It is with this in mind that Shahak and Ehrenfeld told their harrowing personal stories. Shahak charged the Ministry of Defense medical board, which hears soldiers’ claims, with behavior befitting “an insurance company,” and said that its manner of questioning was “like the way they do in Syria.”Įrim Balaila is contemplating launching a public campaign against the Ministry of Defense decision not to back the bill. In a phone interview with The Times of Israel, Kadima MK Yisrael Hasson, the author of the bill, said that without the support of the Ministry of Defense the chances of passing the law through the necessary stations in the Knesset, despite near wall-to-wall approval, were “slim to none.” Legally, the removal of causality would be “a breaking of the basic essence of the rehabilitation law and therefore a dangerous precedent.” The Ministry of Defense said in a statement that it does not support the proposed law on “moral grounds and legal grounds.” Morally, it said, granting POWs automatic recognition would create “discrimination” whereby one group would have to prove a link between their illness and their military treatment and another would not.
The bill calls for immediate recognition of all POWs as suffering from at least 20 percent disability on account of complex PTSD and for all of those who die from cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure and nervous system diseases among others, to be recognized as veterans who died from war-inflicted injuries. Israeli POWs on the southern front during the Yom Kippur War (Photo credit: Courtesy: Erim Balaila) The proposal, based on the ground-breaking research of Israel Prize-winning psychiatric epidemiologist professor Zahava Solomon, calls for a reorganization in the way released POWs are treated in Israel. But Erim Balaila, feeling that the Ministry of Defense treatment of POWs is still inadequate, met with MKs last summer to draft a piece of legislation entitled the Recognition, Treatment and Rehabilitation of POWs Bill. Some were interrogated, charged with treason, tried, and stripped of their rank. Many POWs have described their questioning at the hands of the Israeli officers upon return as worse than their initial captivity experience. “Our goal throughout was to ensure that his return would be different from ours,” said Ehrenfeld.
Shalit was taken straight home and secluded from the public, cloistered from the outside world and embraced by his family, given time to heal.
“The needs of the individual were finally put before those of the army at large,” said Uri Ehrenfeld, another member of Erim Balaila, who was taken captive on the eighth day of the Yom Kippur War. When he came off the plane, the IDF Chief of the General Staff hugged him. Gilad Shalit is an example of their success. Benny Gantz hugging Gilad Shalit on the day of his release from captivity (Photo credit: IDF Spokesperson/ Flash 90) Their goal was twofold: to knit together the hundreds of remaining POWs - many of whom avoided each other out of a sense of shame - and provide them with a sense of community and a support network and to advocate for better state treatment of POWs. Itamar Barnea, a fighter pilot and psychologist, and Professor Avi Ohry, a doctor who specializes in rehabilitative medicine, came together in 1998 and founded Erim Balaila (Awake at Night), a non-profit organization that Shahak now heads. Shahak and other Yom Kippur War POWs, including Dr. Yet like every POW, he said, he suffers at nights, and while the Ministry of Defense has made significant headway in its treatment of Israeli servicemen and women who were taken captive, it still lags behind the United States, where there is a national POW Day and every POW is granted immediate disability recognition. Sitting with him for a long conversation, at times explicit about the cruelties of captivity (and the occasional joys, of which more later), he seemed like so many other pilots, his mind governed by a quick, cool and orderly mechanism.
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