Yahye Ibrahim Sanwar participated in the kidnapping of IDF soldier Nachshon Waxman, who was murdered after several days in captivity in 1994. He was also convicted for the murders of two Palestinian Authority Arab men who were accused of cooperating with Israeli security forces to capture terrorists. Sanwar was given five life sentences, and has been in prison for 19 years.
Fatkhi Abu-Sheikh sent a suicide bomber to the Park Hotel in Netanya, where he carried out the notorious “Passover massacre” in which 30 Jews were murdered and 140 wounded, 20 of them seriously. He was given 29 life sentences, of which he has served six and a half years.
Abbas el-Said was the head of Hamas in Tulkarem. He initiated and planned the Park Hotel bombing and a bombing at the Sharon Mall in Netanya. He was sentenced to 35 lifetimes plus 50 years in prison, and has served six and a half years of his sentence.
Mohammed Arman planned three fatal attacks. He planned the attack on the Moment Cafe in Jerusalem that killed 11 young Israelis and wounded 54 others, the attack on Hebrew University that killed four Israelis and five foreign nationals and wounded 85 and the attack on a Rishon LeTzion pool hall that murdered 15 and left more than 50 wounded. He was sentenced to 35 lifetimes in prison and has served six years of his sentence.
Atiya Mohammed Warda sent three suicide bombers to attack Israelis. He sent two of the bombers to the Number 18 bus line in Jerusalem, one in February of 1996 and the other in March of the same year. The first attack killed 26 and wounded 48; the second attack killed 11 Israelis and eight foreign citizens, and wounded seven others. In addition, Warda sent a bomber to a hitchhiking post in Ashkelon, where he murdered one young woman and wounded dozens of others. Warda was given 48 life sentences and has been in prison for six years.
Hamas has refused to reduce its demands during more than two years of negotiations for Shalit's freedom. Negotiations have stopped and started repeatedly. Israeli diplomats recently accused the Egyptian team mediating the negotiations of failing to pressure Hamas into reducing its demands.
A ministerial committee suggested in 2007 that Israel change the definition of “blood on their hands” to include only those who personally murdered Israelis. The change would allow terrorists such as those above to be excluded from the category of “bloody-handed” terrorists and therefore to be released in prisoner exchanges. The change in definition faced opposition from several senior military and intelligence officials.
Despite opposition, Israel's negotiating teams have agreed to release a number of terrorists who were directly involved in fatal attacks. The offer was not good enough for Hamas, which insists that over 1,000 prisoners be released.
Professor Yisrael Aumann, a Nobel prize-winning expert in game theory, issued a highly emotional appeal last week calling on the government not to give in to Hamas' demands. Releasing more than 1,000 terrorists, including those responsible for dozens of murders, would be both immoral according to Jewish law and ineffective according to game theory, Aumann said. He criticized Defense Minister Ehud Barak and others for giving in to terrorists' demands in the past and thus making the negotiation for Shalit's release far more difficult.
Prof. Yisrael (Robert) Aumann said that agreeing to the ransom demanded by Hamas for the return of kidnapped IDF soldier Gilad Shalit - the release of over 1,000 imprisoned Arab terrorists - would be both contrary to Jewish morality and ineffective according to Game Theory, the research field in which the professor won a Nobel Prize in 2005.
Choking back tears at several points, Prof. Aumann was clearly emotionally distraught during his remarks before the Jewish Statesmanship Center For Strategic Planning (JSC) on Wednesday evening. His lecture focused on the morality of ransoming Jewish captives held by terrorist gangs, with specific emphasis on the Shalit case. Cpl. Shalit was kidnapped from a military base near Gaza over two years ago, in an attack that also killed two IDF soldiers. Negotiations for his release, mediated by Egypt, have broken down several times over Hamas demands that 1,500 terrorists - many of whom were directly involved in murdering Israeli civilians - go free in exchange for the kidnapped Israeli.
Aumann, whose son fell in battle during Israel's 1982 Peace for Galilee War, said that despite a deep identification with the pain felt by Shalit's family, paying the ransom demanded by the PA terrorists would be immoral. It was likely to cost Israel a greater price in human lives both through encouraging future kidnappers and through the acts of terrorism the released prisoners are likely to commit. Past experience shows that most prematurely-released terrorists return to lives of violence, once back in their home environment.
"I say the following things with awe and humility, with fear and trembling," began Prof. Aumann tearfully, "but they are things that need to be said." He went on to quote a statement made by Defense Minister Ehud Barak several days ago that public demonstrations over the negotiations for Shalit's release "do not contribute to reaching the goal and, to the contrary, distance the attainment of that goal." In response, Aumann continued reading, "the father [of Gilad] said that in Israel, redemption of captives is a supreme value." He sees himself as on the side of both Barak and Noam Shalit, Aumann said, "but the Defense Minister is correct."
Referring to passages from the Talmud discussing the matter, Aumann went on to explain that "the supreme value is not the redemption of captives. The supreme value is that there not be any captives. ...If the redemption of one captive will lead to three captives taken in the future, not to mention ten fatalities or more and dozens of wounded, then we have missed the mark. And then, it would be forbidden to redeem the single captive. Yes, forbidden."
Aumann's position on the ransom of captives is based not only on his understanding of rabbinical sources, but on his expertise in Game Theory. The analysis of the situation according to Game Theory, Aumann explained, coincided with the position of the sages of the Talmud and Maimonides, who determined that a captive should not be redeemed for more than his or her worth, in order to assure a functioning society.
'We Brought This Upon Ourselves'
"We have brought ourselves to this depressing situation," Prof. Aumann said of the ransom demands made by Hamas and the Lebanese Hizbullah. "We ourselves raised the cost. And the cost here is not in money, the cost is in souls, in fatalities, in wounded and in additional captives."
Aumann acknowledged that the Shalit family is acting as any family would in seeking all paths to obtain the release of their son, Gilad. "My claim is against our government," the professor said, "the government which brought us last summer the grotesque, shameful and criminally negligent exchange of murderous terrorists for dead bodies." In a deal reached between Israel and the Hizbullah in July of this year, the terror organization returned the bodies of IDF soldiers Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev in exchange for five Arab terrorists held in Israeli jails, as well as 199 terrorists' remains.
"Where were you then, Mr. Barak?" Prof. Aumann asked rhetorically. "Did you not understand that you were making the return of a live soldier to his family more remote, perhaps with no practical possibility to attain that goal? This cycle of terror has to come to an end. We must think about the future, not just about the present."
The Jewish Statesmanship Center For Strategic Planning is located in Kedumim, in the center of Samaria. It is an elite non-profit institution, aimed at creating an alternative, ideologically based intellectual and political leadership for the state of Israel. The center seeks to create a new national agenda, based on Jewish sources and what they see as "the historic mission of the Jewish nation."
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