Gilad Shalit and the Rising Price of an Israeli Life

This was the cover story at yesterday's New York Times Magazine:

On the afternoon of June 27, 1976, Palestinian and German terrorists hijacked an Air France flight originating from Israel and directed it eventually to Entebbe Airport in Uganda, where most of the non-Israelis on board were immediately released. More than 100 hostages remained, 83 of whom were Israeli. They were held for the next six days, until an elite team of Israel Defense Force commandos freed them in the famous raid known as Operation Entebbe. The name of the mission became synonymous with Israel’s refusal to give in to the demands of terrorists and its willingness to go to extraordinary lengths, and risk many lives, to free Israeli hostages.

Despite Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s final decision to use a military operation to rescue the Entebbe hostages, recently declassified documents tell a more complex story, one that reveals Rabin’s doubts about the mission and exposes the inescapable dilemma, which has only intensified over the years, at the heart of Israel’s policy toward its own captured citizens. We now know that even as the raid was being planned, the Rabin government was making contact with various international middlemen to obtain a list of the hijackers’ demands, and Rabin himself privately said he was willing to release the 53 prisoners the terrorists had named. During the secret discussions prior to the Entebbe operation, Rabin, who agreed to the mission after much persuasion by intelligence and ministry planners, effectively established the principle that is still followed by all Israeli leaders facing hostage situations: if the necessary intelligence is available and the operational circumstances allow, force — even a great deal of it — will be used to free hostages; if not, Israel will negotiate a prisoner exchange.

Rabin signed off on the Entebbe plan only after intelligence agents assured him that aerial surveillance showed Ugandan soldiers guarding the terminal where the hostages were being held, indicating that the building was not booby-trapped. (These same documents also reveal the orders to follow if the commandos ran into Idi Amin himself. “He isn’t a factor,” Rabin said. “If he interferes, the orders are to kill him.” To which the foreign minister, Yigal Allon, added, “Also if he doesn’t interfere.”)

Amos Eiran, who was then director general of Rabin’s office, told me recently: “On the morning of the operation, Rabin summoned me and went over the wording of the resolution he was going to propose to the cabinet on the subject of the operation. He was wearing a dressing gown and was very tense. He accompanied me to the elevator and said: ‘Prepare for me a draft letter of resignation. I give the operation a 50-50 chance. If it fails, I’ll accept all the responsibility and resign.’ I asked, ‘What will you see as a failure?’ and he replied, ‘Twenty-five or more dead.’ ” When the mission was completed, three passengers and one Israeli soldier were killed.

Thirty-five years later, many who took part in Operation Entebbe at the highest levels were also involved in the negotiations to bring home Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier who was abducted by Palestinian commandos on June 25, 2006, and whose capture has consumed Israeli society for the last five years...

I love that bit about Edi Amin!

But continue reading:

On the day Shalit was released, the country held its breath. Service in banks came to a halt because clerks could not stop watching the live video of Shalit’s movements, from Gaza to Egypt and then from Egypt to Israel. All over the country, banners and signs were hung, welcoming him home. Gilad was everyone’s son, everyone’s brother. To Israelis, his release was arguably the most significant event of the last 10 years. The exuberance at his return drowned out whatever protests existed of the deal that was made to bring him home.

It is hard to fathom the price Israel paid for Shalit without placing it in the context of previous prisoner swaps, originally with Palestinian organizations and later with Hezbollah. The first to grasp how sensitive Israeli public opinion was on the issue of hostages and M.I.A.’s — and therefore what a powerful weapon abduction could be — was Ahmed Jibril, the leader of a faction of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. In 1979, Israel reluctantly agreed to its first disproportionate exchange with a guerrilla organization when Jibril insisted on getting 76 P.L.O. members in exchange for one hostage...

It's a long essay. But worth reading in full.