Noam Shalit, father of Gilad Shalit Last Friday Davide and I went up north to interview Noam Shalit, whose 20 year-old son Gilad, a corporal in the IDF, has been a captive of Hamas for six months. On June 25 Hamas militants attacked Gilad's army post via a tunnel they had dug, reportedly over a period of six months, under the fence that separates Israel and Gaza. They killed two soldiers and abducted then 19 year-old Gilad, who was serving with a unit that was stationed at Kerem Shalom, on the border with Gaza, to protect the civilians in the area from infiltrators.
(The details of the abduction are on , and my post about visiting Kerem Shalom in July is ). Hamas has confirmed that Gilad is alive and well, but nothing has been heard from him. He has not received any visits from the Red Cross and Hamas has not revealed where he is being held.
There are many rumours about negotiations for his release in a prisoner exchange but, as Noam observed, the vast majority of the newspaper reports are disinformation. No-one knows whether Hamas and the Israeli government will reach an agreement at all, let alone when. When I called Noam to request an interview, he said, very politely, that he did not have any new information about his son.
I told him that we were interested in writing a piece about him. "But I am not the story," he protested gently. Actually, the story of Noam Shalit's humane and quietly determined behaviour since his son's abduction is a fascinating story on many different levels.
I guess it's a cliche to write about a quiet family man who was never interested in politics being suddenly thrown into the public spotlight by tragic circumstances and rising to the occasion with dignity and humanity. And I think it's unlikely that some Hollywood director will decide to make a film about Noam Shalit's struggle to obtain the release of his son. But I do think that Noam's actions and words can teach a lot - not only about being humane, but also about Israeli society.
The Shalit family lives in Mitzpe Hila, a quiet community in the Galilee that is too small to have street names, let alone its own school. It is about 6 kilometres from the border with Lebanon. During the war last summer, Katyushas fell in their next-door neighbour's garden.
"Were you afraid?" we asked. "Oh no," he said.
"We have a bomb shelter inside the house." When we arrived at the Shalit home, Noam was outside watering his garden. He greeted us, indicated that we should sit around the table just outside the front door, and brought us some mineral water and glasses.
Here I have to confess that I always feel a lot of trepidation before interviewing somebody who has suffered a personal tragedy. I quite enjoy interviewing politicians, writers and artists, but I always worry about trespassing on someone's grief. I had seen Noam interviewed on television several times, so I knew he was courteous and soft-spoken, but I was still terribly impressed by his dignity and strength.
Throughout the interview he remained calm and detached, never raising his voice or expressing a strong emotion. Noam Shalit has been described as and a symbol of peace. When asked whether it was true that he had spoken to , the (Hamas) spokesman of the Palestinian Authority (PA) who recently expressed harsh criticism of his own people for their failure to build a functioning society in Gaza (article ), he said, "Yes, I'm not very political.
He seemed like a nice man and I have no problem talking to anyone who is willing to talk to me and doesn't want to kill me. " He speaks frequently with PA officials and is planning to visit Gaza in order to meet Hamas politicians. He visited the families who were bereaved at , and he also visited the wounded residents of Beit Hanoun who were evacuated to Israeli hospitals.
"I know Beit Hanoun was a mistake, but it was a huge tragedy and a lot of innocent people who just want to live normal lives were caught between battling powers. At the hospital, I appealed for a break in the cycle of violence." Quite a lot of people read about Noam Shalit's actions and concluded that he was a leftist who did not represent mainstream Israeli society.
Actually, I think he is a good example of Israel's silent majority. Noam describes himself as non-political. He did not vote in the last elections ("I was in Eilat") but when asked, he said he most identifies with Ehud Olmert's centrist Kadima party.
He also describes himself as pro-peace, although he thinks that calling him a hero of peace is "very exaggerated." He was "strongly" in favour of the withdrawal from Gaza because he saw it as a chance for peace: "I hoped that the Palestinians in Gaza would build businessess and hope for the future, factories and houses. But instead they built tunnels to smuggle weapons and they built bomb factories.
It is very disappointing." But his desire for peace remains unshaken. "I really believe that the extremists on both sides are dragging us into this conflict.
Because the vast majority on both sides, I think, want peace and quiet. We don't love each other, but we are sick of wars and violence." Gilad Shalit has become a symbol and a bargaining chip, but of course for Noam he is just his son - and he wants him back.
Right now the negotiations for Gilad's release are stuck on the issue of how many Palestinian political prisoners should be freed in an exchange (there is talk of exchanging 1,000 Palestinians held in Israeli jails for Gilad), and also on who those prisoners should be. There is controversy, for example, about releasing , the popular former Fatah activist who was sentenced in a Tel Aviv civilian court to five life sentences for murder and attempted murder (more about Barghouti ). Noam sees all these negotations in simple and pragmatic terms: "I have appealed to the Palestinian and Israeli governments, not to make grand political deals on the back of my son.
I know that the political prisoner issue is very important on the Palestinian street, but we won't be able to resolve it using my son. They abduct my son, we jail Hamas members of the Palestinian parliament, and then they respond with another kidnapping..
. It's endless, and nothing will be resolved like this. The only solution is for both parties to sit down and negotiate.
" Noam's mother was born in France, so he has held an EU passport since he was 18 - and thus Gilad is also an EU citizen. So Noam has met with and asked him to use the EU's influence with Damascus, because the militant arm of Hamas (led by ) is located there, and they are the ones who most oppose releasing Gilad. It's not easy, he said, to explain to Europeans that an IDF soldier can also be a European citizen.
At one point during the interview, two women - neighbours - stopped by with a cake one of them had baked. Noam introduced us and explained that his wife was out shopping, so the women just walked into the house and left the cake. His 16 year-old daughter came home from school, greeted her father and went inside to listen to music.
"Yes," Noam confirmed, "We realized very early on that it is not useful or healthy to just sit at home and wait." He drives to his job at every morning, his wife continues to work, his elder son attends the and they still manage their . Davide asked if his neighbours from the nearby Muslim and Druze villages had visited him just after Gilad was abducted, when so many friends and neighbours came to offer comfort.
Yes, answered Noam, of course they did. This is not Noam's first family tragedy. His twin brother was killed on the Golan Heights at the beginning of the , while Noam was serving in the Sinai.
And yes, he did have flashbacks when the president of Iscar called him into his office and relayed the news about Gilad, together with the municipal officer assigned to such tasks. He remembered that it took a few days to locate him in the Sinai in 1973, with all the confusion of the war, and of course he remembered being informed by his officer that his twin was dead. August 28 was Gilad's birthday.
His family marked the occasion, together with a few friends, in a simple ceremony that was held on the spot where his son was abducted. They read poems, sang a few songs, and released balloons. We asked Noam if he had made any plans for Gilad's return.
"No," said Noam. "We haven't made any plans. We haven't even thought about it.
We know we will have to treat him very carefully because he was only 19 years old when he was abducted. He had been in the army for less than one year."
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