The Coming Shalit Deal

A deal to free Gilad Shalit is imminent. Or it isn’t. It’s impossible to tell from any article like this one. In general, reports that a deal is imminent are usually manufactured by one side, namely by one side’s negotiating team, to pressure the other side into restarting negotiations. They may also be planted in the media by “neutral” third parties like German diplomats, or with their assistance. They almost never mean that a deal is actually imminent. Except when one is.

So maybe there will be a deal this week, maybe next month or next year, but eventually there will be one between Israel and Hamas to free Shalit, or to return his bones, or (worst case scenario) with information about what happened to him. With that in mind, who stands to benefit from a deal between Israel and Hamas for Gilad Shalit?

• the prime minister and defense minister – Each reaps huge rewards. After about a week, they will get their lackeys to start slinging mud about each other, at which point one will continue to be a winner and the other will turn retroactively into a loser.
• the other ministers – The closer they can position themselves to the action (negotiations, exchange of prisoners, cameras and microphones, grieving/celebrating families), the more likely they are to win.
• the opposition – Kadima suffers from not having freed Shalit when they were in power. They look bad if they point out the extremely negative consequences of dealing with Hamas. The only thing they can do is rally behind Netanyahu. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. They lose.
• Hamas – They said they would kidnap Israeli soldiers to use as bargaining chips. They did kidnap an Israeli soldier. If they use him as a bargaining chip, they win. If they fail to make a deal with Israel and Shalit dies in captivity, but they still negotiate within five or six years, they still win. If they let it go for over 20 years like Iran has done with Ron Arad, and they can’t make any deal, they lose big time.
• PLO – The more Hamas wins, the more the PLO loses.
• Shalit – If media reports are true that he was led away from his base by his captors walking on his own two feet, he should have been shot in the back by his own comrades and honored for his sacrifice. My heart goes out to him and his family, but this whole fiasco is at least partially his fault. He loses overall, but wins from not having been a) killed in the kidnapping attempt or b) court martialed for bringing this nightmare on all of us.
• IDF – Pyrrhic victory. On the one hand, they’ll do anything to return a captured soldier. On the other hand, it looks like they’ll let him sit in captivity for many years first.
• enemy prisoners – I guess they win too. It’s crazy to treat terrorism as a judicial problem and to put the enemy’s fighters in prison as if they are criminals, rather than killing them on the battlefield; trading their freedom for Shalit’s is a direct result of this insanity.
• Israelis – Absolute losers. We get nothing from this except an energized enemy and more warfare.