Prisoner exchange with Hezbullah - Israeli receives 2 dead bodies

[Sirotnikov]

Originally posted by BeBro
As posted, afaik - at least that's what media here say - it was played by Hzb as if at least one guy was still alive.

we had pretty good intel on them being dead.

but hezbullah started playing on public emotions and started spreadng rumors than one soldier was alive

[Sirotnikov]

Originally posted by DinoDoc
BeBro: What's the point in exchanging live prisoners for dead ones?

because it is more important that israeli families can live in peace, than that lebanese prisoners paying a due.

[Sirotnikov]

Originally posted by MOBIUS


And at least 800 civilians in your own words...

you know very well this is off topic.

hezbullah shot out of civilian neighbourhoods and kept his ordnance bases in underground tunnels in villages.

civilian territory that is used for such purposes loses its 'protected civilian area' status.

their loss is hezbullah's fault.

[GePap]

Hezbullah has two main rationales for the continued "resistance", Kuntar's (and a couple of other's) imprisonment and the Sheeba Farms occupation.

Now they are down to one excuse. If Israel gets smart and hands over the Sheeba farms to say the UN or Lebanon (like that sliver of land has any real strategic importance), then they would leave Hezbullah with no clear rationales for "resistance" save illegal flyovers of Lebanese airspace. Yes, Hezbullah would claim victory (rightly) but then, neither "victory" in any way actually harms Israel's long term security, while it forces Hezbullah to change.

On an emotional level, this obviously has many people bothered, but the sad truth is that when Israel failed two years ago to hand Hezbullah a military defeat, the game changed.

[SlowwHand]

Originally posted by Sirotnikov

you know very well this is off topic.

hezbullah shot out of civilian neighbourhoods and kept his ordnance bases in underground tunnels in villages.

civilian territory that is used for such purposes loses its 'protected civilian area' status.

their loss is hezbullah's fault.

Yes, indeed.

[Sirotnikov]

Originally posted by MOBIUS
The family of the dead child probably had closure up until the moment this guy came back into the news. Not only that, but he is being released because of political expediency...

The family of the dead child (Haran family) can never get their loved ones back.
The continuous imprisonment of Kuntar doesn't help the Haran family.
His release helps another family get their loved one's bodies back. Safe from possible abuse and dishonor. Able to have a grave to visit.

Obviously it is horrible.
I think we paid a bad price, and I'm not terribly happy with the deal itself.

But I support the principle of getting people back, at any cost.
Sometimes the cost is a bold commando action, that can kill 10 people. Sometimes the cost is releasing prisoners. You know what I would prefer, but it isn't always possible.

The Israeli govt don't care this guy's crime and are just using his as a pawn.

huh?
The Israeli govt. cares about the fate of a family's loved ones more than it does about the fate of a terrorist.

As for the importance of the well being of another innocent family - what if he kills another innocent family's child?

That's another important issue.

This is much more related to Palestinian prisoner swaps than Hezbullah prisoner swaps.
I doubt Samir Kuntar will have direct participation in terrorism in the coming years.

Palestinian prisoners though are much more likely to attack quite quickly.
But then you'd be all supportive of their release, right?

And you'll post a thread reminding everyone that we keep 8000 palestinians imprisoned, and demand their immediate release.

It seems you just wait for Israel to do something and then take up the contrary position.

Israel should have held out for a straight body swap and nothing more. Which is also why your stupid govt won't have the balls to attack Iran and is embarrassing itself pretending that it will...

Remember this quote.

Gives a whole new meaning to "Invasion of the Body Snatchers"...

tact was never your strong quality.

See, they even take the bodies from your own country knowing full well they can get leverage later - because it's worked time and time in the past, and will continue to do so in the future...

so the best solution is to leave Israeli soldier's bodies be left there?

Or do you suggest we try to get them back aggressively? Like... you know - the 2006 war that you criticise?

[SlowwHand]

Never leave anyone behind. That's been the creed of, at least Americans, and I would think Israel, always.

