• Tebowing.com founder (and Rocky Mountain Hebrew Academy alum!) Jared Kleinstein will have some free time now that Tim Tebow and the Denver Broncos are out of the NFL playoffs. [Time]

• Gilad Shalit has joined Facebook. [JTA]

• Milwaukee Brewer Ryan Braun, currently appealing his 50-game suspension for violating drug rules, will accept the award for National League MVP this weekend. [NJ Jewish News]

• An op-ed highlights the close ties between the Center for American Progress, a Washington think tank, and the Obama administration. [NY Post]

• More thoughts on Matt Gross’ trip to Israel. [NJ Jewish News]

• Noam Shalit, father of Gilad, will run for Knesset as a Labor man. [Haaretz]

• The editor-in-chief of ThinkProgress, the liberal group of blogs which has come under fire for its writers’ alleged anti-Israel slant, reportedly admitted in an email that the term “Israel-firster”—which appeared in at least one TP writer’s Twitter feed—is “terrible, anti-Semitic language.” [JPost]

• The saga of a prospective New Jersey Hebrew-language charter school. [NYT]

• The lost 11th century Jews of … Afghanistan! [Medievalists]

• Carl Kruger Agonistes. [NY Mag]

On Saturday Night Live, Rick Santorum (played by Andy Samberg) says, “What is this campaign about? Two things. One, making the family once again the center of our nation’s public policy, and two, starting a war with Iran as a favor to Israel, whether Israel asks us to or not.” Mondoweiss sees a biting barb. I see, at the least, mainstream recognition of just how central Israel has become to this race.

• Does Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan have cancer? The rumors are swirling. [JPost]

• Israeli security seems outmatched by the prevalence and volume of crimes committed by religious settlers in the West Bank. [Haaretz]

• An official report produced in the wake of the Gilad Shalit swap (for more than 1,000 men and women) suggests regulating and reining in future prisoner exchanges. [Ynet]

• Ex-President Ehud Olmert was indicted on bribery charges in connection with the infamous Holyland real estate scheme. Of course, Olmert has also already been convicted of rape. [Apologies: Pre-caffeine, we wrote this. It was ex-president Moshe Katsav who has been convicted of rape.] [NYT]

• Prominent pro-Israel donor Newton Becker—his beneficiaries included MEMRI and the Zionist Organization of America—died at 83. [Jewish Journal]

• Without renouncing violence, Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal pledged mass nonviolent protests against Israel. [AP/WP]

• As explosions rocked Damascus, the United States insisted that an Arab League plan to restore peace (and, potentially, enact regime change) be permitted to follow through. [Haaretz]

• President Abbas met with several former prisoners freed as part of the Gilad Shalit swap, including one responsible for the murder of an Israeli teenager. [AP/WP]

• Josh Block, the former AIPAC spokesperson involved in a controversy over liberal bloggers’ remarks and charges of anti-Semitism, was released by Rachel Kleinfeld’s Truman National Security Project, where he had been a fellow. [Salon]

• The amazing story of a multi-year film shoot—for a biopic about the Soviet Jewish physicist Lev Landau—that has basically become its own totalitarian state trapped in 1952, complete with a megalomaniacal director who is referred to as “Boss.” You’re asking if the director is Jewish? You need to ask if the director is Jewish? [GQ]

• A company uses baby foreskins to try to grow human skin. You’re asking if the company is German? You need to ask if the company is German? [Huff Post]

• A bittersweet visit to several former strongholds of Jewish life in both Poland and Spain finds the author mourning what was lost. [NYRB]

• Contributing editor Rachel Shukert remembers celebrating Hanukkah as one of the few Jews in Omaha, Nebraska. [VF]

Have happy fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh nights of Hanukkah!

“I felt like a time machine,” he told me. “I could not believe all the buildings. And when I came to the village, I didn’t know a soul.”

In the village of Saffa, west of Ramallah, Sumoud Karajeh, 23, is marveling at her new lease on life. In 2009, Karajeh was sentenced to 20 years in prison for stabbing a guard at the Qalandiya checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah.

“When I was in prison, I thought I will not be a mother, I won’t study until I am 40 years old,” Karajeh said last week in her living room. Now she’s moved back into her childhood bedroom, reconnected with friends, and plans to study social work at Al Quds Open University as she did before her arrest. “I will have a normal life,” she said.

***

Barghouti and Karajeh are only two of the 1,027 Palestinian prisoners Israel agreed to release last month in exchange for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, captured and held by Hamas since June 2006. Even though most Israelis support the swap, most also recoil at the idea that convicted militants like Barghouti and Karajeh have been given a chance to lead normal lives. And yet both say they have no regrets about the crimes they committed. For Barghouti and Karajeh, and scores of other Palestinians who could otherwise never enter Israel, prison, in fact, offers a rare opportunity to live in the belly of the beast. It serves as a rite of passage—a forge where Palestinian national ideals are hammered into place.

Karajeh spoke to me on a rainy day last week. A tiny schoolgirl carrying a yellow umbrella had pointed the way to Karajeh’s home at the edge of the village of about 4,000. A banner of Palestinian flags fluttered over olive trees in the yard. On the front door was a poster: “Free Palestinian Prisoners,” it said in English and Arabic. Inside, the house was cold enough to wear a jacket. A picture of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas embracing Karajeh leaned on a shelf next to an oversized stuffed puppy. Karajeh and her mother, Hanan, sat on ornate wooden chairs upholstered in gold. Karajeh wore a bright patterned headscarf, pristine white sneakers, jeans, and a blue cardigan. Pale, with thick black eyeliner and full lips, she had a gap between her front teeth that made her look younger than 23. While she spoke, her mother brought out tiny cups of strong coffee.

Though Karajeh admitted she was in prison because she stabbed an Israeli soldier, she refused to give any details about the stabbing or her motivation. An onlooker captured the event on a cell-phone video and posted it to YouTube. Karajeh said that Israeli intelligence officers had summoned her to the Ofer compound near Ramallah for a two-hour interrogation two days before we met, and she was still rattled by it.

The hardest thing about prison, Karajeh said, was the first 30 days. Israeli intelligence officers interrogated her deep underground in the Russian Compound, a prison steps from Zion Square in central Jerusalem, she said. For a month, Karajeh saw only the investigation room and the tiny cell where she was in solitary confinement. She could not tell what time it was. “Prison was like a grave,” Karajeh said.

I asked her how she stayed sane. “Well, my name is Sumoud,” she quipped. Sumoud is Arabic for steadfastness. “The soldiers would shout, and I would think to myself about my life, about my village and my street and my house,” she said. “I would remember my relatives and name their children in my head, and I would sing to myself.”

A religious Muslim, Karajeh said she trusted that Allah would deliver her from her suffering. And once she was tried and sentenced, life improved. Karajeh was transferred to the women’s division of Hadarim prison, and three months later to Damoun in northern Israel. It was her first time away from home, where she was one of seven brothers and sisters. The other Palestinian prisoners took pity on her. “They were kind to me because I was the youngest,” she said. “They would bring me gifts from the canteen. They would teach me things like English and Hebrew.”

Continue reading: ‘Israel made us kill’

• So, reconciliation appears to be back on track, for now. [JPost]

• That great Times Magazine cover for the Gilad Shalit article? It required 60 hours of drawing. [NYT The 6th Floor]

• Henry Kissinger will not serve as secretary of State in a Herman Cain administration. Which, actually, might be the first good reason to vote for Cain. [Politico]

• Stuart the Turtle sees something he doesn’t like about Occupy Wall Street. [Forward]

• Nextbook Press deputy editor Wayne Hoffman returns to shul. [Huff Post]

Palestinian protesters attempted to take the bus into Jerusalem without permits, in a nod to the Freedom Rides of the 1960s.

• Perhaps the most sensational aspect of the article is the light it sheds on just how crucial the Israeli lefty Gershon Baskin, a guy with no official government affiliation, was to freeing Shalit. Basically, through a Hamas contact that he made at an academic conference (!), Baskin was able to set up a more or less direct Israeli line not just to Hamas but to the ultra-hard-line leader of Hamas’ military wing, Ahmed Jabari—“the first name,” Bergman notes, “on Israel’s list of terrorists to be assassinated.”

• Bergman writes: “It is very unlikely that we will ever learn where he was held. The degree to which Gaza, unlike the West Bank, is opaque to Israeli intelligence has profound implications for future operations there. The inability of Israeli intelligence to discover Shalit’s place of captivity in a small space that is an hour’s drive from Tel Aviv was a profound failure, one to which the departing heads of Israel’s three security organizations—Mossad, Shin Bet and the military—all admitted when they retired this year.” In other words: if doing the deal reinforced the logic of abducting soldiers from Hamas’ perspective, Israel’s inability to rescue Shalit had already reinforced that logic.

• The story of Miriam Grof, the mother of a soldier captured in the 1980s whose activism on behalf of her son provided the template for Noam Shalit’s activism for his, proves—as if any proof were necessary—that hell hath no fury like a Jewish mother who misses her child.

• Bergman also scrupulously provides the perspective of a man whose little boy was killed during a 2003 bus bombing and who opposes all prisoner exchanges. It is chilling that his sentimental view is corroborated by the decidedly unsentimental men who have run Israel’s intelligence and security agencies—they also were greatly opposed to this deal.

Yet after reading Bergman’s piece—and after staring at the magazine’s incredible cover—I personally find it hard to avoid the conclusion that this was the right thing to do. A simple cost-benefit analysis ignores the expressive function of such a transaction: that Israel will exchange a thousand men for one is a statement—a “speech act,” if you will—about how Israel values life (a Jewish life, anyway) and how that sets it apart within its unfortunate part of the world. I don’t know that you can put a price on that, even when the currency is lives.

Gilad Shalit and the Rising Price of an Israeli Life [NYT Magazine]

• It is looking more and more likely that the United States will not even need to exercise its Security Council veto to prevent full Palestinian membership in the United Nations. [NYT]

• Israeli naval ships have made contact with the two Gaza-bound flotilla-type boats and informed them the blockade will be enforced. As of early this morning, they were only about 50 miles from shore. Meanwhile, there will likely be more of these. [Haaretz]

• The United States is backing away from earlier plans, made in the wake of the uncovering of the alleged assassination plot, to impose stricter sanctions on Iran’s central bank. [LAT]

• A man (now in custody) threatened the wife and daughter of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. [AP/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Gilad Shalit underwent surgery to remove shrapnel he got during his 2006 abduction. (Which means he’s needed it these past five-plus years.) [Haaretz]

• A comprehensive list of what valuable U.N. agencies the United States may be eliminating aid to next. [FP Turtle Bay]

• Stupid Gilad Shalit, going to the beach on Shabbat. Doesn’t he know he’s a pure political pawn and not a human being now? [JTA]

• Was the 7 billionth baby a Jew born in Brooklyn? It’s more plausible than you think! Maybe! [Ditmas Park Blog]

• An Amy Winehouse-Nas duet has emerged. [6 Degrees No Bacon]

• A new biography conclusively shows that Reinhard Heydrich was not, in fact, history’s most self-loathing Jew. [TNR The Book]

Leaves are fallin’ all around.

• The Egyptian reporter who interviewed Gilad Shalit after his release claims the Red Cross checked him out first. The Red Cross says she’s a liar. [JTA]

• A toxicology report indicates that Amy Winehouse had an extremely high amount of alcohol in her blood when she died. [Metro]

• The first picture from the nude Dead Sea photo shoot has been released (link in the article). [JTA]

• Ed Koch schmoozes. He’s still got it! And he’s back on Team Obama (for now). [New Jersey Jewish News]

• So the Anti-Defamation League wasn’t really trying to prevent conservative groups from attacking President Obama on Israel, except maybe it was. [JustASC]

‘Melo hoops with Hasidim.

Yesterday Israel approved a deal, seemingly hastened by the Gilad Shalit prisoner swap, which will free Grapel in exchange for 25 Egyptian prisoners. And if all goes according to plan, Grapel will be released Thursday. Some former U.S. intelligence officials believe Grapel may really have been an Israeli spy, but Israeli soldiers, never mind the Jewish state’s clandestine agents, are seldom returned alive. The Egyptians know he’s not a spy, but he’s a valuable card anyway, which is why they captured him. It is logic and behavior befitting a terrorist organization.

If Hamas and Hezbollah can get the Zionist entity to release their associates, the thinking goes, why can’t Egypt’s interim ruling body, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, do the same for Egyptian prisoners? The problem in the Middle East, then, isn’t that the Islamists are on the verge of taking over and thereby transforming Arab societies. The problem is that these societies are already governed by the passions that make the Islamists so popular.

Longtime U.S. ally Hosni Mubarak, the former president of Egypt, would not have dreamed of taking an American citizen hostage. It’s true that things have changed in Egypt, but let’s not overstate the case: Grapel’s arrest is not a sign that the Supreme Council of Armed Forces is joining hands with Iranian-backed terror organizations. The purpose of the exchange, from Cairo’s perspective, is to placate the mobs that have already laid siege to the Israeli embassy, burned Coptic churches, and may in time cause even worse problems for the ruling military council. The way to calm the situation, they believe, is to show that Egypt’s problems are manufactured by the West, and that Cairo’s ever-competent rulers managed to unearth a plot before the foreigners could once again unleash their mayhem.

