New Barak leak: Netanyahu opposed 'terrorists for Gilad' deal
Speaking of the Shalit prisoner exchange, Barak tells his interviewers — who are working on his biography — that Netanyahu was opposed to the exchange of the captive IDF soldier for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners, but gave in after Barak pressured him.
“Bibi [Netanyahu] is forced into action, and shows a side [to his personality] that is less elegant, less about self-control, less pretty, when he’s in a personal crisis over something,” Barak says in recordings he did not know would become public.
“As much as he was opposed to [the] Gilad Shalit [exchange], and I pressured him for months to do two things, to do Gilad Shalit and immediately afterward to pass in the government [and in] the Knesset [the recommendations of] the Shamgar Committee” that recommended changing Israel’s prisoner exchange policy.
What he refers to as 'Shamgar' was a law that would prohibit Israel from trading terrorists for Israelis being held hostage. As if that would stop any Israeli government from doing exactly that....“In the end he was convinced he had to free Shalit but wasn’t convinced to do the obvious next step [of passing Shamgar], and that’s how he found himself in the [June 2014] kidnapping of the three kids,” teenagers whose kidnapping by a Hamas-affiliated cell in the West Bank triggered that summer’s Gaza war.
As some of you might recall, I opposed the 'terrorists for Gilad' trade. And I still think it was the wrong thing to do.
Labels: Binyamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, Gilad Shalit, terrorists for Gilad trade
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:32 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home