[Sirotnikov]

Samir al Kuntar is not just a hero but a real one,he conducted an operation in nahariya ,Occupied Palestine ,the aim was to bring israeli hostages in order to have a swap deal with the Israeli entity .there were hundreds of hundreds of Palestinian detainees in the israeli prisoners and those counts on resistence men like Samir al kuntar.
the story of samir killing a 4 year old girl is of course an israeli scenario to violate his heroic image .on the other hand there is Samir’s story which says that the girl was killed by IDF fire .
whatever the debate is ,it will not distort the fact that Samir is a hero ,for his Goal is sublime and his patience is great .In short ,he is a real master of freedom,dignity and Resistance.
welcome back after 30 years of prisonment ,3ameed el Asraa Samir al Kuntar .

and arab poster on a news site justifying samir kuntar

[Sirotnikov]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/16/lebanon.israelandthepalestinians1

It's one of those days when a lot of people are probably looking at the Middle East and scratching their heads. The Israelis have released Samir Qantar, who committed a terrible atrocity, along with four others who are defined as terrorists to Hizbullah - which Israel defines as a terrorist organisation. And all of this in exchange for two dead bodies. What's going on?

I suggest there are three things worth looking at here.

The first is that this brings some kind of closure to the Lebanon war fought over a period of 33 days exactly two years ago. According to the Hizbullah narrative, the raid across the Israeli border on July 12, 2006, and the taking of the two soldiers - Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev - was initiated in the first place in order to gain new leverage for the release of Qantar.

Israel had been due to free Qantar as part of a previous prisoner exchange, the Tenenbaum deal, in 2003, although according to the Israelis Hizbullah had reneged on its commitment to provide new information on the fate of missing airman Ron Arad (whose plane crashed over Lebanon in 1986). This has led some security officials in Israel to argue that Samir Qantar is more of a headache than an asset and that his release would reduce Hizbullah's incentive to conduct similar hostage takings in the future - a case of keeping him captive being more bother than it was worth.

That 2006 war was mishandled on all sides. Hizbullah's leader Hassan Nasrallah has publicly stated that had he anticipated the severity of the Israeli response, Hizbullah would not have conducted the cross border raid. Israel's governing coalition has remained shaky ever since this war, which damaged its reputation (having failed to secure its stated goals) and which led to a committee of inquiry and to the resignation of the then-defence minister and IDF chief of staff. Only today did Israel realise what it declared it set out to achieve by launching the war: namely, the return of the two soldiers.

The international response during the war had also been shamefully lacklustre, with the US in particular avoiding the kind of diplomatic intervention that could have ended the fighting much earlier. The parties themselves would have benefited had the diplomatic effort and the passing of UN Security Resolution 1701 not been so delayed. So there are lessons to be learned on all sides, but at least there is now a greater degree of closure and perhaps a somewhat reduced prospect of future flare-ups.

Secondly, the deal provides a window into an aspect Israeli society not always on view and that has to be understood in order to make any sense of today's events. The prisoner exchange deal was not about the crisis that has enveloped prime minister Ehud Olmert and the recent investigations surrounding him. It will come as a surprise to many that the deal also met with only muted criticism from the right-wing opposition. It was not precedent setting. Israel has engaged in such exchanges in the past, including the 2003 Tenenbaum deal which was agreed by the then Sharon Likud government that included today's Likud leader of the opposition, Benjamin Netanyahu.

More than anything this is about the Israel that is still a small community, in which the stories of one or two families can touch virtually every citizen. Israel is a country of only seven million. It has a conscript army that prides itself on being the people's army, and there exists a strong sense that the state is responsible for returning home, in whatever condition, any citizen that it has sent to the battlefield.

One episode in particular haunts Israeli society - that of the missing airman Ron Arad, whose fate after 22 years is still unknown (though he is presumed dead). The Arad family is a permanent fixture of the Israeli collective psyche and no one wants to go through what they have gone through, including the uncertainty that his wife Tammy lives with. To be clear, Israelis are not celebrating today. Most Israelis probably find the deal both sickening and necessary - something that had to be done for the families, Goldwasser and Regev.

Many may see this as excessive sentimentalism and a weakness of Israeli society. The opposite argument though carries much and perhaps more weight - that this kind of social and communal solidarity, of which the willingness to make such a deal is an expression, is actually a core strength of Israeli society, especially as it continues to demand service and sacrifice of its citizenry (and that's even to those of us who consider much of the sacrifice to be an unnecessary by-product of the occupation).

And there is also something of a dreadful bargain here: the two families, and in particular the newly declared widow Karnit Goldwasser, have spent much of the last two years meeting foreign dignitaries who have visited Israel and visiting foreign capitals to explain their plight, part of a campaign orchestrated by the state. But the tables can be turned. Once a deal was available, Karnit and the families stepped forward and told the state: Now it's your turn. For two years we told the world the other side was the obstacle. If you pull out now, then we will turn all the moral stature we can summon against you.

