Jeff Jacoby
Israel’s deadly mistakes
By Jeff Jacoby
Globe Columnist / December 20, 2009
IN 1983, ISRAELI authorities arrested Ahmed Yassin, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza. He was convicted of unlawfully stockpiling weapons and establishing paramilitary jihadist organizations, and sentenced to 13 years in prison. Just two years later, however, he was set free in the now-infamous “Jibril deal’’ - the release of 1,150 security prisoners held by Israel in exchange for three Israeli soldiers held by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a terrorist group headed by Ahmed Jibril. Yassin soon launched Hamas, a murderous organization committed to Israel’s liquidation. Over the years, Hamas terrorists have killed hundreds of Israelis, and maimed or wounded thousands more.
Few Israeli policies have been as counterproductive or morally questionable as the lopsided prisoner exchanges it has entered into with terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah. Time and again, Israel has paid for the freedom of a few POWs - sometimes just the remains of a few POWs - by releasing hundreds of violent detainees, many of them complicit in the deaths of civilians. And time and again, the newly freed terrorists have picked up where they left off.
Yassin is only the most notorious example. According to Israeli journalist Nadav Shragai, “about 50 percent of the terrorists freed for any reason returned to the path of terror, either as a perpetrator, planner, or accomplice.’’ An analysis by the Almagor Terror Victims Association in 2007 found that at least 30 attacks in the preceding five years had been committed by prisoners freed in deals with terrorist groups. More than 175 men, women, and children died in those attacks.
Now Israel is poised to repeat this mistake. To win the release of Staff Sergeant Gilad Shalit, who was abducted by Hamas-led gunmen in 2006, the Israeli government is reportedly nearing a deal to free around 1,000 Palestinian prisoners.
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