A kidnapping or a capture

[Scurrilous]

<snip>

"Terrorist attack or guerrilla attack, an Israeli soldier kidnapped or held as a POW -- the high-strung rhetoric of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was once again being tested today in the wake of a successful coordinated, three-cell attack by armed Palestinians on an IDF base at Kerem Shalom, a kibbutz on the Israeli side of the southeastern corner of the Gaza Strip. The raid killed two Israeli soldiers but more significantly, it ended with a corporal, quiet Gilad Shalit from a Galilee hamlet, being held by gunmen. The military wing of the Hamas party, Izzadin al Qassam, the Popular Resistance Committees, and a group calling itself the Army of Islam, claimed responsibility. But Hamas’ political leaders were calling for the militiamen to release the Israeli soldier, the PRC was saying it was not holding him, and nobody really knows who is in the so-called Islamic Army.

In any case, the general consensus in Israel was that the Hamas government is to be held responsible -- and to blame. Indeed, while Israel was giving time to an Egyptian diplomatic-security delegation in Gaza working to recover the Israeli corporal, Israel was also threatening to conduct an assassination campaign against Hamas political leaders, and to conduct a ‘rolling campaign’ by air and possibly ground, against the Hamas’ ‘terrorist infrastructure’ in Gaza. That’s almost laughable, considering that over the five years of the intifada, from 2000-2005, there were hundreds of Israeli air strikes against that so-called ‘terrorist infrastructure,’ which among other things included the Palestinian Authority’s police stations, prisons, with the Israelis claiming that the Palestinian security forces were also terrorist outfits, so their command and control facilities -- the infrastructure -- should be destroyed.

For the Israelis, yesterday’s event was a clear-cut case of kidnapping. And as The Jerusalem Post’s Anshel Pfeffer pointed out in his newspaper’s web edition last night, Israelis can bear the burden of dead soldiers, but the anxiety of what happened to a captured soldier is too much for them to bear, so much so that clear thinking becomes clouded. Pfeffer’s article slaughtered a sacred cow, calling it the Entebbe Syndrome, a belief that no negotiations with terrorists and a heroic rescue is the only choice available to Israel. But as has happened often in the past, that policy has only meant more dead soldiers.

As for whether it was a terrorist attack or a guerilla operation, an important distinction in international law at least, just a few weeks ago, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, whose father was operations chief for the Etzel underground, which killed dozens if not hundreds of innocent people (including Arabs and British -- and Jews) during the British Mandate in Palestine before Israeli independence, admitted to an American TV network interviewer that attacks on soldiers are not terrorism. And while it is true that the seven or eight Palestinian gunmen who tunneled 800 meters over the past two months did cross the border into sovereign Israeli territory even as the Palestinian political arena seemed on the verge of approving a plan to end all attacks inside the Green Line, Israel routinely crosses the border into Gaza by air and occasional ground and armored troops, for their own operations."

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