Freeing Killers: A Price Too High to Pay to Free a Captured Soldier

This is not a popular piece to write.

Noam Shalit, father of Gilad, the abducted soldier, has been quoted today in HaAretz and the Voice of Israel radio on Thursday, July 6th, that he urges Israel to hand over 130 Arabs convicted of first degree premeditated murder, in exchange for the freedom of his son.

Noam Shalit is compelled to accept the idea that freeing convicted killers is the only way that he will see his son alive once again.

This is certainly not the time to judge Noam Shalit, and to invoke the adages in The Talmudic Tractate, ETHICS OF THE FATHERS: “Do not judge someone until you have come unto his place” and “Never judge someone at a time of his sorrow”.

Yet with genuine empathy for what Noam Shalit must be going through, one thing must be said: Freeing his son is not worth such a price.

I write that difficult sentence as a journalist who has had the opportunity to arrang for interviews with ten of these unrepentant killers who now sit in prison for life. When each of these convicts were asked what they would do if they were free men, each of them shrugged their shoulders and declared that they would go back to killing Jews.

To observe the matter-of-factness with which these killers describe their heinous acts, you learn one thing: If any of these killers are released, they will continue to murder.

Indeed, Attorney Zev Dasberg, head of the Israel Institute for the Research on Terror Victims, prepared a booklet for distribution to Israel’s legal and political system in which he documents that more than fifty people have been murdered in cold blood by killers who were freed by Israel in previous gestures when convicted killers were freed over the past five years.

My perspective is also as a father who currently has a son in an Israeli army combat unit, not far from Gaza. My son, Elchanon, asked me one thing before he was drafted into the IDF: Please do not trade any murderers in exchange for me in case I am captured.

With as much pain as it would take, I would honor Elchanon’s request.

At the same time, we must all remember the cruel realities of war: In a war, soldiers are killed, wounded and captured. That is what war is all about.

Captured soldiers are exchanged at the end of a conflict, or during a lull in fighting. That is not the situation today.

It is one thing to redeem a captive, as we are commanded to do by Jewish Law.

It is quite another thing to free a soldier and know that his freedom will result in the murder of many more people.

That is not a cycle of violence.

That is a cycle of murder.