1000 to 1

If someone offered you odds at 1000 to 1 in a wager, your chances of winning $1000 on your $1 bet would be REALLY slim.

So what conclusions can we make about Israel trading 1000 Arab prisoners currently sitting in Israeli jails for 1 Israeli prisoner sitting in an Arab jail in Gaza?

Today's Wall Street Journal has a few articles on the topic, and one of them concludes with the reason Israel did it;

So what may explain Israel's bargain? Gilad Shalit is a known individual: what psychologists would call an "identifiable being." His picture has been plastered throughout Israel. The Israeli press has written hundreds of articles speculating about his well-being. By contrast, the Israelis who are endangered by this deal are mere statistics—an unidentifiable group of people who may die in the future. Psychologists call these "statistical lives."

There is a long line of psychological research showing that, in making decisions, human beings will incur far greater costs to save one identifiable being from immediate peril than to enact safety measures that might save many more statistical lives. While no expense will be spared to save an identifiable miner trapped in a coal mine, there is often great political reluctance to spend an equal amount on mine safety. Such a response is entirely human, but it is not rational.

See it here;  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203914304576628644114718586.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

But doesn't what Israel did simply encourage Hamas to go take another hostage so they can free another thousand prisoners next month?

In the Review and Outlook section of the same Journal we have this:

Israel has a long history of unequal prisoner exchanges. Since 1982, it has released thousands of Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners in exchange for a handful of Israeli soldiers and civilians, some of them living, others already dead. Last week, it agreed to release more than a 1,000 Palestinians, many of them serving life sentences for murder, in exchange for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier who has been held hostage in Gaza since June 2006.

The Jewish state's repeated willingness to pay an exorbitant price for its citizens is a testament to its national and religious values, which stress the obligation to redeem captives. There's an instructive contrast in that, for anyone who cares to notice it, with the ethics of Hamas, which refused to grant the Red Cross permission to so much as visit Sgt. Shalit. There's a contrast, too, with the ethics of those Palestinians now cheering the release of "brothers" imprisoned for committing such acts as a 1989 bus bombing that killed 10 Israelis and the 2001 bombing of a Jerusalem pizzeria.

But virtues often have their defects, and the line between moral values and moral hazard can be a thin one. The negotiations to return Sgt. Shalit dragged on as long as they did largely because Hamas had reason to believe it could drive the hardest possible bargain. The same logic explains why Israelis will continue to be tempting targets for hostage taking.

Sooner or later, Israel will learn the name of its next Gilad Shalit. Sooner or later, too, it will learn that the better course is to give its enemies reasons to think twice before taking hostages in the first place.

How about one other hypothesis of why Israel would trade 1000 for 1;   Maybe Israel knows that a serious war is about to break out with Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, Jordan and Egypt...and they want all their soldiers out of harms way so they will be free to destroy anything they need...and won't have to worry about Hamas beheading Gilad Shalit in front of the camera and freaking out Israeli citizens.  Could that be a possibility?

What I do know is that Israel simply can't go on trading 1000 for 1.  It will bankrupt their system and it will embolden and empower the very terrorists who they hope will someday be their partners in peace.