Israel forced to negotiate

British journalists Robert Fisk and Donald Macintyre reports on the prisoner swap between Hezbollah and Israel.

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Israel to swap killer for two dead soldiers

By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem
Indepedent - Monday, 30 June 2008

Israel's cabinet has decided to free a Lebanese guerrilla responsible for a notoriously brutal attack on an Israeli civilian family in return for the bodies of the two soldiers whose abduction triggered the 2006 Lebanon war.

The cabinet decision – by 22 votes to three – clears the way for a prisoner exchange with Hizbollah to be completed over the next fortnight to secure the return of the reservists Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev.

The Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, said during the five-hour cabinet meeting for the first time that the state had concluded that the two soldiers had died either during the Lebanese guerrilla group's cross-border raid in July 2006, or soon afterwards.

Under the deal, Israel will also receive the body parts of other dead soldiers, along with a report on Ron Arad, the airman declared missing after his plane crashed in Lebanon in 1986. In return it will release five Lebanese prisoners, a dozen bodies, mostly of Hizbollah militants, and an unspecified number of Palestinian prisoners.

Easily the most sensitive of the Lebanese prisoner releases is that of Samir Kuntar, who in 1979 infiltrated across the border and is serving multiple life sentences for an attack in the northern Israeli town of Nahariya in which he shot Danny Haran in front of his four-year-old daughter.

Witnesses said that Kantar – then aged 16 – then smashed the skull of Mr Haran's daughter against a rock with his rifle butt. Mr Haran's wife, Smadar, accidentally suffocated her other daughter, aged two, as she tried to prevent her screaming as they hid in their apartment during the attack. Kuntar has denied killing the four-year-old.

Yesterday's decision followed a protracted period of heart searching within the Israeli security establishment over the prisoner release, intensified by a vigorous media and lobbying campaign for the exchange by the abducted reservists' families. While the Israeli military's chief-of-staff, Lt-Gen Gabi Ashkenazy, strongly supported the exchange, the heads of the main intelligence agencies, Shin Bet and Mossad, opposed the deal. Opponents of the exchange have argued that swapping bodies for live prisoners would increase the incentive for hostage taking by militant groups while reducing that for keeping the hostages alive once in captivity.

Mr Olmert, who last week had appeared to reconsider the German-mediated exchange, did finally recommend that it went ahead – while acknowledging that the debate "is exceptionally sensitive in terms of its national and moral implications". Three cabinet members, Justice Minister Daniel Friedmann, Housing Minister Ze'ev Boim and Finance Minister Ronny Bar-On, opposed the exchange.

Most of the Israeli media was strongly in favour of the exchange going ahead with the mass-circulation daily Yedhiot Ahronot proclaiming "Bring them Home" in a front-page headline yesterday. The Maariv headline said under a picture of Mr Goldwasser's parents and Mr Regev's father: "Look into their teary eyes." But Yossi Beilin, the prominent Knesset member in the left-wing Meretz party, told Israel Radio before the cabinet meeting: "If they are dead, I certainly oppose this deal. The principle must be releasing live prisoners for live hostages, and releasing bodies in return for the fallen."

The Israeli military acknowledged last year that the two soldiers had been seriously injured in the raid after which Mr Olmert took Israel into a month-long war which cost the lives of more than 130 Israeli soldiers and civilians and more than 1,000 Lebanese casualties. Hizbollah has never produced any evidence that Mr Regev and Mr Goldwasser were still alive.

Mr Olmert told the cabinet: "We know what happened to them. As far as we know, the soldiers Regev and Goldwasser are not alive."

Mr Goldwasser's wife, Karnit, who has travelled the world to press leaders to push for her husband's release, said she was still trying to come to terms with the Prime Minister's declaration. She added: "My heart aches. It is very difficult for me. I am very tired, drained inside. All I want to do is to digest things, try to understand what happened ... to rest a bit ... to have my pain."

Mr Haran's widow, Smadar, said that she was devastated by the decision but understood it. "The despicable murderer Kantar was never my own personal prisoner, but the state's prisoner," she told a news conference. "Even if my soul should be torn, and it is torn, my heart is whole."


