Jerusalem Post Editor Saul Singer remembers his brother Alex, murdered by one of the Palestinian Arab prisoners released this week by Israel: Life is many things.

This week’s prisoner deal, however, made the issue unavoidable for my family and a number of others who lost soldiers in Lebanon. Among the released prisoners was Anwar Yassin, who had another 13 years to serve of his 30-year sentence for killing Alex Singer, Ronen Weisman, and Oren Kamil on September 15, 1987.

The surprise introduction of a personal element has not helped crystallize my muddled views on the deal. A pundit’s job is to make tricky cost-benefit analyses, but even before I knew Alex’s killer was in the mix, my calculator had short-circuited. How to compare the concrete freedom of one Israeli, even one who may have been kidnapped under circumstances partly of his own making, against the potential victims of unrepentant released terrorists? What weight should be given to the injustice that Yassin, 36, will be given a hero’s welcome, and has a whole life ahead of him?

I am comforted by the fact that the price that so many Israelis have found expensive is regarded by Palestinians to be cheap. Some analysts found Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah to be more defensive than triumphant, and have noted that most of the Palestinians were small fry on the terror ladder, sprung only a short time before their scheduled release.

Yet while I find the morality and advisability questions to be murky, one message is not: the vast contrast between the value placed on human life. Prisoner deals represent a rare and stark quantification of the human value gap.

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