Omri Bezalel

We waited for Command to green light our special ops mission scheduled that night in Gaza. My crew and I rocked gently on a sleek 36-foot kevlar and rubber boat, a kilometer from shore. I was with seven of my crewmates. We were 23 years old, and warriors of the Israeli Naval Commando. It was the first night of 2009. A new year had begun, rung in with a war. Operation Cast Lead was an Israeli offensive into Gaza in response to hundreds of rockets fired by Hamas into Southern Israel.

           I had been lighting the seventh candle of Hanukkah with my family in Tel Aviv a few days before, when the Israeli Air Force began the most aggressive bombing campaign in Gaza I’d seen during my five year service. Having finished my service in July 2007, I was called to base the next day, along with almost 10,000 other reservists.

            I stood on the bow of the boat. There was no moon and I couldn’t see the water, though I could hear it lapping against the boat and I could smell the salt in the air. I looked toward Gaza, which, apart from a few explosions and streaks of red across the sky, was dark. He was there. Somewhere, in some deep basement of a building I couldn’t see, he was sitting scared and alone and uncertain of the future.

            We received the green light and completed our mission. We did the same the next night and the one after that. But as we carried out our operations along the shores of Gaza night after night, I had only one thought: Don’t stop until we get him back.

        “Him” was Gilad Shalit, a 20-year-old corporal in the armored tanks division who had been captured by Hamas on June 25, 2006. Three weeks after the operation in Gaza began, a ceasefire was declared. I returned to base to hand in my rifle, uniform, and gear. I drove my Honda Civic south to Tel Aviv on highway 2, looking at the Mediterranean to my left. Shalit was still in Gaza.

             Since the day Shalit was taken, I had fought in the Second Lebanon War, fallen in love, nearly killed by a grenade, finished my service, travelled through Australia in a 1993 Daihatsu Feroza, and been accepted to school in New York City. I was lucky. Shalit wasn’t.

            It would be an exaggeration to say not a day went by that I didn’t think of him. But I thought of him often enough, and, to me, Operation Cast Lead represented the best of the Israeli military. A singular force of my brothers and sisters, harkening back to its golden days, saying, “We’re coming for you and won’t leave until we get you back.” Shalit certainly heard the bombs we dropped around him, and just as easily heard when the bombardment stopped.

            I knew the alternative to rescuing Shalit by force was a deal that had been on the table since his capture. Hamas had demanded north of one thousand Palestinian prisoners—including terrorists who had killed about 500 Israelis—in exchange for their prisoner. Like every soldier I knew, I’d have risked my life and volunteered for a mission to infiltrate Gaza and snatch Shalit. I also didn’t have moral qualms about firing missiles arbitrarily into Gaza until Hamas gave him up, ethics be damned. But setting killers free wasn’t an obvious solution to me.

            It was a difficult question. It placed the individual against the collective. On the one hand, how could we leave our soldier behind? Was it morally sound to allow him to rot in a jail, perhaps never knowing his fate? That had happened once before in Israel, and the public never recovered. But on the other hand, the numbers didn’t add up. One thousand people for one. Families of terror victims would see their loved ones’ killers go free. Those killers might murder again. Did it make sense to put so many citizens at risk just to get one soldier back?

            I didn’t have answers. But it came as a surprise to me that 80 percent of my countrymen did have an answer. Yes, it made sense. A vast majority of my country supported the deal, and many did so actively and ferociously. And it was eventually public opinion that pressured the government to make the exchange in October 2011.

            The Shalit deal did more than ask a moral question of the value and price of lives. It brought into question the entire role and perception of Israeli soldiers, and the special relationship between the military and civilians. Was Shalit a soldier we were willing to sacrifice for the better good of the people, or a 20-year-old boy who needed our help and protection?

            I’m not sure everyone asked themselves these questions. For most, it came down to a gut feeling, an emotional response. And why wouldn’t it, in a country with mandatory service, where every citizen knows someone serving in the military, and even more so, someone who was killed or injured during service.

            It didn’t surprise me at the time that so many supported the deal. It was only years later, living in a different country, that I realized the Shalit Deal wasn’t trivial. Americans had a hard time understanding why a country would agree to an exchange they saw as lopsided and irrational. I couldn’t explain it to them. It was like asking why fish swam in water, or why humans needed oxygen. It was the way of the world. But it made me wonder for the first time, would any other country have agreed to such a deal? And if not, what was it about the Israeli psyche and mentality that allowed the Shalit Deal to happen?

           

***

​

The picture covered the entire wall of the entrance to the PR firm Rimon Cohen Sheinkman. It was a grainy black-and-white photograph of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. I recognized in it David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister. I came closer to the wall and studied the photo. I heard a voice behind me. “That’s a picture of the first vote in Knesset.”

            I turned and saw a woman with shoulder length blonde hair and hazel eyes, in a silk button-down white shirt, tucked into black suit pants. This was Tami Sheinkman. I offered her my hand and she shook it.

            “What did they vote on?” I asked. She cocked her head and looked at the picture.

            “I don’t know. No one’s ever asked me that,” she said. She led me to a square glass office across from the reception and offered me a seat. Her office wall was filled with pictures of her four daughters beside a framed photograph of her with the late Israeli president, Shimon Peres. Her desk was buried under piles of newspapers. On top of them was an ashtray with one cigarette put out, its scent still noticeable.

