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Kidnapping, an Ineffective Weapon    [

    Camouflage
    Lib ration | Editorial

    Thursday 29 June 2006

    "We must save Corporal Shalit." That was the order given to 5,000 Israeli soldiers who entered the Gaza Strip yesterday. This spectacular military operation, unless decisive, raises the same eternal questions, reveals the well-identified fractures that each new crisis confronts. The Israelis experience themselves as victims and consider that the operation they call "Summer Rain" is legitimate. The head of government, Ehud Olmert, without any notable military past, would undoubtedly not have survived the absence of a riposte, or even any hesitation to fly to the rescue of the young corporal who has become a symbolic figure. The Palestinians also experience themselves as victims: of a history that has dispossessed them, of a long litany of deaths that the Israeli September withdrawal has not interrupted - as demonstrated by the recent controversial death of a family on the beach in Gaza, victims, in the end, of ISD reprisals that resembles "collective punishment" when the first target is the main electricity power station supplying the territory. Operation "Summer Rain" is a short-term response to an old dilemma and is obviously not of a nature to settle that dilemma. Ariel Sharon, in the evening of a long life of combat, determined that unilateral disengagement constituted the best option to separate the two peoples in the absence of any realistic prospect of a negotiated agreement. His successor, Ehud Olmert, has taken up that logic and got himself elected on the basis of that program, which he intends to spread to the West Bank. But barely had this plan been formulated when the IDF had to head back to Gaza, as though attracted by an inexorable magnet. Something to put the capacities of concrete walls and electronic barriers into perspective: they only camouflage accumulated resentments, without calming them. When the clamor of "Summer Rain" has died down, each side will feel itself to be a little more the other's "victim," and peace will only be more difficult.

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    Kidnapping, an Ineffective Weapon
    By Jean-Pierre Perrin
    Lib ration

    Thursday 29 June 2006

For twenty years, Israel has never negotiated with kidnappers.

    As demonstrated by the emblematic figure of navigator Ron Arad, whose plane was shot down in Southern Lebanon in 1986 and whose trace has been lost by Israel, kidnappings of Israeli soldiers have always deeply shocked Israeli society. All the more so as the previous instances have ended in the soldier's death, as in the - also emblematic - case of Sergeant Nahshon Waxman, 19 years old, held for five days in the West Bank village of Bir Nebala and killed on October 14, 1994, during the Special Forces attack to liberate him. His kidnapping took place smack in the middle of the Oslo peace process. In a video, the kidnappers had previously demanded the liberation of Hamas's spiritual leader, Sheik Ahmed Yassine - then imprisoned in Israel and since then assassinated by the Israeli army - from Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

    The first kidnapping of an Israeli soldier goes back to February 1989, when Hamas militants kidnapped a sergeant and shot him dead in southern Israel. Three months later, a second soldier was kidnapped while hitchhiking and assassinated, again by the same movement. His body was only discovered seven years later.

    In October 2000, at the beginning of the second Intifada, two soldiers from the Israeli Reserves who had gotten lost in Ramallah were kidnapped and lynched in front of a crowd within the confines of a police station. The Israeli army riposted by destroying police headquarters with its helicopters, then by re-entering Palestinian areas.

    In total, nine kidnappings in twenty years. Each time, the Israeli government rejected any negotiation with the kidnappers, who were often the source of an escalation of violence. Thus, Sergeant Waxman's death, which occurred in parallel with a series of suicide attacks, bore weight in the collapse of the peace process.