I have only sympathy for Gilad Schalit's parents, Noam and Aviva, who are fighting to save their son.
I have nothing but disdain for the way in which the Gilad Schalit Campaign Organization has been hijacked through P.R. gimmicks to serve left wing causes.
Five politicians, who were once high in the security establishment, have been mobilized on billboards all over Israel to demand "Gilad Now!" just as they want "peace now". According to them only the Israeli government is guilty of not freeing him today.
When the Prime Minister revealed that Israel (after much agonizing) had agreed to the terms proposed by the German mediator one year ago (!) while Hamas had never responded to them, Haaretz declared in a banner headline that Bibi is a liar. When the German government confirmed that what Bibi had said was true, the silence on the left was so great you could hear a pin drop. Haaretz published a tiny clarification and the five musketeers continued to insist from every billboard that Gilad could be brought home today.
What they want is for Israel to sign a blank check and let Hamas fill in the number and identity of the terrorists to be freed and their destinations.
This is the same kind of blank check they want Israel to give the Palestinian Arabs to coax them to come back to negotiations.
In both cases their thinking extends only to the immediate moment of signing. What will happen when Hamas kidnaps another soldier and demands the release of twice as many terrorists, because they see that it works, is none of their concern. Let the government and the IDF worry about it.
On the other hand I find it hard to believe that the vaunted Israeli intelligence establishment does not know, after five years, where in Gaza Gilad Schalit is being held captive. Is Israel, which carried out the Entebbe rescue on July 4, 1976 and the elimination of quite a few top men of Hizbulleh, up to the mysterious problems troubling the Gaza Fraud Flotilla in Greece today, "eyeless in Gaza?"
Even in the unlikely event that this is so, Israeli intelligence certainly knows where the prime minister and other ministers of the Hamas government in Gaza are and it should not be an insurmountable problem to capture them. At least once before Israel captured senior Syrian generals in order to convince the Syrian government to exchange them for Israeli prisoners whom previously they refused to release.
Before considering all those things, how do we even know that Gilad is alive? This is not farfetched. Hizbulleh kept up the fraud that Regev and Goldwasser were alive for years, and when they eventually returned only coffins, it became clear that they had been killed on the very first day. There has been no sign of life from Gilad for two years and Hamas refuses to let the Red Cross see him.
Perhaps the five musketeers should ponder this question rather than encourage the Israeli public to send SMS's that they are in favor of Gilad's release. Which Israeli is not in favor of Gilad's release? But the P.R. experts of the campaign work overtime on new gimmicks instead of facing the real problem squarely.
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