Israel Update for October 2011

The details of the Shalit deal were released by the government several days after it was first announced. The plan featured the freeing of 1,027 Palestinian prisoners in several stages. One third of them had been serving life sentences, most with 'blood on their hands'. In the initial stage, carried out on October 18th, Gilad Shalit was driven to the Gaza Strip border with Egypt and handed over to Egyptian intelligence officials, who had participated for several years in the German-mediated negotiations to secure his repatriation. After his safe transfer to Egyptian control and following an initial medical check to make sure he was in relatively good health, 477 Palestinian prisoners were set free from Israeli prisons. Another 550 prisoners will gradually be sent back to their family homes before the end of December.

Of the 477 Palestinians freed from jail in the initial stage, 131 were returned to their homes in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. In addition to this, another 17 prisoners from Israel, Judea and Samaria were sent to the Hamas-ruled coastal zone for a period of at least three years since they were deemed very likely to return to the terrorist path given their past actions and pronouncements. Another 144 prisoners not originally from the Gaza Strip were sent to the fenced off Palestinian zone for an indefinite period of time. Five Arab-Israeli prisoners were set free to return to their towns and villages, mostly in the Galilee region.

A total of 54 male prisoners were released to Judea, Samaria or the eastern half of Jerusalem with various 'legal restrictions' placed on their future movements within those areas. Thirty nine prisoners deemed by Israeli security officials as too dangerous to remain in the region were transferred to several countries abroad. Many Israeli commentators touted this as a major concession on the part of reluctant Hamas leaders. Twenty six female prisoners, some directly involved in terrorist actions that took Israeli civilians lives, were sent to their home areas in Judea, Samaria and several Jerusalem Arab neighborhoods. One woman deemed too dangerous to remain anywhere near Israeli citizens was sent away to nearby Jordan, with orders that she can never cross back over into Israeli-controlled territory.

Dancing In The Streets

After being reunited with his grateful parents in the presence of PM Netanyahu and other senior Israeli officials, Gilad Shalit was taken to his family home in northern Israel. Several senior army officers and Christopher Bigot, the French ambassador to Israel, visited the home in the following days, the latter to convey a message from Nicolas Sarkozy. An Israeli medical examination determined that the freed soldier was suffering from general weakness and a lack of sunshine, but was otherwise in fair condition.

Scenes of jubilation greeted the hundreds of Palestinian prisoners reunited with their families and friends. In a televised speech from his headquarters in Damascus, overall Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal hailed the lopsided exchange deal as a 'historic victory' for his extremist group and 'for all of the Palestinian people'. However he admitted his 'happiness was mixed with sorrow because we were not able to gain the freedom of all the prisoners' originally demanded by the Muslim terrorist group.

Israeli political commentators all agreed that the swap deal boosted the radical Hamas movement while concurrently weakening the more moderate Palestinian Authority headed by Mahmoud Abbas, therefore also harming the already dim prospects that peace talks will resume anytime soon with the reluctant PA. Writing in the Jerusalem Post newspaper one day after the prisoner exchange was announced, analyst Yaakov Lappin stated that 'The Hamas regime in Gaza will be significantly fortified by the Shalit deal, and see its standing in the Palestinian street, and the wider Arab-Muslim world, boosted'. He added the deal 'lessened the prospects' that Palestinians living under Hamas' harsh rule in the Gaza Strip would rise up and demand greater political and cultural freedoms, as has occurred in many Arab countries this year. Although Iran's anti-Semitic leaders indicated they opposed the prisoner exchange, since it involved indirect Palestinian negotiations with the hated 'Zionist entity', they were nevertheless said to be glad to see the fundamentalist Muslim movement strengthened against the less religious PA.

Opinions varied in Israel as to whether Gilad Shalit's freedom would help or harm PM Netanyahu's chances of winning the next Israeli elections, currently scheduled for early 2013. Many analysts opined if a major terrorist assault were launched by any of the freed Palestinian prisoners, this would undoubtedly hurt his electoral prospects. The prediction came as many families of murdered terrorist victims decried the uneven deal as 'dancing on the blood' of their slain relatives. Netanyahu had earlier told his cabinet that 'the Jewish people is a special people, responsible for one another' in justifying the lopsided swap. This did not stop many from pointing out that he himself had warned against exchanging convicted terrorists for kidnapped IDF soldiers in his best-selling 1995 book, Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat Domestic and International Terrorism. In the book, Netanyahu wrote that releasing scores of terrorists in exchange for Israeli citizens was 'a mistake that Israel made over and over again'.