            Sheinkman is a partner in the firm, located in the center of Tel Aviv. Ordinarily, the firm provides public relations services and crisis management for commercial companies, capital markets, and governmental bodies. But what put Sheinkman on the map, the reason why I knew who she was, is because she’s the person most credited with bringing Gilad Shalit back home. She ran the PR campaign for the family. To understand how the Shalit deal garnered such wide support in Israel, she’s the best place to start.      

            Sheinkman, 57, opened her computer to a Power Point presentation. She revealed a picture of a boy, maybe 17, with round brown eyes, short brown hair, pale skin, and an unconfident smile. It was the face of someone awkward, who if you asked him for directions might mumble a few words without looking you in the eye.

            “Do you know who this is?” Sheinkman asked me.

            “Gilad Shalit,” I said. Every Israeli citizen knew that picture.

            “Good. Now what about this man?” She clicked to an image of a man in a white T-shirt, who seemed to be everything Shalit wasn’t. A captivating smile you imagined won women over. Muscular, handsome, a fighter.

            “I have no idea,” I said.

            Her lips formed a sad and knowing smile. “His name is Tzvika Feldman,” she said. “And he’s where the story of Gilad Shalit begins for me.”

            Sheinkman was a 22-year-old officer in the Israeli Air Force when she met Feldman. He was a 22-year-old high school teacher who taught his students about Israel by hiking through its mountains and valleys. He was her first young love. When the Lebanon War broke out on June 6, 1982, Feldman was called to the reserves as a tank driver. In the Battle of Sultan Yacoub six days later in Syria, Israeli tanks were ambushed in an attack that left dozens dead and wounded, and nine Israeli soldiers captured, including Feldman. A survivor of the attack said Feldman had been shot but was still alive when taken. Feldman was never seen again.

            The day Sheinkman was notified, she received a postcard that Feldman had sent her before crossing the Syrian border. It read “Dream a little dream for me,” a line from their song. Feldman’s sister asked Sheinkman to find out what she could. But Sheinkman received the same response all families of captured soldiers heard: Keep quiet. Wait patiently, the army is doing everything it can.

            “That mantra has stayed the same throughout all the years,” Sheinkman told me. “From my experience with Tzvika, I knew that to get Gilad back, we couldn’t stay quiet.”

 

***

 

Sheinkman’s biggest challenge was keeping Shalit’s story in the news, even when nothing was happening. During Purim, a Halloween-like Jewish holiday where kids dress up, she released pictures of Shalit as a child in a clown costume. During Passover, Shalit’s family announced they wouldn’t sit for Seder until Gilad was released. 

            Eventually, Sheinkman did her job so well that the media began reporting on Shalit on their own accord. Every day, the popular DJ Yael Dan concluded her program with songs Israeli artists had written about Shalit, noting the number of days he had spent in captivity. The issue of Shalit’s return became a cornerstone of the campaigns for the 2009 elections, when Benjamin Netanyahu was elected.

            Sheinkman paced the campaign carefully, releasing items—such as an illustration of Shalit with the caption “Gilad is still alive,” or the word “help” written in Shalit’s handwriting— at regular intervals. The Shalit family manned a tent in front of the Prime Minister’s Jerusalem residence for two and a half years. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis changed their Facebook profile pictures to Shalit’s image. Sheinkman made sure there was always something for the media to report.

            She told me about her first meeting with Noam and Aviva Shalit. Sitting in her PR firm’s conference room, Noam Shalit, who had been the public face of the campaign up until then, complained bitterly that the press and the country were beginning to forget about Gilad. Only six mentions of him in the newspapers last month, practically nothing, he noted angrily. They needed help.

            Sheinkman had difficulty focusing on Noam’s words. Her gaze was stuck on Gilad’s mother, Aviva, whose eyes betrayed her helplessness, and whose despondent body affirmed her belief that her son was never coming home. Sheinkman told the Shalit family the story of Tzvika, the boyfriend she had lost 30 years before. She took the case pro-bono, and assured them she wouldn’t give up until Gilad was home.

            Every PR campaign has a target audience. In Shalit’s case, it was the Israeli Prime Minister, who at the time was Ehud Olmert. Sheinkman deemed Olmert responsible by virtue of what she referred to as the “unwritten agreement” between Israel and its soldiers. In the United States, Sheinkman pointed out, people volunteer for the military, get a full salary, and accept the risks that come with military service. Because service is mandatory in Israel, young men and women are forced to take on these risks. They certainly don’t do it for the money, with combat soldiers earning less than $200 a month. That places certain responsibilities on the country. But where did this “unwritten agreement” come from?

            Sheinkman explained that she detected the “unwritten agreement” in the words of David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister. “May every Jewish mother know that she has put her son under the care of commanders who are up to the task,” he said in a speech to the General Command staff in July 1963. Sheinkman interpreted this to mean that Israeli people are responsible for each other; it’s part of the Israeli culture and national narrative, the ethos upon which Israelis are raised.

            Sheinkman’s goal was to burn Gilad’s character into Israeli consciousness, and creating the perception that he could have been anyone’s child, brother or relative. Sheinkman wanted the Israeli people to perceive Aviva’s child as their own. The phrase she coined captured the essence of the campaign: “Gilad, the child of all of us.”

            Sheinkman made Aviva the driving force behind the campaign. Soon after coming on board, Sheinkman set up Aviva’s first interview with Channel 2 News. Aviva showed the reporter Gilad’s room, and then her garden where the plants Gilad had planted his last weekend at home were still growing. In four minutes, Aviva used the word “child” 11 times.

