That Which Gets Rewarded, Gets Repeated: Counter-Terror Soldiers Protest Gilad Shalit Prisoner Release Deal With Hamas

Imagine the Israeli government asked you to risk your life to capture a terrorist, and that you did so. Imagine that soldiers have died fulfilling those orders. Then imagine those terrorists were to be released by that same Israeli government. Next time that same government asked your unit to go on a similar mission, what would you now think? These men therefore make the strongest argument against Israel's prisoner release deal that is soon to result in the too long overdue freedom of hostage Gilad Shalit: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/148760#.Tp0NwOywWcO

That which gets rewarded gets repeated. I told this to someone recently and he responded that assumes that Hamas is not already attempting to kidnap more soldiers regardless of the deal. This retort is baseless because it ignores the fact that the incentive for this was already created before this deal. Prisoner exchanges have taken place in the past. In fact, in Israel's nine prisoner exchanges with Arab enemies, dating back to the first, 54 years ago, Israel has freed 13,509 prisoners in order to win the release of a total of 16 soldiers. An average of well over 800 for each one. On July 16, 2008, Hezbollah gave back the two kidnapped bodies of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev in exchange for Palestine Liberation Front terrorist convicted murderer Samir Kuntar (his hero's welcome party was even broadcasted for all to see the great victory of terror) and a couple hundred others. That was not even to save a life, but only to bring back bodies. Today one can see the exchange for Gilad.

Israel created this incentive to kidnap Israeli soldiers before this deal by its previous deals and concessions to terrorism. Why else would Hamas not slit the throat of Shalit the way jihadists in other parts of the world have? It's certainly not because of their humanitarian tendencies toward an Israeli soldier. It's because they knew having him alive in captivity was useful and that eventually they could get, in their words, a "victory" which they just achieved this last week. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadenijad also declared it to be a victory for the jihad. Israel has once again reaffirmed that. If those jihadists facing the American military thought they could get such a deal by a single kidnapping, perhaps less Americans would have their heads slit off on video. No other country would even think of making such a deal. Everyone must celebrate the return of Gilad, but no one can think that Israel's policies of negotiating with these terrorists, of making concessions to these Islamoterrorists like handing them Gaza on a silver platter (under a deluded belief that withdrawal would further peace) or releasing over a thousand prisoners, hundreds serving life sentences for some of the worst terror attacks on Israel, does anything more than once gain embolden them. It lets them quite reasonably believe their terror successfully leads to "Zionist failure." Continuing to reinforce this belief yet again in a very dangerous way simply does not serve Israel's long term strategic interest, nor does it help to keep Israelis safe.

Hamas has promised more kidnappings. They would have to be idiots not to put in every effort they have to keep trying. Tweet