Likelihood of Success

Prisoner exchanges are a terrible idea for an obvious reason: They provide an incentive for future kidnapping.  It’s even worse when you kid yourself, while engaging in this foolish strategy — the sort of thing you might do in order to try to compensate for, let’s say, launching a new war in Lebanon with the sole stated aim of recovering a prisoner, and not coming even close — that you are making “inroads” with “moderate elements.”

Lynn B. cuts right through the concept of “moderate Palestinians,” and that true rara avis, the “moderate Hamas” — a wild fantasy object of Israeli leaders who eat green eggs and ham on Yom Kippur and swear they are not men of superstition and boogety-boo:

It seems, according to one unidentified Israeli official, that there are now three separate elements fighting for control of Hamas: 1) the ones who want to pretend to think about conceding a few points re: Israel’s right to exist in order to appear moderate and thus gain concrete concessions of their own from Israel, the US and the EU; 2) the ones who want to stand firm on their “principles” and continue to reject every possibility of co-existence with Israel; and 3) the “most radical” ones, who were behind Cpl. Shalit’s kidnapping in the first place and have no intention of allowing any agenda other than their own to dictate his destiny.

Thus we can see how easily the veneer of a palestinian Arab “moderate” is concocted. That first group now looks pretty good in comparison to the second and third groups, although the distinction between the goals of the latter two is somewhat unclear. But what does this have to do with Shalit?

It’s what they are threatening to do to him that’s the problem, of course — and to the rest of us.  But perhaps what’s worse is what we do to ourselves in lying so profoundly about the reality of the world out there.