Why Cairo chose Grapel as its test case seems to be merely a matter of convenience. Yes, the Queens native served in the Israeli Defense Forces in the 2006 war, where he was injured fighting Hezbollah. Yet the fact that Grapel, a law student at Emory University in Atlanta, had taken a job in Cairo in May with St. Andrew’s Refugee Services, a Christian organization that mostly provides legal aid for Sudanese refugees, is perhaps what first attracted the attention of Egyptian authorities. African refugees—Christians and Muslims—are a sensitive issue for the Egyptians, not least because their mistreatment in Egypt has caused many of them to flee to friendlier vistas across the border in Israel.

While some believe the Shalit deal set the precedent for the Grapel exchange, it’s a mistake to see the two cases in the same light. For Israel, the point of freeing a thousand prisoners in exchange for one is not merely a moral calculation, but also a form of strategic communication intended to dishearten Israel’s foes. The message it sends is not only that Israel values life above all, but that the Jewish state can afford to put its enemies back on the street because in the end, no matter how numerous, those enemies have no chance of winning.

The Grapel deal is something else—straight-up extortion with domestic political benefits. For Egypt, getting prisoners released for Grapel is more like Libya winning intelligence agent Abdelbasset al-Megrahi’s freedom from the Scottish government as part of an oil deal in 2009, or Iran’s kidnapping three American hikers and accusing them of espionage two years ago. Here the point is to face down the West publicly, and generate popular support at home. The message is: Western actors are trying to sabotage the people of the Middle East, but the ruling authorities are proud heroes of resistance who have exposed the designs of the imperialist or Zionist oppressors and have made them publicly pay for their crimes.

The Egyptian army probably didn’t want to get into this game of political extortion, but with Mubarak’s downfall it became necessary to win the affections of a very demanding audience: Egypt’s middle-class urban youth, a constituency to whom Mubarak never paid much attention, which is precisely what led to his demise. The Obama Administration believed that Mubarak’s exit would have little effect on an Egyptian political system still dominated by an army dependent on $1.3 billion in American military aid each year, but the problem should now be as obvious to the White House as it was to the Egyptian military from the outset. As angry as the army was at Mubarak for trying to install his son in the presidential palace, it also understood it was dangerous to give the mob a de facto veto that would allow it to shape the Egyptian political system however it saw fit.

That vision, unfortunately, is very popular in the Muslim-majority Middle East. It’s generally anti-Israeli and anti-American, to be sure, but Israel and the United States are details in a larger architecture of resentment of the West.

Hatred of the West, and of its local proxies, has been a central part of political Islam’s program from the outset. The Muslim Brotherhood was formed in 1928 in the midst of Great Britain’s 72-year-old occupation of Egypt. But long before London took an active role in Egyptian politics, 18th- and 19th-century Muslim intellectuals and activists counseled the masses to be suspicious of the West. Take their science and technology, they advised, but forgo the West’s secular values, which undermine you and your faith.

Today, those who advocate for engagement with Islamists argue that groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and Tunisia’s Nahda Party have matured and are now willing to play by the rules and act like democrats. The Islamists may not like the West, but they have no choice but to uphold agreements and partake in the international system. On the other side of the debate, skeptics fear that the Islamists are talking out of both sides of their mouth, and once in office they’ll never willingly forsake power. But both of these arguments miss the point.

Yes, Islamism is already turning out to be the most powerful political current across the region. But the attraction of Islamism is not simply that it appeals to conservative and traditional Muslim societies, but that it draws freely on the sources of resentment that have been part of the political language of the region for more than two centuries. It was not Egypt’s Islamists who led the charge against the Israeli embassy in September, but young and nominally secular Egyptians. And it is that mob, potentially in the many millions, with whom Egypt’s ruling body was currying favor when it arrested Grapel.

• The accused killer of the 8-year-old Brooklyn Hasidic boy Leiby Kletzky will reportedly plead insanity and allege that his confession was coerced. [JPost]

• Nowhere is the war over textbooks more intense or poignant than in the Arab-language schools of East Jerusalem. [LAT]

• Suspected Israeli spy Ilan Grapel’s father fervently denies that his son is anything other than a law student. [Haaretz]

• Jerzy Bielecki, a Polish Righteous Gentile who saved a Jewish woman he loved from Auschwitz, died at 90. [NYT]

• In a competitive bid to open a new engineering school in New York City, Cornell has joined forces with Israel’s Technion. [Ynet]

• Daniel Schechtman, a newly crowned Nobel laureate (for chemistry), has invited Gilad Shalit to join him at the ceremony in Oslo. [Jewish Chronicle]

• The late Juliano Mer-Khamis‘ Freedom Theatre takes its talents to New York City. [NYT]

• Marine Le Pen and Ron Paul, two peas in a pod. Hrmm. [Ben Smith]

• A profile of Gershom Baskin, the man behind the man behind the negotiations, by Tablet Magazine contributor Daniel Estrin. [PRI’s The World]

• At a film industry gathering, Robert Downey, Jr., asked everyone to forgive Mel Gibson. I hope he was booed. [JTA]

• Our art critic Robin Cembalest will be speaking this Saturday at the D.C. JCC. [D.C. JCC]

Most of the Occupy Wall Street protesters actively dislike the anti-Semities associating themselves with the movement. Repeat after me: “This asshole does not represent us.”

Here’s what Blumenthal doesn’t mention: that the “interview” this morning on an Egyptian television network was the final sadistic nail in the coffin of the five-plus years’ captivity of a teenage Israeli soldier. To be very clear, the interview was not agreed to by Israel—the original plan was for Shalit to be in Egypt for less than 15 minutes, merely an intermediate point between Gaza and Israel—and the Israeli government is shocked and appalled by the propagandistic spectacle (the English-language interviewer asked Shalit leading questions about Egypt’s indispensable role in brokering the deal and whether more Palestinian prisoners should be free). If you watch the video and see this poor kid barely able to keep his eyes open and wanting only to see the family he’s been kept away from for a fifth of his life, you will be shocked and appalled, too. See that picture? The hand on Shalit’s shoulder belongs to a Hamas thug standing behind him. At a moment when Shalit must still not have been sure that the deal for his freedom was going to go through, he was subjected to this. Frankly, it’s fucking enraging.

Anyway, it’s a shame that Blumenthal only elects to display his formidable skills as a press critic (really, this was great!) when it suits his prior agenda. And does Blumenthal really want the stories of the prisoners told? The one who killed a few dozen members of three generations of one family during a Passover Seder? The one who blew up a Sbarro’s pizza joint? If he thinks that standing those stories against Shalit’s story, even with the full, appropriate context of a brutal, unjust four-decade-long occupation explained, will somehow manage to make us care less about Shalit and more about an unequivocal terrorist group, then he can go for it.

I’ll prefer to focus on what Noam Shalit told actual members of the media earlier today outside his house in the north of Israel. “When I first saw Gilad,” he said, “I did not say much, I just hugged him.”

The U.S. Media Reports: Gilad Shalit Swapped for 1000 Non-People [Al Akhbar]
Gilad Shalit: I Thought I’d Stay in Captivity For Years [Ynet]

The only blip in the exchange was Shalit’s appearance in a brief, English-language interview on an Egyptian television network. He seems relatively healthy (you know, considering) if extremely tired, and at one point the interviewer and his translator got into a fight over the fact that Shalit was tired and should be let go. Indeed, the interview strikes this viewer as idiotic, borderline sadistic; it also was pretty clearly put together to trumpet Egypt’s involvement in brokering the deal. It is appalling. The original plan had it that Shalit would be in Egypt for under 15 minutes, and there was no mention of a TV interview. If it turns out Israel did not accede to the TV appearance, whoever forced it upon a soldier who had been in captivity for more than five years deserves all the trouble that’s coming to him. [UPDATE: An Israeli official told the AP, "We are all shocked that a so-called interview was forced on [Shalit].”]

Still, most importantly, Gilad is back. Here he is emerging at an air base in central Israel:

Gilad Shalit Reunited With Family at IDF Base Following Return to Israel [Haaretz]
WATCH: Egypt TV Despicable Interview With Gilad Shalit [Forecast Highs]
Hamas Frees Israeli Soldier as Prisoner Swap Begins [NYT]
Israeli Soldier Is Freed in Prisoner Swap [WSJ]
Hamas and Israel Exchange Prisoners [Al Jazeera]

And quite a plan: Haaretz reports there will be 11 phases, a series of preordained moves in which the several sides (the Israelis, Hamas, the Egyptians) take various steps to reassure the others that they will follow through on their ends of a bargain that will ultimately see over 1,000 prisoners go free. For example, Israel releases a few dozen female prisoners; then Shalit is transferred, via the Rafah crossing, from Gaza to Egypt, only at which point will Israel begin releasing some of its male prisoners. (Upon transfer from Egypt to Israel, Shalit “will be given his old cell phone in order to telephone his mother.”) Prime Minister Netanyahu is playing an extensive, symbolic role in the latter part of the proceedings. After all, this was his decision, and his to own—for better and for worse. He was reportedly difficult to persuade throughout, right back to when chief negotiator (and former Mossad official) David Meidan first made informal contacts with Hamas.

It was not hard to see why Netanyahu, or any Israeli, might hesitate to make this deal, and the disclosure of the names of nearly 500—almost half—of the Palestinian prisoners whom Israel will release makes it even less hard. “These are not just prisoners with ‘blood on their hands,’” Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff (who wrote about the Shalit situation for Tablet Magazine) report. “Rather, the list includes some of the founders of the Hamas military wing, such as Zaher Jabarin and Yihya Sanawar, and prisoners involved in some of the most ignoble terror attacks in Israel, including the 1989 attack on bus 405 and the 1994 abduction of Israel Defense Forces soldier Nachshon Wachsman.” And the people behind the 2001 Tel Aviv night club attack. And the 2001 bombing of the Jerusalem Sbarro. And the Passover massacre at Netanya in 2002 (for me, the always-remember-where-I-was moment of the Second Intifada). More names, and the crimes they committed, are listed here.

It is therefore unsurprising that the deal has not been greeted with unanimous approval. Three cabinet members—Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, the Yisrael Beiteinu head; Uzi Landau, the infrastructure minister, also of YB; and Moshe Ya’alon, of Netanyahu’s own Likud—voted against the deal outright. Interior Minister Eli Yishai, head of Shas, suggested freeing certain Jewish terrorists as part of the deal for the sake of “balances.” And speaking of: one entrepreneurial soul, an Israeli Jew who claimed he was related to terrorist victims, vandalized Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s grave in protest (click for ugly, important picture). Victims’ families have the opportunity to petition the High Court to overturn releases, but the court is expected to stare the government’s decisis on this one. In a touching article, the Times’ Ethan Bronner reports on two families of victims of prisoners who will be released—one of which opposes the deal, the other of which supports it. Two Jews, two opinions. (A new poll suggests that 79 percent of Israelis support the exchange.)

Is it a gift to terrorists? Plainly. Is it massively, just gargantuan-like, lopsided? Inarguably. The only consolation to be taken is that some of the terrorists Hamas has wanted these past five-plus years were not included (and nor is Marwan Barghouti, although he is a special case: it is far too complicated to try to parse whether Israel should truly wish him jailed, or Hamas truly wish him freed). It’s not even clear that Hamas will honor elements of the deal barring the return to the territories of some prisoners, who are being deported upon their releases. Is it going to lead to further kidnappings of Israeli soldiers in exchange for further prisoners? Well, why wouldn’t it? This is what happens when you literally negotiate with terrorists.

Meanwhile, is Israel getting much in return besides Shalit? Freeing Israeli-American Ilan Grapel will require more Israeli prisoners released. Turkey claims it aided the mediation, but Egypt disputes it, and certainly the deal is not suddenly going to repair Israeli-Turkish relations. Aaron David Miller is quite correct when he notes that this will have no effect on the peace process—in fact, in empowering Hamas and marginalizing the Palestinian Authority, it’s pretty sure to hurt it (further).

If the deal seems totally bewildering to non-Israeli readers, well, maybe it’s simply bewildering. Or maybe we don’t understand what it means to live in a society where one soldier can be everyone’s son, and everyone’s son can provide a reason for staying together, and engineering a major strategic defeat is worth it so that none of your citizens can claim they were never alive at a time that Gilad Shalit was a free man.

Shalit Swap: The Step-by-Step Guide [Haaretz]
Behind the Scenes of the Shalit Deal [Ynet]
Israel Releases Names of 477 Prisoners to be Freed in Trade [NYT]
In Shalit Deal, Israel Crossed Its Own Red Lines [Haaretz]
A Yearning for Solidarity Tangles Public Life [NYT]
Related: News of a Kidnapping [Tablet Magazine]
Everyone’s Son [Tablet Magazine]

There is something fishy going on here. And it involves an American citizen.

Grapel has been detained for nearly four months. Because he entered Egypt with his American passport (he has dual U.S.-Israeli citizenship; his father is Israeli), he is under U.S. jurisdiction and is the United States’ responsibility. Duly, he was able to meet with U.S. diplomats. And only last week, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta (previously head of the Mossad’s U.S. counterpart, the CIA) visited Cairo in part for the express purpose of seeking Grapel’s freedom.

Here is where it gets interesting. Panetta failed, but he was in Cairo—we now know—either at the same time or mere days before Israeli negotiator David Meidan—a former Mossad senior officer (who therefore must have worked with Panetta before) who was Israel’s Shalit pointman—and Hamas officials were also in Cairo. They were negotiating not with the usual German mediation but with Egyptian mediation. Flash forward to yesterday morning, when reports appeared that Egypt was now raising the stakes vis-à-vis Grapel: extending his prison stay yet again and still without an indictment, accusing him of throwing fire bombs at Egypt’s Interior Ministry building, and—wait for it—demanding the release of 78 Egyptian prisoners in Israeli jails in exchange for his freedom. That was yesterday morning; by yesterday evening, Grapel was quietly freed under the backdrop of the Shalit deal.

