One Shalit for 9 Turks?

What if...
instead of releasing the Israeli soldier, the Palestinians got tough -- akin to the dilemma in Fail Safe.

Whether the continued military incompetence we've seen in earlier invasions of Lebanon and Gaza is responsible for the deaths on the aid ship, or whether some of the dead were indeed summarily executed with 4 bullets to the head, it doesn't really matter.

9 Turks dead. 0 Israeli soldiers, who boarded the aid ship in international waters.

How can Israel compensate for the dead? How can you get an "eye for an eye" Old Testament people to understand the pain their killings are causing to others? More importantly, how do you stop their vicious cycle of incompetent military killings?

Perhaps you even up the death tallies. I believe the rockets that Hamas has fired into Israel have killed exactly one person in recent years -- an Israeli Arab, at that. Yet she feels the need to board aid ships in international waters, and blockade the civilian population of a neighboring unoccupied territory out of some strange legacy of insecurity and a twisted idea of self defense.

It's the imbalance that's killing us here. If Israel is to change, she too must share in the pain. Let her people mourn, like the Turks today, and the Lebanese whose people were killed in the ill-planned invasion.

Mr Shalit is a soldier, not a civilian. What about a simple lethal injection? Give the poor boy a sedative even beforehand; let him make his spiritual amends before taking his life, much as we do condemned prisoners. Don't make him suffer as you take the life from him -- none of this beheading, or victory dancing around the corpse. Deliver the body, intact, to the victim's family for proper timely burial.

War is hell. This is War. Innocent deaths must be avenged, whether caused deliberately or by bumbling incompetence. And the people holding Mr. Shalit aren't bound by any formal rules of standard military convention.

It will be a horrible pain to Shalit's family. I understand that. Soldier Shalit would be a sacrificial lamb, not for any crimes he himself committed, but to make a point that killings affect families, real people.

I think, as so much time as passed since the Holocaust, and Israel has adopted policies of collective punishment and special treatment based on ethnic bloodlines (aparteid roads, anyone?), they have forgotten the pain of innocent deaths. They wail and beat their breasts when incoming rockets call plaster to fall in a settler's illegal home, and a piece of plaster scratches an innocent babe's skin.

For this, they need behave like pirates, overtaking ships in international waters in order to maintain their blockade and punish a people.

The world finally wised up to the treatment of the Holocaust. Americans too are finally waking up to what kind of a country, "an independent democracy", they helped to build in our alleged ally Israel.

Trust me: once that death toll score evens out a bit, and there's more parity on the playing field, the dominant team (on paper) will have an incentive to perform better, with less incompetence causing deaths to others. That unintentional incompetence excuse has played itself out.

RIP Mr. Shalit. May your coming death remind us that pain of loss knows no bloodlines.

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ADDED: Here's a brief look at the lives that were cut short trying to break the Gaza blockade.

A decent summary of the big-picture issues at hand.