Israel's prisoner swap with Hamas

[newcomer]

@Dissonance

:rolleyes: I thought the 1/4 million ethnically cleansed Serbs that you are unable to dispute already did that.

The two situations are nowhere similar or comparable whatsoever.

Aside from the fact that a significant number of Croatian Serbs returned and that, for whatever reason, a number has decided to stay in the homes or areas from where Croats and Bosnians are expelled, there are no elements on which a broader comparison can be made. What can be debated is comparison on the subject of “right of return” but even there the differences are exact opposite. While Israel maintains that Palestinian right of return is a no starter, i.e. don’t even think about it, in countries of former Yugoslavia a return of refugees is guaranteed in the internationally backed and certified documents such as Dayton Peace Agreement (Annex 7: Refugees and Displaced Persons: The agreement grants refugees and displaced persons the right to safely return home and regain lost property, or to obtain just compensation.).

So, no debate there at all but nice try at going off on a fruitless tangent.

On another relevant issue – the one I raised with the video posted - there is no comparison as there is no nation that builds a circling wall to segregate and contain the other; there are no armed check points where right of crossing can be withdrawn at a soldier’s whim, there are no controls of natural resources, there are no controls of what the other may or may not receive from 3rd parties, there are no forced settlements of the most religiously radical elements of one nation deep into the land of another nation, there are no roads in the land of the other where the other is not allowed to use it… etc. etc. etc.

The funny thing is I know it, you know it but no amount of simple facts can bend ideological crude.

In conclusion, you lose and you lose so mightily. Yet, something tells me you’ll just shrug it all off with another irrelevant and ignorant remark.

[Erdosain]

Not that I wanted to bump this sad thread, but there was a very long and interesting article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine about the Shalit prisoner swap: Gilad Shalit and the Rising Price of an Israeli Life. (Warning: it’s eleven internet pages long.)

The two things that jumped out at me were:

1. This story about an Israeli kidnapped in the UAE and apparently mailed (!) to Lebanon.

Tannenbaum was a shady businessman and a colonel in the reserves, who of his own free will went to meet Hezbollah agents who lured him to Dubai with the promise of a lucrative drug deal. In Dubai, his contacts sedated him, packed him in a crate and sent him via Iranian diplomatic mail to Beirut, where he was held in solitary confinement for more than three years.

You can send an unconscious body diplomatic mail? You’d think the air holes would give something away. WTF?
2. This quote seemed to sum up things nicely:

Ultimately, it was Israel that made the supreme compromise in agreeing to release terrorists whom it had vowed never to set free. While half of Hamas’s V.I.P. list remained in prison, those who were released were collectively responsible for the deaths of 600 Israelis and for wounding thousands. Some of them had been sentenced to hundreds of years in prison. German intelligence was amazed by these concessions, which Netanyahu himself had said he would never agree to.

Now Shalit is home, and Israel can only wait to see if the gamble Netanyahu took with the country’s security was justified or whether, as the deal’s opponents claim, the release of so many killers will encourage even more kidnappings and fuel the flames that are perpetually smoldering in the Middle East.