Free 100 Terrorists to Save a Jew Today and Sacrifice 100 Jews Tomorrow

The Maxim restaurant in Haifa overlooks the sea. The owner is a Christian Arab and it is a well-known meeting point for Jews, Christians and Muslims. October 4, 2003 is a sunny Saturday, the beach is crowded with the last bathers of the season, when a Palestinian Arab woman, Henadi Jaradat, arrives at the Maxim. An Arab waiter takes her order. The terrorist eats calmly, scrutinizes the Israeli families who are unaware of their last meal. Then she blows herself up. A massacre that destroyed entire families. The Zer-Avivs, the Bianos, the Almogs. Twenty-one dead, including 5 children.

The terrorist’s head with its ponytail splashes onto the sidewalk in front of the restaurant. Everywhere the remains of the victims: a shoe, a pack of cigarettes, a lipstick, a baby bottle... In one fell swoop the Zer-Aviv family was destroyed. Liran had just celebrated her fourth birthday. Noya was one year old. A neighbor of the Zer-Avivs will say: “When I saw that mass of children I recognized Noya’s baby bottle, those who know the life of the kibbutz know that the [child’s] name is engraved on the bottle.”

The terrorist who sentenced them to death by sending his cousin to blow herself up, Sami Jaradat, is a free man again this week.

The monstrous blackmail that Israel agreed to pay to the Gaza Jihad also feeds on the psychological torment of those who have returned. No other country would accept knowing that 251 of its citizens are experiencing all this.

And then there are the names that haunt a country, even after forty years have passed.

Ron Arad and Yishai Aviram jumped from their Israeli jet over southern Lebanon. An Israeli helicopter got close enough for Aviram, but only Aviram, to escape like in a movie: he grabbed the helicopter and held on tight as it flew home. It was October 16, 1986, and it was the last time Arad would be seen by another Israeli, dead or alive. Arad’s capture by Lebanese terrorists, the failed negotiations for his release, and his disappearance (he is said to have died in Iran) have haunted Israel, to this day. Ron was twenty years old and had a baby girl of a few months. Every year in Israel, on the day that commemorates Ron’s capture, thousands of blue balloons with the words “Free Ron Arad” fly into the sky.

7,747 Palestinian Arab terrorists were exchanged for 147 hostages or soldiers, alive or dead. In 2011, they exchanged 1,027 terrorists for a single Israeli. In the first phase of the agreement during the current war in Gaza, 1,904 Palestinians for 33 hostages.

Strange, is it not? No “disproportionate response” is mentioned in the U.N. or anywhere else. None of those who are as indulgent towards Hamas as they are critical of Israel, loudly proclaim that “a life is worth a life”, amazed by the terrible equalization of the restitution of an innocent civilian for thirty-two terrorists (for living soldiers, the price goes up).

In American author William Styron’s novel “Sophie’s Choice” (which was made into a film starring Meryl Streep), Sophie is forced to choose in Auschwitz which of her two children will be sent to the gas chamber and which one will survive. If she had refrained from choosing, both would have died.

Such is the nature of the choice Israel has faced in negotiating hostage deals since 251 people were kidnapped on October 7.

Abbas Muhammad Alsayd, released in 1996, has been implicated in three terrorist attacks, including the 2002 attack on a Passover Seder in Netanya, where numerous Holocaust survivors died.

In 1998, Iyad Sawalha was released as gesture of “goodwill”: in 2002 he detonated a bomb that killed seventeen people. And in 2003, Ramez Sali Abu Salmin was released: seven months later he blew himself up in a Jerusalem bar, killing seven people. They always return to terrorism.

Shin Bet director Ronen Bar presented the Israeli security cabinet with statistics indicating that “82 percent of those released in the Gilad Shalit deal in 2011 have returned to terrorism.”

The most infamous of the prisoners released in 2011 is of course Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and dozens of his men who have risen to the helm of the group in recent years. Hamas military leader Ahmed Jabari boasted at the time that terrorists released under the deal were responsible for the killing of 569 Israelis. Sinwar planned the October 7 deaths of 1,200 Israelis.

Among the Palestinian Arabs terrorists who Israel freed in 2011 to get back Corporal Gilad Shalit, a prisoner of Hamas for five years, were Abed al Hadi Ganaim, who threw an Israeli bus off a cliff, killing 16 people; Abd al Aziz Salaha, who hacked to death two Israeli reservists who had taken the wrong road in Ramallah (his are the bloodstained hands shown from a window in that infamous photograph) ; Musab Hashlemon, sixteen life sentences for two suicide bombers in Beersheba; Ibrahim Jundiya, twelve life sentences for the attack on the bus station in Jerusalem; Fadi Muhammad al Jabaa, eighteen life sentences for the massacre on a bus in Haifa; Husam Badran, who massacred twenty Russian children at the Dolphinarium in Tel Aviv and fourteen who were having lunch at the Matza restaurant in Haifa.

The Palestinian Arab terrorist was carrying a large bag he managed to get past the checks of the private guards at the entrance to the Park Hotel in Netanya. He took about fifty steps and, crossing the atrium, entered the dining room. There were dozens of people, entire families, many children. They were listening to the reading of the Hagadah.

The terrorist waited a moment before activating the detonator. The marbles and nails hidden in the bomb reached the furthest people. The hall was devastated, windows and glass doors were blown out, chandeliers were knocked off their hinges, half of the ceiling collapsed. A carpet of blood and human remains. An enormous pool of blood was created. A text from the Hagadah and a piece of matza, unleavened bread, were immersed in the pool, as in the worst proclamations of anti-Semitic propaganda.

