The Shaming of Israel

Despite being extremely busy at the moment, I couldn't let today's events pass without a brief comment. The so-called 'prisoner exchange' between Israel and Lebanon is, in fact, no such thing: the term 'prisoner exchange' implies some degree of reciprocity, prisoners exchanged for prisoners, whereas what has actually taken place today is the exchange of five Lebanese prisoners for the corpses of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, two Israeli soldiers kidnapped and murdered during Hezbollah's illegal incursion into, and assault upon, sovereign Israeli territory in July 2006.

The images of Samir Kuntar, the most infamous of the five Lebanese prisoners released today, being welcomed as a hero in Beirut are more sickening and disheartening than I can possibly put into words. Indeed, these words - 'sickening' and 'disheartening' - really are inadequate, for they entirely fail to communicate the absolute rage and indignation filling not only my stomach, but the collective stomach of the entire Israeli nation. To briefly recap Kuntar's crime:

In 1979 Kuntar and his small band of PLF terrorists landed on the beach at Nahariya, a small coastal town in the north of Israel. After murdering a policeman, they proceeded to break into the home of an Israeli family, the Harans. Kuntar and another member of the group dragged the father of the family, 31-year-old Danny Haran, and four-year-old Einat, down to the beach. After shooting Danny in the back of the head at point blank range in front of his daughter - and after drowning Danny's body to ensure that he really was dead - Kuntar smashed Einat's head open with rocks, stamped on her body, and crushed her skull with the butt of his assault rifle. Meanwhile, the mother of the family, Smadar, hid in the house with her two-year-old daughter Yael. After throwing grenades into the house and starting a fire in the hope of flushing out Smadar and Yael, Yael began to whimper. Fearing that her cries would alert the terrorists, Smadar covered her mouth, in the process accidentally smothering and killing her daughter.

Kuntar never expressed any remorse for his crimes. He should have died in prison for his crimes. The idea of him living free and healthy in Lebanon - much less welcomed as a hero, a "resistance fighter returning from the prisons of the occupier", to quote Lebanese President Michel Suleiman (how long, one wonders, until Hezbollah and Syria conspire to have Suleiman murdered as they did Rafik Hariri? Statements like this will do nothing to save him from his inevitable fate) - is one that is, I'm sure, too much for many Israelis to bear.

Understandably, some people might be a little perplexed as to why Israel would agree to such a disproportionate exchange in the first place. Indeed, this is not the first time that Israel has acquiesced to such an exchange: in 2003 Israel released over 400 Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners in exchange for one Israeli (drug dealer) who had been captured by Hezbollah and the corpses of three other Israels. Part of the answer is to be found in Jewish law, which requires that every possible effort must be made to bury Jewish bodies as intact as possible, i.e. with all of their body parts. Hence the uniquely Israeli figure of those Orthodox Jewish medics who, after a suicide bombing, scour the surrounding area looking for any limbs, digits, organs - in fact any body part at all, no matter how small - which have been scattered by the impact of the explosion, and then match them up to the relevant corpse, ready for burial.

For too long now Israel's enemies have taken advantage of this requirement, and Jewish law more generally. The Arabs launched the Yom Kippur War in 1973 in the full knowledge that - in fact, precisely because - the overwhelming majority of Israelis, including their military, were observing the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, a day on which all eating and drinking is prohibited. If Israel attempted something similar during Ramadan, the world would be in uproar. Three years ago, Shin Bet (Israel's internal security service, a bit like MI5 in Britain) foiled a Hamas plot to infiltrate an Israeli army outpost (in Israel). Hamas intended to kidnap a number of soldiers in order to use them as bargaining chips for the release of Palestinian prisoners. Knowing that they wouldn't be able to kidnap so many soldiers, the leaders of Hamas hit upon another idea: rather than kidnap the soldiers, they would instead kill them, decapitate them, and, after displaying their severed heads on television, hold them to ransom.

How long will Israel continue to be humiliated in this way? What happened to the policy of never negotiating with terrorists? Israel used to be the one country which actually stuck to that policy, recognising, correctly, that if they started to negotiate no Israeli would ever be safe anywhere in the world. And, indeed, this is the case today. Although quoting Yitzhak Rabin is one of those habits that Israel must learn to overcome, I think that it is worth recalling his maxim that Israel must fight for peace as if there were no terror, and fight terror as if there was no peace. There is cautious optimism that Israel and her enemies are, finally, making progress with the former. But this process cannot take place at the expense of the latter. Israel cannot allow itself to be humiliated in this way. There is a difference between making necessary concessions and sacrifices to attain a genuine peace with legitimate partners in the Arab world and capitulation. Israel must rediscover its backbone, its pride, its sense of fighting spirit. It must understand that the fight for peace ought to be carried out with an absolutely ruthless determination, but that the fight against those who would kidnap, torture, bomb, decapitate, and murder its citizens must be pursued with the same degree of ruthless vigour.