Posted: 22 Oct 2011 11:33 AM PDT

Nir Volf
Israel Hayom
19 October ’11

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=1496

Four years ago, after a year and a half of media silence, and the sense that Gilad Shalit was starting to be forgotten, Noam Shalit enlisted the help of a public relations firm • That is how the abducted soldier became “everyone’s son.”

U.S. Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl was kidnapped by the Taliban exactly one week before the third anniversary of Gilad Shalit’s abduction by Hamas. Both Bergdahl and Shalit are the same age, but the similarities between them end there. While Shalit has returned home, the U.S. soldier is still in captivity in Afghanistan and nobody seems to care, not even after the Taliban has released five video clips of the soldier, the last one being in May. “It is no accident that most Israelis do not know this story and even that most Americans do not know this prisoner exists. And this is despite the fact that in the video clips released of him, he appeals, at the height of emotion, to his family and the U.S. government to release him in exchange for the release of prisoners from Afghanistan,” says Prof. Gabriel Weimann from the Department of Communications at the University of Haifa.

“Here enter the differences between the ‘people’s army’ which exists in Israel and is loyal to the doctrine of never leaving a soldier behind, and the U.S. Army which is certainly not what we would refer to as the ‘people’s army.’ In the U.S., serving in the army is a profession, people earn a salary and volunteer for army service as professionals, and therefore it makes sense that the Americans are less willing to intervene emotionally in the fate of a captured soldier. This is very unique to Israel, especially when you take into account that, rationally, the prisoner swap deal was not a good one. A deal in which 1,000 terrorists are released in exchange for a single man cannot be good, no matter how you choose to view it. Therefore, it becomes clear to us that it is impossible to take the rational approach here, and that the campaign for Shalit’s return appealed to the emotions of Israeli citizens.”

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