Netanya is a favorite destination for elderly, religious Jewish immigrants. Thirty dead in an instant, many of them Holocaust survivors. It was the largest single massacre of Jews since World War II, at least until October 7. Rescuers found themselves faced with an indescribable scene. Dozens of bodies on the ground and their cell phones ringing wildly.

In 2011, Israel “pardoned” 924 life sentences to get back just one of its own. Now the question arises again: how many more will die for the release of three thousand Palestinian terrorists in exchange for hostages?

The first to understand how sensitive (to him, weak) Israeli public opinion is on the issue of hostages and missing in action was Ahmed Jibril, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. In 1978, Israel began a military campaign to drive Palestinian Arab terrorists out of southern Lebanon, from where they were launching deadly attacks against Israeli civilians.

Five Israeli soldiers, Avraham Amram and four others, were captured by the terrorists. When negotiations for the soldiers’ release began, the Israelis hoped to keep any exchange on one of two lines. An Israeli for an imprisoned terrorist. And be willing, if necessary, to exchange all Palestinian Arabs captured in this operation for Israelis captured in the same time frame. The PalestinianArab terrorists, led by Jibril, rejected the scheme. Eventually, the Israelis capitulated, exchanging 76 prisoners for Amram and the bodies of the others.

Jibril had learned an important lesson.

Jibril’s greatest success came halfway through 1985, when in exchange for three Israeli soldiers he demanded the release of 1,150 prisoners. The group included some of Israel’s most infamous terrorists, including Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin and Kozo Okamoto, a member of the Japanese Red Army who participated in the massacre of 26 Israelis in the arrivals hall of Lod airport in 1972. Ziad Nakhaleh, the current leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, was also released.

Two years after the exchange, the first Intifada broke out, in which the released terrorists played a key role. 160 Israeli civilians were killed.

In the period 1993-1999, 854 of the terrorists released under various agreements returned to killing.

In 2004, Israel freed 400 Palestinian terrorists in exchange for Elhanan Tannenbaum, who was held prisoner by Hezbollah, and the bodies of three soldiers kidnapped on Mount Dov. Former Mossad chief Meir Dagan said that one of those released in that deal, Luay Saadi, went on to create a terrorist cell that killed thirty Israelis.

The first Lebanon war in 2006 broke out with the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers: two years later, Hezbollah managed to exchange their bodies for living terrorists, including Samir Kuntar, the terrorist of the Nahariya massacre.

It was April 22, 1979, when Kuntar led a group of four terrorists who, leaving from Tyre on a rubber dinghy, landed at midnight on the beach of Nahariya. The four ran into an Israeli police officer whom they killed instantly. They entered a building at 61 Jabotinski Street and broke into the Haran family’s apartment. The terrorists took Danny hostage along with his four-year-old daughter Einat. The mother, Smadar, managed to hide in a loft above the bedroom with her two-year-old daughter Yael. Smadar later said: “I knew that if they heard Yael crying they would throw a grenade into our hiding place and kill us all. So I held my hand over her mouth and to keep her from screaming. Crouching in there, I remembered my mother’s stories of hiding from the Nazis during the Holocaust.”

Smadar caused her daughter to die of suffocation, realizing it only too late. In the meantime, Kuntar and his men dragged Danny and little Einat to the beach, where they engaged in a shootout with Israeli officers and soldiers. It was then that Kuntar shot Danny point-blank in the back in front of his daughter, dunking him in the sea to make sure he was dead. He then killed the little girl by smashing her skull against the rocks on the beach.

Samir Kuntar died a free man in Lebanon.

Thousands of terrorists freed between 1993 and 1999 took part in the Second Intifada, during which 1,500 Israelis were murdered.

David Applebaum, head of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Shaarei Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem, and his 20-year-old daughter Nava were murdered by a suicide bomber on September 9, 2003, while they were on their way to Café Hillel in Jerusalem. Nava was scheduled to be married the next day. The killer, Ramez Sali Abu Salim, of Ramallah, had been released from an Israeli prison in 2002.

Abdullah Abd Al Kadr Kawasme was arrested in 1988, following the murder of Israeli policeman Nissim Toledano and exiled. He was responsible for many terrorist attacks, including the infiltration of the Adura community on April 27, 2002, where four people were killed, including five-year-old Danielle Shefi. Kawasme was also responsible for the infiltration of the Carmei Tzur community on August 6, 2002, where three people were killed; two suicide bombings in Jerusalem on May 18, 2003, killing six people; and a suicide bombing in Jerusalem in June 2003, killing 17 people. Kawasme was finally eliminated by Israel on June 21, 2003.

In 2006, Gilad Shalit’s family began pressuring the government to agree to release their son. At the time of the Shalit affair, the names, faces and families of those who would be killed by some of the 1,027 Islamic terrorists released in exchange for Shalit over the next decade were not yet known.

And then came October 7, 2023. Of course, we now know the names, faces and families of those killed and of the 251 hostages kidnapped in an operation planned by the prisoners Israel released in 2011. What we do not know are the names, faces and families of those who will be killed in the next great massacre organized by those who are being released these days.

The adage says that history always repeats itself twice: the first time as a tragedy, the second time as a farce. For the Jewish people, history always repeats itself as a tragedy.