Stephen Flatow, father of terrorist victim Alisa Flatow, says, “Sometimes we must swap living people for dead bodies.”
July 31, 2008
As the father of a terrorism victim, Stephen Flatow watched Israel’s exchange with Hizbullah this month with a mixture of disappointment, resignation, and measured pride.
The West Orange attorney, whose daughter Alisa was killed in a Gaza bus bombing in 1995, knows the high price of the exchange that brought home to Israel the bodies of Israeli reservists Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser in exchange for five Lebanese prisoners and the remains of some 200 Arab militants.
Such lopsided deals, he said, leave Hizbullah “laughing up its sleeve.”
And yet he is also proud of Israel’s ethic of assuring soldiers’ families that they will never abandon their loved ones in the field.
Ultimately, said Flatow, this month’s exchange was “a mistake we had to make, if only to reinvigorate Israeli youth with a desire to fight for their country.”
To Flatow, the Israeli side of the equation includes “more than concern about soldiers’ bodies being returned. It suggests that the Israeli government is saying to its troops: ‘We will do everything we can to make you proud of us, too.’”
Flatow has a special connection to Israel’s fighting forces. His 25-year-old son Etan, who made aliya in 2005, is a recently inducted member of the IDF.
‘A lot of people are saying, “We have no choice. We have to show our people we care.”’
“We don’t worship death. We worship life,” Stephen Flatow said. “We have to be the best possible people we can be. If that means we sometimes swap living people for dead bodies, sometimes we have to do it.”
It goes to a person’s sense of worth, he said.
“If I knew that my well-being or even my body is valuable to you and you will spare no effort to protect me — or to bring me back in the worst-case scenario — then I will feel better about what I am willing to do for you.”
As a father who still grieves for his murdered daughter, Flatow said he looks at the suffering of the Regev and Goldwasser families and sees “no closure for the parents.”
But, he said, in one sense “there might be some closure” for Karnit Goldwasser, who lobbied tirelessly for news of her husband and whose confirmed status as a widow would allow her under Israeli law eventually to marry again.
Hero’s welcome
Flatow said he is encouraged by the work of German intermediaries whose contacts with Hizbullah helped broker the exchange.
But, he said, the Iranian-backed Shiite militia is “rebuilding, and now they supposedly have four times as many missiles as they had during the war two years ago. This was a hard deal for Israel to make, and I suspect Hizbullah is still laughing up its sleeve.”
Indeed, Hizbullah staged a hero’s welcome for released prisoner Samir Kuntar, who had been serving multiple life terms in Israel for the shocking killing of a four-year-old girl, her father, and a police officer.
Like many diligent observers of Israeli politics and diplomacy, Flatow is now focusing on the moves Hamas might make over demands to free another IDF captive, Gilad Shalit.
“What I think we have to look at is the impact on Israel’s will to survive. A lot of people in Israel and here in the States are saying, ‘We have no choice. We have to show our people we care.’
“The question is do you draw a line in the sand? That is an answer I struggle with whenever I see the Prison Authority is going to release a group of prisoners. It just brings a lump into my throat,” he said.
One big concern is the possible release of the two men imprisoned for the bus attack that killed Alisa Flatow.
Because they were members of Islamic Jihad — not Hamas — Flatow said, he doesn’t know to what degree Hamas leaders in Gaza would seek their release.
But if the two Palestinians were released in a prisoner swap, Alisa’s father said he would weigh the trade-off.
“I would judge that in the aftermath of what we just went through and what we are going to go through with the release of Shalit,” he said, “and if there are concrete results in terms of a peace effort beyond the exchange.”
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