Israeli Becomes Key Focus of POW Debate : Mideast: Ron Arad was shot down over Lebanon 7 years ago. Now, his wife, family and friends are battling to link his release to the peace process.

As Israel releases the Palestinian prisoners it holds, Tami Arad watches with an agonized mix of hope and bitterness.

“I can feel the joy of their families, but I ache because my Ron isn’t coming home,” says Arad, wife of an Israeli air force navigator shot down over Lebanon seven years ago and taken prisoner by a militant Islamic group. “What is the meaning of peace, if the first step, the very first, is not freeing all prisoners?”

It is a question that not only Tami Arad but other Israelis are asking. More than half of Tel Aviv’s 1,400 buses now carry big bumper stickers, saying, “Ron Arad, we’re all with you,” and many motorists have put stickers on their cars declaring, “Ron Arad was born for freedom.”

The last seven years have been hard for Tami Arad, 32, and the pain showed on her as she spoke of her husband, her struggle to cope without him and now her campaign to win his freedom.

“If someone is dead, it is tough, really tough, but you can go on,” she said in an interview. “If you have to wait, though, you can wait forever. When Ron was taken prisoner, I felt my life stopped--it became a frozen life, a life that I cannot control or direct.

“What hurts most is knowing that this all is not the hand of fate, that the decision to hold Ron or release him can be made by those who have him,” she said. “They can prolong his suffering and my suffering, or they can send him home. But for them we aren’t people. We are the enemy, and they care nothing for our pain or suffering.

“I know Ron is alive--I keep coming back to that,” she continued. “But all I can do is wait, simply wait.”

But Tami Arad no longer is simply waiting. She is campaigning with her husband’s family and friends to make his release an element in Israel’s negotiations with its Arab neighbors.

“Israelis would be a lot more supportive of the peace process if they saw Ron come home and if the questions about our MIA’s (from the war in Lebanon a decade ago) were cleared up,” said Hen Arad, Ron’s brother. “We are going to give a lot for peace, and this is something we should get in return.”

After calls upon Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to link the release of more Palestinian prisoners to freedom for Arad, now 35 years old, and information on six Israeli soldiers reported missing in the fighting in Lebanon, a senior intelligence officer from the Palestine Liberation Organization said Syria was now holding Arad and had the bodies of three Israeli soldiers killed in a 1982 tank battle in Lebanon.

“Peace is not an abstract concept representing a nebulous utopia,” the Jerusalem Post said in an editorial reflecting common Israeli thinking. “It is a state of relations between peoples in which the release of prisoners . . . is a vital, indispensable component.”

Although denied by Syria, the PLO statement reinforced Tami Arad’s belief that her husband is alive.

The Lebanese delegation to the Middle East peace talks in Washington had told the Israeli delegation last year: “The Lebanese government has information that leads it to believe Arad is still alive.” Israeli intelligence has since obtained further confirmation, according to senior security officials.

But Arad’s whereabouts remain a mystery.

When his Phantom fighter-bomber was shot down near Sidon in southern Lebanon on Oct. 16, 1986, while attacking Palestinian targets, Arad bailed out with the pilot, landing in an olive grove. The pilot was rescued by helicopter, but Arad had already been captured by Amal, a Lebanese Shiite militia.

When Amal split into rival factions, Arad was taken by the hard-liners to the Bekaa Valley, the rear base for several militant Islamic groups, including the Iranian-supported Party of God, or Hezbollah. Before the PLO assertion that Arad was held by Syria, Israel assumed he was in the hands of Hezbollah or a similar group or had perhaps been moved to Iran.

“Iran does not have to admit that it holds Ron, but it does have to accept that it can bring about his release,” Tami Arad said. “I know Iran is not involved in the peace process and that it opposes it, and I know that it is difficult to put pressure on Iran.

“But Iran does have relations with important countries in Europe and with other U.S. allies, it does business with major multinational companies that want to profit from the peace process, it wants to enhance its position in the world--all of this gives us leverage. . . .

“Now is the moment,” she continued. “Throughout the world people want to help the peace process in the Middle East. We must explain that Ron Arad and our MIAs are part of the peace process, that Israel cannot progress without them. I feel that if Ron is not brought home now, then it could be never.”

Vital time was lost immediately after her husband’s capture, she said.

She was then 25, the mother of a 15-month-old daughter, Yuval, and very dependent on her husband, three years older. “I was in high school when I met Ron, 21 when we got married, just a kid really,” she recalled. “Suddenly, I was the wife of a POW, not a widow, thank God, but something like it. . . .

“I had depended on Ron for everything,” she said, “and now I had to do it all myself. I had to be mother and father for Yuval. I had to make a new home off of the air base, to find a profession, to get a job. I cope, but it’s hard. At night, other people have their families, and I am alone with the television, a book and my worries about Ron.”

For a few years, she taught school. Later she studied criminology at Bar-Ilan University and for 2 1/2 years she has worked as an editor and newscaster on the popular Army Radio here. She gets her husband’s air force pay and the military has helped in other ways.

Her daughter, Yuval, now 8, is busy with choir, gymnastics, piano and drama lessons as well as school. To her, dad is “Ron,” a man whose picture hangs in the kitchen. “At school, the other kids tell her that her father is dead,” Tami Arad said, “but we--she and I--know he’s very much alive.”

The family is seeking support for a campaign here and abroad to free Arad, contending that with the advance of the peace process his release is now a humanitarian cause although he was taken prisoner as an Israeli soldier on a combat mission.

With an Israel committee campaigning for Arad’s release, a tactic to make it a political issue here, groups in England, Holland and elsewhere in Europe are forming to raise it internationally.

“We also frankly think we are owed some Western assistance,” Hen Arad said. “Israel did a lot, particularly in freeing Arab prisoners we held, to win the release of the Western hostages in Lebanon. Once (American hostage) Terry Anderson and (British hostage) Terry Waite were free, however, everyone forgot about Ron Arad.”