Robert Fisk: 'Theatrical return for the living and the dead'

The Indepednent - Thursday, 17 July 2008

Yesterday was the last day of the 2006 Lebanon war, the final chapter of Israel's folly and Hizbollah's hubris, a grisly day of corpse-swapping and refrigerated body parts and coffin after bleak wooden coffin on trucks crossing the Israeli border, which left old Ali Ahmed al-Sfeir and his wife, Wahde, stooped and broken with grief. Ali had a grizzled grey beard and stood propped on a stick while Wahde held a grey-tinged photograph of a young man – her son Ahmed, born in 1970. "He was a martyr, but I do not know which lorry he will be on," she said. In the slightly torn picture, he looked whey-faced, unsmiling, already dead.

That could not be said for Samir Kuntar – 28 years in an Israeli jail for the 1979 murder of an Israeli, his young daughter and a policeman. He arrived from Israel very much alive, clean shaven but sporting a neat moustache, overawed by the hundreds of Hizbollah supporters, a man used to solitary confinement who suddenly found himself idolised by a people he had not seen in almost three decades. His eyes moved around him, the eyes of a prisoner watching for trouble. He was Israel's longest-held Lebanese prisoner; Hizbollah's leader, Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, had promised his release. And he had kept his word.

The coffins – newly hammered together in Tyre before the 200 Hizbollah, Amal militia and Palestinian bodies arrived from Israel – were soon bathed in the Lebanese flag and golden Hizbollah banners, drawn by a flower-encrusted truck towards Beirut. Wahde climbed on to a plastic chair, desperate to see the box containing her son's skeleton. Old Ali pleaded to stand with her but she told him he was too old, so he stood, head bowed, amid the television reporters and young Hizbollah fighters, with tears in his eyes. Who knows if Ahmed was in one of the boxes?

But it was also a day of humiliation. Humiliation most of all for the Israelis. After launching their 2006 war to retrieve two of their captured soldiers, they killed more than a thousand Lebanese civilians, devastated Lebanon, lost 160 of their own – most of them soldiers – and ended up yesterday handing over 200 Arab corpses and five prisoners in return for the remains of the two missing soldiers and a box of body parts.

For the Americans who have supported the democratically elected Lebanese government of Fouad Siniora, it was a day of hopelessness. For Mr Siniora himself, along with the President and all the surviving ex-prime ministers and presidents of Lebanon, and the leader of the Druze community and the country's MPs and Muslim religious leaders, and bishops and higher civil servants, and the heads of all the security services – along, of course, with the UN's representative – were at Beirut airport to grovel before the five prisoners whom Hizbollah had freed from Israel. They were flown north by the Lebanese army's own helicopters.

As for Hizbollah, they staged a mighty pageant of leaping cavalry horses and massed bands and dabkeh dances as Lebanon's Shia imams and their invited Sunni sheikhs and Druze notables sweated in their heavy robes throughout the day's 37C temperatures on the border. But the Israelis, it seemed, were in no hurry. Well aware that Hizbollah had constructed a theatrical homecoming for both the living and the dead, they delayed the first 12 coffins for five hours and then the five living prisoners for another four hours. By this time, the camouflage-clad horse riders – including a long-haired Che Guevara lookalike – and their green-clothed mounts had long finished cantering and the dabkeh dancers had run out of breath and the bagpiper – yes, a real, moaning bagpiper – had run out of puff and even the white-scarved honour guard was wilting in the heat. Their discomfort was exquisite.

And there was a certain sleight of hand in all this. Mr Nasrallah had promised to retrieve the bodies of Palestinian "martyrs", and they included the remains of 19-year-old Dalal Moghraby, which were supposedly stacked on the first lorry to cross the border yesterday. She was the girl who led 11 Palestinian and Lebanese gunmen in an attack on the Israeli coast road north of Tel Aviv. Cornered by the Lebanese army, she decided to fight it out. Thirty-six people died and a surviving videotape shows an Israeli agent, a certain Ehud Barak – yes, the man who is now Israel's Defence Minister – firing shots into her body and dragging her across a road. Mr Barak was one of the Israeli cabinet members who voted for the return of her corpse yesterday. But the Palestinians, it turned out, did not want their dead returned to Lebanon.

Dalal Moghraby's mother Amina Ismail, for example, wished her remains to lie where she was buried in Israel – the land which she and millions of other refugees still regard as part of Palestine. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command said it wanted its dead "martyrs" to remain on "Palestinian land" as they would have wished, and asked Hizbollah to exclude them from the returning corpses. No such luck. For Hizbollah had other ideas and – with the agreement of the Israelis, of course – brought them back to the land of their exile.

