Jewish Herald-Voice (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 100, No. 53, Ed. 1 Thursday, March 19, 2009 Page: 5 of 40
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Page 5
Jewish Herald-Voice
March 19, 2009
Deal’s collapse extends Shalit saga
By DINA KRAFT
JERUSALEM (JTA) - They have
come by the thousands - first-grade
classes, families from the North,
government ministers, rabbis, even
tourists. The black tarp tent where
Gilad Shalit’s family has taken up
temporary residence, outside the
prime minister’s Jerusalem home, has
become Israel’s newest pilgrimage
site.
The Shalits hoped their presence
would put pressure on the government
to cinch a deal with Hamas for a
prisoner swap that finally would bring
home their son nearly 1,000 days since
he was captured in a cross-border
raid and spirited into Gaza.
“It’s pretty surprising because we
did not expect so many people to come,”
Noam Shalit, the captive soldier’s father,
told JTA. “They have come to give
their support and show their solidarity
with us, and we were taken aback. We
undertook this as a test of the public but
never imagined this kind of turnout.”
He commented, “It helps us cope, but it
also, I assume, is getting attention for
us in higher places.”
In what has felt like a national
emotional roller-coaster ride, antici-
pation in Israel for a deal to release
Shalit had grown in the waning days of
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s
administration. But by Tuesday,
March 17, an llth-hour agreement
with Hamas appeared to have fallen
through. Olmert in a television
address to the nation delivered the
disappointing news at a special news
conference.
“The government’s ministers heard
an expanded and detailed report from
Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin and Ofer
Dekel, my personal envoy on the matter
of prisoner exchanges,” Olmert said.
“All government ministers accepted
the position of the envoys, namely
that Israeli officials said Hamas was
emboldened by the recent groundswell
of public support for a Shalit deal and
had hardened its demands. Hamas
demanded the release of some 450
Palestinian prisoners, among them
masterminds of suicide bombings that
killed dozens of Israelis. “We will not
agree to release prisoners other than
the hundreds we already agreed to,”
Olmert said. “Disappointment,” the
tabloid headline read on Israel’s daily
Yediot Achronot.
While the Cabinet voted against
the deal, a poll by the Dahaf Polling
Institute found that 69 percent of
Israelis surveyed favored a deal to get
back Shalit, even if it would include
the release “of hundreds of terrorist-
murderers and the deportation of
some of them to outside Palestinian
Authority territory.”
Twenty-two percent said they were
against such an agreement. Voices
against a swap have come mainly
from relatives of terror victims. Some
bereaved families even staged a
counter-protest across from the Shalit
tent in Jerusalem.
Last summer, when Israel released
Arab prisoners, including terrorists,
for the bodies of two soldiers killed in
the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, many
Israelis criticized Olmert for cutting a
deal that only would encourage Israel’s
enemies to kidnap more soldiers and
raise their ransom demands. At the
time, many commentators said Shalit
would suffer, as Hamas ratcheted up
the price of his release.
Noam Shalit, a quiet, thoughtful
engineer who reluctantly has become
an international figure in the
battle for his son’s freedom, sent a
letter to Olmert on March 17, once
it became apparent that the latest
indirect negotiations with Hamas
had collapsed. He has said he fears
that an incoming government under
Prime Minister-designate Benjamin
Netanyahu likely would take a harder
line against a deal.
“I request unambiguously and
publicly from you, and despite the
steep price this requires: Bring back
my son before the end of your term
in office,” Shalit wrote Olmert. “This
letter of mine is a prayer to save my
son. I ask you, father to father - Don’t
abandon my son Gilad.”
The Shalits’ plight resonates deeply
in Israel, where there is a mandatory
draft for Jewish citizens, and the army
generally embraces the ethos that no
soldier is to be abandoned in the field.
Among those who have visited the
Shalits in their protest tent were the
wife and daughter of Ron Arad, the
Israeli airman who bailed out over
Lebanon in 1986. He survived the
bailout and was confirmed alive about
a year-and-a-half after his capture, but
contact eventually was lost, and his
fate remains a mystery. His example
is seen as a cautionary tale in Israel.
One of the slogans publicized by the
grass-roots movement for Shalit’s
release has been “Gilad is still alive.”
Veteran Israeli commentator
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A family friend, with Noam Shalit outside Israeli
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s office in Jerusalem
on March 17.
Nahum Barnea wrote in the
March 17 Yediot Achronot
about Israel’s bad choices
in the Shalit scenario:
“Either risk the chance of
Gilad Shalit’s fate being the
fate of Ron Arad, or risk
the awful security damage
that will be wrought by
those dangerous prisoners
once they are released.” He
wrote, “No matter what we
do, we lose.”
At the protest tent,
Noam Shalit patiently
shook hands with the
steady stream of supporters, posing
for photos and trying to smile when
offered blessings. “We are with you
all of the time,” said Livia Shalit (no
relation), 64, of the Tel Aviv suburb of
Kfar Saba. “We decided we could just
not sit at home anymore.”
Another woman pressed his hand
and said, “I am a Holocaust survivor.
Gilad has become a son for all of us.”
A towering wall of poster board,
set up next to the tent, features
messages for Gilad Shalit on colored
note paper. “We love and miss you,”
one message read. Another read:
“Come home.” □
Touro Synagogue to cancel public tours
NEW YORK (JTA) - Touro
Synagogue, the nation’s oldest Jewish
house of worship, plans to cancel public
tours because of financial difficulties.
The last two paid staff members of the
Newport, R.I., synagogue were let go,
according to the Providence Journal.
Plans to open a museum of
American Jewish history at the site
this summer will go forward. Group
tours, already scheduled for the
summer, will take place, but no new
ones will be booked, said a spokesman
for the nonprofit foundation that runs
the project.
Touro is a major tourist destination,
especially for Jewish visitors. It was
built in 1763 and declared a national
historic site in the 1940s. In 2001, the
National Trust for Historic Preservation
designated it as the nation’s first
religious historic site. □
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Samuels, Jeanne F. Jewish Herald-Voice (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 100, No. 53, Ed. 1 Thursday, March 19, 2009, newspaper, March 19, 2009; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth544331/m1/5/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; .