            Sheinkman made sure the piece aired on Friday evening, when families come together for Kiddush, and sons and daughters in uniform are home from base. A time when my mother, as all parents, could look from Aviva Shalit on television to her own children and think, “It could have been me. Next time it might be.”

            Sheinkman stopped speaking and looked at me. “Now,” she said, “was ‘the child of all of us’ a form of manipulation?”

            “It’s a problematic sentence,” I said.

            “Why?”

            “Because Shalit isn’t a child,” I said.

            “That’s right. In our perception, a soldier is supposed to defend us, not us defend him. The choice of using the term ‘child’ was to illustrate that we need to protect him. Did I cheat the Israeli people? No. I wasn’t representing the interest of the military or the country. I represented the interests of the Shalit family, whose child—doesn’t matter that he’s a soldier—is still their child.”

 

***

 

The national narrative of Zionism had always been a series of transitions between extremes: from slavery to freedom; from the diaspora to the Land of Israel; from victimhood to heroism. With the establishment of Israel as the Jewish state, the military became a cornerstone of Israeli identity. In elementary school, I sent gift bags to soldiers during the holidays. As a soldier, I received them from little kids, with thank you notes. The contract between citizens is clear: I’ll protect you when you’re young, and you’ll protect me when I’m old.

            I grew up on heroism stories of the 1948 War of Independence, when Israel defeated seven nations. Holocaust survivors came off the boats in Israel, picked up a rifle, and charged. The days of helplessness and victimhood were over. I learned about our greatest victory during the Six Day War of 1967 when Israel eliminated the Egyptian Air Force. My Dad, a tank commander, told me how during the Yom Kippur War he and two other tanks, the last line of defense on the border, destroyed 40 Egyptian tanks. The military and its soldiers have always been the one thing standing between Israel and annihilation. When I enlisted in 2002, I felt a part of that history and legacy. Being a soldier wasn’t just something that was forced upon me, it was a calling of the highest order.

            The First Lebanon War changed everything. It was the first war that Israel fought not out of necessity or for survival. In the world’s eyes, the Israeli military transformed from David to Goliath. But more importantly, it marked the beginning of a shift in how Israeli society viewed its soldiers—more vulnerable and less heroic—which would later help Sheinkman convince a country that Gilad was their child as well.

            The Lebanon War began in 1982 when Israel invaded Lebanon, and ended three years later, with Israel retaining the Southern Lebanon Security Gate. For the next 18 years, soldiers served in posts atop hills, ran routine ambush missions, and, mostly, took cover when Hizbollah shot rockets at them. Casualties mounted during the 1990s. The pinnacle came with the Helicopter Disaster in February 1997, when two Israeli transport helicopters crashed into each other. All 73 soldiers aboard were killed.

            One citizen of Israel’s north, a mother to a soldier serving in Lebanon at the time, believed he was a sitting duck in an unnecessary conflict. Together with three of her friends, she created the Four Mothers movement to turn Israeli public opinion against the occupation in Southern Lebanon. The combination of the Helicopter Disaster and the success of Four Mothers led Israel to withdraw from Lebanon in 2000.

            The Four Mothers’ campaign slogan—“Bring the sons back home”—helped change the country’s perception of its soldiers. That was the beginning of viewing soldiers as sons and daughters instead of adult men and women protecting a nation. Sheinkman later made another important word choice by changing “son” to “child.”

 

***

 

Since the day Israel became a state, it has had to deal repeatedly with hostages and kidnappings.  Israel appeared to have three options in such a situation. First, force: given sufficient intelligence and military capability, green light a military operation and extract the hostage by force. Second, negotiation: lacking the proper intelligence, to instead negotiate the hostage’s release through a prisoner exchange. Third, do nothing: allow the hostage to stay, and likely die, in captivity.

            Israel used the first option, extraction, in 1976 during the Entebbe raid. Four terrorists hijacked an Air France plane and diverted it to Entebbe, Uganda, where the non-Israeli passengers were let go. The terrorists demanded the release of 53 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the remaining 83 Israeli passengers.

            Instead of negotiating, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin sent Israeli commandos to Entebbe to raid the airport. Three hostages and the mission commander—brother of future Prime Minister Netanyahu—were killed, as well as the hijackers and members of the Ugandan military. The mission was a success and became legendary in Israel’s military legacy and part of the national narrative.

            In 1985, after the Lebanon War, Israel resorted to negotiations, the second option. Ahmed Jibril, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), had captured three Israeli soldiers. In exchange, he demanded 1,150 prisoners. Hoping to pressure Jibril, Israel kidnapped his nephew and proposed a straight exchange: his sister’s son for the three soldiers. Unfazed, Jibril simply added his nephew’s name to the list and waited. In July 1985, unable to extract the prisoners, Israel returned Jibril’s nephew, along with the other 1,150 prisoners, in exchange for its three soldiers.

            The Jibril deal was seen by the Israeli public as an unprecedented Israeli surrender to terrorism. One of the Palestinians released was Sheik Yassin, who founded Hamas (the same organization that would later capture Shalit). Many of the released prisoners became the backbone of the first Intifadah, a Palestinian uprising that broke out in December 1987 and lasted six years, resulting in the deaths of over 175 Israeli civilians.

