The exhilaration of seeing Gilad Shalit returned alive to his
family in Israel after half a decade in captivity is nonpareil.
These are the rare moments when we get to claw back some territory
from the grasp of evil.
Yet the morality of trading a thousand Palestinian
prisoners for one soldier is shaky indeed. Many of these were just
losers arrested for varying degrees of lowlife-hood, people who
might be better placed sponging off their parents than eating free
food supplied by the Israeli taxpayer. They are thrown in to the
deal to give it some bulk, like the plastic packing bubbles in the
shipping box which all but smother the item being
retailed.
Sadly, however, the kidnappers could not be bought off so
easily. They demanded and received some of the worst murderers
alive today. I was a few blocks away, visiting in Jerusalem, on the
day in 2003 when Doctor Applebaum of Shaarei Zedek was blown up
with his daughter at a sidewalk cafe in the Emek Refa’im
neighborhood. She was to be married the next night and her father,
originally of Detroit, invited her out for a farewell coffee, never
imagining they would leave together on a final journey.
Her beautiful white bridal gown was resewn into a curtain
and hung in the Tomb of Rachel. At least the Biblical Rachel
managed to spend fifteen married years with Jacob and to leave two
children as her legacy. All that is left of Nava Applebaum is that
curtain with its broken promise of a future built on
purity.
Now her murderer can walk free and laugh at those naïve
Jews who unleashed him again on the world. He is joined by the man
who found an Israeli girl walking alone and cut her heart out of
her chest. Another member of this group ran his truck into a crowd
of soldiers at a bus stop, killing seven and wounding more than
twenty. There is the female conspirator of the man who blew up
Sbarro’s Pizza thirty days before September 11; she says she is
happy that Israeli children were killed by their
operation.
All in all, these are the Who’s Who of the Middle East
terror world. Any famous incident that you can recall where people
were killed and the bomber did not blow himself up is represented
by a newly released perpetrator. This is like declaring an amnesty
for Charles Manson and Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne
Gacy, all on the same day.
The families and friends of all the victims whose killers
were traded take personal offense. Some are bothered by the fact of
the exchange; others could have swallowed it if the government had
consulted them… or at the very least, notified them in advance. My
grim conclusion is that they are in the right, even if the joy of
Shalit’s return should not be diluted by that
calculation.
The Talmudic law sets a limit of ten-to-one for most
ransoms as a strategy to limit future kidnappings. I suspect that
when families can afford to pay, they are likely to honor this rule
in the breach. The most famous case of a Jew who prevented his
coreligionists from paying an exorbitant ransom was Rabbi Meir of
Rothenburg (1215-1293), who died as a captive in the Tower of
Ensisheim.
Here a greater issue obtains. By freeing unrepentant
killers we are endangering new generations of potential victims.
Certainly the saving of one life today cannot justify creating the
potential for more violent deaths in the future. Sherri Mandell,
mother of the brutally murdered Koby, is right to
protest the deal.
But these are tough calls to make and one can hardly fault
the Israeli government, even if a strong legal argument could be
made that the sovereignty of a government does not include the
right to free convicted killers for diplomatic considerations.
These are the awful Sophie’s Choice situations which are the
product of our unredeemed existence and the lack of courage on the
part of civilized societies to fight evil to the death.
As the second part of the Sukkot holiday (“the holiday of
our joy”) begins on Wednesday night, we can be grateful to have one
of the good guys back in the fold. There is some balm in Gilad
after all! And we can pray for an age of enlightenment and decency
where we are not called upon to be more tough than kind.
