What Israel will do for its own

By Uri Dromi

The news that, after almost six years in the hands of his Hamas kidnappers, army Sgt. Gilad Shalit will return home a free man sparked a spontaneous celebration in Israel.

However, as always in our country, joy was quickly mixed with gloom.

In exchange for Shalit, Israel agreed to release 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, some of them responsible for the deaths of hundreds of innocent Israeli citizens slain in vicious terrorist attacks. Since the record shows that many released Palestinian prisoners return to the macabre business of murder, the life of Gilad Shalit may have been saved, but the lives of many other Israelis will now be threatened.

Indeed, while people hugged and kissed Shalit's parents at the tent in Jerusalem where they had been staying for months, vowing not to leave until their son was freed, others were upset. Not far from the jubilation, Benzi Ben-Shoham was protesting against what he felt was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's surrender to terrorists.

Ben-Shoham had a personal stake in this painful issue: He was carrying a picture of his sister Limor, who had been killed in 2002, when a suicide bomber blew himself up next to her while she was celebrating her 17th birthday at Café Moment in Jerusalem.

It is in such moments that one is reminded how small Israel actually is. The Shalits' tent is just a few yards away from Café Moment, which was closed down after the attack and reopened under a new name.

When he was in the opposition (and, as such, a vocal opponent of any deals with terrorists), Netanyahu used to sit with his wife, Sarah, in Café Moment. Their private home is just a few steps away. Now, as prime minister, with his official mansion even closer, he cuts a deal with the people who sent the suicide bomber on his deadly mission.

In such a small space in Jerusalem, then, everything connects: life, terror, and a government that has to lead us through these difficult issues.

Nobody envies Benjamin Netanyahu today. The decision he made is contrary to everything he believed in. In his books and speeches, he has always been closer to the usual American position: zero tolerance for terrorism; no negotiations with terrorists. When it comes to terrorists holding Israeli hostages, he would certainly prefer a rescue mission over a negotiation - a glorious raid like Entebbe rather than a notorious swap like Jibril in 1985, when 1,150 Palestinian prisoners were exchanged for three kidnapped Israeli soldiers.

But Netanyahu certainly understands the risks of a more aggressive approach. When the C-130 transport aircraft took off from Uganda's Entebbe Airport in July 1976, it was carrying not only the rescued Israeli hostages, but also the body of the commander of the elite unit that had freed them - Col. Yoni Netanyahu, the prime minister's brother.

If there were a chance, the Israeli Defense Forces would have tried to rescue Shalit. It seems, however, that either there wasn't enough intelligence about his whereabouts or there was an assumption that his captors would kill him instantly if attacked. This was the case with Nachshon Waxman, an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas in 1994 and killed by his captors the second Israeli soldiers stormed the place where he was being held.

In the meantime, Shalit was rotting in his cave - not in Entebbe, thousands of miles away, but somewhere in Gaza, so close to millions of his Israeli brothers and sisters who couldn't rescue him. And this is the crux of the matter: Israelis are not used to this kind of helplessness. If all other options were exhausted, many of them had reasoned, let's do something - anything - to save the boy.

The critics of this deal are right, and in my head I share their reservations. Hamas may be strengthened, and murderers will be left to roam free and carry out more vicious schemes. In my heart, however, and in the heart of every Israeli today, there is a renewed feeling of solidarity. We are still willing to sacrifice a lot to bring one of our boys home.

Armed with this solidarity, we will prevail.