            The third option, doing nothing, was implemented once, in the case of Ron Arad, a Weapons System Officer in the Israeli Air Force. In October 1986, his plane was shot down over Beirut and Arad was taken by Amal, a Lebanese political party associated with the Shia community. Nabih Berri, head of Amal, was willing to return Arad in exchange for the release of Lebanese prisoners being held by the South Lebanese Army, an undisclosed amount of money, and the transfer of weapons from Israel to his organization. Israel, unable to locate Arad, was prepared to approve the deal until Berri further demanded the release of dozens of Palestinian prisoners being held in Israeli prisons. Rabin, then Secretary of Defense, shut down the deal, partly in reaction to the public outcry over the Jibril Deal, which he had approved. A short time after, Arad was transferred from Amal to Hizbollah and a deal was never struck. Arad’s fate is still unknown, although he is believed to have died of illness sometime between 1988 and 1997.

            All of these events seemed to have had a major impact on Israeli society, and I wondered what kind of role they played in the mass public support of the Shalit deal. I knew soldiers and civilians alike sometimes suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as a result of the constant conflict. But I wondered if there was such a thing as collective trauma of a people, and whether the support of the Shalit deal was somehow a ricochet of that national trauma.

            I contacted Dr. Keren Friedman-Peleg, a medical anthropologist, and a senior lecturer at Israel’s largest college. She wrote the 2014 book A Nation on the Couch: The Politics of Trauma in Israel, about the intersection of personal trauma with the national collective, within the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict. We met at a coffee shop in Ramat Aviv, a suburb of Tel Aviv, across the street from where I went to elementary school. She’s spent years writing at this coffee shop, finding it offers the perfect blend between white noise and quiet. Friedman-Peleg is 42, slender, with long, dark auburn hair. She listened as much as she spoke, more interested in hearing about my other interviews.

            She told me that growing up in the Kibbutz—socialist communities in Israel where the good of the collective is placed above that of the individual—left her with unresolved issues regarding the struggle between the individual and the collective. It was that struggle—along with the connection between the private dimension of traumatic injury, and the national context in which that trauma takes place—that drew her to her line of research.

            Friedman-Peleg confirmed not only that national trauma exists, but that Israel suffers from it collectively. She defined national trauma as names and events that change the world order and that are burned into the national consciousness. These events cease to have a timeline; the only context they share is the Jewish people and the State of Israel.

            The story of Ron Arad, Friedman-Peleg said, is a national trauma that’s key to understanding public opinion regarding Shalit. “The failure of Ron Arad is like a ghost, it keeps coming back and every time it rises, it floods the public space and elicits an emotional reaction,” she said. “Every once in a while his wife or daughter will give an interview and you’re drawn to it like a magnet. The Israeli public can’t free itself of that.”

            Sheinkman had used Arad in her campaign, making a video of Shalit’s photo morphing into Arad’s. The message was clear: don’t let Shalit’s fate mirror Arad’s. The difference was that many saw Arad as a hero and Shalit as anything but. There were no signs that Shalit had put up a fight to stop himself from being captured. His M-16 was later found inside the tank, underneath his seat. The tank commander and driver had tried to escape but were shot and killed. Despite the weapons at his disposal, Shalit hadn’t fired a single bullet.

            Another national trauma was the case of Nachshon Wachsman, a 19-year-old Israeli sergeant in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), who was captured by Hamas in 1994. Hamas demanded the release of 200 prisoners. Rabin approved an extraction operation and a commando unit breached the house where Wachsman was being held. The operation failed. Wachsman was killed, along with the commander of the operation.

            When looking at the three options—extraction, negotiation, and doing nothing—Israeli society came to understand that two of them were no longer relevant, and that the only option left was negotiation. Sacrificing a soldier for the greater good had become a violation of the ethos of friendship Israelis are brought up with: you don’t leave the wounded behind. So Israelis wouldn’t tolerate another Ron Arad, which invalidated the third option.

            The failed Wachsman rescue operation was the moment the Israeli people realized that the first option of extraction was no longer viable. The days of Entebbe were over. Israel had lost its capabilities to extricate its prisoners and hostages. The mighty Israel, that had achieved so much in so little time, couldn’t even find one person in a basement a few miles from its border. This was a reversal of the national narrative that said the strong Israel could achieve anything.

            Israelis are sensitive to this feeling of helplessness because of another national trauma: the Holocaust. The whole point of having a country was so that Jews wouldn’t feel the helplessness they experienced during the Holocaust. “We're not willing to accept Shalit in captivity,” Friedman-Peleg said. “We can accept him dead. We even prefer that. There’s finality in that. At least then we don’t feel helpless.”

 

***

 

I had felt many times that Israel prefers dead soldiers to captured ones. In 2004, a few days before my crew and I concluded our two-year training period, we went through “captivity week,” where we were taught what to do in case of capture, and then went through a painful simulation. It was physically and psychologically taxing, but the one thing I knew would be hardest in captivity could not be simulated. I knew throughout the week that it would end. The weekend would come and I’d be alive and free. I knew Shalit didn’t have that certainty, and that’s what seemed hardest to me about captivity.

            During that week, we were also taught how to react if our friend was captured. We were told that if we saw no other way to stop a crewmate from being captured, we were to shoot our friend. We reacted with the black humor we used to address most life-and-death situations. I joked to my crew, “Guys, if you see me being taken, don’t shoot, I’ll be fine over there.”

