Triumph and Tragedy in the Middle East

Triumph or tragedy? Today's prisoners-and-bodies exchange across the front lines of Israel's last major war had elements of both. In Israel, the focus was on the tears of the two families coming to terms with the deaths of their soldier sons. But they were almost certainly killed in the Hizbullah raid across the border and the subsequent skirmishing which suddenly escalated into the July 2006 war. Their deaths had not been confirmed by the time Ehud Olmert launched the fateful bombing of the Beirut suburbs which led to Hizbullah's massive rocket salvoes on Israel's northern cities. But pictures of the wreckage of the Humvees in which they were driving suggested the occupants could hardly have got out with their lives.

Until this morning, their families continued to believe in miracles, prompted in part by officials on both sides who kept up a pretense they might be alive. Hizbullah knew the truth but refused to confirm their deaths, presumably fearing that in this macabre form of trading, the soldiers' exchange value would go down. While privately conceding that there was little hope Israeli officials also kept up the public myth that the men might not be dead. In their case the concern was that public anger over the 2006 war could be rekindled. After all, three Israeli soldiers had been killed by Hizbullah in a similar raid in October 2000 and Ehud Barak, the then prime minister, had not started a war.

In Israel ,emphasis was also being put yesterday on the grim record of Samir Kuntar, handed back to Lebanon today after his life sentence for murder was cut short. A Lebanese Druze, he was convicted in 1979 for the murder of a father and four-year-old child in a pointless raid on northern Israel, long before Hizbullah came into existence. So the narrative in Israel today was poignant and one of moral asymmetry: we give back a vicious child-killer in return for two brave soldier's remains.

In fact Israel handed back four other live prisoners, all Hizbullah fighters. Two had been abducted by Israeli commandoes from their hospital beds in eastern Lebanon. They also gave back around 200 bodies of Lebanese and Palestinian fighters killed at various times in the last several years, thrusting dozens of Arab families into the same grief as was being felt by the two Israeli families today.

So while there was mourning on both sides, only in Lebanon was there any real sense of triumph today. The Lebanese prime minister Fouad Siniora sought to make it a state occasion by going to Beirut airport to meet the Hizbullah fighters, but pundits in Israel as well as Lebanon see the swap as a victory mainly for Hizbullah. After all, it was not the Lebanese government which arranged it. Hizbullah did, through intermediaries. Inevitably it now claims the return of the four prisoners as Olmert's final humiliation and, in effect, an admission of defeat.

The verdict of the official Israeli commission of inquiry under former Justice Winograd into the July 2006 war of course did not say that. To many people's surprise, it largely exonerated Olmert. But the facts on the ground (which is the standard by which Israelis usually judge things) offer no evidence for the view that the war weakened Hizbullah. There may be a larger UN peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon, thanks to the UN resolution which ended the war, but Hizbullah's offensive capability is bigger than two years ago. As Professor Shai Feldman, a former head of Israel's Jaffee Centre and now a professor at Brandeis university, put it at a Royal United Services Institute conference in London last month: "Hizbullah has twice as many longrange rockets now. Its command and control system is intact."

So beyond the personal tragedy for two Israeli and 200 Lebanese and Palestinian families yesterday one lesson stands out: the folly of Olmert's quick reaction in July 2006. Ofer Shelah, a correspondent for Maariv and Channel 10 TV who has written a book on the war, summed it up well at the same London conference when he ascribed it to three things which took over from intelligence and reason, not for the first time in Israel's history: impatience, retaliation, and the mentality of dramatizing an existential threat to Israel's survival when it is not justified.