It’s all over, it would seem, but the names and the numbers. Which, it now is clear, was all it was ever about in the first place.

I’m talking about the impending prisoner exchange between Israel and Hamas, in which Gilad Shalit, the Israeli corporal taken prisoner last July in an attack on his tank unit on the border of the Gaza Strip, will be swapped for over a thousand Palestinian terrorists now in Israeli jails, some of them, as the Hebrew expression goes, with “blood on their hands” — that is, guilty of the murder of Israelis.

Looking at my New York Sun columns to see if I had written anything on the subject in July, I discovered that I had. After observing that the custom of exchanging huge numbers of imprisoned Palestinians for small numbers of Israelis had a long history with dire consequences, I wrote in one column:

“In the 1985 exchange with Ahmed Jibril’s Popular Front For The Liberation of Palestine, for example, Israel swapped 1,150 convicted terrorists for three of its soldiers. In the 2004 exchange with Hezbollah for kidnapped Israeli businessman Elhanan Tannenbaum, 460 Lebanese and Palestinians were let go. In both of these cases, a large number of those released returned to a life of anti-Israel violence. Gilad Shalit’s captors have publicly declared their intention of freeing similar numbers of their brethren from Israeli prisons.

“For Israel to give in to such demands now could have catastrophic consequences for the future. There would not be an Israeli at home or abroad who would not be the next potential victim of an abduction. The only way to reduce the price of extortion is not to pay it.”

I was of course not the only one to voice such sentiments. And indeed, immediately after Corporal Shalit’s abduction, the government of Israel, acting as though it had learned the lesson of past prisoner exchanges, declared that it would not repeat the pattern and demanded that the Israeli soldier be released unconditionally. Threatening military action to free him, Prime Minister Olmert promised: “There will be no negotiations [with Hamas], no bargaining, no agreements.”

The cynics smiled. They had heard such talk before. In the end, they said, the Olmert government would cave in, just as two decades of Israeli governments had done before it. Large numbers of Palestinian terrorists, some of them convicted killers, would be traded for Corporal Shalit’s release. The negotiations might drag on for months or longer, but ultimately they would boil down to a matter of names and numbers, just as they had always done.

The cynics, needless to say, were right. Israel and Hamas, it appears, are now in the final stages of negotiating a list of the Palestinian prisoners to be let go. Reports speak of approximately 1,400 of them. Many will be minor figures, convicted of stone throwing, possession of weapons, or simply membership in terrorist organizations. Some will be political leaders. Some will be murderers.

And the message will, once again, be clear: The kidnapping of Israelis pays well. In fact, it not only pays well, it pays better than any other form of terrorist activity. No matter how often it fails, it is worth trying to carry out again and again, because the profits are lucrative when it succeeds. What other investment can give you a return of 1,400 to one?

And so, once Gilad Shalit is released, it will be just a matter of time before Hamas or some other Palestinian organization kidnaps its next Israeli. Once again, an Israeli government will react by announcing that this time no deal will be made. Once again the cynics will smile. Once again they will be right. And once again the ranks of Palestinian terror will be replenished and those active in it will be encouraged by the thought that no matter what crimes they commit, they will eventually be released in a lopsided prisoner exchange.

What makes it so difficult for an Israeli government, once and for all, to hold the line? Why is “this time” never really this time?

Precedent has a lot to do with it. It’s hard to explain why, when government after government has made similar deals in the past to rescue a single Israeli, the latest government should refuse — and of course, it gets harder with each additional deal.

Jewish tradition has something to do with it, too. The notion of the ransom of Jewish captives, pidyon shvuyim, as it’s called in Hebrew, is a deeply ingrained one in Judaism. It goes back to medieval times when Jewish communities often raised large sums of money to free Jews who had been taken captive in acts of war or piracy.

And there’s also the Israeli sense that a Jewish life is worth more than an Arab one and should have a higher value placed on it. Accustomed to prisoner exchanges at the end of the Sinai, the Six Day, and the Yom Kippur wars in which small numbers of Israelis were traded for large numbers of Arab prisoners of war taken by a victorious Israel Defense Force, many Israelis have assumed that swaps with terrorists should be of the same nature. They haven’t bothered to reflect that, while releasing POWs does not lead to new wars, releasing terrorists leads to new acts of terror.

Israelis are, whatever their reputation in the world may be, a soft-hearted people. It’s hard for them to see someone like Gilad Shalit’s father, Noam Shalit, who has only been doing what any father would do — appearing regularly on television to plead eloquently for his son’s release — and to say “no” to him. Saying “yes” is so much easier, even when those saying it also have sons and daughters, some of whom will be killed or kidnapped in the future because their parents have been merciful.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.