            I didn’t know at the time that the directive had a name: Hannibal Protocol. It allowed soldiers to use maximum force to prevent capture. Technically, it stated that the force should be aimed at the enemy, even if it endangers the soldier; a far cry from deliberately shooting your friend as a last resort. As a result of commanders misinterpreting Hannibal directive, the Military Chief of Staff revoked it in 2016 and clarified that the procedure didn’t allow for the intentional killing of soldiers. It was rewritten to say that soldiers should prevent the abduction while “guarding the life of, and avoid hitting, the captive.”

            In the summer of 2014, Israel launched Operation Protective Edge, also known as the 2014 Gaza War. It was a seven-week military operation in Gaza, following the kidnap and murder of three Israeli teenagers. On August 1, the last day of the operation, an hour into a declared ceasefire, Hamas ambushed a crew of infantry soldiers on the outskirts of Gaza. Alon Toledano, a 20-year-old sergeant, was one of the first to arrive on scene. He saw the crew commander on his right, dead. On his left were two soldiers lying on top of each other. He approached them, weapon trained. He recognized the soldier on the bottom. It was his good friend who he had gone through basic training together. He rolled the other soldier over. He didn’t recognize him. The soldier was in fact a Hamas operative in an IDF uniform. Toledano knew what that meant: a soldier was missing. Lieutenant Hadar Goldin.

            Toledano saw a shaft a dozen feet away. Beneath the shaft was a tunnel leading to Rafah, deep into Gaza, close to the Egyptian border. The tunnel was the only place Hamas could have taken Goldin. Toledano spoke into the radio the one word no one wanted to hear: Hannibal. The military went into overdrive. Command wanted to cut off the other end of the tunnel. Artillery and the Air Force bombed the residential area relentlessly—in what later became known as Black Friday—in its attempts to prevent Hamas from holding another live soldier.

            Protective Edge was the first major operation since 2004 that I had not been a part of. I remember sitting in my apartment in Manhattan, reading about Goldin. He had a twin. He was religious. He read the Bible every evening and his copy was lined with comments in the margins written in pencil. I read all this and had one thought: Please let him be dead. And I wasn’t alone. I knew almost the entire country was thinking the same. We weren’t ready to go through it all again. Another campaign. Another captured soldier. Another exchange. There would be no happy ending.

            Another soldier on the scene, in an act of pure bravery, entered the tunnel and went after Goldin. He didn’t find him. What he did find was classified, but it was enough to declare Goldin dead. That night I cried for him and his family while simultaneously I was flooded with relief. 

 

***

 

To understand Israel’s culture of remembrance and memorial and how it views its dead soldiers, one need only experience Memorial Day in Israel. It isn’t happy. It’s a day of national mourning. Shops close, government-owned channels broadcast the name of every Israeli fallen soldier, and students wear a sticker of a rose and the word “Remember.” Twice during the day, a siren sounds throughout the country. Cars come to a standstill on the highway, people stop what they’re doing, and everyone stands at attention for two minutes. It’s the saddest day of the year. At the heart of Israeli culture is an almost fetishization with remembrance and memorial.

            I was surprised when I moved to New York more than seven years ago and experienced the American Memorial Day for the first time. My Facebook feed was filled with posts that read, “Starting off Memorial Day right! #Vegas #MemorialDay.” Blockbuster comedies opened in movie theaters. Everything went on sale in stores. And I kept seeing three words that, put together, seemed at odds: Happy Memorial Day. 

            The closest I’ve seen America come to Israeli Memorial Day is on 9/11, when I saw American flags everywhere and heard every victim’s name read aloud during memorial services broadcasted on almost every TV channel. Now imagine saying to a fire fighter, “Happy 9/11.”

            One of the cornerstones of Israel’s day of remembrance is memorial videos: half hour-long home-made videos of fallen soldiers, filmed and edited by their friends and family, and broadcast all day for free on Israel’s three national television channels. From 10 p.m. on the eve of Memorial Day until 6 p.m. the following day, I would sit and watch a 30-minute window into the pain and suffering of an ordinary Israeli family, just like mine. Saying out loud the amount of Israel’s fallen, a little less than 23,500, feels like an abstract number. But to spend half an hour learning about just one person, seeing their childhood, their service, who they were, who their friends and families and girlfriends were—that’s a tragedy.

            I often wondered what my own memorial video would look like if I were to be killed. Even before I enlisted, there were things I did for others mainly because I thought it would make a good story for them to tell about me in my video. When contemplating my own death on my way into Gaza on a mission, one of the saddest things for me was knowing I wouldn’t be around to see my own memorial video.

            The videos—which came of age during the years of Lebanon, before the helicopter disaster and the Four Mothers movement—portray the fallen not so much as soldiers, but as sons and children, a perspective that later helped Sheinkman effectively solidify “Gilad, the child of all of us.” In that sense, memorial videos provide a context for understanding the Shalit deal.

            The special place memorial videos hold within society offers an insight into Israel’s changing view of soldiers and soldiering. It was the family’s way of telling the government, “We’re no longer satisfied with your memorialization; we don’t need another monument or museum,” and taking control of their own memorialization. On the other hand, the videos helped enforce the changing view. For Israelis, spending one day a year watching 30-minute portraits made it clear who the soldiers were, what the families lost, and how their lives had been destroyed. The implied message wasn’t particularly subtle: next year’s videos might be about your son. The same mentality was used during the Shalit campaign: The next captured soldier could be your brother.

