Families Keep Focus on Missing Israeli Soldiers

The guns have stopped smoking and the troops are trickling home. But among those preparing to return, two Israeli soldiers are most conspicuous by their absence.

They are Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, and it was in their name that Israel went to war in Lebanon five weeks ago. The mission, officials declared at the time, was clear: to rescue the two young reservists, who were captured July 12 by Hezbollah guerrillas while on a border patrol.

Now, as a tenuous cease-fire takes hold, the people of this tiny country are faced with the painful realization that their army, the most powerful in the Middle East, failed to achieve that objective, despite a month of bloodshed and grievous losses on both sides.

The missing soldiers’ families are determined that the men not be forgotten amid the debate and recrimination now swirling in the corridors of power. Their predicament has, at times, been obscured by talk of political issues such as the disarmament of Hezbollah and the mandate of United Nations peacekeepers.

“The cease-fire was a disappointment for us; our brother was left in Lebanon,” said Benny Regev, the eldest of four sons. Eldad is the youngest. “All our soldiers that are in left in Lebanon will come home in a few weeks. Our brother will stay there, in the hands of the Hezbollah.”

On Wednesday, Israel’s foreign minister called on the Shiite Muslim militant group to release the two soldiers.

Meanwhile, Defense Minister Amir Peretz, whose performance has drawn sharp criticism at home, appointed a committee to investigate the government’s conduct of the war and the military’s preparedness amid complaints of inadequate equipment and poor coordination.

For many Israelis, it is the continued captivity of Goldwasser, 31, and Regev, 26, that resonates most deeply in a nation whose reverence of its military is almost impossible to overstate.

The role of Jewish fighters in the battle for statehood, the compulsory army service for all young Israelis and a fierce military ethos of “no soldier left behind” have lent the Israel Defense Forces almost mythic status here. Israelis do not speak of “our soldiers” in battle, they speak of “our sons.”

In some quarters, there is concern that the plight of the two captured men, the stated cause of the conflict, received short shrift in the negotiations leading to the cease-fire and in the U.N. resolution ordering it.

Although the measure calls on Hezbollah to release the soldiers, it lays out no timetable, no procedure and no binding conditions.

In a poll in Israel made public Wednesday, 70% of respondents opposed a diplomatic settlement that did not guarantee the soldiers’ release. Dozens of the two men’s friends and fellow reservists held a rally in Tel Aviv this week to protest the United Nations resolution.

The families have been more circumspect.

“Personally, I believe there is no war prisoners exchange or kidnapped persons exchange before a cease-fire. So a cease-fire is a first positive step in bringing back my son,” said Shlomo Goldwasser, 59, who with his wife, Miki, raised Ehud and two younger sons in Nahariya, a northern city on the Mediterranean coast.

“I hope my government will act correctly in getting him back,” he said. “They promised they would. I didn’t send my son there.”

The Maariv newspaper reported that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was considering offering 13 Hezbollah detainees and the bodies of an unknown number of militants in exchange for the two soldiers. He has appointed a close confidant to take charge of the negotiations. Officials have advised the families that the back-channel talks are best kept quiet.

But the relatives have no intention of letting the obligation to their missing sons slip from public conscience, even though official rhetoric about the war has shifted and expanded over the last several weeks to include other rationales, such as the need to crush Hezbollah, besides the original casus belli of rescuing Goldwasser and Regev.

“What it [falls] to the government to do, I’ll let them do it. I trust my government,” Miki Goldwasser said of efforts to free her son.

“On the other hand, I will keep speaking out to the media about it. I won’t let it fade.”

Her son, quiet but charismatic, was working toward a master’s degree in environmental engineering and had recently married his longtime girlfriend. He was on the last day of his annual reserve duty when Hezbollah fighters crept across the Israeli-Lebanese border, snatched him and Regev, and killed three other Israeli soldiers.

Miki, who with Shlomo now lives in South Africa, turned on CNN later that day and heard about the death and capture of the soldiers.

“I started to cry, but not for my son, because I didn’t think in my wildest dreams that he was there,” she said.

Her husband, accompanied by a rabbi and a doctor, broke the news to her that evening.

Since then, she, Shlomo and Ehud’s wife, Karnit, have spent days traveling through Europe and North America to keep attention focused on the missing men and to raise funds to help Israeli victims of Hezbollah rocket attacks during the conflict.

Yair Goldwasser said he wished Israeli officials would do more to point up the plight of his brother and Regev internationally.

“They could do a little more convincing worldwide, especially to the European Union, of how important this is to Israel,” Yair, 26, said.

“Those two soldiers weren’t just kidnapped from this family.... All the families of Israel feel that they’ve lost a son.”

Hanging over the whole affair, like a black cloud no one wants to mention, is the tragic tale of another Israeli reservist, Ron Arad. In October 1986, Arad bailed out of his crippled jetfighter over Lebanon and was taken hostage by another Shiite Muslim militia.

Arad is classified as alive and missing in action. But for most of the last 20 years, during which his infant daughter has grown up with little memory of her father, there has been no sign of Arad or his whereabouts -- an uncertainty that also haunts the Goldwassers and Regevs.

“Eldad is missing. We don’t know if he’s still alive or his medical condition or if he’s receiving any treatment or if he’s even still in Lebanon,” said Benny Regev, 35, who lives near the city of Haifa.

The U.N. resolution may not have been ideal, but it at least makes a call for the two captured men’s release, which Regev wants to ensure does not fall by the wayside in the diplomatic derby over how to bring peace to the Middle East.

“I want the USA and France, which pushed through this agreement, [to] make efforts to make that call a reality, to stand behind that call,” he said. The safe return of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev is “a wish of all Israelis.”