Terrorists who murdered a friend of mine are supposedly on the list of terrorists to be released in this upcoming round of prisoner releases – all for the “privilege” of seating down with the PA chief terrorist for talks. That makes this particular terrorist release a bit more personal for me than some of the other releases.
The talk today in Israel is about the proposal that Kerry and Obama purportedly made to Abbas and Netanyahu.
Netanyahu will free these terrorists, Abbas will continue to sit and talk to Netanyahu until the end of the year or so, and Obama will, in exchange, free Jonathan Pollard.
A lot of thoughts went through my head when I heard this.
The first was the Wye Agreement, when Clinton promised Netanyahu that he would free Pollard, and then reneged on that. So I hope that if Netanyahu agrees, he learned his lesson, and will demand Pollard be released first.
But I also thought about Pollard being freed, with the disgusting price being demanded in return.
And that brought me to thinking about Gilad Shalit and Hamas.
Gilad Shalit was being held hostage by Hamas in order to obtain the release of terrorists, and now the message from the White House is that Pollard is being held hostage by Obama in order to obtain the release of terrorists.
The comparison is obvious, and here in Israel, where we’ve had a lot of unfortunate experience in this area – it’s what most of us are thinking.
I’m not going to discuss the morality of trading terrorists for hostages, but it is an incredibly difficult decision.
But I would ask Netanyahu to add one more condition to this hostage negotiation.
We don’t want these terrorists anywhere near us. Not in Israel, not in the PA.
We’ll take Pollard, in exchange for releasing the terrorists, so Abbas will pretend to talk to us some more. But we don’t want those terrorists anywhere near us.
Netanyahu should say our condition is as follows, the plane that is bringing Jonathan Pollard home to Israel, should, on its way back to America, be transporting all those released terrorists to their new homes – in America.
That’s a fair trade.