This is all speculation, but doesn’t it seem possible that Grapel was held by Hamas and Egypt as a further bargaining chip, one who, all importantly, caught the attention not only of the Israelis but of the Americans? Actually, we almost know for a fact that Grapel was part of the bargaining, because otherwise there would be little reason to let Grapel go as part of the Shalit deal (the other explanation could be that Egypt wanted to bury the news of the release to save themselves the embarrassment, but that is a pretty contrived explanation). This would also explain the sudden burst of activity on the Grapel front yesterday morning, followed by the reversal yesterday evening: it could have been the Egyptians upping their leverage on the Americans so that the Americans would push the Israelis to strike a deal.

If Panetta were involved in the negotiating, then who else got what? The United States would like to see Hamas turn away from its alliance with Iran, which has never been less convenient seeing as it exists through Syria, where Hamas is headquartered, and Syria may well fundamentally change in the coming months. The United States might also be more eager than usual to see Hamas score this victory over its main rival, the Palestinian Authority (securing the release of one thousand Palestinians), given the recent goings-on at the United Nations.

If Grapel were a part of the deal, it would also suggest that Hamas got a far better deal than they would have gotten without Grapel, because they were able to exert additional bargaining power by appealing to the Americans. This seems plausible, too. We do know that previous negotiations put the number of prisoners exchanged in the 250-350 range, not the over 1,000 that will be released under this deal; on the other hand, in the earlier talks, many prominent figures who won’t be released, such as Marwan Barghouti, were on the table. Getting a look at the prisoners being released may tell us more. Are any of them based in Egypt rather than the Palestinian territories? Do any of them pledge allegiance more to the Brotherhood?

This entire episode occured, of course, in the context of the close ties Hamas has enjoyed with the post-Mubarak Egyptian government, which earlier this year helped negotiate the (failed) Hamas-Fatah reconciliation and which has been sympathetic to Hamas’ cousin organization, the Muslim Brotherhood. Did negotiations fail for almost five years and then succeed after only a few months not because of Shalit but because of Grapel? (Grapel was arrested about two weeks before the fifth anniversary of Shalit’s kidnapping.) Was Egypt less a mediator then merely a part of Hamas’ side?

Finally, this line of inquiry leads to a yet more tantalizing (if less consequential) one. Namely: is Grapel a spy? He has always seemed less Mossad and more particularly dumb Hitchcock protagonist, an idealistic bro who put photos of himself in Tahrir Square on his Facebook page and suddenly found himself caught up in intrigue he had nothing to do with (“he had a satellite phone like I’m an astronaut,” his father memorably put it). At the same time, if you are Egypt, why hold him so long? We may have our answer: according to Meidan, the top-secret negotiations have been ongoing for several months—which is to say, likely since before Grapel’s June arrest. Egypt may have arrested him and quickly realized that he was perfect leverage: someone they could both semi-plausibly accuse of spying for Israel (he had been an IDF paratrooper and had lied about being a journalist upon entry) and use to get the Americans involved. This is maybe what happened—probably, even.

But there is only one thing I feel I can state with confidence, and that is that there is something we have not yet been told.

Israel, Hamas Reach Gilad Shalit Prisoner Exchange Deal, Officials Say [Haaretz]
U.S. Defense Secretary Fails to Secure Egypt Release of Accused Israeli Spy [AP/Haaretz]
Earlier: Deal for Shalit Signed
Israeli-U.S. Law Student Detained in Egypt

He continued: “We will finally be a normal family.”

Since Shalit’s 2006 capture, Israeli leaders have ignored calls to secure his release by freeing Palestinian prisoners, saying it would compromise national security. In 2010, Shalit’s parents, Noam and Aviva, marched across the country to demand a deal and then moved into a white tent outside the prime minister’s residence. They’ve remained there for 14 months—and, along the way, gained thousands of supporters who saw in Shalit far more than the story of just one prisoner. Instead, the young captive became a symbol of the teens recruited to the army, as well as the state’s responsibility to the soldiers it sends to guard its borders. Shalit was a terrifying example of the worst fate that can befall an Israeli in uniform, said supporters interviewed in Jerusalem last night.

Hebrew University student Roni Ofer, 25, said she served in the army at the same time as Shalit. But while she completed her service, he remained a captive. “It was shocking,” she said. “When we are drafted, we know we will be taken care of. Suddenly someone was kidnapped and nothing was done.” Others saw in Gilad Shalit a stand-in for their own children. Ofer Nuna, 40, drove an hour from his home in Rishon Lezion yesterday to bless the Shalits. He stood outside their tent with his 3-year-old son on his shoulders.

“It’s a soldier in the army, it’s like a child of ours,” said Nuna, who still serves on reserve duty. “How can you keep a kid in captivity for five years?”

But news of the soldier’s return brought a wide range of supporters, including skullcapped young men belting out prayers to the beat of a hand drum and Sara Nagani, 53, a homeless woman living in a tent encampment in Jerusalem who last night was waving a blue-and-white Gilad Shalit flag. In summer, throngs of Israelis stood on the same street and demanded more economic equality and a welfare state. Yesterday, the rally was a meeting of people whose demands had finally been met.

Haim Shalom, 33, a reform rabbi in Jerusalem, said Shalit’s release was a correction of “a terrible injustice that we as a society allowed to happen.” He went on: “I think it’s quite appropriate that straight after Yom Kippur and as we go to dwell in our tents, we are finally able to leave this tent here, the tent of Gilad Shalit,” he said.

Just after midnight, Gilad’s father, Noam, arrived. Wearing a blue collared shirt, he pushed his rimless glasses up and offered a smile. Behind him were pictures of his son.

“The Israeli government succeeded after more than five years, 1,934 hard days and 1,935 long nights, to bring Gilad home,” he said. “Tonight we ask to strengthen and bless the prime minister on a brave decision and on leadership he showed despite the great deal of time that has passed.”

Noam Shalit thanked the million activists in Israel and worldwide who have supported him. “From our point of view, this issue will be closed when we see Gilad arrive home and go down the stairs to the house,” he added. “Then we will be able to say the circle has been closed.”

For most of the revelers, 1,000 released Palestinian soldiers was a steep but necessary price to pay for Shalit’s release. But not for Lea Schijveschuurder, 20, whose parents, brother, and two sisters were killed in a bombing in a Jerusalem pizza restaurant 10 years ago. Throughout the evening, as word spread that Abdullah Bargouti, the mastermind of that attack, was one of those to be freed in the deal—rumors later disabused by the media—she was among those standing nearby holding anti-deal signs. Schijveschuurder’s read: “My parents’ blood shouts from the grave.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explained his thinking in a speech to his Cabinet. “I believe that we have reached the best deal we could have at this time, when storms are sweeping the Middle East,” he said. “I do not know if in the near future we would have been able to reach a better deal or any deal at all.”

I tried not to think of Gilad because I felt guilty. Not only was I doing nothing to help the campaign to free him, I opposed its implicit demand that the Israeli government release as many terrorists as it takes to bring him home. Israel has no death penalty, and now we would lose the deterrence of prison: If the deal went through, any potential terrorist would know it was just a matter of time before he’d be freed in the next deal for the next kidnapped Israeli.

But the argument could never be so neatly resolved. Each side was affirming a profound Jewish value: ransom the kidnapped, resist blackmail. And so any position one took was undermined by angst. What would you do, campaign activists challenged opponents, if he were your son? “He’s everyone’s son,” sang rocker Aviv Gefen.

One day I passed a rally for Gilad in a park in downtown Jerusalem. Several counter-demonstrators were holding signs opposing surrender to terrorism. “I happen to agree with you,” I said to one of them. “But don’t you feel uneasy protesting against the Shalit family?”

“We’re not protesting against the Shalit family,” he replied. “We’re protesting to save future victims of freed terrorists. Those victims don’t have names yet. But they could be my son or your son.”

Every debate over Gilad ended at the same point: your son.

We never referred to him as “Shalit,” always “Gilad.” The Gilad dilemma set our parental responsibilities against our responsibilities as Israelis—one protective instinct against another. The prime minister’s job is to resist emotional pressure and ensure the nation’s security; a father’s job is to try to save his son, regardless of the consequences.

And so I tried, too, not to think of Gilad’s extraordinary parents, Noam and Aviva. Even when denouncing the government they spoke quietly, incapable of indignity. The best of Israel, as we say here, reminding ourselves that the best of Israel is the best of anywhere.

For more than a year the Shalits have lived in a tent near the prime minister’s office. When I walked nearby I would avoid the protest encampment, ashamed to be opposing the campaign. This past Israeli Independence Day, though, I saw a crowd gathered around the tent, and wandered over. “GILAD IS STILL ALIVE,” banners reminded: It’s not too late to save him. Inside the tent, Noam and Aviva were sitting with family and friends, singing the old Zionist songs. I wanted to shake Noam’s hand, tell him to be strong, but I resisted the urge. I didn’t deserve the privilege of comforting him.

I wanted to tell Noam what we shared. As it happens, my son served in the same tank unit as Gilad, two years after he was kidnapped. I wanted to tell Noam that that was the real reason I couldn’t bear thinking about his family. That in opposing the mass release of terrorists for Gilad, it was my son I was betraying.

Now, inevitably, the government has given in to the emotional pressure. Inevitably, because we all knew it would—must—end this way. A few months ago, as part of its psychological war against the Israeli public, Hamas released an animated film depicting Gilad as an elderly gray-haired man, still a prisoner in Gaza. No image tormented us more.

Still, there are few celebrations here today. Even those who supported the campaign to free Gilad must be sobered by the erosion of Israeli deterrence. And those who opposed the campaign are grieving for Gilad’s lost years. All of us share the same unspoken fear: In what condition will he be returned to us? What have these years done to him?

Hamas leaders are boasting of victory. If so, it is a victory of shame. Hamas is celebrating the release of symbols of “resistance,” not of human beings. Hamas’ victory is an expression of the Arab crisis. The Arab world’s challenge is to shift from a culture that sanctifies honor to a culture that sanctifies dignity. Honor is about pride; dignity is about human value. Hamas may have upheld its honor; but Israel affirmed the dignity of a solitary human life.

In recent months the campaign to free Gilad demanded that the government worsen conditions for convicted terrorists in Israeli jails, to psychologically pressure the Palestinian public. So long as Gilad was being held incommunicado, activists argued, Palestinian families should be barred from visiting their imprisoned sons. While Gilad’s youth was wasting away, terrorists shouldn’t be allowed to study for college degrees.

The government promised to oblige. But as it turned out, there were legal complications. A newspaper article the other day noted the results of the government’s get-tough policy: Imprisoned terrorists would no longer be provided with the Middle Eastern delicacy of stuffed vegetables.

How is it possible, Israelis ask themselves, that so-called progressives around the world champion Hamas and Hezbollah against the Jewish state? Perhaps it’s because we’re too complicated, too messy: a democracy that is also an occupier, a consumerist society living under a permanent death sentence. Perhaps those pure progressives fear a contagion of Israeli ambivalence.

For all my anxieties about the deal, I feel no ambivalence at this moment, only gratitude and relief. Gratitude that I live in a country whose hard leaders cannot resist the emotional pressure of a soldier’s parents. And relief that I no longer have to choose between the well-being of my country and the well-being of my son.

Rather than follow the same script as scores of anxious parents before them, Aviva and Noam Shalit refused to assume a passive role and let the government’s leaders negotiate for Gilad’s freedom. Instead, they camped across the street from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s house, drawing streams of supporters and publicly questioning the government’s every move. Led by Shalit’s parents, the movement organized marches and demonstrations that drew previously unprecedented crowds, convinced some of the country’s top musical artists to record songs demanding Shalit’s release, and distributed symbolic yellow ribbons that soon became ubiquitous. Considering the contentious political assertion at the heart of their campaign—the demand to free hundreds of Palestinian militiamen, some guilty of murder, in return for Shalit, a moral dilemma that had traditionally divided Israelis—their success is nothing short of astonishing.

Nothing about the smiling, scrawny young man in the pictures hanging across Israel suggests a particularly powerful symbolic presence. Which, perhaps, is the whole point of Gilad Shalit. For the most part, previous Israeli prisoners of war belonged to several distinct categories. Some, like Ron Arad—the air force navigator who was captured in Lebanon in 1986—were career soldiers, the sort of men for whom captivity, presumably, was an occupational hazard. Others, like Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, whose capture by Hezbollah in 2006 sparked the Second Lebanon War, were reservists, older men with families and careers. Others still were captured en masse. But Shalit was very young and all alone, an ordinary boy who was nabbed by the enemy less than a year after putting on uniform. He was, in other words, an everyman.

As such, there was no end to the energy Israelis were ready to invest in seeing Shalit return home. Unlike, say, Natan Sharansky, another famed ideological prisoner who became a symbol in Israel, Shalit represented nothing but himself, which is to say an ordinary Israeli living under extremely difficult conditions and wanting nothing more than a quiet, peaceful, dignified life. Few Israelis could imagine life under Soviet repression, but every Israeli who had ever served in the army—the vast majority of Israelis—could imagine the nightmarish scenario of a patrol gone horribly wrong, ending in years of imprisonment. This is what led virtually every renowned Israeli musician to participate in a project organized by an Israeli newspaper to record songs in Shalit’s honor, and this is what brought massive crowds to a tribute concert in Jerusalem in July 2010. In addition to its stated goal, the movement for Shalit’s release had always had a potent subtext, a cri de coeur of beleaguered citizens rallying against a government they perceived as corrupt, uncaring, and out of touch.

