Twelve years ago, David Meidan, an Israeli intelligence officer, found himself standing a few meters away from Ahmed al-Jaabari, the deputy commander-in-chief of the military wing of Hamas and one of the most wanted by the Israeli occupation at the time. The meeting was in Cairo, and the occasion was direct negotiations for the release of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who was captured by Hamas in 2006. Egyptian intelligence officers were the ones passing messages between his room and the room of the Palestinian delegation nearby.

What does the chief Israeli negotiator say about the experiences of negotiating with Hamas over prisoners?

The British magazine The Economist says that Hamas had held Shalit captive for five years when Maidan received the file to negotiate his release in April 2011. Israeli intelligence agents were stranded trying to find out the whereabouts of Shalit, or the members of the group holding him in Gaza. A previous attempt to negotiate Shalit's release with the participation of German mediators had failed.

When Maidan began his mission, he asked Egyptian intelligence which Hamas officials he should talk to, and they advised him to focus on Al-Jaabari. Maidan later realized that Al-Jaabari was the decision-maker in the matter, and then finally learned that Al-Jaabari was the one who was detaining Shalit. Within six months, the Israeli soldier was released in exchange for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners.

Meydan told the British magazine that dealing with a group that operates in extreme secrecy like Hamas requires the first thing to find the appropriate communication channel to communicate with them. “You have to find the appropriate intermediaries in order to gain Hamas’ interest.”

He left the field of work in the Israeli Foreign Intelligence Service (Mossad) in 2012, and worked in private security companies. But he volunteered to return after Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7 to help free the prisoners. American diplomats, trying to recover their citizens, communicate with him constantly. And his old colleagues in the occupation army and the Mossad ask him for advice. His most prominent task at the present time is to work as an informal advisor to the families of prisoners.

Maidan believes that Israel has a moral duty to work to recover any captured citizen. Before the current crisis, he was participating, free of charge, in an anti-Netanyahu campaign demanding the release of an Israeli citizen of Ethiopian origin who had been detained in the Gaza Strip since 2014.

Maidan believes that Israel must return the prisoners detained by Hamas on October 7 “at all costs,” and “even if Israel has to pay a heavy and painful price that includes opening its prisons and releasing all of its Palestinian prisoners (numbering 6,000).” ".

But this sharp position contradicts the position of Benjamin Netanyahu's government, as the Israeli Prime Minister did not meet the families of the prisoners until three weeks after the crisis. It was only after public pressure from the families of the prisoners and non-public urging from former security officials that the release of prisoners was declared a priority.

“You must go immediately to Jerusalem.”

Although Meidan and Netanyahu have worked together before, there is an ongoing disagreement between them. Earlier this year, Maidan participated in mobilizing protests against the so-called “judicial reform” amendments, which opponents see as weakening the judicial authority in Israel, and Maidan considers them a threat to the so-called Israeli democracy. He blames Netanyahu for his failure to prevent the disaster of October 7; Every week, he publishes posts mocking Netanyahu on social media, and says in one of them: “He is devious and deceitful, and refuses to take responsibility. People are angry with him.”

Meydan was born in Cairo in 1955, and his Egyptian-Jewish father ran a textile factory that supplied neckties to the Egyptian army. But after Gamal Abdel Nasser came to power, and hostility toward Israel and the West spread, Meydan's parents decided to move to Tel Aviv. Maidan said: "No one asked us to leave, but we were like many Jews who felt that the country was closing in on them. The conditions around us were tense and unpleasant."

He studied the Arabic language in high school, and later mastered it at Tel Aviv University. He specialized in Arabic language literature and Middle Eastern studies, and his Egyptian accent is so clear that some people think he is Egyptian when speaking Arabic.

When Meidan was a young intelligence officer in the 1980s, he was sent to Cyprus, and participated in planting agents to collect information about the Palestine Liberation Organization led by Yasser Arafat. He contributed to thwarting a Palestine Liberation Organization attack on the Tel Aviv beach in 1985. After his success in managing Mossad agents throughout the Middle East for 20 years, he was assigned a senior position in the Israeli intelligence service, and he supervised secret initiatives to win the friendship of the Arab regimes in the Gulf ( Such as deals to supply advanced technological means and Israeli spyware.

One morning in April 2011, Meidan was attending a graduation ceremony for Mossad agents, when the head of the Israeli intelligence service whispered in his ear that he should “go immediately to Jerusalem,” because Netanyahu wanted him to handle the file to free Shalit.

Difficult access to Jabari

Maidan says that the difficulties he faced in negotiating the release of one prisoner reveal some of the difficulties that are expected to hinder the release of more than 200 prisoners currently held by Hamas. Maidan narrates that he began his work in 2011 to search for an effective channel to negotiate with Hamas, and he did not benefit much from the information collected by Israeli intelligence regarding Hamas leaders, as it did not help him understand their psychological characteristics or understand the nature of the people with whom he was negotiating. On his first day on the job, an Israeli peace activist named Gershon Baskin asked to meet him. Baskin said he had a contact in Hamas who could link Maidan to the movement's military leadership.

