One Israeli is worth a Thousand Arabs…?

 

The Most sensible – I almost wrote ‘the only sensible’ – sentence uttered this week sprang from the lips of a 5-year old israeli boy.

After the prisoner swap, one of those smart-aleck TV reporters asked him: “Why did we release 1027 Arabs for one Israeli soldier?”

He expected, of course, the usual answer: because one Israeli is worth a thousand Arabs.

The little boy replied: “Because we caught many of them and they caught only one.”

For more than a week, the whole of Israel was in a state of intoxication. Gilad Shalit indeed ruled the country (Shalit means “ruler”). His pictures were plastered all over the place.

It was one of those rare moments, when Israelis could be proud of themselves.

In a way it is a continuation of the Jewish ghetto tradition. The “Redemption of Prisoners” is a sacred religious duty, born of the circumstances of a persecuted and scattered community. If a Jew from Marseilles was captured to be sold on the market of Alexandria, it was the duty of Jews in Cairo to pay the ransom and “redeem” him.

As the ancient saying goes: “All Israel are guarantors for each other”.

Israelis could (and did) look in the mirror and say “aren’t we wonderful?”

Israel has never recognized these Palestinians as prisoners-of-war. They are considered common criminals, only worse.  They have got used to seeing the Palestinian prisoners only as bargaining chips.

This week, the released prisoners were never referred to as “Palestinian fighters”, or “militants”’ or just “Palestinians”. Every single newspaper and TV program, from the elitist to the most primitive tabloid, referred to them exclusively as “murderers”, or, for good measure, “vile murderers”.

One of the worst tyrannies on earth is the tyranny of words. Once a word becomes entrenched, it directs thought and action. Releasing a thousand ‘enemy fighters’ is one thing, releasing a thousand ‘vile murderers’ is something else.

And here’s something else. Young Gilad Shalit was born and brought up on Palestinian territory which Israel was never entitled to. The UN allocated it to the Arabs in the 1947 Partition Plan and it was stolen and ethnically cleansed by hard-core Jewish/Israeli terror squads in 1947/48.

… lets spare a thought (and do something) for the thousands of Palestinians still languishing in Israel’s prisons.