            In her 2015 dissertation at NYU Cinema Studies, Sovereign intimacy: Israeli Homemade Video Memorials and the Politics of Loss, Laliv Melamed wrote, “The movies emerged from a place of Israeli society no longer willing to pay a certain price. But the emergence of these home videos made Israeli society more unwilling to pay that price.”

            There has always been a price. What has changed in Israeli society isn’t the price, but rather the purchase. Israeli society has shown that it’s willing to pay a high price when it feels the purchase is worth it. If you ask Israelis what Israel’s greatest war is, most will say the War of Independence or the Six Day War. If you ask Israelis what Israel’s worst war was, most will say, apart from the Yom Kippur War, the 2006 Second Lebanon War. That war had 124 casualties. The Six Day War saw 700-900 soldiers killed. In the 1948 war, 6,000 died—1 percent of the population. Yet those are remembered as great victories not because the price paid was low, but because what was gained was so significant. Even though Israel technically "won" the Second Lebanon War, many considered it a failure. Nothing was gained. That 124 soldiers were killed not for independence or survival, but for the status quo, became too much for the public to bear.

            Sheinkman’s slogan “Gilad is still alive” was a direct reference to Israel’s Memorial Day culture and its videos. It seemed to say: You spend all this time watching videos and images of the dead, for whom nothing can be done, and you’re ignoring the person who isn’t dead, who can still come home.

 

***

 

The first time Netanyahu publicly reacted to the Shalit campaign was in 2010. Sheinkman had just organized a 120-mile protest march with over 10,000 people from the Shalit home to the Prime Minister’s office in Jerusalem. Netanyahu’s office released in return a statement of four words alone: “Not at any price.”

            “Until that point, we hadn’t talked about the price because as far as the family’s concerned, it wasn’t significant,” Sheinkman told me. “It was the first time I understood that the price has to be a part of the campaign. If they say ‘Not at any price,’ then we say, with all due respect, if there’s no alternative to bringing him back, then there’s a price and we have to pay it.”

            Aviva Shalit resented the use of the term “price.” In a 2011 interview with Yediot Achronot she said, “A person is not a commodity that you can pay for. My son has no price.”

            But both the heads of Mossad and Shabak, Israel’s foreign and internal intelligence agencies, warned that 40 percent of those released would go back to terrorism. How should the two be weighed one against the other? This, in the end, was the question the Israeli government faced. It was the question facing the Israeli people: how do you philosophically come to terms with paying such a price.

            I met with leading Israeli philosopher Asa Kasher, 76, to try and find an answer. Kasher portrayed the philosophical question as the moral obligation to return a soldier versus the increased level of risk for Israeli citizens that doing so would incur. He first made it clear that the moral obligation of returning Shalit was absolute.

            “It’s about solidarity,” Kasher said. “There’s a Jew sitting in captivity and he’s suffering because he’s a Jew. And so it’s our duty, as the national country of the Jewish people, to release him at any price.”

            The question then becomes, does the level of risk of Israel’s national security substantially rise by releasing the prisoners agreed to in the deal. Kasher argued no. That even though Israel gave up 1,027 prisoners, upon deeper inspection, the level of risk didn’t change. Only 450 of the prisoners were determined by Hamas, the other 550 prisoners were chosen by Israel and released at its discretion after Shalit returned. Kasher explained that 600 of the prisoners were criminals, serving short sentences for theft and robbery, and would have been released soon anyway. While the rest were associated with terror, the prisoners constituted a diverse group of risk. The 400 prisoners who were released to Gaza posed less of a risk than the few released to Judea and Samaria. Members of Fatah, as well as older prisoners, were less likely to return to terror activities than members of Hamas or younger prisoners.

            “In the end, the amount of prisoners who presented a risk and who were likely to return to terror activity wasn’t 1,000, it was much less, on a scale that really didn’t tip the level of risk.” Which, Kasher argued, made the deal morally sound.

            “Seven Israelis were murdered as a result of the deal,” I pointed out to him. Did he not see that as substantial risk?

            Kasher called it coincidental. “Those released aren’t the only people acting against us,” he said. “There are hundreds more, just like them. So in this particular case, this person who was released in the deal succeeded. We foil hundreds of terror attacks every year. This time, we weren’t able to, and it just so happened to be the one terror attack carried out by someone released in the deal.” (Though I wondered if that way of thinking might give room to a soldier saying he doesn’t want to participate in a mission in Gaza because the risk level isn’t worth thwarting an attack when there’ll only be another.)

            Kasher made it clear that while he had thought about the moral aspect of the deal, it was clear to him that the Israeli people hadn’t. He characterized the public’s reaction as “purely sentimental.”

            And so while Kasher and the government may have paused to debate the line between national security and Shalit’s return, Israeli society didn’t seem to. Society saw on one side bereaved parents trying to put the cost of the price on the public agenda, and on the other side Aviva Shalit addressing Netanyahu at rallies, saying it wasn’t a question of releasing terrorists, it was only a question of Gilad’s life.

 

***

 

Netanyahu signed the deal on October 6, 2011, releasing terrorists serving 168 life sentences, who had murdered more than 500 Israelis. It included terrorists who organized the attacks in Sbarro pizza in Jerusalem in 2001, the Passover Massacre in 2002, and the Dolphinarium club in Tel Aviv in 2001, killing a total of 66 Israelis.

            Yossi Zur found out about it from the evening news. No one had informed him that the three terrorists who murdered his 17-year-old son, Asaf, along with 17 others in a suicide bus bombing in Haifa in 2003, would be exchanged for Shalit. Those responsible would only sit in jail for eight and a half years: six months per person killed.

