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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27691 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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There isn't a new Israel/Gaza thread so I'm just going to ask here - does anyone know why exactly Israel agreed to exchange over a thousand Palestinian prisoners for Gilad Shalit? He doesn't appear to have been a particularly important or connected IDF soldier, and I've seen some commentary suggesting this deal may have greatly boosted the value of taking Israeli hostages for Hamas.

I've seen this incident mentioned before, but this is the first time it actually sank in. My first thought was that there must have been some bleeding-heart liberal in charge of Israel at the time, but Netanyahu was PM in 2011. This might be the most inexplicable decision a modern Western nation has made in my lifetime.

I honestly feel duped for spending any time at all in the last month trying to understand Israel-Palestine. Why should I care about Palestinian terrorists if Israel doesn't even care about Palestinian terrorists? The whole conflict is Kabuki theatre. Real people in a real conflict would never make such an absurd decision.

It's not like there aren't some good pragmatic reasons to make the swap. Keeping military morale very high is important for a country that is outnumbered, which may help to explain a "we will get you home by any means necessary" mindset toward captured soldiers.

I would expect having hundreds of extra murderous terrorists on the loose would be worse for morale. This isn't just theoretical. At least 6 Israelis were killed by prisoners released in the Shalit deal in 2014-2015 alone.

And that's just the first order effects. It's pretty likely that the moral hazard stemming from a policy of lopsided prisoner exchanges is what motivated the October 7th operation.

I would expect having hundreds of extra murderous terrorists on the loose would be worse for morale.

Maybe for civilian morale, but I imagine that for military morale what's more important is thinking that if you get captured you'll have a decent chance to be rescued or traded for the opponent's prisoners. Facing 11000 enemy soldiers rather than 10000 probably feels rather abstract to the individual soldier on the ground. Feeling like you won't be abandoned if you're unlucky enough to get captured probably feels very concrete to the individual soldier on the ground.

I'm very far from a soldier, but these kind of lopsided exchanges don't really work if soldiers actually get captured in large numbers. So at least for me, it would make me feel uneasy - in the only case were I'm actually likely to be captured (when many soldiers in general are captured), I'm extremely unlikely to be traded. On top, having to face more opponents seems pretty bad, too? But I'm admittedly a more abstract thinker in many ways.

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