Exactly a year after that Jerusalem concert, the activists who initiated the social justice demonstrations were moved by many of the same reasons. Shalit’s portrait was largely missing from the tent encampments in Tel Aviv and elsewhere, but had it not been for the success of the Shalit marches and the bold refusal of activists on his behalf to trust Netanyahu and his Cabinet to do the right thing, the socio-political climate in Israel, arguably, wouldn’t have been ripe for a mass movement of any kind.

When Shalit—slated to be released soon in exchange for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners—returns home, Israelis are likely to feel a rare moment of joy. When the celebrations die down, they will have time to reflect on the other, equally significant achievement of the Free Shalit movement: In a nation accustomed to experiencing grief and bereavement collectively, the majority of the population transcended the ideological debate, ignored the severe advice of retired generals who warned that releasing prisoners would only incite more kidnappings, and focused instead on the intensely private fate of one utterly ordinary young man. There’s no better example of true social justice.

But in Egypt, illusions rarely die quickly—especially when the government doesn’t let them. And from the moment that the violence broke out on Sunday evening, Egypt’s transitional government has mounted a tireless campaign to manage the public’s response and keep it firmly on the government’s side.

The government’s propaganda effort began on Sunday evening, when, according to reports, Information Minister Osama Heikal ordered state-run media to cover the clashes “wisely.” State-run television obliged, reporting that protesters were attacking soldiers and calling Egyptians into the streets to defend the military. As if on cue, thugs showed up in full force. Shouting “Islamiya! Islamiya” and “the people want the fall of the Christians,” they beat protesters, looted Christian-owned shops, and even attacked a Coptic hospital where victims were being treated. Meanwhile, soldiers raided the U.S.-funded Alhurra satellite channel and the privately owned Channel 25, both of which were broadcasting the ongoing violence. (According to reports, at the Channel 25 studio the soldiers asked for employees’ ID cards and then proceeded to beat those identified as Christian.) When a number of state-television producers began criticizing the government’s coverage of the violence on Twitter, Heikal appeared on state television and announced that anyone who “spreads rumors” about the state-run media would be tried.

While the state-run media has been forced to walk back some its initial propaganda— such as its false claim that three soldiers had been killed during the fighting when, in fact, none had died—the transitional government has promoted a series of conspiracy theories that firmly absolve the military. The most predictable of these was uttered immediately following the violence on Sunday night, when Prime Minister Essam Sharaf addressed the nation and warned of “the external fingers that stir conspiracies.” Translation from Egyptian: The United States and Israel are to blame.

Another conspiracy theory peddled by the government is that the anti-Coptic violence was entirely the work of thugs from the previous regime. Tourism Minister Mounir Fakhry Abdelnour, a Coptic billionaire who served in parliament from 2000 to 2005, repeated this line to me over the phone. What about the videos showing military vehicles running roughshod over protesters? “I saw the vehicles running into protesters,” he acknowledged. “But I didn’t see who was driving those cars. And it is very possible that the same attackers who shot gunfire or threw stones or threw Molotov cocktails took the cars and rode them.”

In a way, the government’s conspiracy-theorizing been useful because it has highlighted its alliance with Islamists, who have overwhelmingly echoed the official story. Former Muslim Brotherhood leader and presidential candidate Abdel Moneim Abouel-Fotouh—a “liberal Islamist” according to the New York Times—said that the attacks on Coptic protesters had the “foreign and Zionist aim to foment sedition in Egypt.” The Muslim Brotherhood also sought to absolve the military. “We need a fact-finding committee to see who started it, and how people who dared to attack the army,” Essam el-Erian, a leader in the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, told me. “The army is not in conflict with the people because the army is only guarding the high institutions, like television and others.”

That’s not how many Copts see things. “Our media is inciting hatred, because they said that the army needs protection,” Sally Moore, a member of the Coalition of Revolutionary Youth, told me. “As if the Christians are stronger than the army, and as if it’s a Muslim army—it’s an Egyptian army.” While Pope Shenouda, the Coptic patriarch, has called for a three-day fast and urged restraint, many Copts are demanding further action. At funerals held for those killed in Sunday’s violence, worshipers called for the downfall of the transitional government.

Egypt’s pro-democratic youth activists, however, are taking a more conservative approach. They fear that the government’s misinformation campaign has won over the broader public—and that they will lose the battle of ideas if they push against the government too directly. “People are being influenced by this. I feel it on the streets,” Shadi El-Ghazali Harb, a leading activist in the Coalition of Revolutionary Youth, told me over the phone as he stood outside of a Coptic hospital awaiting autopsy results. “There is a widespread belief that it was not the military’s fault.” So, in the short run, the activists seem inclined to direct their protests against Egypt’s less popular transitional government, rather than denouncing the military leadership directly.

To some extent, the public outrage that the youth activists have helped channel against the transitional government is already paying off. On Tuesday, Finance Minister Hazem el-Beblawi tendered his resignation to protest the government’s handling of the clashes. Though the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces ultimately rejected his resignation, it represented an important setback for the military junta, and rumors that Prime Minister Sharaf has resigned are further undermining it. Meanwhile, the transitional government has moved quickly to pass new legislation that Copts have long demanded, including laws that ban discrimination, legalize churches that were built before licensing became available in the 1900s, and ease church construction. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces still has to approve these laws, however, and many Copts remain skeptical. “If the law is issued, what’s the guarantee that it will be applied practically?” asked Coptic human-rights lawyer Naguib Gobrail, who was injured in Sunday’s attacks.

The deep divide in the way that the Copts and Egypt’s pro-democratic activists on one hand and the broader Egyptian public on the other view Sunday’s violence is potentially explosive. The rage within Egypt’s Coptic community—the understandable reaction to the violence against them before and after Mubarak’s toppling—will only intensify as Egypt’s state-run media continues to dismiss their anger.

Some are predicting that Copts will be inclined to leave the country in the face of this state-sponsored brutality. Gobrail, the human-rights lawyer, noted sadly that two of his sons are pharmacists in Australia and Canada. Moore, however, rejects this notion out of hand. “Copts are ethnically part of this country,” she said. “We’re not building a new Israel somewhere else.”

UPDATE (7:15): New reports say Marwan Barghouti will not be a part of the deal, which is said to involve more than 1000 prisoners.

UPDATE (4:45): You can read Prime Minister Netanyahu’s remarks to his cabinet, in which he invokes the principle of tikkun olam, here. Speaking of saving one life versus saving the world entire, already a Committee of Rabbis for the Salvation of Israel is opposing the deal on the grounds that the prisoners it will free will end up killing Jews.

UPDATE (4:12): President Abbas announced his support for the Shalit deal (if the train is leaving the station, you may as well get on board). Also, Shmuel Rosner reports that the religious Shas party, unlike Yisrael Beiteinu, is backing it.

UPDATE (4:00): “In the coming days we will return Gilad to the bosom of his parents, Aviva and Noam, to his brother Yoel, his sister Hadas, his grandfather Tzvi and the entire people of Israel,” said Prime Minister Netanyahu. Hamas leader Khamed Meshaal claims 1000 prisoners will be released. Meanwhile, speculation continues to swirl about why both Netanyahu and Hamas would desire Barghouti’s freedom: he is at the very least an ex-terrorist likely to sharply challenge President Abbas’ leadership but also strengthen Fatah against Hamas.

UPDATE (3:35): Prime Minister Netanyahu’s office tweets, “I especially thank the #Egyptian government and its security services for their role in mediation & concluding of the deal #Shalit.” Shmuel Rosner reports that a few ministers, including Yisrael Beiteinu leader Avigdor Lieberman, voted agains the deal. Haaretz reports that the deal has been several days in the making, with Israel’s and Hamas’ chief negotiators in Cairo for the past several days and with Netanyahu holding a meeting of a special committee, the existence of which was placed under a gag order.

UPDATE (3:10): According to the Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Twitter feed, Shalit “will be coming home in the next few days.” Also: “the agreement to release #Shalit was signed in initials last Thursday and today was signed formally by the two parties.” Much speculation is centering around the identities of the hundreds of prisoners which Israel would be releasing, and most of all whether Marwan Barghouti, the extremely popular Palestinian leader who was jailed for his alleged role in the Second Intifada, will be included. What’s interesting about this is that Barghouti is seen as a rival to Hamas.

(UPDATE 2:55: Israel Radio says the deal has been reached.) It might be happening. The Israeli cabinet is meeting in an emergency session over a prisoner swap deal (well into the hundreds) with Hamas, apparently brokered by Egypt (and not by the German mediator who had been handling things).

If approved, Shalit could be returned as early as November, or roughly 65 months after his capture.

Meanwhile, ABC News reports that U.S. authorities disrupted an Iran-backed “significant terrorist attack in the United States” targeting Israeli and Saudi diplomats and embassies. The Saudi embassy is in Foggy Bottom, in Washington, D.C., across the street from the Watergate complex, yards from the Kennedy Center, and a couple blocks from the State Department; the Israeli embassy is in sleepier upper northwest, a few blocks from my synagogue and a few more from my high school. In other words, the Iranians are kind of assholes.

Possible Deal Near to Free Captive Israeli Soldier [NYT]
U.S. Says Iran-Tied Terror Plot in Washington D.C. Disrupted [ABC News]

• Congress froze $200 million of Palestinian development aid, to the criticism of both the Palestinian Authority and the Obama administration. [BBC]

• Iran pledged to increase uranium enrichment if the West does not agree to a fuel swap deal it says it has reached with France. [DPA/Haaretz]

• In further public statements, former Mossad chief Meir Dagan said Iran’s nuclear weapons program was far from its point of no return and that military action is “far from being Israel’s preferred option.” [Haaretz]

• A German mediator arrived in Cairo to try to negotiate the release of captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. [Haaretz/Forward]

• And Defense Secretary Leon Panetta also arrived in Cairo, to try to negotiate the release of detained Israeli-American Ilan Grapel. Cairo’s taking on that Casablanca vibe, no? [AP/Haaretz]

• President Abbas said that U.S. entreaties to halt the U.N. statehood gambit were “too late.” [NYT]

• Talks over captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit remain deadlocked, said a Hamas official. Meanwhile, Shalit’s father insisted that the United Nations should not recognize Palestine until his son is free. [Ynet/Vos Iz Neias?/AP/WP]

• Weird story: eight people aboard a yacht in the Strait of Tiran—including four security men—were arrested by Egypt Wednesday, interrogated, and then released today. [Ynet]

• Five judges have been named to try those indicted for the 2005 assassination of Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. [AP/WP]

• Excellent review of Lucette Lagnado’s new memoir, The Arrogant Years, by our fearless editor in chief Alana Newhouse. [NYT]

• As the tents fold on Rothschild Boulevard, the leaders of the Israeli social justice movement wonder what’s next. [LAT]

• It was reported that the Palestinians had formally begun their statehood campaign. Then the leadership denied they had, saying instead that a letter to the U.N. secretary-general was part of a different, grassroots campaign. Good to know they have their things together. [Haaretz]

• Rep. Joe Walsh, a Tea Party Republican, plans to introduce a bill that would pledge American support for MK Danny Danon’s bill for Israel to annex Jewish settlements in the West Bank. [Politico]

• Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, met with captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit’s father and then called on Hamas to release Shalit “unconditionally.” [Haaretz]

• The French court convicted former Dior designer John Galliano, and then sentenced him to a suspended fine of several thousand dollars. [Ynet]

• There is much talk that it is time for Syria’s opposition to arm itself—or, Libya-style, to be armed by the West. [WP]

• Meanwhile, the United States is concerned about the security of Syria’s chemical weapons. [WSJ]

• An Israeli defense official noted that it would require more than one military strike to slow Iran’s putative nuclear weapons program. [Reuters/Haaretz]

• President Abbas lashed out at international requests that, as part of getting negotiations on track, the Palestinian Authority agree to recognize Israel as the Jewish state. [Ynet]

• Israelis yesterday commemorated captured soldier Gilad Shalit’s 25th birthday. [Haaretz/Forward]

• Finally: Sources say President Obama and the European Union will, as soon as today, call for Syrian President Bashar Assad to step down. [Reuters/Haaretz]

• A U.N. probe found that Syria’s regime committed “a pattern of human rights violations … which may amount to crimes against humanity,” and recommended referral to the International Criminal Court. Included is the reported execution of 26 blindfolded men at a stadium in Daraa in May and the deaths of nearly 2,000 by mid-July. [AP/WP]

• After a burst of activity, the Gilad Shalit talks are reportedly stalled yet again. [Haaretz]

• Both the Israelis and the Palestinians are preparing for massive, hopefully peaceful pro-Palestinian demonstrations next month, when the U.N. statehood battle happens. [LAT]

• A report from the besieged Syrian city of Homs. [NYT]

• Trouble at the American Jewish Committee, with executive director David Harris forced to repudiate its director on anti-Semitism and extremism’s statement that use of federal law to combat anti-Israel activism on campuses is wrong. [Jewish Journal/JTA]

• Hamas leader Khaled Meshal met yesterday in Cairo with officials from the Palestinian Authority and Egyptian intelligence. Is Gilad Shalit involved? [Haaretz]

• Iran expressed openness to a Russian proposal to restart nuclear negotiations through a series of small concessions on each side. [AP/NYT]

• Syria is using diplomats to harass and intimidate anti-regime protesters in other countries, including the United States, because they are charming that way. [WSJ]

• A bill proposed by Sen. Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, could withhold U.S. funding from certain Israeli military units if they are found to engage in human rights violations. [Ben Smith]

