The Shalit Case Was Never Discussed, Because Nobody Trusted the Government to Discuss It

Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier, was captured by Hamas in 2006 and held for five years. In 2011 he was released in exchange for more than a thousand prisoners, many of them convicted of killing Israelis. For those five years the question of what price to pay for one soldier was the most emotionally charged question in the country.

I am not going to argue here whether the exchange was right. I want to write about something else: why the country was unable to have the discussion at all, and what that inability tells you about the system of government rather than about the case.

The Question That Existed

There was a real question. Any state that has soldiers will sometimes have captured soldiers, and it needs a policy: what it will pay, what it will not, and why. The considerations are genuinely hard. A high price brings a soldier home and tells the enemy that capturing soldiers is the most profitable thing it can do. A low price abandons a man the state sent into danger and tells the next conscript what he is worth. Released prisoners go on to kill again; a soldier left to die is a specific person with a specific family on the evening news.

Reasonable people could weigh these differently. A society could, in principle, argue the question through and arrive at a policy it was prepared to live with in advance, before the next capture, when no particular face was attached to it.

Israel did not do this. Instead it had a campaign.

What Happened Instead

The public overwhelmingly pressed the government to pay whatever was demanded. Tents outside the prime minister's residence, marches, a family that became a national institution. The pressure was for one outcome only: bring him home, at any price.

Notice what this pressure was not. It was not the result of the public having weighed the considerations above and concluded that a thousand prisoners was the right price. The considerations were barely discussed. Anyone who raised them in public was treated as heartless, and the discussion closed.

So why the pressure? Here is my answer, and it is the reason I find the case worth writing about.

The public did not trust the government to do the right thing on its own, and it had no way to participate in the decision except by shouting for one side of it. If you cannot take part in a decision, and you do not trust the people who will make it, the only lever you have is pressure, and pressure only works when it is one-directional. You cannot march for "weigh it carefully." You can only march for "bring him home."

Distrust Makes Deliberation Impossible

This is the general point, and it goes well beyond one soldier.

A representative regime asks the public to trust it with hard decisions and then makes decisions the public has reason to distrust. Governments have traded prisoners for political timing, have left soldiers in captivity when the exchange was inconvenient, and have paid prices for reasons that had nothing to do with the soldier. The public knows this. Its distrust is earned.

But distrust has a cost that is rarely named. A public that distrusts its government cannot deliberate, because deliberation requires believing that the conclusion will be acted on honestly. Why weigh the considerations if you suspect the decision will be made on other grounds? Better to push as hard as possible for the outcome you can at least see, and let the government's hidden calculations fight against your visible pressure.

That is what the Shalit campaign was. It was not a moral position. It was a rational response to a system that gave people no other move.

What a Direct Decision Would Have Changed

Suppose the question had been the public's to decide. Not this case alone, but the policy: what does the state pay for a captured soldier?

The pressure would have had nowhere to go, because there would have been nobody to pressure. The public would have been deciding for itself, and a public deciding for itself has to face the trade-offs, since it cannot outsource them to a government it can then blame. The arguments that were unsayable during the campaign, about deterrence, about released prisoners, about the next capture, would have had to be said, because someone would have had to vote on them.

I do not know what such a public would have decided. It might have decided to pay any price; publics have their own reasons and they are entitled to them. But it would have decided knowingly, and the decision would have been the country's rather than a concession extracted from a government by people who assumed it would otherwise do wrong.

The end of distrust is the beginning of discussion. Israel could not discuss the Shalit case for five years, and the reason was not that Israelis are incapable of moral reasoning. It was that the system gave them no reason to trust that their reasoning would matter, and a person whose reasoning does not matter stops reasoning and starts shouting.