Have you read the November 9 New Yorker article on Gaza yet? Kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit is the centerpiece, used as a metaphor by each side. For Israelis he represents the inhumane lawlessness of Hamas in Gaza, for Palestinian Arabs, he’s but one man isolated from his family, like all of Gaza is from the whole world. To me his kidnapping is another example of Arab response to nobody taking their case seriously. Yassir Arafat would order the hijacking of a commercial airplane. Now it’s Shalit upon whom all of Israel, and through Israel all the world, is focused. Hamas wants for his return fourteen hundred individuals, four hundred and fifty of whom have been convicted of terrorist killings. One Jew is equivalent to 1,400 Arabs? I’m surprised they admit it. The chief “negotiator” between Hamas and Israel is Osama Mozini, a professor of education at the Islamic University. The New Yorker reporter “asked him why he could not be more flexible in his negotiations for Shalit.”

Mozini began reciting the names of Gazan prisoners. Hassan Salameh, is serving forty-eight consecutive life sentences for recruiting suicide bombers. Walid Anjes helped plan the bombing of at least three devastating attacks. He has twenty-six life sentences. Abdel Hadi Suleiman Ghneim’s name came up. According to Mozini all he was doing was riding in a bus when he grabbed the steering wheel and took it over a cliff. (Mozini laughed at this point, apparently seeing the humor in the situation.) Sixteen people died, many others were wounded—including Ghneim who received a life sentence for every person who died on the bus. “These punishments struck Mozini as ludicrous.”

With such people Israel is supposed to negotiate? With Hamas whose charter maintains that “There is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by jihad”? The last time Israel bargained with kidnappers, it turned over a mass murderer and received in compensation the corpses of two Israeli soldiers. Israeli families, wanted their sons back for a decent Jewish burial, but from an objective viewpoint it’s lunacy to trade murderers for the bodies of people murdered. It can only encourage more cross-border kidnappings. Relatives of Palestinian prisoners have gone on record that more Israelis should be kidnapped to exchange for those in Israel’s jails. “Just outside Rafah, the smuggling capital of Gaza,” reports the New Yorker, “there is a billboard with a portrait of Shalit, behind bars, juxtaposed with a photograph of a masked Hamas fighter. The Arabic text declares, ‘Your prisoner will not have safety and security until our prisoners have safety and security.’”

In fact, the Arabs who say, as does Ahmed Yousuf, Hamas’s Deputy Foreign Minister “We are all Shalits” are right. They are prisoners, but not of Israel, but of their own rage. Rockets raining down on Israeli towns, suicide bombers blowing up pizzerias are actions met with incarceration. Israel is also prisoner of Arab extremists. It’s like the cancer patient whose disease is being treated as chronic. It’s not too bad today, but what will tomorrow’s test results indicate? When will the next plane explode, the next suicide murderer detonate himself killing innocents who are merely riding a bus or crossing a street. To the bomber there are no innocents. Like Shalit everyone in Israel, whether citizen or tourist is part of the occupiers who must be driven into the sea and if the world will not provide us with warplanes and tanks, we’ll do it our way.

The paranoids who control the Muslim world in their grip with their grudges, imposing their fundamentalist religious beliefs, would rather die than concede that Allah has returned Israel to the Jews. They talk of al-Nakba, the calamity. But the real calamity is war and grudges and kidnappings and rockets and suicide bombings all for nothing, for nothing except more blood, Jewish and Arab. Tom Friedman was right in last week’s Times. Nobody over there wants peace; it’s all a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. As Yousuf, the Hamas Deputy Foreign Minister says, “we are all Shalits,” to which I add, “caught in a world of madness unimagined even by Kafka.”