• Egypt may now postpone September’s parliamentary elections, which is perceived as likely help newer and more secular parties and harm the Muslim Brotherhood. [WSJ]

• Thwarted on the flotilla, hundreds of pro-Palestinian activists plan to fly in to Ben Gurion Friday and launch protests. [Haaretz]

• Recent demolitions call into question Israel’s plans for the Jordan Valley, which it wants for its future security but which most people’s plans for a two-state solution would put in Palestine. [WP]

• Both Israeli and Palestinian security forces are already preparing for massive demonstrations at home come September, no matter what actually happens in Turtle Bay. [AP/WP]

• The transfer of the bodies of 84 Palestinian terrorists was postponed on the grounds that they could be leverage in a deal for Gilad Shalit. [AP/WP]

• Ethan Bronner has the Israelis and the Palestinians tentatively tipping back toward U.S.-brokered talks in exchange for no statehood vote at the United Nations in September. [NYT]

• Tablet Magazine contributor Joseph Dana reports from Athens that Israel is exerting heavy pressure on the Greek government to stop the flotilla, which is scheduled to push off soon. [+972]

• Howard Jacobson weighs in on Alice Walker and the flotilla. [CNN]

• The Goodmans—Las Vegas Mayor Oscar and Mayor-elect Carolyn—updated. [NYT]

• Great profile of incoming New York Times editor Jill Abramson. Peter Kaplan: Whatta guy! [Forward]

• Elliott Abrams has a long, fair, excellent essay on Israeli settlements that is worth the time even for those who will disagree with it. [Foreign Affairs]

• Judaism is increasingly only for women. #slatepitches [Slate]

• Mimi Sheraton sez: Bagels are too big! [City Room]

• Harold Grinspoon and “the Jewish mind.” [NYT]

• The next Woody film will be set in Rome, star Alec Baldwin and Jesse Eisenberg, be called Bop Decameron, and not be at all didactic. Okay, one of those four statements is a lie; can you guess which? [Speakeasy]

• The lost Jews of … Argentinian cowboys! [WP via Goldblog]

• Two streets in Jerusalem are to be named for the Mizrahi Black Panthers. [Haaretz]

R.I.P. Peter Falk. Here he is in The In-Laws (the original, you doofuses).

• In response to Hamas’ refusal to let the Red Cross visit Shalit, Netanyahu announced that prisoners in Israeli jails would face tougher conditions, losing privileges such as educational coursework opportunities. “We will give them all that they deserve according to international law but nothing beyond that,” he said. [Haaretz]

• Apple has removed the “Third Intifada” app from its iPad and iPhone app stores, following a complaint from Israel’s information minister (among others). [Ynet]

• Some Modern Orthodox teens are keeping what has become known as “half Shabbos;” that is, observing Shabbat but still texting their way through the day of rest. Texted greetings of “gd Shbs” have replaced the more traditional, wordy “Good Shabbos.” Kids these days. [The Jewish Week]

• Greece’s foreign ministry urged Greek citizens and ships not to take part in the Gaza-bound flotilla soon to depart from Athens. [JTA]

• Contributing editor Mayim Bialik has 7301 ‘fans’ of her official Facebook page. You go, girl! [Facebook]

We are saddened to report the tragic death of Nextbook Press social media manager Margarita Korol’s 14-year-old brother, Eli. Donations may be made in memory of Eli, who was a budding engineer, to the Union of Concerned Scientists. [Margarita Korol]

• President Ahmadinejad and Grand Ayatollah Khamanei are basically playing the Game of Thrones in Iran. [NYT]

• The International Committee of the Red Cross wants proof that captured Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit is still alive, nearly two years after the last sign that he was. [Reuters/JPost]

• John Galliano exercised the substance-abuse defense. His verdict is due September 8. [NYT]

• Five Russian nuclear experts who helped design Iran’s facility at Bushehr died in a plane crash. [Haaretz]

• President Obama announced a speeded-up pullout from Afghanistan, as well as a changed mission there that will now, in more limited fashion, focus on counterterrorism. [NYT]

Al Jazeera television reported on its website that Cairo has come up with a blueprint for Shalit’s release and that Hamas deems it acceptable. A few days later the London-based Al Hayat reported that Hamas was ready to renew negotiations with Israel, brokered by Egypt. Haaretz quoted Israeli defense officials as saying that while they welcome Egyptian involvement, reports of a breakthrough should be taken with a grain of salt, since such reports have proved false before. A high-level Israeli delegation is due in Cairo over the weekend to discuss the matter, Maariv said on its website, prompting one commenter to write that the trip should have been postponed by a few days so no one could argue that Yoel Shalit’s outburst might have been what set the process in motion.

An Israel Air Force attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would be “a stupid thing” (“davar metupash”), former Mossad chief Meir Dagan said at a conference for senior civil servants held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem this week. “The question of questions is what will happen afterward,” he said. “Afterward there will be a war with Iran. That’s the kind of thing where we know how it begins but not how it ends.” Yedioth Ahronoth reported that Dagan had made similar comments to journalists before but that they were banned from publication by the military censor. The Israeli media are legally obligated to get permission from the censor before publishing articles that could potentially damage national security—but there’s a catch, writes Ronen Bergman in Yedioth: There’s no problem as long as the person who makes the statement is the (former) Mossad chief rather than a journalist.

Takeoffs from Ben-Gurion International Airport have resumed since the discovery of contaminated fuel brought them to a halt last Thursday, but the crisis continued to delay outgoing flights throughout the week. Terrorism has been ruled out as a cause, and the airport is awaiting expert findings. The Israeli press gave a lot of play to the hundreds of stranded Maccabi Tel Aviv fans trying to get to Barcelona to watch their basketball team play in the Euroleague’s finals. Fans who stayed home had to face the prospect of missing the final moments of the game because even if it were to go into overtime, Israeli television stations were planning to end the broadcast by 7:45 p.m., 15 minutes before the siren (tzfira) signaling the onset of Memorial Day, Yedioth reported. As it happened, the Israeli team lost the championship to the Athens-based Panathinaikos and listened to the siren in the locker room, via a cell-phone link to Israel. In a way, that loss was a good thing, Yossi Sarid wrote half-seriously, since the “distressed fans returning from Barcelona would disembark from their planes with expressions reflecting their identification with the 22,867 bereaved families” of fallen soldiers.

Hamas’ condemnation of the U.S. killing of the “Arab holy warrior” added fuel to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s opposition to the Hamas-Fatah reconciliation agreement, which was signed this week. As Israel withheld millions of dollars in Palestinian Authority tax revenues because of the deal, outgoing Shin Bet security service director Yuval Diskin warned reporters in an exit interview that the financial move might have serious consequences. “If we and the Americans and the Arab countries don’t give money, there won’t be a Palestinian Authority,” he said, adding that despite the unity deal, he doesn’t foresee genuine cooperation between the rival Palestinian factions. Meanwhile, several Israeli legislators representing Arab parties attended the signing ceremony in Cairo, sparking condemnation by right-wing Knesset members, one of whom said, “It’s time these MKs became members of a Hamas parliament and left the Israeli Knesset.”

Former Labor leaders Amram Mitzna and Amir Peretz have both been heralded as the possible saviors of their party—but the fact that those predictions didn’t exactly pan out didn’t stop Mitzna from declaring his candidacy for party chairman or Peretz from launching his election campaign this week. A recent poll found that of all the leading prospective candidates, Mitzna would bring Labor the most seats in the next election, while Peretz came in fourth. Though he did not say he would negotiate with Hamas, Mitzna said the Palestinian reconciliation “is their decision” and that he wouldn’t turn away any potential peace partner. Echoing Yitzhak Rabin’s comment that peace is something you make with your enemies, Mitzna noted that, after all, “We can’t go make peace with the Swiss.”

Israel’s Supreme Court granted former President Moshe Katsav a few more days of freedom this week. Katsav, who was due to begin serving a seven-year sentence for rape and other offenses this coming Sunday, has won a deferral until Wednesday, when the court is scheduled to hear his request to further push off the day he goes behind bars. In the meantime, security guards are being assigned to the Katsav “pesel”—the Hebrew word for both statue and idol—on the lawn outside the president’s residence in Jerusalem and told to keep an eye out for possible Independence Day vandalism, Maariv reported. Visitors will, however, be allowed to be photographed next to Katsav’s likeness—“if they want to, of course,” the story adds archly.

On the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day this week, Israeli papers provided data on how quickly survivors are dying out. “Thirteen thousand Holocaust survivors halchu le’olamam in Israel in the past year,” Yedioth said on its cover, using a Hebrew euphemism for dying that literally means “went to their world.” Also this week, the paper reported that the Interior Ministry has decided that when it begins issuing new biometric ID cards in a few months, the serial numbers will start with 6 million, in memory of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. One blogger questioned the wisdom of this decision, asking: “Is the long-term plan here to turn the entire country into Yad Vashem and all citizens into walking exhibits?”

One of the pilots who will be flying a Boeing 767 in Israel’s annual Independence Day aerial demonstration Tuesday is 40-year-old Smadar Shechter, the first, and so far only, female El Al captain, Yedioth reported this week. “It will be a great honor to fly on Independence Day with the Israeli flag on the tail of the plane, while I’m over the capital,” she said. The headline’s focus on the Hebrew word for a female captain—it read “Good Morning, This is Smadar the Kabarnita Speaking”—indicates that it’s something Israelis are not used to hearing. But that doesn’t mean they don’t like it, said Shechter. “The truth is that it’s really fun for them,” she told the paper. “The passengers feel good that they have a female pilot on the plane. They’re really enthusiastic when I speak.”

Since the abduction, the Shalit family has received a couple of letters from their son, an audio tape, and finally a short video, delivered in October 2009 in exchange for the release of 20 female Palestinian prisoners. Hamas has refused Israeli demands to allow the International Red Cross to visit Shalit, although Israel allows such visits at its prisons. Not much more is known about the Israeli hostage’s situation. Shalit, now 24 years old, seemed in the 2009 video to have recovered from the physical wounds he suffered during the abduction. The fear now is mainly about Shalit’s psychological well-being: What have nearly five years in total seclusion done to his emotional health? Will he return from Gaza a shadow of his former self? In the video Shalit was quite coherent, but 19 months have passed since the taping, and Shalit had read from a script dictated by his captors. Shalit’s parents are usually reluctant to express personal feelings, but from interview to interview their worry about his mental state only seems to grow.

Hamas activists have told Nathan Thrall, an analyst for the International Crisis Group, that members of the group mentioned “Gilad” many times during phone conversations after the abduction, to mislead Israeli intelligence. “We took Gilad to lunch,” the activists would say, or “We met with him.” But it is believed that the people who are actually responsible for the soldier avoid using phones. Most of their contact with the outside world is done through messengers, young boys who deliver handwritten notes.

Has Israel made any attempts to rescue Shalit since his capture? As far as we know, not anything Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been proud of. Netanyahu and his defense minister, Ehud Barak constantly say that all options remain open and that the Israeli security branches are working on relevant operational plans. Current and former senior officials in Israel’s different security agencies have attributed the failure to rescue Shalit to the strict secrecy surrounding his whereabouts. A tight, disciplined group of members from the organization’s military wing is in charge of hiding the kidnapped soldier and guarding him. The senior members of the military wing, many of them veterans of the Israeli prison system, have learned their lessons from the failures of previous kidnapping attempts. The IDF’s previous chief of staff, Gabi Ashkenazi, admitted in 2009: “We don’t know where Gilad is held.”

One might assume that Shabak, Israel’s domestic intelligence service, has some general information about the area in which Shalit is being held, but for an Israeli prime minister to seriously consider the possibility of a rescue operation along the lines of the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden, the information has to be precise. Netanyahu also has to ask himself what kind of risk he’d be willing to take regarding the lives of the commandos. If, for example, Shalit is held in a secure basement of a house located in a heavily populated refugee camp, the raid wouldn’t only be a question of the intelligence required—What house? What floor? Is the hostage forced to carry a belt of explosives on his body?—but also how to surprise his guards, send in a team unannounced, and get both the rescue commandos and the hostage out safely without having the whole of the Gaza Strip on their tails?

Senior Israeli officers with experience of missions of this sort admit that imagining a Shalit rescue is the most challenging tactical problem they have ever encountered. Netanyahu, contrary to his right-wing ideological background and tough public persona regarding terrorism, has actually been very careful about using military force in the past, because he knows that operations can go terribly wrong. He lost his older brother, Col. Yoni Netanyahu, in Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976, during the most famous and heroic Israeli rescue operation. In 1994, Shabak located another kidnapped soldier, Nahson Waxman, who was held in a Palestinian village near Jerusalem. Both Waxman and an IDF officer were killed during the rescue attempt.

But Israel has also failed to successfully apply non-military pressure on Hamas. After Shalit’s abduction, Israel arrested about 40 Hamas members of the Palestinian parliament and a few ministers in the West Bank, who were then released—moves that seemed largely inconsequential on the Palestinian side. In late February this year, a Palestinian engineer and presumed Hamas member, Dirar Abu-Sisi, disappeared while riding a night train in Ukraine. A few weeks later, Israel admitted to having him in their custody but refused to discuss how he got there. The German weekly Der Spiegel, considered to have great intelligence sources, claimed Abu-Sisi was kidnapped by Mossad agents looking to discover where Shalit is being held. Abu-Sisi denies any knowledge of Shalit’s whereabouts. And last month, the Israeli Air Force assassinated Tayser Abu-Snima, a member of the Popular Resistance Committees who is considered to have been involved in the planning of the Shalit abduction.