            Zur is part of Almagor, an organization of victims and families of victims of terror attacks. It was founded after the Jibril deal to provide economical and social services to families, and to represent the interests of the victims. Its members deal with the media and lobby politicians. The organization is made up of volunteers. Zur and Almagor had spent four years protesting against the Shalit campaign and arguing against an exchange.

            Zur had met with Shimon Peres while he was president. “During the Entebbe operation, you were unwilling to release one prisoner,” Zur said to Peres, who had been Secretary of Defense, during Entebbe. “Today you’re signing the release of a thousand prisoners. Explain to me what happened from then until now.” Zur told me that Peres said that the turning point for him was Nachshon Wachsman, the captured soldier who was killed in 1994 during a rescue operation. He didn’t want to see that happen again.

            While the Shalit family spent every day in their protest tent in front of the Prime Minister’s office, Zur and Almagor protested on the other side of the street. When the media left and the cameras turned off, the two camps mixed. The Shalit campaign gave the bereaved families donated sandwiches. They talked.

            “It wasn't a battle of I hate you and you hate me. I understood them. We weren't against them protesting, it was their right as a family,” Zur, 57, said to me in his home in Haifa. “There weren't hard feelings, only different opinions.” Those in favor of the Shalit deal often criticized the bereaved families for being motivated by revenge.        

            “I don't think they really understood us. But it's like any other political opinion, you don't always understand or accept the other side,” he said. “I completely understand his parents, you want your child back. If my child were there, I’d give back Tel Aviv.”

 

 ***

 

On October 18, 2011, Gilad Shalit returned home. Like most Israelis, I watched on TV. That day’s coverage began at six in the morning, seven hours before Shalit reunited with his family. Cameras waited for Shalit at Tel Nof Air Force base, only a 40-minute drive south of Tel Aviv. The helicopter landed, its ramp door lowered, and Shalit appeared in a crisp green uniform. Netanyahu was the first to greet him and Shalit gave him an awkward salute—strange, considering the prime minister isn’t the commander in chief or part of the military and not someone a soldier salutes. But that was the picture newspapers used the next day. “You’re a hero,” Netanyahu told him. Shalit met his father, who gave him a quick hug and kiss, then led his son to a private room where the family, together with Sheinkman, waited for him. No one mentioned the word “price.” All that mattered was that after 1,941 days, our soldier was home.

            Netanyahu needed the big show in order to emotionally justify signing the deal. Following the deal, his approval ratings soared. But more importantly, the Israeli people needed it. They had spent five years being told that Gilad Shalit was their child. It had ceased to be a private family matter, and so neither could the return remain private. The Israeli people had a right to see their son return. It was a campaign built on the emotions of the Israeli people and the day of coverage was their reward.

 

***

 

It was clear to the government, once it heard Hamas’ demands, that a deal for Shalit would make the slope even more slippery. In 2008, the Defense Secretary appointed a commission to thoroughly examine the question of what to do in case of a captured soldier. It was decided before hand that the commission’s findings wouldn’t apply to Shalit, but to similar cases that would follow. The commission reached the conclusion that the policies in place today, of having no cap of prisoners in an exchange, are mistaken.

            I spoke to Amos Yaron, a former general in the IDF and one of the three members of the commission, about their findings. “A country can't afford to release those kinds of amounts of terrorists for one, two, or three soldiers,” Yaron, 64, told me in his office. “It isn’t rational. Today it's 1,000, tomorrow it's 2,000, and in the end it's the Prime Minister.”

            The commission recommended that Israel exchange no more than a handful of prisoners for one soldier. The days of 1,000 for one would be gone. In a perfect world, Yaron said, the commission would submit their report to the Minister of Defense who would give it to the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister would then call in the members of the commission to discuss and ask questions. Then he’d bring it up with Members of Parliament, get feedback, and make fixes and changes. Finally he would legislate a clear law stating what to do in case of a captured soldier.

            None of that happened. The commission never heard back about the report. It was classified and never released to the public. “It's a minefield for the Prime Minister,” Yaron told me. “Discussing the findings would force him to make a decision, which would only tie his hands.”

            But I wondered why it wouldn’t be the other way around. Wouldn’t the Prime Minister having his hands tied by a clear law give him something to lean on when pressured by the public?

            Yossi Zur, the bereaved father, put it another way. Shalit was no hero, but what happens when a true hero gets captured? Say a decorated veteran pilot gets shot down over Gaza while executing a dangerous mission. The Prime Minister doesn’t want his hands tied then.

 

            ***

 

My and Shalit’s generation of soldiers is different from the one that came before. It wasn’t only a different generation, it was a different country with a different political climate. My father fought nation armies; I fought guerrilla fighters. My father had absolute morality in fighting for Israel’s survival; I dealt with settlers and a Palestinian civilian population, and talk of occupation.                       

            But the boundaries between the families and the military were clearer back then too. I thought about my father’s stories from the Yom Kippur War. His parents received a letter from him once a month. There were hardly any phone conversations. They didn’t know who his commander was and it didn't matter. His parents weren’t any less worried about him than my mother was of me or Aviva Shalit of Gilad. But they had a boundary and, for better or worse, they didn’t overstep. Their son was a soldier and that’s all they needed to know.