Building And Voting

Soon after the Shalit agreement was finalized, PM Netanyahu offered to freeze all government public construction in dozens of Jewish communities located in Judea and Samaria (most home construction there is privately funded). His office said the move was designed to encourage the Palestinian Authority to return to the negotiating table. This came as Quartet peace envoy Tony Blair and other western officials continued their intensive efforts to get the two sides to resume face to face peace talks, which were broken off by the PA in 2008. The background to this effort is the pending UN Security Council vote to approve or reject the PA's unilateral statehood bid, made by Mahmoud Abbas at UN headquarters in New York City in September. Media reports said a vote on the controversial issue is now expected to take place on or around November 11th.

Meanwhile one of the 15 Security Council member countries, Columbia, has launched its own bid to get the opposing sides to negotiate peace terms once again. In fact, the Netanyahu government's public building freeze proposal, which was quickly rejected as inadequate by PA leaders, was delivered to Abbas by Columbia's visiting Foreign Minister. This came as a group of French and Italian lawmakers announced they opposed upgrading the PA's official status in any EU body, saying the Abbas autonomy government does not enforce child labor laws, represses the Palestinian media and engages in other egregious human rights abuses.

A spokesman for Mahmoud Abbas, Nabil Abu Rudeina, announced that the PA leader wishes to hold long overdue Palestinian elections this coming January, which would be the first time they took place since February 2006. The spokesman said the presidential and parliamentary ballots would be held in coordination with the opposition Hamas movement which won the 2006 round even though it strongly opposed the 1990s Oslo peace accords that the Palestinian electoral process was based upon. Some Israeli analysts said the move indicated Abbas expects to win statehood endorsement by the UN General Assembly before then, if not in the Security Council. The Obama administration continues to work feverishly to secure the opposition or neutrality of at least nine nations currently sitting on the 15 member Security Council in order to avoid vetoing the statehood bid, which Iranian leader Ahmad Ahmadinejad insisted would unleash a 'new wave of hatred' for the 'detested' United States in the Muslim world.

War On Tel Aviv

Diplomatic sources told international journalists in October that Iran will soon begin moving its outlawed uranium enrichment programme to an underground facility in Fordow, near to the Iranian Shiite Muslim holy city of Qom. Built inside of a mountain, the facility would be extremely difficult for Israeli or other bombs to destroy in any attack upon Iran's rogue nuclear development programme. Currently the regime's main enrichment facility is located near the central town of Natanz.

Meanwhile Ahmadinejad told CNN his country had not deliberately misled the UN's Atomic Energy Agency about the scope and aims of its nuclear programme, calling such UN charges 'lies'. He also condemned the violent killing of Libyan strongman Muammar Qaddafi in late October, implying it was part of a Western plot to dominate the Arab world. This came as Israeli leaders continued to express serious concerns that Syrian dictator Bashar Assad and his repressive regime might lash out at the Jewish state militarily as the internal Sunni Muslim Arab revolt against his minority Alawite regime gains further steam. Assad told reporters in early October that he would attack Israel if NATO forces took any action to halt his brutal crackdown against mostly peaceful protestors in his fractured country, where human rights groups say over 3,000 protestors have been killed since the mass revolt began last March.

Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the notorious Shiite Lebanese Hizbullah militia leader, threatened to 'smash the bones of Israeli soldiers' if war breaks out in the near future, as many analysts warn is a distinct possibility given the fierce upheaval raging in nearby Syria and other parts of the turbulent Middle East. Speaking to supporters in Beirut, the clerical leader warned the next war 'will begin in Tel Aviv' adding that his Syrian and Iranian-backed forces 'will cross all red lines' and have 'many surprises that will change the face of the region' if a new Israel-Hizbullah conflict rocks the area. Israeli officials admit they are worried that Hizbullah might have acquired chemical weapons, or possibly even nuclear warheads, to launch at Israeli population centres like Tel Aviv. Just before the Hizbullah leader uttered his latest war threats, Israeli Home Front Minister Matan Vilna'i warned that production of gas masks will soon be suspended if the Finance Ministry does not allocate an additional one billion shekels to keep the production lines working. He added that currently there are only enough gas masks available to protect half of the Israeli civilian population.

In these tumultuous days of regional violence, chaos and wars and rumors of wars, it is most reassuring to recall that the Hebrew Prophet Daniel, exiled to Babylon with his Jewish brethren, wrote of a future time when 'One like a Son of Man was coming with the clouds of heaven, and He came up to the Ancient of Days and was presented before Him. And to Him was given dominion, glory and a kingdom; that all peoples, nations and men of every language might serve Him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion which will not pass away, and His kingdom is one which will not be destroyed' (Daniel 7:13-14).