History lay piled in layers yesterday: a long-ago murder in Israel and the release of the killer who now, courtesy of the Israeli prison system, speaks fluent Hebrew and English; the body of a Palestinian girl whose killings on the Tel Aviv coast road provoked Israel's first invasion of Lebanon in 1978 (total dead about 2,000) as surely as Hizbollah's capture of two soldiers prompted the bloodbath of Israel's revenge (total dead about 1,200). But what would this matter to Mr Nasrallah in his hour of final triumph?

Once more, despite Hizbollah's capture of west Beirut earlier this year and the gun battles that broke out across Lebanon (total dead 65), he has recaptured his old popularity as the only man with the only army to stand up to Israel's legions. And there will most assuredly be another war.

By the roadside south of Tyre yesterday, there was a huge poster of an Israeli warship struck by a Hizbollah missile in 2006, burning fiercely. "And more to come," the caption announced, archly.

I found Hizbollah's exhausted cavalry clopping north, their wilting riders – including Che – lolling in their saddles, the tired horses veering across the road. So this was what the war was all about.


Robert Fisk: It's never good to swap people for bodies

If you get into this grisly game, the result is a murderer released from Israel parading around Lebanon

Independent - Saturday, 6 September 2008

Al-Jazeera – much praised by the now-dying US administration until it started reporting the truth about the American occupation of Iraq (at which point, you may recall, George Bush wanted to bomb it) – is back in hot water. And not, I fear, without reason. For on 19 July, its Beirut bureau staged a birthday party for Samir Kantar, newly released from Israel's prisons in return for the bodies of two Israeli soldiers. "Brother Samir, we would like to celebrate your birthday with you," allegedly gushed al-Jazeera's man in Beirut. "You deserve even more than this... Happy Birthday, Brother Samir."

The problem, of course, was that "Brother Samir" – whose moustache looks as if it has been modelled on that of a former German corporal – had been convicted in Israel for the 1979 killing of an Israeli father and his daughter. The Israelis claim he smashed in the head of the four-year-old with a rifle. Kantar denies this – though he does not deny that another child, this time two years old, was accidentally asphyxiated by its mother when she was trying to avoid giving away their hiding place. Kantar received a conviction of 542 years – long, even by Israel's standards – and had been locked up for 28 years when he was swapped (along with other prisoners) for the bodies of the dead soldiers, Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, whose capture started the 2006 Lebanon war.

Kantar received a hero's welcome home from Hizbollah – even though Hizbollah did not exist when he was convicted – and was received by virtually the entire Lebanese government. I reported this whole miserable affair and referred to the cabinet in Beirut "grovelling to this man". I was right. Al-Jazeera has now done a little grovelling of its own – but this has been accompanied by an extraordinary article in the American and Canadian press by Judea Pearl, attacking Kantar's reception in Lebanon and al-Jazeer's treatment of the man, announcing that Kantar's royal procession in Lebanon had brought "barbarism back to the public square".

Professor Pearl – who teaches at UCLA – is the father of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal correspondent butchered by Islamists in Karachi. They cut off his head. And only someone with a heart of stone could read Judea Pearl's words without being moved. Here, after all, is another father grieving for a cruelly murdered child. Not long before he died, Daniel Pearl had shown great kindness to me after I was badly beaten on the Afghan border. He shared all the numbers in his contacts book with me while he and his wife made me tea and cookies in Peshawar. After his abduction, I wrote an open letter to Osama bin Laden (whom I knew), pleading for his release. I was too late. Daniel had already been murdered.

Judea Pearl currently runs a foundation named after his son and dedicated to dialogue and understanding. I will not go on at any length about a vindictive letter he wrote about me before his son was abducted – in which he claimed that I "drooled venom" and was "a professional hate pedlar", adding that the 2001 international crimes against humanity in the United States were caused by "hate itself, of precisely the obsessive and dehumanising kind that Fisk and bin Laden has been spreading".

This, of course, is the kind of incendiary stuff that produces a deluge of crude hate mail (which, indeed, is exactly what it did). But whatever his feelings about me now, Judea Pearl has a point.
Yet he wants al-Jazeera to apologise formally for that infamous party which has, he writes, robbed journalism of its "nobleness" and "relegitimized barbarism", and something in me says – whoa there! The narrative is being cut off and rewritten. For if Kantar represents barbarism, why on earth did Israel release him in the first place?

Indeed, Israel released Kantar and other prisoners and 200 corpses of dead Hizbollah and Palestinian fighters at the demand of the Hizbollah militia. And when you get into the bodies game – swapping long-held prisoners for corpses – then the prisoners are going to be greeted when they are freed, whether we like it or not. Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister, suggested there was indeed something noble about the prisoner exchange because it showed that Israel always cared for the return of its missing soldiers, alive or dead.

