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Wednesday, January 28th 2004 Prisoner Exchange: I Don't Know, and You Don't Know Either
I have no idea where to come down on the prisoner exchange between Israel and Hezbollah. I do have a couple of thoughts:
If you are certain about this issue one way or another, you haven't thought about it enough. For its part, the blogosphere seems disturbingly unanimous on this issue. A little nuance, and the realization that the desire to "bring the boys home" goes extremely deep in the Israeli psyche, may not be out of the question.
On the other hand, the scope of the deal does seem a little one sided to me. Over 400 Palestinian terrorists, double digit Lebanese terrorists, some more terrorists from random Arab countries, and like 60 bodies - in exchange for the remains of 3 soldiers killed in an ambush initiated by Hezbollah and for the safe return of an Israeli civilian kidnapped by Hezbollah. It's all well and good to talk about how Israel is a humane society that will always go after every single one of its boys and bring them home, and that the Arabs don't care about their boys, but in all honesty the Arabs seem to be making out like bandits in terms of getting back their boys back too.
Arabs cross into Israel, murder Israeli families, get caught afterwards. Then Arabs ambush, kill, or kidnap more Israelis, torture them for years, and exchange them for the release of the Arabs that had originally killed Israelis. It just seems so damn unfair.
Also in the negative column, the release of criminals in order to get back a kidnapped Israeli seems to be the definition of rewarding terrorism. Nasrallah has already said that he's going to kidnap more Israelis. There is a not un-compelling case to be made that this deal will actually lead to more Israelis being kidnapped.
All of these problems present themselves before we even get to the second phase of the swap, which is about exchanging Samir Kuntar - a man who liquidated a family and killed the policeman who tried to top him - for information (??!!) about Ron Arad. Arad is the navigator who went missing in 1986, when he was captured by Lebanese militiamen, taken to Beirut, tortured for God only knows how long, and eventually sold to the Iranians. Israel is set to release the man who tortured and sold him, Mustafa Dirani, in the initial deal (although there's been some movement on that) and then to try to get information about his in subsequent phases. Not so fair to the Arad family, who has certainly suffered while Israel repeatedly failed to bring their boy home.
If you didn't think the issues surrounding Ron Arad's fate (which is clearing up by the day - Nasrallah recently admitted that Arad ended his life in Lebanon) are complicated enough, try to wrap your mind around this ethical quandary. If Ron Arad was tortured and executed by the Arabs like so many other Israeli boys and girls, should Israel release a living Arab terrorist, in exchange for Arad's remains? It is well-known that his mother was adamant about saying no before she passed. On the other hand, there is the issue of what Arad means to the whole State - he is nothing less than a symbol of the Israeli boy that the country needs to get back. His restoration is long overdue, and if a painful price must be paid for the Return of Ron Arad (where that event is meant in terms of its cultural significance) then perhaps it must be paid.
The Leftist Israeli rags that are opposing this deal in the names of the families need to shut the hell up. A newspaper that supported the idea of negotiating with Arafat well into the second year of the current conflict, a newspaper that is more than a little complicit in selling peace-longing Israelis on Oslo, is in no position to give sermons about not rewarding terrorism.
That's all for now. This will only get more complicated as we learn more about the conditions of the Israelis, the names of the Arabs to be released, and the status of negotiations about Arad. |
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