The Civilian-Terrorist Exchange Is Emblematic Of The Conflict

On January 19, 2025, three young Israeli women who were held in captivity in Gaza for 471 days were released in exchange for 90 Palestinian Arabs held in Israel. Among those Arabs were Khalida Jarrar, a convicted member of the Palestinian terrorist group, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) who was involved in several plane hijackings; Nawal Abed Fatiha, who stabbed a 70-year-old Israeli man in a 2020 attack in Jerusalem; and Ibrahim Zamar, who shot two people near the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in 2023.

The gross inequality of the exchange in QUANTITY (but not quality) raised the eyebrows of the media, questioning the thirty-to-one ratio of people, while ignoring the equivalization of civilian women torn from their homes to convicted terrorists.

*New York Times noting the “uneven exchange” of numbers while minimizing the qualitative difference of civilians for terrorists*

But that is the story of the Middle East.

The Jewish State, is a liberal democracy which is roughly 76% Jewish, with 7.2 million Jews. It sits amongst 450 million Muslims in its immediate vicinity (about 62 times as many Muslims as Jews), in countries which are autocracies and almost completely Islamic. Just past those neighbors are another 500 million Muslims, some of whom have called Israel a “cancer” which must be removed from the planet.

The Israeli women who were freed – Romi Gonen (24), Doron Steinbrecher (31) and Emily Damari (28) – were simply living their lives when an estimated 3,000 Palestinian Arabs from Gaza stormed into Israel, killing their friends, family and pets, and then abducted them. That is in sharp contrast to the Palestinian Arab terrorists released by Israel who were waging a war of ethnic cleansing to rid the region of Jews when they were taken prisoners.

The media’s framing of the story whitewashes the difference in the nature of the exchange of innocents for criminals, asserting that they were just “accused of terrorism.” It calls out the numerical difference as rational, even while it vilifies Israel for the difference in the number of dead in the Hamas-initiated war.

*New York Times describing Palestinian prisoners as simply “accused of terrorism”*

The qualitative symbol of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict is Neta Sorek, a Jewish feminist peace activist slaughtered by Palestinian terrorists as she walked in a forest in 2010. The quantitative symbol of the broader Jewish-Muslim Conflict in the Middle East is the grossly uneven exchange of 2025.