The message was understood, the cabinet voted 22-3 in favour of the deal. It also has to be said the family conducted itself with exemplary dignity throughout the two years. Negotiations will now shift to those with Hamas for the release of Corporal Gilad Shalit, alive and held in Gaza. Several Israeli ministers emphasised the urgency to now secure a deal for his release.

Thirdly and finally, today also gives us a window into Lebanon. The celebrations and festivities surrounding the release of someone who committed such an ugly crime, and of no moral or previous political standing, make for unpleasant viewing well beyond Israel's borders. Yet a response that says a plague on all of the Lebanese for celebrating would be very out of place. So too would an analysis that exaggerates the extent to which this strengthens Hizbullah. Some Lebanese no doubt felt coerced into celebrating today. For others it was simply an opportunity to vent their anger and frustration at previous Israeli incursions into Lebanon, at the 18-year occupation of the south and at the destruction and havoc wrought by the military campaign in 2006. And no, none of that justifies Qantar's crimes or him being hailed as a hero.

The visuals today no doubt favour Hizbullah. Indeed, today Hizbullah embellished its sense of having been the victor of the 2006 war and enhanced its standing in Lebanon and beyond with the entire Lebanese leadership standing in salute. But don't get carried away. Many Lebanese are no doubt looking at the pictures of Qantar and asking themselves whether everything they suffered in 2006 was worth it for this guy. The basic divisions in Lebanon remain intact: those who support Hizbullah probably feel vindicated today, and those who oppose Hizbullah probably still feel cheated.

There is another, less obvious way in which the prisoner exchange may present challenges to Huzbullah in the medium term, even if it's a short-term boon. For Hizbullah to credibly maintain its arms and resistance posture, it needs a justification that resonates with the Lebanese agenda. The prisoners were part of that explanation. What remains now is the disputed and tiny territory of the Shebaa Farms under Israeli control. As the pretexts are removed, Hizbullah is faced with an increasingly naked challenge: Why does it not fully integrate into Lebanese politics, and can it legitimately claim to serve a Lebanese-wide interest? It would be wise to resolve the Shebaa issue, thus prodding Hizbullah into a more definitive choice between bullets and the ballot-box.

Where does all this leave us? For certain families there are mourning rituals, for others festive celebrations. Beyond that, three developments from the last weeks have all helped move this corner of the Middle East toward a more stable if still fragile equilibrium: the Lebanese, with Qatari assistance, have brokered an internal political power-sharing arrangement, and the new national unity government was just sworn in; Israel and Syria have been conducting proximity talks - peace negotiations with Turkish mediation; and in Paris last weekend, Syria and Lebanon agreed to exchange ambassadors.

There is still along way to go to achieve tranquillity in the triangular border region between Syria, Israel and Lebanon. But those steps and even today's sombre exchange might help move things in the right direction.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1002317.html

Torture takes many forms. We take it and we hand it out, we live with it and we live with ourselves knowing that we may be subjecting our loved ones to it, that our loved ones may be engaging in it, that innocent people on every side may be torture's direct victims.

Few innocent people have been tortured like the loved ones of the people murdered by Samir Kuntar, the Palestine Liberation Front monster convicted of a crime so brutal that even the designation terrorist is too good for him.

This week, the loved ones will know that Kuntar will be feted to a hero's welcome staged by Hezbollah, whose claims to being a religious organization, stain the word religious with a level of sadism that is astonishing, reaching new levels with every gloat by the torture master who calls himself a spiritual leader, Hassan Nasrallah.

But that will be only one aspect of the glee with which Hezbollah will likely take explicit pride and claim exultant victory.

Not satisfied with keeping the families of kidnapped IDF soldiers Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev in the dark for two years as to their fate, a Lebanese report which appears to have been leaked by Hezbollah two days before the prisoner swap, stated that one of the soldiers had survived the kidnapping attack, but that the other was surely dead.

Then, to torture the families further, the report refrained from revealing which of the two had been killed, or whether the other was still alive.

But for sheer gratuitous sadism, the case of Samir Kuntar has few rivals. Consider the survivors of Kuntar's acts of murder.

Consider Smadar Haran, a survivor of the 1979 attack led by Kuntar. Kuntar burst into Haran's apartment building in the dead of night, seizing Smadar Haran's husband Danny and their daughter Einat, 4 years old.

Desperate to save their two-year-old girl Yael, Smadar Haran huddled with her in a crawl space in the attic. "I will never forget the joy and the hatred in the voices [of Kuntar and his men] as they swaggered about hunting for us, firing their guns and throwing grenades," she later recalled in the Washington Post.

