There is no way of knowing if Ouda Tarabin was sent to Egypt to spy for Israel or not. In any case, Israel will deny it. That's a white lie permitted under the rules of the diplomacy game. Tarabin wasn't caught "red-handed"; he was tried secretly, behind his back, and when at the first opportunity he crossed the border into Sinai, the Egyptians arrested him. Only after 15 years had passed did he return home. Various Israeli governments asked his family and the media not to make waves. In Israel, people believed that former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak could not release Tarabin in the face of public pressure from Israel and other countries. The recommendation to keep radio silence didn't turn out as expected. Things stayed quiet, and Tarabin was not released. Would things have turned out better if Israel had raised an outcry in international circles? There's no way of knowing for sure. The question marks surrounding Israel's handling of the Tarabin case remain. The fact that quiet approach failed is not proof that diplomatic noise would have led to any better result. Mubarak didn't free Tarabin because he didn't want to, or couldn't, or feared for his life, and the Muslim Brotherhood were no partner for talks on the case or an early release. The opposite -- any fuss could have put his life in danger. The current administration is an open enemy of the Muslim Brotherhood. It takes great risks, and Ouda Tarabin is not the biggest one. Moreover, his release was only moved up by a short time, and went ahead in exchange for Israel freeing Egyptian prisoners. When Tarabin returned, he was received with a merely polite smatter of applause. If it was done that way to avoid embarrassing Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, so much the better; if it was done because the Bedouin sector put a price on his head for being part of the Israeli rule, as was said on Kol Israel on Thursday, it's a bad sign. The Bedouin's own flesh and blood has been freed after being in prison for 15 years, and his brothers are angry at him instead of celebrating. The rest has to do with his family's noble behavior. His mother, who clung to his neck and wept, and his father, who welcomed him with restraint. Of course, the welcome home ceremony wasn't missing a scene where the prosecutor and the deputy minister argued about who had done what to secure Tarabin's release, and both ignored the fact that it had taken place two weeks before his prison term was up anyway. So welcome home to Tarabin -- and the government should ensure that this family, which lives among heaps of refuse and has known troubles, won't find itself complaining to the media about its living conditions. Assuming, of course, that his biography proves that he did a lot for the sake of the country.