            But 50 years later, every mother has her son’s commander’s cell phone number stored in her phone. It’s illegal for a commander to keep a soldier on base longer than 28 days without allowing him home to visit, unless he’s been court martialled. Families and girlfriends come to visit their sons and daughters on base every Saturday with pots and pans of Friday night’s leftovers. Even my unit, the Naval Commandos, had “parent’s day” during our training. The line between home and military life has become blurred.

            On the one hand, one of the reasons Israeli soldiers don’t suffer from PTSD on the level American soldiers do is because in Israel, soldiering is a shared experience. Not only has everyone been in the military and can relate, but also being able to talk to my mother about my commanders when she knows them, undoubtedly helped me through many hardships. But just as parents could put a face to commanders, so could every commander put a face to his soldier’s parents. And the idea that commanders knew they had to answer to parents put a strain on the entire chain of command, from squad leader to general to prime minister.

            When I enlisted into the Naval Commandos, my mother said to me, “As a citizen, I’m very proud. As a mother, I’m scared to death.” I asked my father, who was in the minority against the deal, what he would have done had it been me instead of Shalit. He told me he never would have allowed me to sit in captivity for five years. He would have done everything to get me out. “But I wouldn’t have wanted a prime minister who would give in to me,” he said.

 

            ***

 

Here is Yossi Zur, whose son was killed in a terrorist bus explosion in 2003. It’s January 2017 and I come to his home to interview him. When I leave, he hands me a business card so that I can send him the article when it’s done. That night at home, when I empty my pockets, I look at his card for the first time. On the right side is Zur’s name and contact info. On the left side is a picture of his son—a bright face, sweet smile, and blond hair parted down the middle. Below the picture are the words “Asaf Zur (Blondie). 1986-2003. A 17-year-old angel.”

 

Here is Yahya Sinwar. He’s 55 with short white hair, a kept beard, and a missing tooth on the right side of his mouth. He was sentenced to life in 1989 for murder, but was freed 22 years later in the Shalit deal. He opposed the Shalit deal from prison because he saw it as a surrender to Israel’s conditions. It’s February 2017 and he’s the newly-elected leader of Hamas in Gaza.

 

Here is Mazan Fuqua. He was released in the Shalit deal. He’s sent to Gaza and returns to terrorist activities. It’s March 2017 and he lies dead on his doorstep in the Tell al-Hama neighborhood. Police have erected checkpoints to try and find the one or several killers that shot him four times from close range using a silencer. They will not find them. Israel will deny involvement.

 

Here are three Israeli teenagers wearing Yarmulkes. Their names are Naftali Frenkel, Gilad Shaer, and Eyal Yifrah. It’s June 2014 and they are hitchhiking in the West Bank. They get in the wrong car. Eighteen days later their bodies are found in a field north of Hebron. Hussam Qawasmeh is convicted of the murder. He says he received the money for the operation from his brother in Gaza, who was released in the Shalit deal. Their murder sets off a chain of events that leads to the Gaza War a few weeks later, and to the eventual death and capture of Hadar Goldin.

 

Here is Leah Goldin, Hadar’s mother. It’s April 2017 and she’s speaking at the government hearing held to discuss the failures of the 2014 Gaza War. “My son went from being a hero to a national debt. You’ve turned us into the enemies of the state,” she calls to Prime Minister Netanyahu. Member of Parliament Miki Zohar tells her that she’s overreacting and Leah Goldin throws her glass of water toward him and tells him he has no right to speak. She turns back to the Prime Minister. She raises her voice. She cries. “You keep saying you’re a bereaved brother. But your brother was returned. Talk to me about your children. And where are the Members of Parliament? Why can’t we hear you? There are two soldiers in Gaza. Don’t you have children who need to enlist? Shame on you. And I don’t care if you’re on the left or right. We all have the same people’s army. Everyone’s family is enlisted.”

 

Here are four dead Israelis. Police Chief Superintendent Baruch Mizrahi, 47, Danny Gonnen and Malachi Rosenfeld, both 25, and 48-year-old Rabbi Michael “Miki” Mark. They are all shot and killed in terror attacks planned or executed by prisoners released in the Shalit deal.

 

Here’s a picture of Shalit, his brother, and both their girlfriends having dinner at a nice restaurant, five years after his release. His girlfriend posts the photograph on Facebook and receives in response 600 hostile comments, asking where the celebrations are for the families of the Israelis who have been murdered by the terrorists released in exchange for her boyfriend’s freedom.

 

Here is Aviva Shalit. She was on the cusp of losing the most important thing, the one thing many people never recover from. She did what she thought was right. She had given birth to Gilad, not the nation.

 

Here is Gilad Shalit. He joined the military because that’s what 18-year-olds do in Israel. He never presumed or wanted to be a warrior or hero. One night he fell asleep in a tank, and 11 years later everyone knows his name and face. People either love him or hate him, and everyone has an opinion about him. He becomes a sports writer and dates a girl who was part of the campaign to bring him home. He doesn’t want attention and gives almost no interviews.

 

Here is Israel. It’s a country that usually tries to do the right thing but doesn’t always know what that is. Where young men and women—some willingly, others less so—join the military and are forced to make hard decisions that impact an entire nation. Where the line between public and private, between civilian and military is blurred, often unrecognizable. A country where the relationship between its citizens and soldiers is simultaneously heartwarming and disconcerting. A nation that has evolved with the times and has seen, as most nations have, the collective give way to the individual. A place, maybe the only place, where the Shalit Deal can happen, and with the support that it garnered.