Israel Matzav

If only....UPDATED

Moonbat website Antiwar.com reports that Israel is going to renege on its agreement [PLEASE SEE IMPORTANT UPDATE BELOW] to release another 550 'Palestinian' terrorists as the second part of the terrorists for Gilad trade.

But now a government-appointed panel in Israel recommended in a secret report Thursday to back out of the deal. Defense Minister Ehud Barak would not divulge details of the report but said Israel has “no choice but to overhaul the rules” now that Sgt. Gilad Schalit has been freed.

The second half of Palestinian prisoners, some of whom are children and minors, are reportedly serving sentences for “security offenses,” not for violent attacks or for being part of either Hamas or Islamic Jihad.

Many are political prisoners. The Israel Defense Forces apply what is called the administrative detention policy, which allows Palestinian political prisoners to be held for six months without charge or trial. Detention orders can be renewed every six months.

“It’s a primitive and racist way to hold a trial,” Qadura Fares, the president of the Palestinian Society Prisoners’ Club in Ramallah, told InterPress Services in August, “and no civilized country in the world uses such methods. Needless to say, Israel’s legal system could never do this to an Israeli Jew. Even the Israeli settlers who carry out acts of terror against Palestinians in the West Bank are not treated in this manner.”

Let me tell you some of the ways in which this post is a lie.

First, the IDF released another 550 terrorists in December. So Israel has not reneged on the terrorists for Gilad deal.

Second, the claim that the terrorists were not violent is also false. According to one of my friends who did the analysis,

Were they children and jay-walkers? No. Based on my detailed analysis of the prison list, prisoners belonging to the set of [attempted murder] or [engaged in shootings] or [planted/hurled bombs] were 358 of the 550. In plain English: terrorists.

Third, there was in fact a report released on Thursday that said that Israel should not trade terrorists for kidnapped soldiers and civilians. It was talking about the future.

Interviewed on Israel Radio, Mr. Barak was asked about a classified report submitted to him on guidelines for handling negotiations regarding abducted soldiers. The interviewer asked whether the rules were expected to be made stricter so it would “no longer be 1,000 terrorists for one soldier.”

“I believe that will be the conclusion,” Mr. Barak said. “There is no choice. We have to change the rules fundamentally to protect the state’s overall interests.” He said an important part of the report’s conclusions were on “how to approach the negotiations, in what framework, with what rules, and I think it’s clear that the rules will be a lot stricter.”

...

In a separate statement issued by his office, Mr. Barak said he had appointed the committee to examine the issue in 2008 and asked a former Supreme Court justice, Meir Shamgar, to be its leader. It was agreed, he said, that the conclusions would not be presented before the return of Sergeant Shalit.

The statement added that given the region in which Israel lived, it would find it difficult to secure its vital interests “unless we change the rules, the reality and the results of deals like those we have witnessed in the last 25 years.”

Both in the statement and in the radio interview, Mr. Barak declined to be more specific, saying that the report, which he said was nearly 100 pages long, was classified and that ultimately the new rules would have to be established by the prime minister and the government.

The bottom line is that Antiwar.com lied. But while we're on the topic, I have to make two further comments. First, the Shamgar report should have come out immediately, and the government should have acted in accordance with it in negotiating the terrorists for Gilad trade. It's not like the family changed its behavior based upon the expectation there would be no Shamgar report.

And second, if anyone really believes that the government won't violate its guidelines because some poor kid's family insists on it, you don't know this country well enough.

UPDATE SUNDAY 2:35 AM

The first link in this post is to a cached page. Antiwar.com took down the original article.

Labels: Ehud Barak, lies, terrorists for Gilad trade

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:42 PM