"I knew that if Yael cried out, the terrorists would toss a grenade into the crawl space and we would be killed," she wrote in 2003. "So I kept my hand over her mouth, hoping she could breathe. As I lay there, I remembered my mother telling me how she had hidden from the Nazis during the Holocaust. 'This is just like what happened to my mother,' I thought."

Smadar Haran's personal torture had only begun. She would later learn that Kuntar had dragged her husband Danny and older daughter to the beach nearby, where he shot Danny execution style, making sure that her father's death would be the last sight her little girl would ever see.

Kuntar then took the butt of his assault rifle and brought in down on Einat's head, crushing it against a rock.

Smadar Haran would later recall, "By the time we were rescued from the crawl space, hours later, Yael, too, was dead. In trying to save all our lives, I had smothered her."

Two weeks ago, in an act of heroism that is beyond imagination, Smadar Haran spoke publicly of coming to terms with the impending release of the monster who turned her life into a waking nightmare. "Samir Kuntar isn't, nor has he ever been, my private prisoner," she told a news conference. "His fate must be decided now according to Israel's needs and ethical interests."

There will be those who note that Israelis have been responsible for acts as inhuman as those of Kuntar. They have. But that neither excuses Kuntar nor legitimizes his elevation to the status of hero and martyr to the Palestinian struggle or the Lebanese resistance.

For Israelis, even after all these years, the release of Kuntar is a form of self-inflicted torture. So heinous, so unpardonable were his crimes, that American Jewish author and journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, himself a veteran of the IDF, wrote on The Atlantic Monthly's Website last week, "As unbelievable as this sounds, Israel is actually thinking of swapping Samir Kuntar in a prisoner exchange with Hezbollah. Kuntar is perhaps the most terrible person held in an Israeli prison, a man who crushed the skull of a Jewish child against a rock. Sometimes, these prisoner exchanges don't seem worth it."

What are they for, these prisoner exchanges? Perhaps only for this: that when sending their troops into battle, Israeli commanders can continue to look them in the eye and say with candor and in good faith that if they are taken prisoner, Israel will spare no effort to bring them back.

It may be all we have left to endure this torture. But it may also be the essence of what we are.

[Pekka]

Sometimes you have to stop thinking that to your action there is a reaction. Even if that is true, then you become a machine, this isn't the game theory in real life. People are rational and irrational. The theory of the mind states that the brain is modular, some of them parts encapsulated, so even though we see an illusion and at the same time KNOW it is, for example, an optical illusion, we can't help but see the illusion.

This is to say that if you're going to calculate, that when you trade dead bodies for a murderer, then that it will further incerase attacks on your ass, because they might think this is the way to go, to take hostages and kill them, you still get the same trade you see... that's hardly the point. I think that's villifying the enemy, as if they consist of only brutes and animals. While an act might happen as an indirect result of this, it still is THEIR CHOICE. No one is forcing anyone to attack, and no one is putting their guard down. No one is not firing back, no one is not aiming for the stomach when it comes down to it.

This isn't the economy of guerilla warfare. People say well, think about that murderer, if it was your family members killed by him. Well, what about the other side, if your boys were even dead in the other side. You'd still want it back. And those who say they don't, they're lying or psychos.

What you're doing is you're ALSO showing to your own kind and troops, that if you die back there, we'll try to still get you back here, even if you are dead, we want to claim the body. I'd like to think that if I was in the situation of war, that my side would still try to bargain for me even if I was dead. And no one is dead as a bonus because this guy was traded, it's just not a fact. Someone might get it, but might not get it. On the positive side, you get a new chance to shoot him as well.

My bottom line is, that I don't think this is a show of weakness. Israel is not de facto weaker because of this. It will be a costly mistake to assume so. They aren't going to be less vigilant. You care for your own more than you want to put on a war face for someone else. You're already fighting them, what's the point? Unless you really are weak, then you need to show strength, but since you are strong, it really makes no big difference.

[Sirotnikov]

You care for your own more than you want to put on a war face for someone else.

Golda once said that peace is a function of people on the other side loving their children more than they hate their enemies.

I'm glad that we love our children more

[Az]

But I support the principle of getting people back, at any cost.

Wait, we got any people back?

[Sirotnikov]

i hate the deal too. but those are people whether you like it or not, az.

[Az]

I am sorry, I was thinking that people are beings with emotions, thoughts, and feelings, not bags of mauled rotting flash.

mea culpa. I sure as hell wouldn't want my dead body to be retrieved for the release of a bunch of *******s. And probably neither would you. Or them, for that matter.

[Heresson]

I'm with Az in that matter.