After 1,941 days, Shalit is finally back home on Israeli soil.
Beny Alagem, an expat Israeli who purchased the Beverly Hilton in 2003, worked feverishly with the Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles and the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles to bring the Jewish community together in his hotel ballroom.
Hundreds of people came from all over the county for the 7 a.m. event. They filled the chairs and lined the walls; necks craned to see the two huge screens beaming live footage from Israeli television. They cheered, applauded and wiped away tears of joy when Shalit appeared on the screen.
Although Shalit was actually released during the middle of the night local time, attendees at Tuesday’s event were on hand to witness his return to his hometown of Mitzpe Hila.
As the crowd filled up on coffee, juice and pastries, the live stream showed Shalit walking out of the mouth of an Israeli army helicopter to a waiting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli news commentator noted how gaunt and pale Shalit looked.
Westwood resident Carole Shnier said she came to the early morning event to share a historic moment.
“It’s very surreal because there was disbelief that this day would ever come,” she said. “It’s bittersweet, but I’m thrilled and proud to be a Jew and a supporter of the state of Israel.”
Richard Sandler of the Jewish Federation addressed the crowd.
“We come together today as one community and one people to support Gilad Shalit and his family, our brothers and sisters in the IDF Israel Defense Forces and the state of Israel,” he said.
The morning program included addresses by local rabbis and Los Angeles city officials, all of whom spoke about the joy of bringing Shalit home, and also about the release of thousands of inmates from Israeli prisons in return for Shalit’s freedom.
“This is an amazing moment that we can all experience firsthand. It was a gut- wrenching decision for all of us. We are relieved to witness Gilad’s return but our hearts are heavy,” Israeli Consul General David Siegel said. “The anguish of bereaved families of victims of terror and what the future may bring is in our minds.”
Nonetheless, Siegel said Israel’s decisions came from a great internal strength.
“We uphold the sanctity of life,” he said. “Ours is not a society that celebrates in the release of cold-blooded murderers.”
Siegel also thanked the Los Angeles community for actively seeking the release of Shalit over the past five years.
L.A. County 3rd District Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said the only thought that came to his mind was the difference in the celebrations in Israel and Gaza.
“Israel, the Jewish people and all freedom-loving people celebrate with Gilad but in Gaza thousands are celebrating the release of murderers,” Yaroslavsky said.
What has happened, many Israelis are asking themselves, to the country that produced the daring and heroic raiders of Entebbe who managed to defy all odds in rescuing Israeli hostages from a hijacked plane?
And at a deeper level still, it is the fact that an obscene moral equivalence has been established by this deal between the innocent and the guilty.
This equivalence is being played out in the coverage which describes the deal as a ‘prisoner swap’ or ‘prisoner exchange’ – more than 1000 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails for one Israeli prisoner held by Hamas.
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Hostage: Shalit was denied visits from the Red Cross throughout his incarceration.
But Shalit was a hostage, kidnapped in an act of illegal aggression by an organisation whose aim is the destruction of Israel and which allowed him not one visit by the Red Cross during his five year incarceration.
By contrast, the released Palestinians have not just been tried and punished according to due process of law, but include among their number not just those who have committed some of the worst terrorist atrocities in Israel’s history - such as the blowing up of Sbarro’s pizza restaurant in Jerusalem, where 16 people were murdered including five members of the Schijveschuurder family - but even worse, some of the masterminds behind such atrocities.
Some families who have lost loved ones in these terror attacks have welcomed the deal; they say they did not want the Shalit family to suffer as they themselves have suffered. But for other families bereaved by these murders, the anguish is unbearable.
Watching the murderers of their loved ones walk free to a rapturous reception in Gaza and the West Bank and listening to their gloating satisfaction at having taken the lives of Israeli innocents, these families feel as if they have been brutally abandoned by a society for which justice cannot be allowed to get in the way of emotion.
For these suffering relatives, it is almost as if today they are being forced to endure yet another bereavement.
But then, the equivalence being drawn in the coverage of this deal reflects in turn the morally bankrupt ‘tit-for-tat’ analysis of the Arab war against Israel employed by so many in Britain and the west.
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For whenever Israel points out that any military action against the Palestinians is only in response to Palestinian attacks, many in Britain claim that those Palestinian attacks were only in response to previous Israeli attacks. Thus Israel is always painted as the ultimate aggressor.
This is entirely false. From the moment Israel was re-established in 1948, it has only ever launched military operations against the Arabs in response to actual or imminent Arab attacks. Yet many in Britain refuse to acknowledge the difference between murderous aggression and the defence against it.
They refuse to acknowledge that Hamas sets out to murder as many young Israelis as possible, whereas Israel goes to great lengths (not always successfully) to avoid civilian casualties.
They refuse to acknowledge that the aim of every single military operation by Israel in Gaza is to defend and protect itself against attack by a fanatically Jew-hating enemy pledged not only to destroy Israel but to wipe out every single Jew on earth.
The refusal to acknowledge this crucial moral difference has meant that many in Britain and the west view Israel as the aggressor in the conflict, and the victimisation of Israelis is largely glossed over.
Tragically, however, in the years to come Israel may come to realise that it paid for the life of Gilad Shalit with the blood of further murdered Israelis and the lifelong torment of their families.
Yet no-one should underestimate the extreme difficulty of the decision Netanyahu was forced to take in this case.
As so often in Israel, he was between a rock and a very hard place. However he resolved the Shalit dilemma, it would have been a terrible decision.
For Jews, the diabolical nature of this kind of choice – weighing up the sacrifice of one of your own against the sacrifice of others of your own– has a terrible historical resonance.
For during the Holocaust, a particularly sadistic torment inflicted by the Nazis upon their Jewish victims was to force them to choose which of their children or loved ones to sacrifice in order to save others from gas or bullet.
The Holocaust happened because the world looked the other way until it was too late. It abandoned the Jews to meet their fate and be forced to make these infernal choices alone. And now the world is abandoning Israel to meet its fate and be forced to make these infernal choices alone.
Sure, America helps arm Israel in order that it may defend itself against otherwise insuperable odds. But at the same time, the west forces Israel to remain trapped in a permanent war that the west ensures Israel cannot win.
Prisoners wave as they are driven to meet their loved ones as part of the exchange deal
For Israel’s fate is to live cheek by jowl with people pledged to destroy it. Armed to the teeth, Israel will however never unleash its full military power against those people because it is constrained by Jewish ethics.
The result is that it deals more scrupulously and humanely with its mortal enemies - and takes more punishment as a result - than any other nation on earth.
The Arabs know this and take full advantage of it, launching attacks in order to present Israel with the choice between abandoning its own victims - as has effectively largely happened in the rocket-bombarded south of Israel - and taking military action, which will inevitably result in some civilian casualties and thus not only earn the opprobrium of the double-standard applying world but, more lethally, destroy Israel’s own belief in itself.
To their eternal shame, Britain and the west have allowed themselves to be manipulated by this cynical strategy in the cause of genocide.
These false friends leap to defame, demonise and delegitimise Israel by denouncing its military actions as illegal, aggressive or disproportionate – thus in effect trying to paralyse its attempts to defend itself against attack, while simultaneously forcing it to surrender to its enemies through the appeasement process.
The outcome is that Israel is now trapped between Hamas, Fatah, Hezbollah, Iran, Syria, Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea – and yet is blamed for preventing peace by building apartments in the suburbs of Jerusalem.
The infernal choice it was forced to make over Gilad Shalit was thus but the latest and most dramatic example of how the west has abandoned Israel to swing in the wind.
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