When Shalit was kidnapped, Ehud Olmert was serving as prime minister. In March 2009, as Olmert was being forced out of office after he was indicted for corruption, many Israeli analysts assumed that Olmert would try to finish the Shalit deal before handing over the government to Netanyahu. An Israeli delegation, including Shin Bet head Yuval Diskin and Olmert’s chief negotiator on the swap, Ofer Dekel, traveled to Cairo for indirect negotiations with Hamas. The Israelis stayed in one hotel, while the leader of the Hamas military wing, Ahmad Al-Jaabri, whom Israel had tried to assassinate numerous times, stayed in another. Olmert’s people now claim that the Egyptians came close to striking a deal. But then, they say, Hamas officials watched a TV broadcast showing then and current Defense Minister Ehud Barak sitting with the Shalit family. Barak went there to express support for the parents’ demand that the government make more concessions and close the deal. Hamas, says Olmert, immediately realized that it now had power to squeeze Israel into new concessions and refused to sign the agreement. Barak, naturally, denies the story.

Al-Jaabri and the senior members of Hamas’ military wing seem to be calling the shots regarding a possible Shalit deal. During the Cairo talks, Hamas was represented by three members of the military wing and only one member of the political wing, Mahmud a-Zahar. Even the head of Hamas’ political office in Damascus, Khaled Mashaal, usually considered the organization’s leader, can only advise Al-Jaabri on the subject. While the Hamas government in Gaza has asked Al-Jaabri many times to reach an agreement with the Israelis, he has refused, insisting that Israel should accept all his demands. A year ago, a crisis developed in the Hamas leadership over Shalit, and a-Zahar resigned from the negotiation team. Six months later, he rejoined. It is not known how the prospective Hamas-Fatah pact is likely to affect the splits within the Hamas leadership or the possibilities for a deal.

During the last four years and 11 months, Hamas has been trying to create public pressure on the Israeli government to agree to Hamas’ terms for completing the deal. It started with the publication of one of Gilad Shalit’s letters to his family after less than a year in captivity. But Hamas’ attempts to ratchet up the pressure on Israel have grown more complex with time and have recently been aimed at creating a feeling of urgency or panic in Israeli public opinion. For example, a demonstration organized by Hamas in Gaza included a performance in which a Palestinian actor playing Gilad Shalit appeared in a cage, crying for his release. In April 2010, the armed wing of Hamas released an animated video portraying Shalit’s father, Noam, walking empty streets, carrying a picture of his son. He passes by billboards with Olmert promising in Hebrew to release Gilad. Then Noam passes a picture of Netanyahu, who promises the same. In the background, you can hear the real voice of the abducted soldier. The Noam character continues to walk, growing old with a walking stick until the announcement comes that a deal has been completed. The father is then shown waiting for Gilad at the entrance to the Gaza Strip. A Red Cross bus arrives carrying a coffin covered with the Israeli flag. Noam cries out and wakes up from a nightmare. The subtitle reads: “There is still hope.”

***

What is known is that Hamas is currently demanding that Israel release 1,000 prisoners for Shalit, in two stages. At first, 550 prisoners chosen by Israel would be freed in return for Shalit being delivered to a third party, presumably Egypt. Then, Israel would release 450 more prisoners, from a list of names that Hamas has provided. Israel has also discussed another release of 400 prisoners as a gesture to Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas. Both sides have agreed on the mechanism by which the prisoners would be released. The heart of the problem remains the group of 450 prisoners Israel says has blood on its hands. Many of these prisoners are serving life sentences for their involvement in the murder of hundreds of Israelis during the Oslo peace process and the Second Intifada. Hamas expects the release of some of its senior prisoners and also of Marwan Bargouti, one of Fatah’s leaders in the West Bank, and Ahmad Saadat, the leader of the Palestinian Popular Front. According to reports printed in the Arab press, the debate now concerns a few dozen prisoners. Israel insists that some of these men remain in jail. Others, it suggests, will not be allowed to return to their homes in the West Bank but will be kept further away, in Gaza or in Europe, since they might help Hamas rebuild its terror networks if they were permitted to stay in the West Bank. Netanyahu has said lately that most of the discussion now regards the number of prisoners to be deported.

A senior Egyptian official who participated in the negotiations says that Israel has handled the issue “worse than a used cars salesman.” The Israelis, he insists, “behaved like amateurs. They drew an imaginary red line and then agreed to withdraw, again and again. And all this time Hamas didn’t blink. They never moved an inch.” In the beginning, Olmert agreed to free only a few dozen prisoners from the Hamas list. By the end of his term, it was 325 of the 450—and it is believed that Netanyahu has agreed to go even further.

After Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in early 2009, Germany replaced Egypt as the primary mediator between Israel and Hamas. The chief German representative, Gerhard Conrad, has acquired a great deal of experience in previous prisoner deals with Hezbollah. This time, it seems his mission is even more difficult. In early April, Hamas officials reported that Conrad’s latest visit to the region had failed. A few days later, Netanyahu’s negotiator, Hagai Hadas, announced his resignation, saying he had promised his family that he would retire after two years. Netanyahu quickly replaced him with another Mossad official, David Meidan, the former head of the organization’s international relations branch, which means that the Shalits will now have to deal with its third official representative in less than five years.

***

Meanwhile, Gilad Shalit himself has become a sort of national hero, our collective Israeli child. His is the young face that an entire nation reflects upon in a mixture of guilt, mercy, and sympathy. While the United States generally refuses to negotiate with the kidnappers of American citizens or soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan (Olmert says that President George W. Bush was angry at him for “talking to terrorists” regarding Shalit), here everything is open to bargaining.

The difference between the American and Israeli approaches to hostage situations might have a lot to do with the fact that Israel has a mandatory military service, while in the United States, an American soldier’s kidnapping might almost be considered a freely chosen occupational hazard. In a small society like Israel, where every young man is expected to serve, the general sense of solidarity with Shalit is huge, particularly among the young. Israeli sensitivity toward military casualties has grown rapidly over the last two decades—and is even greater when it comes to live hostages.

The Shalit family’s tragedy has become a national story whose continuing resonance throughout most sectors of Israeli society is hard to overstate. Gilad Shalit’s face can be seen on more Israeli T-shirts than Che Guevara, Jim Morrison, and Bart Simpson put together. Google will turn out 2.2 million results for his name in Hebrew alone, while the names of the officer and soldier killed in his tank are nearly forgotten. Two months ago, Israeli police arrested a con man suspected of stealing hundreds of thousands of shekels from citizens who believed they were contributing money to the Shalit cause.

Gilad’s parents, Noam and Aviva, have stayed for months at a protest tent across the road from Netanyahu’s official residence. On cold Jerusalem nights, one can see them there, two lonely figures, fighting the freezing wind. The Shalits are considered a very polite, patriotic family, though in an interview with us two and a half years ago, Noam Shalit attacked Olmert quite aggressively. Had Olmert and his sons served in combat units themselves, he implied, the prime minister’s attitude might have been different. For Noam Shalit, whose twin brother Yoel died as a tank commander in the Yom Kippur war of 1973, this is a very thorny issue. His relationship with Netanyahu (a former officer of the elite special forces unit Sayeret Matkal) is slightly better.

New initiatives on Shalit’s behalf are born every week. One Tuesday morning this March, a group of citizens called upon all Israelis to stop what they were doing for five minutes and think of Shalit. Hundreds of thousands of people participated, including President Shimon Peres and many government ministers. It was an act of frustration, of impotence, wrote Michal Levertov in Haaretz. Like another new Israeli custom—leaving an empty chair for Gilad during the Seder—the protest moves the problem into the mystical world, exempting the government from responsibility for Shalit’s fate. Levertov called such acts “a memorial for a living soldier.” She is right.

The organization campaigning for Shalit’s release, a movement that depends strictly on volunteers, has debated one question for years: Should the fight become more aggressive? The debate inevitably brings up the Groff affair, during which eight IDF soldiers were kidnapped in 1983 by Palestinians in Lebanon. Miriam Groff, one of the soldiers’ mothers, applied personal pressure on then-Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin and even collapsed in his office. Rabin couldn’t stand it and approved the Jibril prisoners swap, agreeing to release hundreds of terrorists. Two years later, many of those prisoners helped ignite the First Intifada.

***

Growing public support for Shalit’s release “at any cost” drives the old guard in Israel—former generals and the conservative right—crazy. Many see the attitude toward Shalit as sentimental and childish. They are also afraid that his release will bring a huge surge in morale for Hamas, not to mention the danger from hundreds of experienced terrorists coming back to the territories after gaining a lot of knowledge from their colleagues in Israeli jails. “Shabak officials showed me the list of prisoners who are supposed to return to my area,” says one IDF regional commander in the West Bank. “I’m very worried. This would completely change the situation here.”

Retired Maj. Gen. El’azar Stern is one of the proposed deal’s toughest and most vocal opponents. “Shalit should not be released at any cost,” he told us. “Hamas’ demands are irrational and not proportional. We should not think only of the Shalits but also of the parents of children who might be killed if these murderers are released.” Much of the public hysteria is produced by a PR firm working with the Shalit family and movement, Stern said, pointing at the ceiling. The PR firm’s offices are located a few floors above Stern’s office, at the Azriely complex in midtown Tel Aviv. Like others who oppose a swap, Stern reminded us that in 2004 Israel released hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in return for the bodies of three IDF soldiers and one (living) corrupt reserve officer held in Lebanon. The result? According to Shabak, 165 Israelis were killed by some of these former prisoners over the following three years.

Netanyahu is not impervious to such arguments. Recently, while speaking to Knesset members from the right wing of his Likud party, he complained about their attacks against him. “I’m doing everything I can to keep the prisoners in jail,” Netanyahu reprimanded one MK. “They’re all supposed to be released for Shalit. It’s just me, only me, alone, preventing this, under enormous pressure. I agreed to free more prisoners than Olmert did, but I refuse to let them come back to Judaea and Samaria. Let them go to Tunisia.”

On the other hand, here’s what Nahum Barnea, a senior Israeli journalist, wrote in Yedioth Ahronot the day the entire country stopped for five minutes in honor of Shalit. Maybe there’s no other way but paying the full price Hamas demands, he wrote. The government has tried everything and failed. After almost five years it’s time to move on. Barnea’s main argument refers to the damage the Shalit affair has caused to the heart of the state’s commitment to its citizens, and especially its combat soldiers. While service in the IDF is mandatory, combat service is no longer unavoidable, and an 18-year-old Israeli can easily find ways to serve in comfortable places and avoid danger. IDF senior officers have told us, on numerous occasions, that Shalit’s fate is a source of constant frustration among their troops. The fear young soldiers show for their lives gradually erodes the unwritten agreement between them and their government.

Although public opinion polls show a steady majority of support for “great concessions” in return for Shalit’s release, some analysts believe that publishing the names of the senior prisoners to be included in the swap (and their deeds) might change the public’s attitude. Being familiar with the details of the case, and the men who are likely to be released in any prisoner swap, we have differing views on the wisdom of a deal. In fact, having worked and written together for many years, we have yet to encounter a question in which our own personal opinions are so divided. It may be, as the saying has it, that you stand where you sit. One of us (Issacharoff) tends to emphasize the huge advantages Hamas will gain from a deal, the danger to the PA regime in the West Bank, and the possible future terrorist attacks. The other (Harel) concentrates on the ongoing damage to the IDF’s spirit. It is also an emotional issue: When your 7-year-old son’s favorite bedtime imaginary game becomes “saving Gilad Shalit,” it is hard not to want to see Shalit free, whatever the cost.

Amos Harel is the defense analyst for Haaretz. Avi Issacharoff is the newspaper’s Arab affairs correspondent. They blog at MESS Report, on Haaretz.com.

What do you think spurred this deal?
A lot of the things that you’ve read. Three of the main factors are: a. Both sides are trying to appease the new government in Cairo; b. You have fear on both sides of what could happen in Gaza and the West Bank, where there have been several demonstrations calling for unity; c. You hear Hamas was urged to move forward because they see the ground crumbling underneath them in Damascus, where their politburo is based. I don’t want to say whether that last argument is accurate—it’s clearly true that they must feel uneasy, and they are in a particularly awkward position there, because the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood was so oppressed by the regime. But I would caution that, even though uncertainty itself may have made unity more attractive to Hamas, it’s not at all clear that if something were to replace [Syrian President Bashar] Assad, it would be any less friendly to Hamas.

Deals of this ilk have been floated before. Do you think it will truly happen this time?
There have been many false starts before, but there has been no announcement like this in the last four years—since the Hamas takeover of Gaza. It does seem different than other times. On the other hand, all they’ve announced is that they’ve agreed to agree. The devil is in the details. Past negotiations have been held up over seemingly arcane points—like whether or not a temporary leadership committee overseeing Palestine Liberation Organization reform could be overruled by the PLO’s executive committee, and what percentage of legislative seats in the next election would be determined by party-list voting and what percentage by voting for individual candidates. And that’s not even getting into the morass of security—what the Fatah presence will be in the security forces in Gaza.

Can the Palestine Liberation Organization continue to negotiate with Israel even as Hamas pledges it will continue not to?
Maybe. On one hand, this deal says Hamas is going to be a part of the PLO. On the other, until that happens, they’re not a part of the PLO, and it is the PLO that is the official designate for negotiating with Israel. This is how you can have [Palestinian Authority President] Abbas and Hamas officials both saying—accurately—that the new unity government will not negotiate with Israel. The question is what the PLO will be permitted to do before the integration of Hamas has taken place.

