Maj. Gen. (res.) Uzi Dayan says the security establishment is to blame for the deal to release Gilad Shalit by not providing alternative means of releasing the abducted soldier.
Dayan, who served as the IDF Deputy Chief of Staff, explained in an interview with Arutz Sheva Tuesday that there is "an unwritten agreement between the state, its soldiers and their families, which says that the soldiers will defend the national home and the state will do everything in its power to bring them back should something happen."
Dayan does, however, see the deal as an act of leadership on the part of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu, he estimates, was interested in an alternative course of action, but when the security establishment failed to provide one and instead supported the prisoner release deal, "he had no choice but to accept the deal and sign it."
The spirit that motivated the IDF in earlier years, when Netanyahu himself was an officer in the elite Sayaret Matkal, is gone, Dayan added.
Finding a way of releasing Shalit "should have been an obsession for commanders and soldiers," he said, but it was not.