Excerpts from an editorial in The Times of London yesterday:
A melancholy line was drawn under Israel’s 2006 war with Lebanon yesterday when two black coffins were unloaded at a United Nations base on the Israeli-Lebanese border and the bodies of two kidnapped Israeli soldiers were returned to their homeland. In exchange for the remains of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, army reservists whose seizure by Hezbollah sparked the 34-day conflict in Lebanon, Israel released a terrorist serving a life sentence for the deaths of four Israelis as well as four other Lebanese prisoners.
The exchange has been the subject of tortuous negotiations by a German intermediary for two years. It sparked very different reactions in the two countries.
In Lebanon, a brass band, banners, a red carpet and yellow Hezbollah flags greeted the freed prisoners, and in Beirut the government declared a public holiday as the president, prime minister and speaker of Parliament waited at the airport to greet Samir Qantar, imprisoned since 1979. In Israel, by contrast, there were no ceremonies. The families of the dead soldiers wept as they saw the television pictures of the coffins, newspapers questioned the point of the swap and critics of Ehud Olmert, the embattled prime minister who ordered Israeli troops into Lebanon, said that the two men died for nothing.
Israel’s readiness, however reluctantly, to go ahead with the exchange is, to many, surprising. It flies in the face of a long-declared policy of not negotiating with terrorists. It seems grotesquely unbalanced: Israel is willing to release four convicted terrorists, as well as scores of Palestinian prisoners later, in return for two corpses. And, most seriously, it perpetuates the cycle of hostage-taking — on both sides — by giving an incentive to kidnap or arrest people to use them as bargaining chips in future exchanges. Worse still, hostage-takers will conclude that in negotiations with Israel, even dead bodies have a value.