What does this deal mean for Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and his West Bank state-building, which was the beacon of hope for many Western observers?
Fayyad is not going to be part of the unity government. The Times mentions that he’s loathed by Hamas; he’s not loved by Fatah either! He was a very easy sacrifice to make. What is true is that the Americans love Fayyad and will be worried about where their money is going when he’s gone.

What does this mean for the bid for U.N. statehood recognition in September?
You have people like Haaretz‘s Carlos Strenger writing that this greatly weakens Abbas’s chances of obtaining U.N. recognition, and I don’t understand that reasoning at all. It was always highly likely that you were going to have a U.S. veto in the Security Council. So what we’ve been talking about all along is non-binding endorsement of Palestinian statehood by the General Assembly, which seems unlikely to be thwarted whether you have Palestinian unity or not. Some would argue that the case for recognition becomes only stronger if Abbas comes to the U.N. as the representative of the Palestinian people in both the West Bank and Gaza. Others say not only that Abbas had little to lose, because the U.S. would oppose the U.N. option with or without unity, but also that the effects of U.N. recognition have been greatly exaggerated, so even if a unity government were to have some negative impact at the U.N., the stakes are considerably lower than much of the commentariat imagines.

Prime Minister Netanyahu is set to give a speech in Washington, D.C., next month. What is he going to say now?
A week ago, he was said to be planning a ‘Bar Ilan 2,’ laying out a proposal for new talks, and he’s reportedly been negotiating the contents of that speech with American and European officials. Wednesday, he said the P.A. has to choose between peace with Israel and peace with Hamas. Clearly his speech is going to have to be rewritten.

Could the deal make the freedom of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier captured and held by Hamas, more likely?
A Hamas official said yesterday that the reconciliation deal and Shalit have no connection to one another, but you have a lot of commentary in the Israeli press making the conjecture that this isn’t so. It does seem at least possible that you could see movement. Abbas had been opposed to a Shalit deal because it would greatly strengthen Hamas to have secured the release of 1400 Palestinian prisoners. But if that prisoner release could be conceived as a joint victory, or at least not entirely Hamas’s, then maybe.

Related: Our Man in Palestine [NYRB]
Palestinian Recognition Is a Cause for Cautious Optimism [Haaretz]
Earlier: Fatah Chooses Hamas

• President Shimon Peres met with President Obama at the White House. In addition to discussing Iran, the peace process, and Gilad Schalit, Peres asked Obama to free convicted spy Jonathan Pollard. [JPost]

• How Kabbalah—or, to be more precise, the sketchy Kabbalah Centre—helped ruin Madonna’s plans for a multimillion-dollar girls’ school in Malawi. [Newsweek]

• A dispatch from the Egypt-Gaza smuggling tunnels. [The Daily]

• The world has one deaf-blind acting troupe, and it’s Israeli. [JPost]

• Somebody sent a pig’s foot and an anti-Semitic note to Rep. Peter King, who recently chaired controversial hearings into homegrown Muslim radicalism and who, despite the surname and Long Island district, isn’t Jewish. [JTA]

Jake Gyllenhaal talking about the afikomen on Shalom Sesame? Jake Gyllenhaal talking about the afikomen on Shalom Sesame.

“Simple Twist of Fate”: For every Israeli sports team that has tried, and almost succeeded, and eventually failed to advance in any important international tournament.

“Maggie’s Farm”: For former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who is always on the lookout for a good real estate deal.

“Somebody Touched Me”: For former President Moshe Katsav.

“I Shall Be Released”: For Marwan Barghouti, the popular Palestinian leader, currently languishing in an Israeli prison.

“You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”: For Defense Minister Ehud Barak, quitter extraordinaire.

”You Gotta Serve Somebody”: For the evangelical Christian tour groups.

“It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding”: For every child, Israeli and Palestinian, needlessly dying while leaders keep on missing opportunities and breaking promises.

“Subterranean Homesick Blues”: For Gilad Schalit, the Israeli soldier held in some subterranean basement in Gaza, homesick and, more importantly, probably actually sick.

ENCORE:

“Gates of Eden”: For the Messiah, who has not come yet.

“The Mighty Quinn”: Because when He does come, everybody’s gonna jump for joy (and maybe he’ll even be an Eskimo).

“Girl From the North Country”: For Golda Meir, Wisconsin’s own and still a rock star.

Dylan Show Confirmed for June in Ramat Gan [JPost]

• Hillary Clinton announced today that the State Department has evidence that Robert Levinson, who disappeared in Iran in 2007, is alive somewhere Southwest Asia. She asked the Iranian government for help finding him. [AP]

• Gadaffi tried to set up a “Libyan political party”… in the Knesset. [JPost]

• Jews are increasingly joining the protests in Madison. [JTA]

• Union demonstrations continued in Israel today, as negotiations are held to avoid a 10,000 worker strike. [Haaretz]

• A delegation from Hamas is meeting in Damascus to discuss a new proposal by international mediators to release Gilad Shalit. [JPost]

• Obituaries of the 37 Jewish men and women of the U.S. armed forces who died in Iraq and Afghanistan. [Forward]

• Syria and Qatar offered Hamas $50 million to keep kidnapped soldier Gilad Schalit and not do an exchange deal with Israel: This according to none other than Mubarak, who informed a U.S. diplomat, who then reported it in a cable since released by WikiLeaks. [JPost]

• Jewish settlers’ third annual Hebron 10K road race will, for the first time, pass through the Palestinian areas of Hebron itself. Stay classy, guys. [972]

• “The Dead Rabbis Society of Brooklyn” may not be great search-engine optimization bait, but it’s a damn fine headline. [The Brooklyn Ink]

• Alan Slifka, founder of the Big Apple Circus as well as of the Abraham Fund Initiatives—which aimed to bring about increased Jewish-Arab cooperation in Israel—died at 81. [NYT]

The Sway Machinery, the cantorial funk outfit (not a typo), has a new album coming out. And a new video:

Comparing himself to David Ben Gurion and Ariel Sharon, Barak announced that he would be leaving the Labor party along with another minister and three other Knesset members to establish a new center-Zionist “Independence Party,” which would remain part of Netanyahu’s government. The move was planned in secret by Barak and Netanyahu, and it immediately shored up the governing Likud coalition by depriving the left-wing members of the Labor Party, which Barak left behind, of any leverage against the prime minister. The three remaining Labor ministers in the Netanyahu government reacted by immediately quitting it.

While Sharon’s split from the Likud to form Kadima in 2005 was a move made to advance a particular political agenda, many observers saw Barak’s maneuver as a characteristic piece of selfishness whose intended beneficiary was Barak himself. And it will likely further lower the reputation of Israel’s most widely loathed public figure. A few months ago, a panel of journalists and experts was convened by the Tel Aviv newspaper Ha’ir to select the most hated Israeli. Out of 50 contestants—including Netanyahu and other politicians and media personalities—the hands-down winner was Barak.

Such mocking disregard might surprise non-Israelis. Barak enjoys enormous respect in the international community, where he is almost universally considered to be the most responsible and serious member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. And because the widely disliked Avigdor Lieberman is Israel’s foreign minister, Barak also serves as Israel’s de facto diplomat-in-chief; last month, he made his ninth visit to the United States in three years. Barak remains the Obama Administration’s main point of contact in Israel’s government, and, although his relationship with President Bill Clinton has been thorny at times, these days both Clintons (including the now-more important one, Hillary) seem to think highly of him. Nearly all of the relevant administration officials—including Dennis Ross, now Clinton’s special envoy for the region, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates—have known and respected Barak for two decades and clear time on their schedules for him whenever he passes through Washington.

And yet within Israel, the verdict of Ha’ir’s unpopularity contest surprised no one. Barak is now enjoying unparalleled status as a public punching bag; indeed, it is doubtful that any other Israeli politician has achieved lower popularity in recent years—quite a feat, given the competition from figures like the brutish Lieberman, the corrupt and incompetent Ehud Olmert, and the blinkered leadership of Shas. The contempt in which Barak is held is even more astonishing when one considers his pedigree: He is one of the three most decorated officers in the history of the IDF and holds a bachelor’s degree in physics and math and a master’s degree in engineering-economic systems from Stanford University. He is even, some claim, a very capable amateur pianist. But all of his credentials and talents have never translated to more than a rudimentary ability to connect with people. Barak, an oft-told joke goes, will one day commit suicide by leaping from his IQ to his EQ.

Indeed, dislike for the current defense minister has become so ingrained in the Israeli psyche that his own political handlers have tried to ride the wave rather than fight it: Two years ago, when Barak’s campaign for prime minister ran into a ditch during Knesset elections, his aides fought back with a series of advertisements portraying Barak as “not a sahbak”—the Arabic word meaning friend or “man of the people”—but as “a leader.” The meaning was clear: You might not want to make small talk with Barak at a party, or invite him over to watch soccer on TV, but you might at least trust him to be a responsible grown-up.

The ads did little good. Labor won only 13 Knesset seats (out of 120)—an all-time low for the party. And these days, the most common expression describing Barak is another Arabic term: ahabal, an idiot or fool. In November, Ofer Eini—a member of Histadrut, Barak’s own party—lobbed the now-infamous insult at Barak during a television interview. Eini was responding to a question about the scandal du jour, that Barak’s wife, Nili Barak-Priel, had been caught employing an illegal maid from the Philippines. “Barak has this quality: He never misses a mistake,” claimed Eini. “You’re a member of the government. What the hell do you bring a Philippine worker for? Employ an Israeli one. You should set an example. You need to be an ahabal to do such a thing, really! You know it’s against the law. Did you think that they wouldn’t catch you? Well, they did.” Eini’s language was harsh, but the expression stuck, summing up what large swaths of the Israeli public believe to be an inglorious and costly string of mistakes, both personal and public.

“There’s something slightly autistic about him,” admits a senior official in Israel’s defense administration, who has known Barak for decades. “He hardly listens to criticism, least of all when he’s convinced that he’s right and everybody else is wrong.” Still, one-on-one, Barak is very convincing and, until very recently, public opinion polls showed an interesting pattern: Most Israelis trusted him as a defense minister, though not as a possible prime minister.

Now almost no one trusts him, in either role.

***

By all accounts, Barak’s problems began a decade ago, during his term as prime minister, which is widely seen by Israelis as an unqualified disaster. After an unprecedented 12-point victory over Benjamin Netanyahu in May 1999, Barak managed to squander nearly all of his public support outside the Labor Party within 20 months as prime minister during which he delivered only one crucial, strategic decision: the unilateral withdrawal from Southern Lebanon, which ended 18 years of Israeli occupation. But he then promised to try and achieve regional peace “in 15 months”—and failed miserably. Negotiations with Syria reached a dead end, and the July 2000 Camp David peace summit with the Palestinians famously achieved nothing. Barak went to Camp David supported by only a quarter of Knesset members, and he avoided an immediate ouster only because the summit was held during the Knesset’s summer recess. The peace talks failed not because of Barak, but because Yasser Arafat refused to compromise—a conclusion supported by Bill Clinton, who gave full backing to Barak’s accusations against the PLO chairman. But Arafat can’t have been encouraged by the prospect of compromise with a leader who was clearly a political lame duck. Barak’s string of political failures got even longer two months later, when the second Intifada broke out, plunging the country into nightmarish violence and leading most Israelis to blame the prime minister for being both naïve and unprepared.

Barak was able to make a political comeback—of sorts. After the IDF’s fiasco during the war in Lebanon in the summer of 2006, Amir Peretz, then head of the Labor Party and minister of defense, was widely criticized as unfit for his job. In May 2007, Barak quickly maneuvered him out of both the Labor leadership and the defense ministry, taking his place in Ehud Olmert’s government. Now Barak had a new problem: During his six years out of government, he had been mainly occupied with his flourishing business career. His affluence wasn’t easily accepted by Israeli voters, who generally believe that the leader of what is still supposed to be a workers’ party should not be worth millions of dollars (and be seen flaunting his wealth). To be fair, Barak’s focus on his business career while out of office was no different from Netanyahu’s (and was certainly less outrageous than Olmert’s). But for Barak, an image of ostentatious luxury was quite damaging—and was not helped by his purchase of a $10 million apartment at Tel Aviv’s most luxurious high-rise. Whatever sympathy and forgiveness he received from the Israeli electorate upon his return was soon replaced by contempt.

It didn’t take long for Barak and Olmert to grab for each other’s throats. Serving in the same government, the former friends quickly found each other intolerable. Olmert became embroiled in a series of corruption scandals (he is now standing trial for some of these), and Barak eventually demanded his resignation, forcing the prime minister to retire. But even before this final break, it seemed impossible for Olmert and Barak to agree on anything. In February 2009, Olmert refused to surrender to Barak’s pressure and approve a deal with Hamas in which Israel would release a thousand Palestinian prisoners in return for Gilad Shalit. When Israel invaded parts of the Gaza Strip during Operation Cast Lead in December 2008, Barak’s resistance prevented Olmert from gambling on a full-scale reoccupation of the Strip, which Olmert had hoped would lead to the final defeat of Hamas in Gaza. At this point, there emerged a fierce—and still ongoing—argument between Barak and Olmert, hard to decipher because of restrictions by Israeli military censorship, about the decision-making process before certain Israeli actions abroad, which international media organizations have assumed refers to the successful bombing of a Syrian nuclear plant in September 2007, which Olmert is said to have championed, and Barak, it is implied, opposed.

