ABSTRACT
In April 1984 the war in Lebanon still weighed like an incubus on the existence of every Israeli. Given the fiendish inventiveness of Arab terrorists, the Israelis might have been thought incapable of surprise at any sort of terrorist tactic, except perhaps at lurid variations on the old themes. The inalienable right of captured terrorists not only to all the rights due prisoners of war but even to all niceties of peacetime legal procedure has long been a strident demand of most journalists. On 20 May 1985, Israel released 1,150 terrorists, more than half of the security prisoners held in the country, in exchange for three Israeli soldiers who had fallen into the hands of terrorists in Lebanon in 1982. The information about the three captive Israeli soldiers to be released did little to strengthen the government’s case for what it had done.
