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News Analysis
Editorial
Shalit's Release Demands
Stricter National Security
VVashington/JTA
R
epublican presidents
have been guiding Israel
toward the
peace table — some-
times not so gently —
almost since the Jewish
state was born more
than six decades ago.
But in the recent
round of debates, the
crop of candidates
vying for the GOP nom-
ination have been chid-
ing President Obama for
forcing Israel's hand —
usually to great cheers
from the audience.
"You don't allow an inch of
space to exist between you and
your friends and allies',' former
Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney
said at a Sept. 22 debate in
Orlando, Fla., earning thunderous
applause.
The GOP has moved a consid-
erable distance since President
Dwight Eisenhower banged Israeli
heads until the Jewish state agreed
to relinquish the Sinai Peninsula
captured in the 1956 Middle East
War — or even since President
George W. Bush cajoled Israelis
and Palestinians into the ill-fated
2007 Annapolis talks.
Romney and Texas Gov. Rick
Perry, the frontrunners, dis-
agree on many
issues — Social
Security as a
federal program,
the utility of
health care man-
dates, immigrant
rights — but
they trip over
each other in
assailing the
Obama admin-
istration for
pressuring or
criticizing Israel.
Romney
coined the
phrase "threw
Perry
Israel under the bus" when Obama
in May called for peace talks
based on the 1967 lines, with land
swaps. Not to be outdone, Perry
traveled to New York
for the opening of the
United Nations General
Assembly and accused
Obama of "appease-
ment" and said he
backed Israel because
he was a Christian.
Whereas previous
Republican adminis-
trations have opposed,
with varying degrees
of vehemence, Israeli
settlement build-
ing and remained cool to Israeli
claims to sovereignty over eastern
Jerusalem, Perry departed from
these positions at his New York
news conference. Standing beside
right-wing Jewish activists, Perry
expressed support for Israeli
settlement building and said he
favored Jerusalem "being united
under Israeli rule'
Changing Culture
Current and former GOP opera-
tives and veterans of Republican
administrations have identified a
number of factors in explaining
why the Republican Party, which
until a decade or so ago tolerated
a faction that advocated keeping
Israel at a friendly distance, is now
hewing almost exclusively to a
policy of no daylight between the
United States and the Jewish state.
The chief reason they cite is the
growth of the evangelical move-
ment as a cornerstone of the
party, but other factors include
the changed attitudes toward the
Middle East in the wake of the 9-11
terrorist attacks,
the significance
of the Jewish
vote in certain
swing states and
the emergence
of a Jewish
Republican
Neusner
donor base in
Photo courte sy IDF
GOP
Learned To
Love Israel
Unconditionally
a community that for decades has
given mostly to Democrats.
"Israel is not just for Jews
anymore said Noam Neusner, a
former domestic policy adviser
to President George W. Bush and
now a communications consultant
to Christians United For Israel.
(He also was once a Jewish News
intern).
"There are 5 million American
Jews and 50 million evangelicals,
some of whom are Hispanic,
African American, Korean," he
said. "Every Sunday morning, they
are reading scripture and reading
it seriously.
"What the candidates all
understand implicitly is that you
demonstrate a sense of America's
unique role in the world and
moral force by supporting Israel:'
Matthew Brooks, executive
director of the Republican Jewish
Coalition, said that while evangeli-
cals had a role, the changed post
9-11 world should not be under-
estimated as a factor. Republican
presidents such as Eisenhower,
Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and
George H. W. Bush operated in a
Cold War arena in which cultivating
allies among Israel's rivals and ene-
mies may have made sense — but
that is no longer the case, he said.
"There were elements in the
realist camp who may have seen
Israel not as a strategic ally:'
Brooks said of the presidency of
the first George Bush. "Given how
things have developed — the
global war on terror, the rise of
militant Islam — that doesn't
make any sense anymore'
Neocon Influence
Marshall Breger, an adviser to
Reagan who
now teaches
law at Catholic
University, noted
that the post
9-11 atmosphere
tended to favor
the neoconser-
vatives within
Breger
News Analysis on page 37
36
October 27 20
1
Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu, Sgt. Maj. Gilad Shalit and Shalit's father,
Noam, shortly after the Israeli soldier's release from the
Gaza Strip.
srael has an unwritten social contract with its citizens
that vows the government will go to great lengths
to free captured soldiers. So Israel's swap of 1,027
Palestinian security prisoners for Hamas-held Israeli sol-
dier Gilad Shalit isn't surprising. Shalit, now 25, returned
to Israel on Oct. 18 – more than five years after his kid-
napping in a cross-border Hamas raid at an Israeli check-
point. His Gaza Strip release marked the first return of a
captive Israeli soldier in 26 years.
Israel has a checkered history of overly unbalanced pris-
oner exchanges with Arab enemies going back to the War
for Independence in 1948-49 and up to the Second Lebanon
War in 2006. The most lopsided proposal came in 1985;
Israel let go 1,150 Arab prisoners for three soldiers held in
Lebanon following Israel's 1982 invasion.
A sense of family permeates Israeli culture. This
tight-knit feeling drives Israeli society amid the daily
onslaught of physical and verbal enemy threats. Shalit,
gaunt and weary yet proud, was handed over by masked
Hamas gunmen to Egyptian mediators and arrived back
on Israeli soil a national hero – everyone's son. Israel
strives not to leave a soldier, everyone's son or daughter,
on the battlefield. Its intent is to not sacrifice a captured
soldier, presumably Jew, Arab or Druze, even if 1,000
prisoners go free as part of a deal. Gazans, meanwhile,
cheered their just-released brethren whose "deeds"
included a 1989 bus hijacking that killed 16 and a 2001
Jerusalem pizzeria bombing that killed 15.
The math won't jive in the Shalit deal, especially when
elements of the newly released resume their violent
ways against Israel, which will happen as sure as Hamas
rockets pepper Negev towns. One of the liberated, Yehia
al-Sinwar, a founder of Hamas' military wing, under-
scored that. He took part in the 1994 kidnapping of Sgt.
Nachshon Wachsman – killed by his captors in a rescue
attempt by Israeli commandos.
You can argue the life of one Israeli soldier, cherished as
life is to Jews, isn't worth the risk posed by freeing hun-
dreds of Islamist terrorists, who certainly didn't lose their
jihadist stripes in Israeli captivity. But the redemption of
Gilad Shalit reaffirms the Israeli ethical code, if not the
Talmud's lack of clarity on "redeeming of the captive."
Israel's challenge now is to ultra-protect its borders,
streets and soldiers. Daunting danger lurks in the midst of
Islamist terrorists frothing over the huge dividends exact-
ed by taking hostage Israel Defense Forces fighters. L i