Comment / Gilad Shalit and the changing concept of captivity

Captivity in the Israeli context is unfortunately not merely a legal or historical term, but a concept dependent on cultural shifts. The way it is perceived is derived from an appreciation of the contemporary system of values, beliefs and norms.

Since statehood, the norms and values that shaped the concept of captivity have certainly changed. The point of departure for a discussion, in its cultural aspect, is the prisoner's dilemma: The choice between surviving - which involves a level of condemnation - and complying with directives at the cost of perishing.

This dilemma has taken many different forms over the years. The ethos of fighting until the last round, which reigned undisputed during the country's early years, completely rejected the notion of surrender and served to delegitimize the captive. The surrender of the fighters of Kibbutz Nitzanim in June 1948 led to the publication of "Combat Page" by Abba Kovner, communications officer for the Givati brigade.

Kovner, a founder of the Vilna ghetto underground, became the distinct spokesman for the ethos of fighting to the last round. He ended his call with the words: "It is better to fall in the home trench than surrender to a murderous invader. To surrender while the body is alive and the last round still breathing in the cartridge spells both disgrace and death!"

The heritage of Uri Ilan - who committed suicide in a Syrian prison in 1955, leaving behind a note reading: "I did not surrender" - repeated this message of preferring the collective and its interests over the individual's right to life.

But the Yom Kippur War was a turning point. The ethos of fighting to the last round of ammunition was cracked. Instead of this ethos, an alternative tradition developed of preferring the individual right to life, and subsequently the legitimacy of choosing to become a prisoner of war. It was no accident that the captives of the Yom Kippur War did not rush to publish their memoirs. Many decided to remain captives of the Uri Ilan ethos. They held their tongues about their stories from captivity until they felt Israeli society was prepared to understand their choice of life over fighting until the very end. Only during the last decade have we witnessed a cascade of autobiographies by those captives.

During the 1980s and 1990s, another major shift occurred. The captive's right to life as an absolute issue became a quasi-economic question. The term "prisoner exchange deal" led to a debate on the "payment" which needed to be made for a prisoner. The legitimacy of falling captive, the emergence of a recognition of the individual's right to life and the state's subsequent responsibility to retrieve its captives were all made clear in the Jibril deal, and culminated in the Second Lebanon War. In that war, one of Israel's stated goals was the retrieval of its captives.

The dilemma regarding the release of Gilad Shalit and his personal right to life requires an understanding of the sum of shifts that have occurred over the years in Israeli society regarding the value of human life. The appreciation of human life and what concessions it justifies cannot be deduced from the past, nor from future questions about values. It stems directly from the system of beliefs and values here and now. The vote for Shalit's release is an expression of society's recognition of life as a supreme value, for the time being, at the end of the first decade of the millennium.

The writer is a cultural and national security researcher at Hadassah College Jerusalem and Bar-Ilan University.