Headlines, Human Rights, Middle East & North Africa

MIDEAST: Israel Ponders the Price of Prisoners

Peter Hirschberg

JERUSALEM, Jul 1 2008 (IPS) - An impending prisoner swap between Israel and Hezbollah has ignited a debate over the price Israel should be prepared to pay to get back soldiers who have fallen into captivity, and what this says about the country’s moral fibre.

The cabinet voted overwhelmingly (22-3) on Sunday to approve a deal whereby Israel will release five Lebanese prisoners, including one serving four life terms in an Israeli jail, in exchange for two soldiers who are believed dead and whose abduction two years ago by Hezbollah in a cross-border raid sparked a month-long war between Israel and the Shia group in Lebanon.

As part of the German-mediated deal, which is expected to take place within the next two weeks, Hezbollah will return Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, the two soldiers who were abducted, and Israel will release four Hezbollah fighters captured during the war, the bodies of at least 10 Hezbollah fighters killed in the fighting, and Samir Kuntar, a Lebanese who has spent almost three decades in an Israeli prison.

Kuntar’s impending release has sparked some opposition to the prisoner swap deal because of the gruesome nature of the attack he led in northern Israel in 1979. After infiltrating from Lebanon as part of a four-man cell, Kuntar shot dead an Israeli policeman and then took 28-year-old Danny Haran and his four-year-old daughter hostage in the coastal town of Nahariya.

Kuntar shot the father dead in front of his daughter and then smashed the girl’s skull with his rifle butt, killing her. Haran’s wife Yael accidentally suffocated her two-year-old daughter to death as she frantically tried to stop her from crying and revealing their hideout after Kuntar’s group had entered their apartment.

But it is less the release of Kuntar and more the nature of the deal – the release of living Lebanese prisoners for dead Israeli soldiers – that has sparked a heated debate in Israel. During the charged, six-hour cabinet discussion on the deal, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert confirmed that the two soldiers were dead. “We know what happened to them,” he told ministers, according to comments released by his spokesman. “As far as we know, the soldiers Regev and Goldwasser are not alive. As far as we know, they were killed during the abduction or died of their wounds shortly afterwards.”

Israel has always been committed to winning the release of soldiers, alive or dead, who have fallen into enemy hands. As a result, successive governments have been prepared to approve lopsided prisoner deals. In 1983, Israel released 4,600 Palestinian and Lebanese captives in exchange for six Israeli soldiers who had been seized from their post in Lebanon in 1982, following the Israeli invasion.

In 1985, Israel traded 1,150 Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners for the release of three Israeli soldiers captured in Lebanon in 1982. In 1998, Israel released 60 Lebanese guerrillas in exchange for the remains of an Israeli soldier killed in a botched commando raid in Lebanon. And, in January 2004, the government agreed to release 436 Lebanese, Palestinian and other Arab prisoners for an Israeli civilian held captive by Hezbollah and the bodies of three Israeli soldiers killed by the group.

Opponents of the deal, who are in the minority, argue that the government’s willingness to exchange dead Israeli soldiers for live Arab prisoners will mean that the captors of Israeli soldiers will have less incentive to keep them alive. “This leaves our enemies, the terror organisations, with almost no reason to keep those they have abducted alive,” Yossi Beilin, an MP for the left-wing Meretz party, told the Channel 10 television station on Sunday, just hours after the government voted in favour of the deal.

Beilin said Israel should not be prepared “to pay the same price” for the bodies of dead soldiers as it is willing to pay for the return of living soldiers. “There is a very big difference between saving life and bringing the bodies (of soldiers) back home. The equation needs to be ‘living for living’ and ‘dead for dead’.”

Beilin, who was one of the architects of the Oslo peace accords and is an inveterate peace campaigner, said he hoped the deal with Hezbollah would not endanger the life of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier abducted by Palestinian militants in a cross-border raid two years ago and held captive by Hamas in Gaza ever since. The recent truce agreed between Israel and Hamas is meant to open the way to renewed negotiations over Shalit’s release.

“I hope this hasn’t given them ideas that they don’t need to keep him alive in order to extract a heavy price,” Beilin said.

Moshe Ya’alon, a former army chief, said in the week leading up to the Cabinet vote that there should be a limit on the price Israel was prepared to pay to win the release of abducted soldiers. “In some situations we need to agree to make sacrifices in the face of what is demanded of us, because the price we would have to pay is far heavier than the price of losing a kidnapped soldier,” he said.

But with the families of the captured soldiers leading a highly publicised campaign for their return, and strong public and media backing for the deal – on the day of the government’s deliberations, the two leading tabloid newspapers in Israel ran headlines calling for the deal to be approved – it was always likely that the cabinet would okay the swap. As the ministers sat debating the deal on Sunday in the Prime Minister’s office, the families, along with supporters, demonstrated outside.

Supporters of the deal insist that since Israel sends its soldiers into battle, it has a fundamental moral obligation to do everything in its power to get them back if they are captured – dead or alive. For soldiers being sent into battle, they argue, this is a vital message – that if they are taken captive, their government will be ready to pay a very high price to get them back.

A country that is not prepared to pay this price, they say, does not have the right to send soldiers into battle. What’s more, they add, soldiers who went into battle unsure of their government’s commitment to win their release if they did fall into enemy hands, would be less motivated to fight.

That was the position Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi adopted in urging the cabinet to vote in favour of the deal. “I am the commander of everyone – of the living and of the dead,” he told ministers.

Olmert, who had deliberated right up until the Cabinet meeting, said he had reached “the conclusion that as the prime minister of Israel I should recommend approval of the resolution that will bring to an end this painful chapter, even at the painful price that it extracts.”

But he also said he planned to hold deliberations over establishing clear protocol for dealing with abductions in the future. He said he was troubled by the concerns that Israel’s “commitment to release our prisoners at any cost – almost – constitutes an incentive for further kidnappings.”