Podhoretz the Younger manages to miss the point entirely:
It turns out that Gilad Shalit, the kidnapped Israeli soldier, is also a citizen of…France. But I guess, since he’s a Jew, the French Foreign Minister would just as soon he was murdered by Hamas rather than actually support efforts to free a French citizen.
Or, perhaps, the French quite reasonably feel that someone who is not only a citizen of another country but has actually taken up arms for that country instead of France is no longer a concern of theirs. And while I’m no expert on French citizenship laws, I seem to recall that it wasn’t all that long ago that swearing allegiance to another country, let alone taking up arms for one, was enough to automatically cause the loss of one’s US citizenship.
This is not a new dichotomy. Napoleon once famously required the Jews of France to decide if their loyalties lay with their people or with France. Gilad Shalit obviously decided that his lay with Israel, as was his right, but at that point his fate ceased to be a matter of concern for his former nation.
After all, the man didn’t get captured because he was a French citizen, but because he is an Israeli soldier. It is an Israeli problem, and Israel certainly has the werewithal to respond to it.