A number of hours before the Ilan Grapel prisoner exchange deal between Israel and Egypt, the PA (Palestinian Authority) Maan news agency published additional details of the deal, which will significantly benefit the new Egyptian regime.
The United States will be giving Egypt F-16 fighter planes as part of the deal, ironically now, after the fall of President Hosni Mubarak. Despite maintaining good relations with the White House, Mubarak’s request for the fighter planes was rejected. It appears Egyptian and American officials met during recent days, during which time they finalized the final details of the deal.
Egyptian media reports over recent days hinted at additional perks from the Americans to the Egyptians for the release of Grapel, who maintains both Israeli and American citizenship.
Back in Israel, the Supreme Court on Wednesday, 28 Tishrei, rejected petitions from terror victims to block the deal, an expected decision. Many are angered over the release of 25 prisoners for Grapel, explaining that while he was a paratrooper, and he was wounded in the Second Lebanon War, he was arrested in Egypt due to his behavior connected to his radical left-wing political philosophy, and that is what got him in trouble.
Some Israelis feel that Israel should not have become involved and Jerusalem should have permitted the United States to deal with the Egyptians exclusively, but this was not the case.
In another prisoner-related matter, media reports in Israel continue to speculate that the next item on the prisoner exchange agenda is America’s release of Jonathan Pollard. Pollard activists are not too quick to become optimistic, having experienced similar periods in the past, as was the case during the Clinton administration in the White House, when everyone was certain that then PM Binyamin Netanyahu was bringing Pollard home, but sadly, this did not occur.
(YWN – Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
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One Response
Obama will do anything to camouflage the fallout from “his” Arab Spring so that it’s severe and devastating consequences will be deferred until he is out of office (hopefully sooner than later) and let the next president take the blame for what ever goes wrong. That is the only possible explanation for such seemingly bizarre behavior of giving advanced weaponry to the current unstable regime after refusing to give it to a staunch and stable ally.