel back from negotiating a permanent peace with the Palestinians. By signing the prisoner swap deal, Israel confronts the formidable Muslim Brothers, parents of Hamas, and paved their path into the West Bank.

     None of Israel's talking heads has been able to explain what made Hamas suddenly flexible enough on its toughest terms to swing the deal. For instance, the top terrorist guns of both Hamas and Fatah were not included in the prisoner swap and will stay in jail.

     The answer is revealed here: It was not Hamas' decision to give way; it was forced to do so by its Egyptian Brotherhood masters. US officials in Cairo for talks with the Brotherhood leaders and Gen Mowafi led them in the real negotiations for the Shalit deal.

     They first established its fundamental and left the Israeli prime minister's emissary David Meidan and the head of Hamas' military wing Muhammad Jabari to tie up the technical ends.

     The Americans pushed Israel hard to accept the deal, while the Brothers gave Hamas no choice

The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea--the Shalit Issue

The Israeli government is caught in a conundrum. Do they return one soldier to his family while giving up 1000+ terrorists or do they make the decision that to return killers to freedom is too high a price to pay and if one soldier is not be returned, so be it.  Obviously, with the announcement of the completed negotiations, Shalit will come back to his family.

While there are valid points on either side of the argument, we are concerned with the decision. History has shown that terrorists return to their roots and will strike out against their former captors. Whether it is those who were caught on the fields of Iraq or Afghanistan or in Israel, it seems like the minority are rehabilitated. Most return to their killing ways. 

So to release 1000+ (some say 1028) will only mean more killing and maiming to the Israeli public. Yes,we understand that the family wants their son back and we completely feel for them and the loss they have had since Shalit was captured. However, we must look at things in a more long term vision. How many people will lose their sons, daughters, mothers or fathers, sisters or brothers when the final count is calculated? Is this loss worth the return of one? We do not think so.

In the following post, Jerome Auerbach writes about the dilemna.

What is your opinion?

The Gilad Shalit Dilemma

Jerold S. Auerbach - American Thinker,  October 16th, 2011

In Haifa eight years ago, Asaf Zur was returning home from school.  Along the way, his fellow bus passenger, a Hamas suicide bomber, blew himself up and killed seventeen Israelis, mostly school children like 17-year-old Asaf.

The  bomb belt worn by the terrorist was made by Mawaz Abu Sharach and Majdi Amro. They trained him, planned his deadly assault, and drove him to his target. For their heinous cruelty they received seventeen life sentences. Interviewed from an Israeli prison on British television for a program called “Inside the Mind of a Suicide Bomber,” they said: “We will be released before our sentences' time; we will go back to terror because we must kill more Jews.”

Sharach and Amro are among the 1,027 terrorists who will be released by Israel in return for Sgt. Gilad Shalit, 19 years old when he was abducted during a cross-border raid from Gaza more than five years ago. Held captive and incommunicado by Hamas ever since, his outside contacts have been limited to three letters, a DVD, and an audio tape — granted only in return for the release of 20 female Palestinian prisoners.

Shalit's cruel confinement mobilized his family and their many supporters.  Gilad's father Noam worked relentlessly to secure his son's release.  Mass prayers have been held at the Western Wall.  Ten thousand Israelis joined in a protest march, organized by Shalit's parents, to the Prime Minister's residence in Jerusalem.  A tent was erected nearby for family and friends to maintain vigil and to press for Gilad's return — at any price.

Few issues galvanize Israelis, and evoke their sense of themselves as a national family, like the capture of soldiers.  Gilad became “a son to all of us,” whose return home would heal the deep family wound.  News of his imminent release, in exchange for the Palestinian terrorists (nearly 300 of whom are convicted murderers serving life sentences), electrified the country.  A substantial majority of Israelis, who have supported such disproportionate prisoner exchanges in the past, enthusiastically approve.  So does Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal, for whom the agreement is a “great achievement.”

But not Yossi Zur, father of Asaf.  He knows the history and consequences of vastly disproportionate prisoner exchanges.  During the past thirty years, 7,000 Palestinian prisoners incarcerated for brutal terrorist actions have been released in exchanges for 19 Israelis (and 8 bodies).   Since 2002, 182 Israelis have been killed by the released  terrorists.  Based on these numbers, dozens of Israelis are likely to die at the hands of prisoners who will be exchanged for Gilad Shalit.

Why now, after five years?  Egyptian military rulers, who brokered the Shalit exchange, may have wished to strengthen relations with Hamas to please the Muslim Brotherhood.  Hamas can use the deal to weaken Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, whose pursuit of UN recognition Hamas opposes.  And Prime Minister Netanyahu will surely bask in public approval for bringing Gilad Shalit home — when he is not castigated for surrendering to terrorists.

The Israeli conundrum cuts deeply.  To Security Agency Chief Yoram Cohen, this is “the best deal for Israel from a security perspective.” But he conceded that strengthening Hamas could “increase motivation for more attacks and kidnappings.”  Despite good reasons for opposing the deal, claimed Israeli journalist Ari Shavit, there is “one decisive reason” to support it: Shalit has become “a symbol of mutual solidarity” for Israelis; “without this feeling, there is no meaning to our lives here.”.

To those on the Israeli right, however, it is a “disgraceful surrender.” The Netanyahu government was denounced for betraying Israelis whose family members were killed by the released terrorists.  A number of those families filed emergency lawsuits to stop the release. Soldiers in elite counter-terrorist units who had risked their lives to capture the murderers also protested.

A decade ago fifteen-year-old Malka Chana Roth was one of fifteen Israelis murdered in a horrific Palestinian terrorist bombing in the Sbarro pizzeria in downtown Jerusalem.  The suicide bomber was escorted to the restaurant by Ahlam Tamimi, a 20-year-old university student who was disguised as a Jewish tourist.   Sentenced to 16 life sentences, she said, “I'm not sorry for what I did.  I will get out of prison and I refuse to recognize Israel's existence.”  Ahlam Tamimi was prescient: she is on the list of prisoners to be exchanged for Shalit.

When Frimet Roth, Malka's mother, heard the news she responded: Tamimi has been “handed a life to live – the life of a hero, an inspiration. And the government that prosecuted this monstrous woman has agreed to the satanic transaction.”

It is difficult to imagine that Israeli solidarity can be forged from Noam Shalit's joy and the bitter sorrow of Yossi Zur, Frimet Roth, and the families of hundreds of other innocent victims whose Palestinian murderers will be free to murder again.

According to President Shimon Peres, the Shalit exchange demonstrates that the Jewish state has fulfilled its “top moral value – to save one soul in Israel.”  But to save one soul by virtually assuring the deaths of others is, at least, morally questionable.  The imprisoned 13th century Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg refused the huge ransom of 23,000 silver marks raised by his loyal followers lest it encourage the incarceration of other rabbis.  He died in prison seven years later.

As Yossi Zur realized, “since the names and faces of the future victims are not known, it is permissible to ignore all signs and past experience, and fantasize that nothing will happen.” For Israelis,  sadly, history suggests otherwise.

Jerold S. Auerbach, author of Brothers at War: Israel and the Tragedy of the Altalena (2011), blogs at www.jacobsvoice.tumblr.com.