Baskin had contacted the two former envoys who supervised the Shalit release file, but they refused to help him, and considered him a fool and a dreamer. As for Maidan, he was more receptive to this cooperation because he believes that “a good intelligence officer must be good at observing, listening, remembering, and not giving in to emotional bias.” Maidan then began exchanging messages through the intermediary provided by Baskin, until the messages through the intermediary reached Al-Jaabari, the deputy military commander of Hamas. In the beginning, the messages were just brief texts, then the scope of communication developed and expanded, until Baskin began transmitting messages using a fax machine, as he described it.

The communication via Baskin channel contributed to consolidating Hamas’s conviction that the Israelis are serious about the negotiation initiative. “Confidence increased gradually, one small step after another,” Maidan said.

Shortly thereafter, Maidan asked the Egyptians to arrange a meeting with Al-Jaabari in Cairo. Al-Jaabari was afraid that the Israelis would kill him while he was driving his car through the Sinai desert to the Egyptian border, so he asked for guarantees of his protection.

The atmosphere of the meeting was not promising at first. Al-Jaabari had spent 13 years of his life in Israeli prisons, and thus he was stubborn and strict in negotiations, and his “demands were endless,” as Maidan put it. The Egyptians sought to ease the atmosphere with small initiatives. Meanwhile, Maidan worked to instill confidence in the Egyptians that he was a person worthy of being relied upon to “adhere to the understandings and agreements that were being reached.” After several sessions, mediation efforts progressed from negotiating the initial principles of the deal to discussing the names of the prisoners who would be released in exchange for Shalit.

Maidan says that this stage was the most difficult in the negotiation process, because many of the men included by Hamas on the list had participated in operations targeting Israelis and high-ranking wanted persons. Maidan claims that he had an advantage over the Palestinian side, and that he knew what Al-Jaabari would ask before disclosing it, as he put it.

So Netanyahu acquiesced

At the time, Netanyahu was under great pressure from within Israel, as unprecedented protests over the high costs of living broke out in Israel that summer. Then the deal provided him with a way out of those pressures, and Maidan reached a deal that included the release of a thousand Palestinian prisoners (including some prisoners whose release sparked great controversy, such as Yahya Sinwar, currently head of the political bureau of Hamas in the Gaza Strip) in exchange for Shalit. Thus, Meydan traveled to Cairo in October to sign the deal.

A week later, Al-Jaabari and Egyptian intelligence officers escorted Shalit to the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt. Maidan and his team were waiting for him in an Israeli military vehicle. Shalit and Maidan were transferred in an Israeli military helicopter to an air base. Maidan was surprised when the helicopter door opened and found Netanyahu waiting for the young soldier with a press crew. This was an opportunity to take some photos that would attract popular support, and Netanyahu would not miss an opportunity like this.

In October 2012, Meidan spoke at a symposium held at Tel Aviv University about his experience working as a negotiator for the release of prisoners, and he told the students at the time that the internal political crises that Netanyahu was facing contributed to pushing him to accept Hamas’s demands, which were exorbitant. Somehow, someone in attendance recorded Maidan's statements and leaked them to the press, angering Netanyahu. Although Maidan was a candidate to take over the head of the Mossad, Netanyahu did not approve of his nomination. He realized that he no longer had the opportunity to advance in positions in the intelligence service, so he resigned and ended his career in the agency.

“The assassination of Al-Jaabari was wrong.”

A year after Shalit's release, Israel assassinated Ahmed al-Jaabari with a missile strike as he was driving his car in Gaza City. Maidan believes that this "was a wrong decision."

Currently, various parties are supervising the efforts aimed at liberating the October 7 prisoners, including the Israeli occupation army, which collects intelligence information, plans rescue operations, and exchanges information with relatives of the prisoners.

The families of the prisoners formed a committee so that they could work together to promote their demands and put pressure on the government. Most of them want the attacks on Gaza to stop in order to retrieve their children, but a few of them support the continuation of the bombing. Netanyahu appointed someone responsible for the prisoner file. Both Qatar and Egypt are participating in efforts to mediate the release of the prisoners.

Maidan said that some people who offer to help extract prisoners are “sincere and have good intentions,” but some are merely “charlatans” who exploit residents’ fears. Maidan believes that the time factor is very important if some prisoners are destined to remain alive, and therefore spending a lot of time and effort on the wrong communication channels may be costly. Maidan said that the families of the prisoners should "focus their efforts and find the appropriate mediators, whether it is Qatar, Egypt or Turkey."

Maidan had always opposed dividing the exchange deal when he negotiated the release of Shalit, but now he believes that the large number of prisoners requires doing things differently, and “if we cannot reach a comprehensive agreement, let us do it gradually, such that we release, for example, the women and children first.” "To build trust."

Despite the blood spilled in the past three weeks, Maidan believes that trust is possible and must be built between negotiators from Israel and Hamas to negotiate for the prisoners. Yuval Diskin, the former head of the Israeli internal security service Shin Bet, says that this ability to "creatively think" is what makes Maidan a successful negotiator. "He is familiar with Arab culture, and most importantly of all, he is a trustworthy man."

Maidan has suspended his public campaigns in opposition to Netanyahu, but intends to resume them once the war is over. When the Economist correspondent asked him about the most important lesson he learned from his participation in the negotiations to release Shalit, he replied: “Reach an agreement as quickly as you can, because if you delay, it may be too late.”

source: Arabic Post