Another deal with the devil?

Image Source: Haaretz

I would draw your attention to Yossi Verter's analysis in Haaretz today of the deal Netanyahu may have just brokered with Putin to win the release of Kremlin hostage Naama Issachar ["It’s No Election Campaign Gift or Friendship: Putin Just Blackmailed Netanyahu"]. 

In a tone rarely heard when recalling the Shalit Deal - other than by terror victims like my husband and me - he links the two releases thus: 

"She [Naama Issachar] will return home not because Netanyahu is a great leader but because, in an election fateful for his future, he’s willing to pay a high price for the public’s sympathy. If relations between him and Putin were really as wonderful as he’d like us to believe, this whole story never would have happened.

Netanyahu freed Gilad Shalit from Hamas captivity at the cost of more than a thousand terrorist killers, just to extinguish the last embers of the social protest movement that was putting him in a panic. Now he’s freeing Naama Issachar for major concessions, most of which Jerusalem will keep trying to hide."

Verter also notes how Sarah Netanyahu prominently injected herself into every photo of the two leaders and of Naama's mother, Yaffa. 

I can't help recalling Bibi Netanyahu's interview with the German paper Bild, shortly after he released 1,027 terrorists including Ahlam Tamimi, our Malki's murderer. In it, he revealed that Sarah had pressured him to do that deal. [See "First lady follies", February 12, 2016]

  

Did she play a key role in this self-serving, lop-sided swap too?

Either way, it is apparent that our prime minister hasn't changed since 2011. He remains a man guided by this ethos: "Anything goes if it will keep me in power."