Jew from England, the Jews of Istanbul paid the ransom for his release. In today's Israel, this obligation still holds.
Public meetings and demonstrations are now being held for the release of Gilad Shalit. The organizers do not say openly that the aim is to push the government to accept the exchange deal. But, since there is no other way to get him back alive, that is the message in practice.
One cannot envy the members of the government who find themselves in this situation. Caught between two bad options, the natural tendency of a politician like Olmert is not to decide at all and postpone everything. But this is a third bad option, and one that carries a heavy political price.
The strongest emotional argument voiced by the opponents of the deal is that the Palestinians are demanding the release of prisoners with "blood on their hands." In our society, the words "Jewish blood"-two words beloved by the right-are enough to silence even many on the left.
But that is a stupid argument. It is also mendacious.
In the terminology of the security service, this definition applies not only to a person who has personally taken part in an attack in which Israelis were killed, but also to anyone who thought about the action, gave the order, organized it, and helped to carry it out-prepared the weapons, conveyed the attacker to the scene, or assisted in other ways.
According to this definition, every soldier and officer of the Israeli army has "blood on his hands," along with many politicians.
Somebody who has killed or wounded Israelis-is he different from us, the Israeli soldiers past and present? When I was a soldier in the 1948 war, in which tens of thousands of civilians, fighters, and soldiers on both sides perished, I was a machine-gunner in the Samson's Foxes commando unit. I fired thousands of bullets, if not tens of thousands. It was mostly at night, and I could not see whether I hit anybody, and if so-whom. Do I have blood on my hands?
The official argument is that the prisoners are not soldiers, and therefore they are not prisoners of war, but common criminals, murderers and their accomplices.
That is not an original argument. All colonial regimes in history have said the same. No foreign ruler, fighting an uprising of the oppressed people, has ever recognized its enemies as legitimate fighters. The French did not recognize the Algerian freedom fighters, the Americans do not recognize the Iraqi and Afghan freedom fighters (they are all terrorists, who can be tortured and held in abominable detention centers), the South African apartheid regime treated Nelson Mandela and his comrades as criminals, as the British did Mahatma Gandhi and the fighters of the Hebrew underground in Palestine. In Ireland, they hanged the members