The Highjacking of Sentiment

The Israeli public simply does not know how to speak up for itself. And the stakes are nothing short of existential. The latest outrage is the mass prisoner release of a thousand terrorists including one of the most bloodthirsty and dangerous animals ever to be captured by Israel, Samir Kuntar.

In 1979, Kuntar, accompanied by three other terrorists, shot 28-year-old Danny Haran in the head, killing him in front of his four-year-old daughter, Einat. Kuntar then bludgeoned Einat to death against the rocks on Nahariya's beachfront. Danny's wife, Smadar Haran, was able to hide in a crawl space above the bedroom of their home with her two-year-old daughter, Yael, and a neighbor. Tragically, trying to keep her infant daughter quiet while hiding from the murderers, Smadar accidentally suffocated Yael . Kuntar has spent the last 29 years in Israeli prisons, and has never stopped bragging about his brutal atrocity.

Kuntar and his ilk, walking time bombs of murderous terror, are being given their freedom in exchange for the corpses of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev. The message for Hamas? No need to keep Gilad Schalit alive. Israel will pay a premium just to get corpses back. The message for kidnapping? Oh, how it pays! Jewish blood? Cheap. Jewish bones? These will give you influence. These will free your murderers.

It's hard to identify the more contemptible in this episode. 22 cabinet members proved too weak-willed or demagogic to sympathetically but firmly stand up to the families of the kidnapped - and protect the rest of us. Then there is the prime minister, who waited to ascertain which way the political winds blew, who waited for the large majority of the cabinet to make their choices, before voicing his support for the swap. Either way, Ehud Olmert is no leader and has no business making critical decisions that will have repercussions - deadly repercussions - on those who will be kidnapped and those who will be blown apart by missiles. There is no doubt that Hizbullah, Hamas, Fatah, Al-Qaeda, and Iran will be emboldened.

So many of us flew the flags bearing the faces of Goldwasser, Regev, and Schalit on our cars. How many of us thought that our moral support for these kidnapped victims would be exploited and rechanneled into a political sham that rewards terrorism and ultimately puts us all in much greater danger?

To Ehud Olmert, Tzipi Livni, Haim Ramon, Ehud Barak, Shaul Mofaz, Eliyahu Yishai, Ariel Atias, Ruhama Avraham Balila, Ami Ayalon, Minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, Yacov Ben-Izri, Yitzhak Cohen, Avi Dichter, Jacob Edery, Rafi Eitan, Gideon Ezra, Isaac Herzog, Raleb Majadele, Meshulam Nahari, Meir Sheetrit, Shalom Simhon, and Yuli Tamir: You voted to free murderers who declared that they will murder again. You violated every standard of propriety and responsibility to defend this land and its citizens. You are not worthy to make any claim to leadership or to authority. When the next soldier or civilian is kidnapped, it will be your fault as much as any of the actual perpetrators. YOU let them know that their strategy of murder and psychological torment works. You have opted for popularity over duty, political expediency over responsibility. You could not face down the families, the press, the short-sighted. You are abject failures as representatives of our interests and have earned any agony that this decision will cause you.

To the parents and spouses who demanded that Israel pay any price for your peace of mind. You condemned future Israeli lives not for the lives of your loved ones, but for their bones. To gain closure, you became the mouthpieces of their murderers as you relegated other parents and spouses to the same unspeakable hell you have endured. Yes, you were in pain when you did this, you were weak from psychological agony. But you must have known that you were being played. Your part in appeasing the kidnappers has insulted the legacy of your loved ones. Unfortunately, history will remember them as unwilling and passive pawns in this tragic and cowardly action.

To Roni Bar-On, Ze'ev Boim, and Daniel Friedmann. Thank you for voting against this terrible blunder. You were the few in the cabinet who showed the presence of mind and the integrity that your positions in government demanded. And yet I am convinced that most Israelis realize, as do you, the catastrophe this deal constitutes, to assuage today's morbid grief at the cost of tomorrow's lethal barbarity.

Unfortunately, our system of government as a whole, with its basis in proportional representation, does not respect the concept of serving, and in this case protecting, any general public. It is rooted in the mediocre concept of cynically manipulating interest groups with a prime directive of amassing political power for power's sake.

Definition of "clueless"; see "Livni"

The more the Israeli political elite opens its collective mouth in mock self-criticism, the more it proves how clueless are its members about true democracy. Tzipora Livni's pronouncements at Tel Aviv University last Monday ("Livni: Israel on quick path to anarchy," Jerusalem Post, 23 June 2008) provided a memorable example.

Livni astutely bemoaned the public's "collective feeling that demonstrates a lack of public faith in elected officials." Had she stopped there, she would have merely placed herself in the company of demagogic politicians who state the obvious in order to gain popularity points. But she felt compelled to venture outside the confines of reason by adding her prescription for restoring public faith. "The elected official must get to know his office, to talk with the office workers, to try and create reforms if change is needed."

No, Tzipi. The first step towards restoring the public's faith in its public servants is not making your office a happy place for the grunts. In a democracy, the public's faith is maintained when a clear, honest effort is made to address public concerns. The public is a lot less concerned with your office politics than it is with your accountability and your effectiveness in matters of national policy.

Political corruption and incompetence in our government stem from the disconnect of elected officials from any semblance of a public constituency. For this, we can thank proportional representation and the parliamentary executive system, which are based on the defacto foundations of Israel's governance: sectarian entitlements and party hegemony. Your own political sense, Tzipi, is so compromised that you can't perceive two democratic absolutes: the public has a right to be heard and the Israeli public should have final say over who writes their laws and executes policy.

We can rehabilitate our democratically-challenged elite by reforming our system of elections and governance with two philosophical foundations: the individual, direct accountability of every elected official to a public constituency and public service in a professional executive bureaucracy. Integrity and merit in public service, not officeplace interpersonal feng shui, restore public faith in elected officials.