Starting this week, assuming the deranged surrender deal in Gaza proceeds, countless Israelis will walk among us unable to know their time is limited and their end will be horrific. For some, the end will come quickly; for others, it will arrive after kidnapping and an agonizing period of uncertainty.
Beyond being Jewish, or at least Israeli, their spectrum is broad: men, women, elderly, and children – some not even born yet. They are post-Zionist leftists, and also voters for Likud and Itamar Ben-Gvir, and they are all vegans. Or carnivores? It doesn't matter, they are all marked. All are about to be struck by a terrible blow, and they don't know it yet. That is, they know there's such a possibility – they are Israelis after all – but from the moment this deal takes effect, the certainty simply becomes more absolute.
This isn't a matter of over-dramatization. Nor is there any artificial pulling of emotional strings, already worn thin in a country experiencing a difficult and lengthy war. Heaven forbid. These are dry and cruel statistics, collected by past organizations and associations like Almagor Terror Victims Association, as well as by professionals in the field such as retired prosecutor Maurice Hirsch, and others.
Over the years, approximately 17,000 terrorists of various levels have been released early from Israeli prisons. Among other things, conditions included their commitment not to return to their evil acts – but in the end, surprise surprise, estimates of the rate of released prisoners returning to terrorism range between 50–80%.
For almost 500 days, in Israeli media and on social networks, it has been forbidden to state the obvious – that Islamist murderers who swore to kill Jews will almost certainly continue to kill Jews. Those who say this are denounced as racists, heartless, strange characters who believe in some bizarre theory that if crazed murderers are released, innocent Jews will be murdered. The facts, as usual, are the biggest enemy in the argument, and therefore irrelevant.
Musab Al-Hashlamoun was released in the Tannenbaum deal and orchestrated the murder of 16 Jews? Nonsense, these things happen. Salah Shehade was released and orchestrated dozens of attacks and the murder of Atzmona preparatory students? Merely circumstantial connection. Yahya Sinwar was released in the Schalit deal and orchestrated the largest massacre of the Jewish people since the Holocaust? Oh, come on, that's just a statistical deviation. Why dig into an imagined future reality? Where is your heart?
A towel – as Douglas Adams recommends in the bestseller "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" – is a product that will help you (among other things) escape the gaze of the "Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal," as it is "such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you." I remembered the towel and the monster after an in-depth article published a few months ago in Makor Rishon. The article revealed that over the years, the Israeli security establishment has made sure not to collect precise data regarding the rate of released prisoners returning to terrorism. Why? Make your own conclusions.
On this issue, that same lauded Israeli security establishment is certainly not a monster, but it is apparently no less stupid than that ravenous bug-blatter beast. Both, similar to an average 3-year-old child, believe that if you don't look at a problem – it simply disappears or somehow resolves itself. In any case, don't equip yourself with a towel – equip yourself with a weapon.
