Inside Israel’s Mind: How To Deal With Terrorists Capturing Israelis
An interesting article is appearing this week in the NYT, which deals with Israel’s long and tortured history of dealing with Israelis captured by terrorists.
Whether it’s military action to recover the captured Israelis - as in Entebbe, or paying ransoms (prisoner swaps), the decision is never easy and the costs to Israel have risen over the decades.
This is among the hardest and most emotionally draining issues facing the Israeli political and military establishment.
So, while the military and political leaders will agree to use force when they have solid information to work with - as in Entebbe, they wont do so when they aren’t sure of the whereabouts of the captured Israeli.
That’s why no action was made to get Gilad Shalit from Gaza; it turns out that Hamas had a misdirection operation going to lure Israel into carrying out a raid against a dummy target (possibly to get other Israelis killed/captured).
Operation Cast Lead against Hizbullah was launched after two other Israelis were captured (Goldwasser and Regev), but that military operation failed to achieve its goals of laying low Hizbullah or finding and releasing the two Israelis.
I fault the Olmert government on both counts (Shalit and Goldwasser/Regev), but every Israeli government has faced this kind of crisis, and future governments will face the same prospects.
That’s the sad fact that Israelis must deal with.