Thursday, July 17, 2008

Ill-founded belief, misguided approach

July 17, 2008

Ill-founded belief, misguided approach

YET another chapter in the long-running Arab-Israeli conflict was closed on Wednesday with Lebanon's Hizbollah handing over the bodies of two Israeli soldiers whose capture by its fighters two years ago had sparked a devastating 34-day war.
In return for the bodies of the two soldiers, Israel is handing over the remains of 199 Palestinian
and Lebanese fighters and the five remaining Lebanese prisoners in its custody, including Samir Kantar who is the longest serving Arab prisoner behind Israeli bars. Among the remains that Israel handed over through the International Red Cross was the body of a 20-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed during a daring command attack in Israel in 1978 and who is known to her compatriots as "the bride of Palestine."
Predictably, critics in Israel are lamenting that the exchange deal gave a massive boost to Hizbollah, which will use it to promote itself as the most effective Arab group countering the Jewish state. To be sure, Hizbollah, which successfully withstood the Israeli war against them two years ago, is doing exactly that. And no one could deny the group the right to celebrate what it considers as a great victory.
The Israeli discomfort over the exchange deal highlights the importance that many Israelis attach to using every occasion of humiliate the Arabs with a view of denting their determination to resist the Jewish state's occupation of Arab territories.
That approach is reflected in every Israeli dealing with the Palestinians living under occupation on a daily basis, starting with abusing them and often spitting at them at military check-points and other forms of humiliation. It is deeply embedded in the Israeli psyche that no Arab should ever be allowed to "score" anything against the Jewish state. That psyche was dealt yet another blow on Wednesday.
"Despite the war that was waged against us and despite international pressure to reveal the fate of the two Israeli soldiers, no-one has known their fate until this moment," according to a Hizbollah official who spoke after handing over the remains of the two.
Indeed, Lebanon is celebrating. As a banner in the southern town of Naqura proclaimed: "Lebanon is shedding tears of joy," and "Israel is shedding tears of pain."
Beyond the celebrations, however, the region remembers only too well the intensity of the Israel-Hizbollah war of the summer on 2006 that claimed more than 1,000 lives in Lebanon and some 150 in Israel. Did they have to die? Was Israel unaware that it could negotiate the release of the two captive soldiers with Hizbollah rather than launch a war against Lebanon?
It is time for Israel to reflect. Its stubborn refusal to accept fairness and justice as the basis for any peace settlement with the Arabs and its arrogant belief in military power as the solution to all its problems are at the roots of the regional problem and also the reason for the absence of the sense of "security" for the people of Israel.