MJ Rosenberg, at Huffington Post, picks up on the racism in the prisoners’ story. Note the contrast between his piece and the New Yorker piece on Gaza, which harped on Shalit’s incarceration and never stated how many Palestinian prisoners are held by Israel. Rosenberg:
But most maddening is, in my opinion, the racial implications of the Shalit saga. It does not matter that Israelis and Palestinians are racially indistinguishable. The fact is that the Israelis are "white" in terms of their status in Israel-Palestine and the Palestinians are not.
The Shalit story is reminiscent of the way Americans become obsessed with crimes committed against whites while generally indifferent to identical crimes committed against people of color. The media will devote endless hours and days of coverage to the tragedy of a white woman gone missing while ignoring similar disappearances of black women. The same applies to stories of child kidnappings and other crimes of violence.
We tend only to care if the victim is white.
And Israel is no different (it is, in fact, worse). It cares about "Jewish suffering" but is indifferent, at best, to the suffering it inflicts on the non-Jews with whom it shares the land.
The country is obsessed with Shalit’s imprisonment. It is beside itself with rage, sorrow, and fury. It is so upset that the government is on the verge of approving a massive prisoner trade with the hated Hamas to get Shalit released.
At the same time, Israel is perfectly content with holding thousands of Palestinians in their prisons [more than 10,000, Rosenberg cites]…
These prisoners will sit and rot in jail until released as part of a deal to free some Israeli who shouldn’t have been kidnapped either.
One can take this argument even further. The entire Gaza Strip is an Israeli prison if one uses the most common definition of a prison. It is sealed and its people are locked in. Its million residents cannot leave. Even youngsters accepted at American or European universities are refused exit permits.
