GSS Head: Public Pressure Encouraged Hamas to Keep Gilad Shalit

Yuval Diskin, respected chief of Israel’s Security Agency (Shabak), says that the misguided, open-ended public support for Gilad Shalit ended up hurting him. He said that when he traveled to Egypt in 2009, at the end of Ehud Olmert’s term as prime minister to finalize a deal for Shalit, “the Hamas people in the delegation didn’t want to stop upping their demands at any point. They knew with certainty that no matter condition they would set, the public pressure [in Israel] would force us to accept it. At a certain point, I understood that this had become a slippery slope.”



For much of 2009, Israel was divided by the controversy over what price to offer for Shalit’s return. Many on the left said Shalit had been sent by the IDF and that it was therefore Israel’s responsibility to release even 1,000 terrorists or more for his return. Others said that the release of so many murderous terrorists was a price Israel could not afford to pay.

Back in July 2009, taking the approach that Yuval Diskin took this week, Moshe Feiglin of the Likud’s Manhigut Yehudit (Jewish Leadership) faction wrote, “We can safely say that whoever demands to free Gilad ‘at any price’ is actually sentencing him to death. I hope that I am wrong, but the real meaning of ‘any price’ is that there is no price. The terrorists understand that time is on their side. The more cruel they are, the more they conceal information, and even if they, G-d forbid, murder their captive and bargain for his body, the price that they will exact from Israel will only rise.”

Diskin was speaking last night at a memorial ceremony for the long-time editor ofYediot Acharonot, Dov Yudkovsky. His term in office will end this May, and by law he may not enter politics for three years afterwards.
Diskin also explained that Anat Kam and Ha'aretz journalist Uri Blau, who collaborated in the publishing of secret IDF documents, had “crossed a red line in doing so. It’s one thing to write an article, but to publish the documents themselves was beyond the pale… When we saw that there had been a leak from the army, we suspected that this was just the tip of the iceberg – and we were not mistaken.”