And I am reminded now of how Benjamin Netanyahu released Sheikh Ahmed Yassin from prison after two of Israel's Mossad would-be killers tried to murder Khaled Meshal of Hamas in Amman. King Hussein had angrily demanded the antidote to the poison they gave Meshal – which is how Yassin obtained his release. Then, after Yassin had been greeted by his Palestinian followers and gone ranting on about the need to avoid recognition of Israel, praising suicide bombers into the bargain, an Israeli pilot fired a missile into his wheelchair – not exactly a noble act since the old man was a cripple – and once again we heard about the barbarity of the now dead Yassin. But if he was so barbarous, why did Netanyahu, that famous enemy of "terrorism", release him? Because the two Mossad agents had been caught by the Jordanians? Of course.

So here we go again. The truth is that Israel uses these men as hostages – the American press employ the weasel words "bargaining chips" – and if you're going to get into the grisly game of body swapping, then the result is Samir Kantar parading himself around Lebanon and celebrating his birthday on al-Jazeera. That doesn't justify the pathetic performance of the Lebanese government. It certainly does show the power of Hizbollah. But it shows even more clearly that, despite all Israel's huffing and puffing about "never dealing with terrorists", this is exactly what it does. It's very easy to kick al-Jazeera – and not without reason. But the story didn't start there. And it hasn't ended yet.

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Editorial:

An exchange that clears the way for a new beginning

The Independent - Thursday, 17 July 2008

The macabre exchange that took place yesterday on the border between Israel and Lebanon is being widely presented as the final chapter in the ill-fated war of two years ago. And in many ways it is. Short, sharp and brutal, that war was Israel's ill-judged response to the capture of two of its soldiers by forces of the Shia group, Hezbollah. Now, those two soldiers – emblems since then of Israel's abiding sense of insecurity – have been returned to their homeland, in coffins. Their families can give them the religious burial their faith requires. The circle of retribution has been closed.

Some might also see in yesterday's solemn ceremony a symmetry that was not inappropriate. The prisoner exchange looked as unbalanced as the war itself, which cost the lives of 157 Israelis and more than 1,200 Lebanese. In return for the bodies of its two student conscripts, Israel handed over five Hezbollah prisoners, alive, and the remains of 200 Hezbollah fighters. The agreement was fiercely contested in Israel, and could yet weaken still further the position of the already beleaguered Prime Minister.

Yet crude body counts are deceptive. Israel has always set an exceptionally high value on its captured citizens, which is a reason why Israeli prisoners are so prized as bargaining chips by its adversaries. It was in a vain attempt to halt once and for all the cross-border raids by Hezbollah from southern Lebanon that the Israeli government took the decision to fight.

Nor, in its outcome, was the war as one-sided as the casualty figures suggest. That Israel used this pretext to launch a full-scale war on Hezbollah, the degree of force it used, and especially its pursuit of hostilities even after the ceasefire had been declared, left its international reputation in shreds. Even staunch allies declined to mince their words.

And while the security of northern Israel was improved by the insertion of a new, EU-backed, peace-keeping force in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah's appeal as the leading force of resistance to Israel has also been enhanced – as it has demonstrated from time to time. Arguably, the relief afforded to northern Israel by the enforcement of the demilitarised zone had the unintended consequence of destabilising Lebanon itself. The spectre of civil war returned.

It was inside Israel, however, that the Lebanon war may have had the greatest lasting impact. A war declared in haste, without – as is now known – the wholehearted support of the top brass, became that rare thing: an Israeli military enterprise that failed to achieve its declared objective. Israel could not secure the release of its captives, and its invasion ended in an unproductive retreat.

The war thus demolished the myth of Israel's military invincibility, not just in the region, but at home. It removed many of the arguments for the special place of the military in Israeli life, and precipitated soul-searching at every level of Israeli society. The report of the Winograd Commission, published earlier this year, marked the end of an era in which Israel believed it could rely on military prowess for its security. In truth, though, that process had begun earlier, as a generation reached adulthood with no memory of a time when their country's very existence was at stake.

Had this shift not coincided with the split in the Palestinian Authority and a further weakening of Ehud Olmert's position over corruption allegations, there might have been more progress towards Middle East peace than there has. Even so, recent months have seen tentative advances. Yesterday's prisoner exchange not only ends a lamentable chapter, but could – we hope – mark the beginning of something new and better.