Gilad Shalit's Plea for Freedom: Nervous, Quiet, Worried in Tel Aviv

Unless you have been living under a rock in Tel Aviv you definitely hear, see and FEEL the quiet nervous tension here. This quiet two minutes and forty second plea for freedom was streamed on TV and computer screens like a thunder bolt in mid-summer. The first few seconds after he finished was the most silent Tel Aviv has been in a long time. Than came the whispers and interpretations. What can you say to a prisoner held for four years? What can you tell the family? What should the government do? Tzipi Livni more than two years ago blurted out in anger something like "we are not going to bow down to the Palestinians on the count of one..." Immediately Olmert, Ashkenazi, Barak and everyone you can think of wanted to hit Livni on the head with a baseball bat (OK we don't have baseball here, we can find a bat somewhere.) But there was something to that blurb that is finally sinking in for Israelis and Palestinians: nobody wants to back down and look like a loser. The Israelis are not willing to let murderers out just to be treated like heroes in Gaza. The Palestinians are not willing to settle for not getting everyone out of prison, specially their big heroes. Shalit sits in a hole just beyond our reach. To most at first impression he "looked good". But the way he looked did not calm the nervousness. Just seeing this face reading quietly a simple speech [video/transcript] made everyone's hair stand in the back of his neck.

I think you know things are bad when nobody talks about it. The old white elephant in the middle of the room, the king walking naked in the middle of the street, Shalit still "there" four years later. The situation indicates two big shifts in attitude in Tel Aviv:

1) Israelis are no longer willing to trade Palestinians at any price. If we "JUST" get Shalit without a complete stop to terrorism "they" are not going to get the "very bad ones". (Israelis are not willing to release mass murderers which for the Palestinians are heros)

2) Israelis can be silent and tolerant for a long long time. We can take stress, we can take Iranian presidents on TV, we can take Nasrala and Haniya on TV. We can take silence from Ashkenazi and Bibi... few remember 8 years of shelling from Gaza, Israelis remember.

I am not sure if this indicates strength or weakness of character. It does indicate that the situation with the Palestinians is acceptable, we can live with it, let them have what they bargained for and see what happens... This goes for the Palestinians, the politicians, the generals and their soldiers, the Americans the Arab countries buzzing with all kind of publicity stunts from Saudi Arabian sheiks to Iranian heads of state. Tel Aviv can live with the stress and the media attacks. Israelis are also willing to live with Gaza as an isolated island of poverty, crime and hatred. We can somehow deal with the attacks and with the insane ethics. We can also deal with a prisoner four years in a hole in the middle of that crazy place called Gaza. The sad part is how the Palestinians also learned to live with the situation. Their leaders are clearly convinced of their position. They are morally right and take a look at all the reports coming from the UN and every other organization out there. As if the people writing the reports in New York or Paris living better than more Israelis can change the daily life of Palestinians. Eventually, the Palestinian leaders tell their people: they will be free, strong and most of all ethically right. In the mean time, Gaza will be what it is. It seems like someone has mistaken freedom and morality with reality. Or maybe they have not...

I don't write about politics and security topics. Not because I don't have an opinion, it is just covered, ground to a fine dust, reconstituted and once again ground so much, that people sometime forget the real people living in Tel Aviv. Real people that for the most part do not care much what politicians and government bureaucrats say and do. But do care about their life and how they are perceived. They care about their children going to war. They care about how they are perceived in a horrible light just to make headlines for CNN and BBC. Israelis know how to worry, they have done it for more than a century, they also know morality probably better than most UN investigators and legal analyzers. The also know something else - when people shoot, bomb, lie, curse and for the most part want you dead, you better raise a gun and start shooting. This was true to Israelis long before the Palestinian organized their terrorist organizations. Nasrala and Haniya may forget the Israeli history, but there are plenty here who have been on the land for three, four and five generations. If pushed, Israelis will continue to worry, get gray hairs, and ignore the big white elephant in the middle of the room. Finally, I do not think that Shalit looked good. His teeth did not look good, most prisoners in Arab countries going back to Syria and Egypt have lost their teeth. He did not looked well fed. He certainly did not sound good. That shy little smile when he said "I am being treated excellent" gave it all away. If you are an American and you have lived long enough you may remember the Vietnam prisoner of war tapes, take a look again if you are young or don't remember.