Israel: Exchanging live prisoners for dead bodies

The latest prisoner swap between Israel and Hezbollah revealed the true natures of both sides, said The Jerusalem Post in an editorial. In order to win the return of the two Israeli soldiers whose 2006 capture by Hezbollah prompted an Israeli-Lebanese war, Israel gave up four Hezbollah prisoners. In Lebanon, the terrorists were feted as heroes, their release the occasion of a national holiday. One of them—Samir Kantar, who murdered an Israeli father in front of his terrified 4-year-old daughter and then smashed in her skull—was greeted with a banner calling him “the conscience of Lebanon, Palestine, and the Arab nation.” In Israel, meanwhile, the country was forced to confront what it had long feared but never really believed: Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser were dead, and Hezbollah simply handed over their corpses. Still, Hezbollah was the loser in this exchange, because the whole world saw “the difference between a political culture that valorizes brutality and celebrates a killer as its national conscience, and one that manages a quiet dignity even in the most trying of times.”

But was it worth it? asked Tel Aviv’s Ha’aretz. Should we really keep negotiating “exchanges involving live prisoners and dead soldiers?” The Israeli intelligence services knew all along that the men were probably dead. Yet the Israeli media and many politicians kept churning out clichés like “bring the boys back home,” as if the swap were a rescue operation. It’s a grim trend. “In the past, soldiers risked their lives to save the lives of their comrades; in recent years, however, soldiers have been sent to recover the body parts of other soldiers, while putting their own lives at risk.”

Of course the moral thing to do is to try to recover Israeli remains, said Israel Harel, also in Ha’aretz, but not through such a “humiliating and exorbitantly expensive deal.” We let a “terrorist organization string us along, right up to the last second,” as Hezbollah continued to hint that the soldiers were alive. Even after it became clear that the men were dead, Israeli television commentators kept saying that the return of the remains was a vital national interest. Now, other terrorist groups—such as Hamas, which is currently holding Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit captive—have no reason to keep Israeli prisoners alive; after all, Israel will apparently give up its most vicious terrorist captives in exchange for corpses.

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Israel had no choice, said Yair Lapid in the Tel Aviv Ynetnews.com. The Americans can “afford not to engage in talks with terrorists” because the U.S. Army is made up of volunteers. But Israel drafted Regev and Goldwasser, which means Israel “took an obligation upon itself for their fate.” Alive or dead, the state had to do whatever it took to get the soldiers home. Maybe it’s true that Hezbollah was more calculating than we were in the negotiations. “But who the hell wants to be like Hezbollah? The loud debate on whether we got a good deal or not would be better left to the used-car business.”