Yet after Olmert stepped down as prime minister, it began to appear that the only Israeli politician that Barak could get along with was himself. When Tzipi Livni, Olmert’s successor as head of the Kadima party, tried to form a new coalition, Barak did not go out of his way to help her. During the election campaign, he publicly insulted Livni by calling her by “Tzipora”—her full name, but also widely seen as an anachronistic grandmotherly moniker—in a radio interview. He notably withheld even cursory approval for Livni’s performance while trying to raise the same argument Hillary Clinton first used against Barack Obama, asking, in political advertisements, “It’s 3 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep. Who do you want answering the phone?” The answer of the Israeli electorate seemed clear: anybody but you.

***

And so, the defense minister’s new image has gradually consolidated: arrogant, aloof, condescending, a habitual intriguer against his fellow ministers and political partners who is constantly accused of corruption, although, unlike many of his colleagues, he has never been indicted for any crime. Even his experience in defense matters—his greatest public asset—has evaporated in the eyes of most voters. His personal friction with Olmert prevented him from playing a bigger role in that government, and his public support has collapsed during Netanyahu’s term.

Yet in spite of his obvious political weakness—or because of it—his personal relationship with Netanyahu is surprisingly good. Both men, each of whom had an unpleasant term as prime minister during the 1990s, seem to have gotten beyond their past confrontations, perhaps brought together by shared antipathy for their fellow politicians and for the press. As Netanyahu’s point man in the United States diplomatic and defense establishments, Barak’s importance is much greater than his party’s role in the coalition might suggest. As a result, Netanyahu has given Barak almost unlimited freedom to deal with military issues and has listened to most of the defense minister’s advice regarding the peace process.

Continue reading: “Mr. Defense,” the quarrel with Gabi Ashkenazi, and Israel’s Mr. Unpopularity. Or view as a single page.

• The administration’s on-and-off engagement with Lebanon left it with few options when the Hezbollah ministers walked out of the government yesterday. [NYT]

• New Israeli intelligence showing Iran’s halting nuclear development—it may not even try to build a bomb in the near future—has eased Israeli and American political pressure for military options. There are talks the week after next. [Reuters]

• Speaking in Qatar, Secretary of State Clinton called on Arab states to fight their own corruption and lack of democratic practices, blaming these for helping feed extremists. [WSJ]

• The German mediator quietly completed two days in Gaza trying to negotiate the freedom of captured Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit. [Haaretz]

• A nine-year-old Gaza girl paralyzed in a 2006 Israeli airstrike as well as her father and brother were granted temporary-resident status so that she can continue to receive medical care. [AP/NYT]

• Jewish Democratic Sens. Chuck Schumer and Carl Levin petitioned AIPAC to support the Obama administration’s START missile defense treaty, on the grounds that it would strengthen ties with Russia and thereby help deal with Iran. [Ben Smith]

• Palestinian Authority President Abbas called for the release of Gilad Schalit. It is part of the rising tensions between him and Hamas due to the WikiLeaks revelation that the P.A. was consulted before Operation Cast Lead. [JPost]

• So the Tehran airport has a gigantic Star of David carved into the outside of its roof. Seriously. [Atlantic Wire]

• Natalie Portman compares learning to dance ballet (for Darren Aronofsky’s new film) to putting on tefillin. [NYT]

• Prominent Bay Area Jewish philanthropist Richard Goldman died at 90. [JTA]

Because you asked for it (or even if you didn’t): Matisyahu does Hanukkah.

I was at the playground with my two daughters this week, near our home outside Tel Aviv, when I heard another mother make a comment that would not have been out of place in a war zone.

“I think we left behind some captives in the field!” she said casually in Hebrew. A moment later she held up the “captive”: A doll with yellow pigtails that had been briefly forgotten in the plastic tunnel that leads to the slide.

But while captives, or shvuyim, are an everyday point of reference for Israelis, that’s not the word they typically use to describe Gilad Shalit, probably Israel’s best-known soldier in captivity. Shalit, who was seized on June 25, 2006, by Hamas-allied militants who infiltrated southern Israel by crawling under a tunnel from the Gaza Strip, has been making headlines in Israel again recently, because Hamas and Israel have announced the resumption of negotiations for his release.

The international media often refer to Shalit as having been taken captive. But the Israeli media, along with the many Israelis campaigning for his release, tend to describe him as hahayal hehatuf, the kidnapped or abducted soldier. The word for abductee was further cemented into the cultural consciousness by a TV show called Hatufim, about two reservists’ reintegration into Israeli society after spending 17 years in captivity, which won best drama in Israel’s equivalent of the 2010 Golden Globes.

The term hahayal hehatuf is nearly inescapable in Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refers to the “hatifa” of Shalit, and the Shalit family objects to the use of any other word to describe him. Gilad Shalit’s father has spoken out against the Goldstone Report’s finding that he meets the requirements for prisoner-of-war status, insisting, “Gilad is not a prisoner of war. Gilad is an abducted person and a hostage.” A ben aruba.

Shaul Shay, author of the 2007 article Islamic Terror Abductions in the Middle East, notes that Israeli soldiers taken captive by the army of a sovereign state—like the hundreds of POWs held, and then released, by Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon in Israel’s first three decades—were referred to as shvuyim; the confusion began during the first Lebanon war, between 1982 and 1985, when non-state terror groups like Hezbollah started entering the picture.

Some see the widespread use of the word for abductee, as opposed to captive, as a subtle way of framing Israel as the good guy, or of generating more sympathy for soldiers like Shalit. “Someone who’s abducted is viewed as passive,” writes Eyal Zandberg, a lecturer in the School of Communication at the Netanya Academic College. The terminology, he adds, reflects the view that “the opposing side is the initiator, the one that causes harm, the abductor, while ‘we’ are always defending ourselves.” This view is perhaps bolstered substantively by the fact that, unlike capturing prisoners of war, taking hostages is a violation of international law.

The extensive public support for Shalit’s release, possibly reinforced by the sympathetic connotations implicit in the term hahayal hehatuf, might have been expected to pressure the Israeli government to reach a deal. But prominent peace activist Uri Avnery argues that the government’s own use of the word hatuf has helped create an excuse for its failure to secure Shalit’s release. “Prisoners of war are not left in captivity,” he writes. But abduction, he argues, is “altogether different,” because people are expected to ask whether it’s worth paying the ransom—thus setting the stage for lengthy, and possibly futile, negotiations.

Shoshana Kordova is an editor and translator at the English edition of Haaretz. She grew up in New Jersey and has lived in Israel since 2001.

Earlier: ‘The Peace Process’
No Confidence
‘After the Holidays’

• A “humanitarian” ship organized by Muammar Qaddafi’s son will depart Greece for Gaza tomorrow. [JTA]

• Yehuda Amital, a formidable leader in the religious Zionist movement, died at 85. [JPost]

• The University of California is taking criticism for too weakly responding to and condemning anti-Semitism on its campuses. [LAT]

• Ernest Nussbaum, an 82-year-old resident of Bethesda, Maryland, has invented a new instrument: The Prakticello (it’s a lot like a cello). [All Things Considered]

• Peaceniks for Gilad. [Dissent]

Today is the 15th anniversary of the Grateful Dead’s final show, at Chicago’s Soldier Field, before lead guitarist Jerry Garcia died. Below: “Sugar Magnolia,” the favorite song of the group’s longtime promoter, Bill Graham (born Wolodia Grajonca to a Russian-Jewish family that narrowly escaped Berlin).

• In East Jerusalem, protesters and police skirmished at the site of 22 Palestinian homes whose destruction municipal authorities just approved. [NYT]

• Gilad Shalit’s family is leading a march to Jerusalem demanding the Israeli government retrieve Shalit, whom Hamas kidnapped over four years ago. There is particular resentment that the Gaza blockade was eased without securing anything—like Shalit’s release—in return. [NYT]

• Thomas Friedman warns that the expiration of the settlement freeze, in September, could prompt major West Bank violence. [NYT]

• U.S. and E.U. officials worry that China will step into the energy-trading vacuum that new sanctions against Iran will create, rendering them fairly meaningless. [LAT]

• M.D. Ginsburg, the husband of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, died at 78. [NYT]

Today is the fourth anniversary of Shalit’s capture, and yesterday the New York-based Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations commemorated it by staging its own Freedom Flotilla. This one featured a pleasure boat called the Queen of Hearts, and it left from Pier 40 in lower Manhattan, sailed around the island, and traveled up the East River to the United Nations. It bore a humanitarian aid package, addressed to Shalit.

As the ship prepared for voyage, I stood aboard, sweating with everyone else, some of whom waved posters at the trickle of midday passersby along the Hudson waterfront. “If we can talk to one, two, three people, that’s the least we can do,” explained Rabbi Janise Poticha, who was there representing a small Reform synagogue in the Long Island hamlet of Massapequa.

On deck, Asaf Shariv, Israel’s consul-general in New York, moved through the crowd. “I can assure you that no one on this ship will be attacked by knives or guns,” he told me, referring to video that showed the original flotilla activists brandishing weapons as Israeli commandos rappelled onto the ships.

The heat was ferocious. About 60 people packed into the top tier of the boat, swaying with the tide. Many carried tiny American and Israeli flags; they were equipped with “Free Shalit” signs, stickers, and shirts. But everything doubled as a fan. Eventually, Malcolm Hoenlein, the head of the Conference, stepped up to a microphone. He read a statement in absentia from Elie Weisel, and he quoted Martin Luther King, Jr. “This is the true freedom flotilla!” he proclaimed. He presented a Red Cross representative with the goods for Shalit: Food, underwear, glasses.

Then Hoenlein introduced some singers, who joined a guitarist on stage at the boat’s rear and led a chorus of Od Gilad Chai—“Gilad is still alive”—more joyous than somber. The organizers encouraged travelers to grab some signs and move toward the deck to pose for the press, most of which was still on the boat. The Queen of Hearts finally pushed off at around 1 PM, followed by another rented boat and eight smaller vessels full of supporters.

The sudden breeze revived the wilting passengers, a group that included young mothers who kept their children below deck, twirling flags. On deck, there was more flag waving and singing. A line of men, arms wrapped around shoulders, led the chorus. Hoenlein jumped in for a few bars. After the final note, the song-leader stopped and suggested, “Let’s save something for the front of the U.N.” He gestured assertively and repeated: “The front of the U.N.”

As we approached Turtle Bay, three U.S. Coast Guard boats circled between the ship and the dock. The men in front held large guns. People aboard clattered around with cell phone cameras, competing with the press photographers for the best shot. The passengers began chants of “Free Gilad Now!” Rabbi Basil Herring, of the Orthodox Rabbinical Council of America, read a prayer for Shalit. Across the water, about nine people watched.

Then the prayer ended, the ship slowly turned, and the Coast Guard sped off without incident. More singing resumed. Ani, a small woman from the Upper West Side with a thick Hungarian accent, was all smiles as she disembarked. “I don’t think the U.N. is sensitive to our needs,” she said. “I don’t know if it made a dent or anything, honestly.”

Jewish Activists Sail Flotilla for Shalit to UN’s Backyard [Jewish Week]
Related: King Without a Crown

“Yesterday, in a confident voice and without compromise Netanyahu announced the change in policy on the Gaza siege,” Shalit said. “In other words, he announced, ‘I surrendered to international pressure that was applied to us’ and we are asking where Gilad stands in this equation. We are asking where is Gilad, our son?”

The “pro-Israel, pro-peace” group J Street—last seen calling on legislators not to sign AIPAC-endorsed letters unequivocally backing the blockade—has released a memo arguing much the same thing. “J Street reiterates its call for Shalit’s immediate and unconditional release,” it reads, “and urges Members of Congress to highlight the opportunity—and moral imperative—that the Israeli Government’s wise policy shift in Gaza creates for Shalit’s captors to reciprocate.”

Noam Shalit Slams Netanyahu Over Ease of Gaza Blockade [Haaretz]
Earlier: J Street Challenges AIPAC Over Flotilla Letter

• Elvis Costello canceled two planned concerts in Caesarea, Israel, out of “instinct and conscience” regarding the Palestinian issue. [Arts Beat]

• Tablet Magazine contributor David P. Goldman takes issue with Peter Beinart’s essay: “Zionism is in no danger. The entity that is in trouble is Jewish liberalism.” [First Things]

• Meanwhile, Beinart happily reports that no one has accused him of Israel- or self-hatred. [Jeffrey Goldberg]

• Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-New York) has introduced a House resolution demanding that Hamas release Gilad Shalit. [JTA]

• Jean-Luc Godard’s new film, which debuted yesterday at Cannes, has references to “Jews, Hollywood and the Holocaust.” Not clear if they are meant to be related to each other, or if they just seem that way because of the jump-cuts! [Arts Beat]

• Tonight, at The Strand in Manhattan, Jewcy hosts the first Yiderati reading series. It features, among others, Tablet contributing editor Rachel Shukert. Come one, come all! [Jewcy]

• Several American Jewish religious leaders called on Prime Minister Netanyahu to withdraw the Yisrael Beiteinu-sponsored conversion bill. They warn that it would concentrate power over who qualifies for the Law of Return with the Chief Rabbinate. [JTA]

• Apparently, someone wants to do for Jews on Long Island what Jersey Shore has done for Italian-Americans in New Jersey. [Crushable]

• Russian President Dmitry Medvedev urged Hamas leader Khaled Meshal to release kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. [Ynet]

• The late DJ AM, born Adam Goldstein, has a crucial cameo in the box office-smashing Iron Man 2. [LAT]

• An extensive interview with novelist Nathan Englander, in part touching on his story in this week’s New Yorker. [Book Bench]

Netanyahu accused Iran of trying to get Israel and Syria to start firing things at each other. President Ahmadinejad?