The kidnappers of Gilad Shavit issued their demands for his release shortly after his capture:

Palestinian militants distributed a statement Monday saying they will provide information about a kidnapped Israeli soldier if Israel agrees to release all female prisoners and all children under 18 being held in Israeli jails.

Predictably, consistent with American media coverage of the crisis, CNN declined to provide any information about the imprisoned Palestinians referenced in the statement, while reporting in depth upon Shalit's predicament. Shalit inspires such empathy that someone has posted a Wikipedia article about him, an article that mentions the release offer, but, again, provides no link to additional information about the Palestinians prisoners held by Israel. CNN considered the Palestinian prisoners so inconsequential that it described the release demand as an opening gambit, as if the prisoners can be reduced to a strategem in a game of bridge.

So, exactly who are these people? Fortunately, the Guardian provides some insight:

Just as Israelis feel strongly about the fate of each soldier, Palestinians identify with the mass of security prisoners in Israeli jails, in part because so many families are affected.

Israel holds about 9,000 Palestinian prisoners. One thousand of them are detained without charge or trial, and often exist in a Kafkaesque world of having to prove their innocence without ever being told what it is they are accused of. Most of the remaining prisoners were tried by military courts that consider secret evidence.

In the turmoil of claims, Israel describes Cpl Shalit as a hostage because his captors want to exchange him for hundreds of Palestinian women and youths held by Israel.

But the Palestinians have learned to have long memories on these issues and are swift to point out that Israel's supreme court legalised hostage-taking in 1997 when it ruled that the government could hold "bargaining chips" - captured Lebanese - to swap for Israeli prisoners of war in Lebanon.

The decision was reversed five years later, but many Palestinians view their own prisoners as bargaining chips.

The military characterises Cpl Shalit's capture - in a raid in which Palestinian militiamen tunnelled into Israel and killed two other soldiers - as an act of war because Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip last October. But the Israelis themselves crossed the border just a couple of days before the corporal was taken to apprehend two Palestinian militiamen.

Disturbingly, according to James Brooks, Israel has forcibly incorporated the arrest and indefinite detention of Palestinians into Palestinian social life as an essential aspect of personal identity:

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert lost no time in exploiting Hamas' capture of an Israeli soldier to justify Israel's long-planned re-occupation of the Gaza Strip and mass arrest of the Hamas leadership. In his haste, he has inadvertently achieved a rare thing. He has managed to reduce the absurdity of Israel's position to a known ratio: 9000 to 1.

Nine thousand captured Palestinians languish in Israel's notorious "security prisons", including 380 children and 115 women. Every day Israeli troops and Border Police kidnap, interrogate, torture and imprison Palestinians, often by the dozen. The arrest raids never stop, regardless of summits, truces, or cease-fires. It is estimated that 650,000 Palestinians have been imprisoned by Israel since the current occupation began in 1967.

Arrest and incarceration is such a common experience that it has become a virtual rite of passage for Palestinian boys; men go to prison. In the past year we've read several reports of pre-teen boys, some as young as 8, approaching Israeli soldiers and asking, even begging, to be arrested.

But God forbid that even one of Israel's tender teen warriors should be captured in battle, as young Gilat Shalit was. That would be going too far. That would justify blowing up key bridges and destroying the electricity source of two-thirds of the Gaza Strip. Columns of invading tanks and scores of US-supplied jet fighters and combat helicopters would be required to hunt for the missing soldier, and attack the Palestinian Interior Ministry. From top to bottom, little Gaza would be subjected to yet another round of fierce shelling from land, air, and sea. All in a day's hunt.

Of course, Israel commonly permitted prisoner exchanges in return for their soldiers and the remains of them during the long conflict in sourthern Lebanon. So why has Israel undertaken a different approach in this instance, the grotesque imposition of collective punishment upon the population of Gaza? Sadly, Jonathan Cook may have accurately summarized the real goals of the operation:

First, Israel is determined to continue its campaign of impairing the Palestinian Authority's ability to govern. . . Hamas's electoral success has merely supplied Israel with the pretext it needs for launching its invasion and the grounds for demanding international support as it chokes the life out of Gaza. Israel doubtless hopes that at the end of this process it will be left with Abbas, a figurehead president backed into a corner and ready to put his name to whatever agreement Israel imposes.

Second, the attack on Gaza -- as ever -- is partly a distraction from the real battle. . . As Israel keeps all eyes directed towards the suffering in Gaza, it is starting to make significant moves in the West Bank and Jerusalem. It is preparing for the much-delayed evacuation of a handful of illegal West Bank hilltop settlements -- known in Israel as "outposts" -- demanded as the first stage of the implementation of the almost-forgotten US-sponsored peace process called the Road Map. . The loss of these outposts and a few larger settlements will pave the way for international acceptance of Olmert's convergence plan, his unilaterally imposed expansion of Israel's borders at the expense of a viable Palestinian state.

Equally significant are the overlooked manoeuvres Israel is undertaking in East Jerusalem as it beats a warpath towards Gaza. Last week Israel stripped four Hamas MPs of their right to live in East Jerusalem, effectively expelling them to the West Bank. It also showed that it could lock up them and dozens of other democratically elected Palestinian representatives with barely a peep from the international community.

As the four Jerusalem MPs' lawyers have argued, it is a nonsense that Israel allowed these Hamas politicians to stand in the recent elections and now, after their victory, it calls their membership of the party "support for terrorism". It is also a disturbing sign of how easily Israel will be able to begin ethnically cleansing East Jerusalem of its Palestinian inhabitants using the flimsiest of excuses.

And third, and perhaps most significantly of all, Israel is using the siege and invasion of Gaza as a laboratory for testing policies it also intends to apply to the West Bank after convergence. Gazans are the guinea pigs on which Olmert can try out the "extreme action" he has been boasting of.

The destruction of Gaza's power plant and loss of electricity to some 700,000 people; the consequent scarcity of water, build-up of sewage that cannot be disposed of, and inevitable spread of disease; the shortages of fuel and threats to the running of vital services such as hospitals; the sonic booms of Israeli aircraft that terrify Gaza's children and unpredictable air strikes that terrify everyone; the inability of Palestinian officials to run bombed ministries and provide services; the constant threat of invasion by massed Israeli troops on the "border"; and the breakdown of law and order as Fatah and Hamas gunmen are encouraged to turn on each other. All these factors are designed to one end: the slow demand by Palestinians, civilians and militants alike, to clear out of the hell-hole of Gaza.

If this experiment in human despair works in the small Gaza Strip, its lessons can be applied to much bigger effect in the West Bank ghettoes left behind after convergence. This is how ethnic cleansing looks when it is designed not by butchers in uniforms but by technocrats in suits.

Hence, the American and Israeli media celebration of the victimization of Shalit, which so mendaciously serves the purpose of facilitating the Israeli policies described by Brooks, while the imprisoned Palestinians are given less attention than Paris Hilton's dog, Tinkerbell. Breaking news now suggests another equation, to go along with the 9000 to 1 ratio of Palestinian prisoners to Israeli ones, provided by Brooks. Apparently, the life of one Israeli soldier is worth at least 13 dead Palestinians.

UPDATE: Make that at least 20 dead Palestinians.

Labels: Gaza, Israel, Palestine, Political Violence