Synagogues in Israel and throughout the world have developed the custom to recite a special prayer every Shabbat on behalf of the captured, missing, and kidnapped Israeli soldiers whose fate is unknown, some for more than 20 years. The past 18 months alone have seen the abductions of Gilad Shalit by Hamas in Gaza and Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev by Hizbullah.

Tragically, given the apparent value placed on human life in the Islamists' world, these captured soldiers, barring a miracle, seem unlikely to ever be returned to their loved ones — certainly not alive.

War by its nature involves the killing of enemy soldiers. Since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 ending the Thirty Years War, however, the convention was established that following a war, prisoners were exchanged. In addition, those captured during the war were held as enemy combatants, and "cared for" until their release.

Chapter II of the Annex to the Hague Convention in 1907 formalized the treatment of POWs. Article 4 of the 1929 Geneva Convention and its 1949 revisions made explicit the ban on the torturing of POWs. It sought to protect combatants, guerrilla fighters, and even some civilians. This is not to suggest that in the intervening period many nations at war — including the Germans, the Japanese, and the Soviets — did not violate these conventions. Similarly, during the Vietnam War, there were repeated reports of prisoner abuse and torture.

Nevertheless, until recently there was an understanding, even under the Nazis, that the tens of thousands of captured POWs were to be treated with appropriate attention and minimal care.

War in the Middle East in general, and especially involving the Israelis and its Arab neighbors, has frequently marched to a different beat, especially on the Arabs' side. While the confrontation between Iran and Iraq produced thousands of POWs who were exchanged at the end of the 10-year conflict, hostilities with Israel have always produced mixed responses. The more formal wars have ended with a prisoner exchange. In the case of smaller confrontations and skirmishes, Israel has repeatedly been forced into exchanges that were either grotesquely one-sided or grossly unsatisfactory.

Of course, the United States and Israel do not have pristine records in their own treatment of POWs, captured terrorists, and/or enemy combatants. Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and the rendition policy employed by the U.S. government during the Iraq War alone leave huge questions as to how the United States is treating captured Iraqi soldiers and suspected terrorists. The U.S. Supreme Court has raised numerous questions concerning possible denial by the Bush administration of civil and procedural rights to alleged terrorists being incarcerated by the United States.

Similarly, Israel has a long record of imprisoning Palestinians without trial. None of these actions is comparable to the beheading and murder of alleged spies or informants, but it is hard to justify — especially for a democratic society — policies that deny habeas corpus or the fundamental right to trial. While Israel may well feel that the release of many of those currently held in Israeli prisons will only enhance and reinvigorate the ranks of the enemy, "rational" Arabs could argue the same about the Israeli POWs.

Nor do the United States, Israel, and many other countries have blameless records on their treatment or torture of POWs. The former president of the Israeli Supreme Court, Aharon Barak, has addressed this matter repeatedly. A number of Israeli high court decisions criticized the extensive detention and abuse of prisoners by security forces.

And yet in the case of the missing Israeli soldiers, their captors refuse to acknowledge their existence, their whereabouts, and their condition.

Clearly many in the Arab world believe that human life (even the lives of innocent Muslims) may be expendable. Suicide bombings — in Israel, Iraq, or Afghanistan — that frequently kill, wound, or maim innocent Muslims, including women and children, become the reasonable costs in their holy war. The execution of Daniel Pearl and other journalists and observers clearly cannot be equated with those apprehended in actual, suspected, or alleged terror incidents, or even those captured in battle between belligerents.

This cavalier attitude toward human life suggests the regressive steps that the world has taken in how war is waged. Some states use human shields to protect soldiers in combat; some military forces accept suicide bombings of innocent civilians as a permissible form of warfare, and some governments believe that "enemy combatants" can be tortured or denied fundamental civil and procedural rights. All of this suggests, unfortunately, that some states are comfortable with the old fashioned war cry of yesteryear, "take no prisoners."