Israel's Three Abducted Boys

When A Crime Becomes An Act Of War: Israel’s Three Abducted Teenage Boys

Reflections over events of the past week

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

June 19, 2014

When teenagers are kidnapped, it’s a crime.

Unless you are dealing with Israel. Then the situation becomes not criminal, but political.  In the Middle East, the abduction of teenagers isn’t merely a crime of passion or even revenge between feuding street gangs.  There it is an act of out and out war.  The teens are taken as hostages, pawns in diplomatic negotiations on a world stage.

A week ago, three Israeli teenage boys, Eyal Yifrah, Gil-Ad Shaer and Naftali Frenkel, were abducted by Arab terrorists.  The three are being held as hostages—assuming, please God, that they are still alive.

In any civilized country, the taking of teenage hostages is a crime.

In the Middle East, however, it’s an act of self-defense against an occupying power.  At least that’s how Haneen Zoabi, Member of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, excused the abduction.  In Israel, of course, she can say that without fear of persecution—she is a member of the Knesset, after all, not to mention citizen of the only democracy in the Middle East—Israel.

But aside from the histrionics, what are the terrorists really going to accomplish by their criminal act?

They’re getting world attention.  The number of “likes” for them goes up in the social media and along with that also monetary donations and support of international NGO’s.   It took the European Union five days before it condemned the abduction of the Israeli teens. 

What made these teens “legitimate” victims is that they go to school in Gush Eztion, near Hebron, part of the area that the world expects Israel to give the Palestinians in return for peace. 

The two-state solution is seen as panacea not only for the region’s political woes.  For some, it is key to the establishment of a new world order, a world at peace.  For some, it represents peace in our own time.

But we’ve heard that naïve rationale before, right before World War Two, right before the Holocaust.

The truth is that this war crime, this abduction of three teenage boys, isn’t about settlements or liberation from foreign occupation.  These so-called “freedom fighters” aren’t fighting for anyone’s freedom.  They are terrorists who have taken a vow to the death—a vow to see nothing less than all of the State of Israel destroyed. 

Of course, in this battle that’s being fought all over the media, Israel has to be at its most ethical.  Israel must always answer to a higher standard.  Because Israel is a democracy, and it prides itself on its higher sense of morality.

In response to the abduction, Israel has held intensive searches.   It has arrested hundreds of suspects, including about thirty of the 1,027 it had traded for Gilad Shalit less than three years ago.  Shalit, just to remind you, was abducted by Hamas and held hostage in total isolation for five years, without any contact with the outside world.  Not through the Red Cross, not through the Pope, not through the UN or the World Court.

Unlike the three kidnapped boys, the prisoners Israel just took for interrogation will be arraigned in court and detained in prisons where they will be observed and monitored, visited by the Red Cross, where they will even have television privileges.  Because Israel prides itself on the fact that within its borders, laws of justice prevail over the laws of vengeance.

The human drama waged by the terrorists is made more complex by the increase in number of rockets fired by Hamas from Gaza into Israel.  Obfuscate the obvious.  Create a smoke screen for whatever may come next—negotiations or war. Either way, the terrorists think that they can win—in world opinion if not on the field.

And so the drama is all laid out again, not on the battlefield per se, but on our computers and hand-held screens.

But for the families of the abducted teenagers, the drama is not about war or peace.  For them it’s about hugging their sons.  For them, it’s about ever seeing their children alive again.

Unfortunately, in this terrible scenario some people see moral equivalence.  They perceive parallels between “freedom fighters” held in Israeli prisons and teenagers held as pawns by terrorist organizations.  The truth is different however.  The “freedom” the terrorists seek is not for a Palestine existing alongside Israel.  It’s for a completely Judenrein, Jewish-free, Palestine. 

For Israel, this isn’t about public opinion.  For Israel, this is about survival.  For Israel, the abduction of Eyal, Gil-Ad and Naftali is yet another violent act in an ongoing war to safeguard its existence.

We pray for the safe return of the three boys; we pray for their anguished families waiting anxiously for any bit of news about their loved sons.  We pray for the peace of Jerusalem.  We pray for peace.

(c) 2014 by Boaz D. Heilman