Israel-Lebanon: A Clash of Cultures

David Aikman

In the Middle East last week, no two scenes could have highlighted more vividly the clash of cultures in the Arab-Israeli dispute than the contrasting events in Lebanon and in Israel. In Beirut, there were shouts of acclamation, brass bands, and kisses on the cheek for the returning heroes—along with crowing signs in Arabic that read “humiliation” across a photograph of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. In Israel, the return of the bodies of two Israeli soldiers, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, was followed by the mournful sounds of funerals conducted with quiet dignity in Nahariya and Haifa for the two men. The exchange of two dead soldiers for five living prisoners and 199 dead Lebanese and Palestinian fighters was the fruit of some eighteen months of painful negotiation between Israel and Hezbollah that followed the 33-day “July War” in 2006 between Israel and Hezbollah.

In fact, it was the kidnapping of Goldwasser and Regev that started the war in the first place. The two men were snatched by Hezbollah gunmen after anti-tank missiles were fired at two armored Humvees patrolling northern Israel. Three Israeli soldiers were killed in the attack, three injured, and Goldwasser and Regev, presumed injured as well, were captured and taken back to Lebanon.

The leader of the Lebanese Shiite Islamist group Hezbollah, Hasan Nasrallah, had made it plain that the kidnapping of the soldiers was intended to obtain live bargaining chips for the freeing of Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners held in Israel. Of these, the most notorious was Samir Kuntar, a PLO operative who, only 16, had taken part in a raid on the northern Israeli seaside town of Nahariya back in 1979. The raid was foiled and Kuntar captured, but not before he killed an Israeli policeman and bludgeoned a four-year-old girl to death by smashing her head against a rock with a rifle butt. The toddler’s mother had inadvertently suffocated a two-year-old while hiding in a crawl space of the house as Kuntar and others searched for her.

The Israeli military suspected that the two soldiers had died after their being snatched, either from wounds or execution-style. But Hezbollah toyed cruelly with their Israeli families by not revealing whether they were dead of alive until their coffins were exchanged for Kuntar and four other released prisoners at the border just a few days ago.

The exchange provoked bitter debate in Israel. It has always been a moral imperative of Judaism—and indeed the Israeli Defense Forces—to recover their wounded and dead from the nation’s battlefields. On the other hand, Israeli governments have traditionally refused to bargain with organizations they deem to be terrorist, like Hezbollah, over the return of captured, missing, or dead military personnel. In the Goldwasser and Regev exchange, the government clearly caved in to an earnest campaign by many supporters of the kidnapped soldiers’ families in what the left-of-center newspaper Ha’aretz, in an editorial, described as “a disturbing triumph of sentiment over sense and strategy.” A columnist in the same newspaper summed up the situation drily. “Here,” he wrote, “are the result of Israel’s war against Hezbollah so far. Hezbollah is bringing home a living murderer, and Israel is bringing home two dead soldiers—over whose capture it sacrificed 160 other solders and civilians.”

The disproportionality of the exchange and the grotesque triumphalism of Hezbollah in welcoming Kuntar and others home offended many Israelis. The Jerusalem Post, Israel’s leading English-language daily paper, editorialized: “Hezbollah’s greatest lost, perhaps, has been its standing in the eyes of principled people everywhere, who now can see the difference between a political culture that valorizes brutality and celebrates a killers as its natural conscience, and one that manages a quiet dignity even in the most trying of times.”

But it was not just the Israeli press that felt this way. London’s leading Arabic-language paper A-Sharq al-Awsat thought that it was “shameful to see members of the government in Beirut join the celebrations of Hezbollah.” “The deal,” the paper added, “cost Hezbollah more than seven billion dollars, more than 1,200 dead, and 4,500 wounded Lebanese civilians.”

In the short run, of course, it is indeed Hezbollah’s triumph, for the return of Kuntar was why Nasrallah was willing to risk all-out war with Israel two years ago. (Never mind that Nasrallah candidly admitted he hadn’t anticipated the forcefulness of the Israeli reaction against Lebanon). The biggest loser in the transaction, however, has to be not Israel, but Lebanon, and any prospect that it might remain an independent state. In recent negotiations with Hezbollah over power sharing in the government, the pro-Western Prime Minister Fouad Seniora all but handed over veto-power in government policy-making to Hezbollah, which of course, takes almost all of its cues from politicians in Syria and Iran. Lebanon, a once courageous, independent, and powerfully Christian state, to all intents and purposes, is now under the control of Islamists.

The other shoe to drop is the price Hamas will now demand for the freedom of an Israeli soldier it also kidnapped two years ago inside southern Israel, Corporal Gilad Shalit. As Palestinians in Gaza celebrated the “victory” of Hezbollah in getting Kuntar out of an Israeli prison, it seemed probable that Hamas would raise the price it would ask of Israel for the return of the Israel soldier it holds. Essentially, Palestinian and Arab Islamist groups know that they cannot destroy Israel, but they can cause its citizens much anguish by kidnapping them and holding them for the highest price possible. The small print in all future deals is that the “heroes” they force Israel to release may turn out to be child-murderers. It is the culture of civilized life versus the culture of Al Capone thuggery. 

Dr. Aikman, a Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum, was for many years senior correspondent for Time.

Columns, David Aikman, Provocations, Global Culture, War and Peace, Fri 18 Jul 2008