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By Ron Bousso, Agence France-Presse
JERUSALEM: As Israel and Hezbollah prepare to
exchange prisoners, commentators in the Jewish state question
whether it is paying too high a price and risks bolstering its
arch-foes in the region.
Barring a last-minute snag, Israel will on
Wednesday release four Hezbollah fighters and Samir Kantar,
convicted of a brutal triple murder, at the border with Lebanon.
It will also transfer the bodies of nearly 200
Lebanese and Palestinians killed in recent years.
In exchange, the Shiite movement will hand over
to Israel two soldiers it captured in a cross-border raid in July
2006 that sparked a 34-day war in Lebanon that killed 1,200 Lebanese
and 160 Israelis.
Israel still does not know whether the
soldiers—Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev—are dead or alive, but
they are widely assumed to be dead.
One view is that the deal could undermine
Israel’s deterrence of the Syrian- and Iranian-backed Hezbollah
and the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, which is also holding
an Israeli soldier it captured in June 2006.
“This is a very serious strategic mistake by
the government,” said Ely Karmon, a terrorism expert at the
Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center.
“The mere fact that we are heading for a deal
without knowing whether [Regev and Goldwasser] are alive or dead,
and are releasing murderers, is a major failure,” he told Agence
France-Presse.
While Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has said that
as far as he knows the two soldiers are dead, Hezbollah has refused
to divulge any information on their fate.
And the heads of Israel’s Mossad spy agency
and the Shin Beth internal security services both oppose the deal,
which they say marks a “dangerous precedent” by swapping live
people for bodies, a senior government official said.
But the government has repeatedly said the
deal—the eighth struck with Hezbollah since 1991—reflects a
moral obligation to citizens and soldiers.
“As Israel’s defense minister and a former
chief of staff and commander, I again say that we have a moral
obligation to bring Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev home,” Ehud
Barak said on Monday.
The last major swap was in 2004, when Israel
released more than 400 prisoners in exchange for an Israeli
businessman abducted by Hezbollah and the bodies of three soldiers.
But Karmon said “the deal is presented in
Lebanon as a triumph for Hezbollah and it weakens Israel’s image
in Lebanon. Israel should decide how to act in order not to have to
pay a higher price each time.”
Israel went to war in 2006, partly in order to
free Regev and Goldwasser. Its failure to do so stirred up a painful
and heated debate over the price tag for securing the release of the
two reserve servicemen.
One of the most controversial aspects of the
deal for many in Israel is the release of Kantar, a Lebanese
militant who brutally killed Danny Haran, his daughter Einat and a
policeman in a 1979 raid on northern Israel.
The murders in the coastal town of Nahariya
shocked Israel to the core by its brutality. Kantar and co-militants
shot dead Danny, 28, and crushed the four-year-old girl’s skull
with rifle butts.
Another point of contention is that the swap
deal required that Hezbollah provide a report on the fate of Israeli
airman Ron Arad, missing since his plane was shot down over Lebanon
in 1986.
Yet the report failed to shed any new light on
Arad’s fate, underscoring Israel’s dilemma.
“The report on Ron Arad, as Hezbollah
presented it, does not provide clear answers and does not solve the
question of his fate,” Barak said on Monday.
Eitan Haber, an adviser to the late Prime
Minister Yitzhak Rabin, put a positive spin on the deal.
He said Israel’s willingness to release
murderers in exchange for bodies is a sign of strength, though its
enemies will still try to abduct Israelis.
“We will probably have more such incidents in
the future. Our enemies know we will pay a much higher price than
required... but our soldiers know that we have the higher moral
ground,” Haber told Agence France-Presse.
“The swap will under no circumstances weaken
Israel’s deterrence against Hezbollah. But they will continue to
kidnap our soldiers and we will keep paying.
“There is no such thing as ‘worth it or
not’ in prisoner exchanges. Bodies are not worth a thing but the
feeling it gives the leaders, the families and the soldiers that
know they will always return home is priceless.”
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