The exchange of five living Hezbollah terrorists, delivered to a hero’s welcome in Lebanon, for the corpses of two Israeli soldiers, was stupid. This is a point that has been made by other observers, but I think it worth emphasizing from the start.
Why was it done?
It was painful to the families of the deceased to know the bodies of their sons had fallen into Hezbollah’s extremely disrespectful hands. And by extension, it was painful to the whole extended family of Israel. There was a valid issue of military morale: for the abandonment of soldiers, even soldiers’ bodies, behind enemy lines, detracts from the inducement to fight.
The idea of recovering the bodies, and even risking lives to give the dead a proper burial, is deeply implanted. From Antigone, to 9/11, to special forces missions in Afghanistan and Iraq, we intuitively understand that desire.
Israel, a civilized nation, is disinclined to use corpses as bargaining chips. Hezbollah, a savage and uncivilized polity, has no such inhibition. They, and Hamas, will go to great lengths to take Israeli bodies, whether living or dead, in the knowledge that domestic political pressure—led by the sentimentality of the media—will force Israel to deal, and from a weak hand.
It is right to recover the bodies. But at what cost?
This is something the postmodern mind, which I find increasingly unhinged, is incapable of processing. There are costs involved in obtaining any benefit: the world is constructed in that way. These costs are not always denominated in money; and even when they are, we forget that money stands as a counter for the labour and sacrifice expended to obtain it. Whether we are dealing with indifferent small purchases—when, as the Yorkshireman says, “You can’t have [both] the penny and the bun”—or with huge political transactions touching everyone—the cost of what we propose must be calculated. And the bigger the measure, the more prudence (i.e. sanity) requires that we consider all the foreseeable costs—including, of course, the costs of not taking action.
Let me dwell on this a moment longer, for the point is lost on many people today, especially those of the “liberal” persuasion who (as actual polls have shown), rather pride themselves on their indifference to pragmatic considerations.
These are people in whom the natural human belief in moral, spiritual, “supernatural” absolutes has been unnaturally inverted. They thus begin to assign absolute value instead to mere political desiderata. They want whatever is on their current agenda, from the latest “equalitarian” demand, to grand ecological schemes, to peace-in-our-time, or whatever—“regardless of cost.” They will not even consider the possibility that the cost of the pipedream they desire may be out of all proportion to the benefits they imagine. “You cannot put a price on [insert pipedream here]!”
Yes you can. In this world, you can put a price on anything. And it is a serious failing of democracy that you can then vote to transfer the invoice, so that what Peter wants, Paul must pay—usually in taxes, but often also by changing his ways to accommodate Peter’s insatiable, narcissistic demands for public recognition.
Back to Lebanon, where Israel voluntarily delivered five living psychopaths to a triumphal reception as “national heroes”—a real and large cost, in itself. In doing so, they also removed an immediate, practical constraint on Hezbollah’s bad habit of pumping short and medium-range missiles into Israeli villages and towns.
Consider, for a moment, one of the celebrities the Israelis turned over. Sumil Kuntar murdered an Israeli family including a little girl in a terror operation at Nahariya in 1979. The details are horrific, and I won’t revisit them.
On Thursday, this man told Hezbollah’s al-Manar TV network, “To tell you the truth, we envy our enemies—the way they care for a body and will go to the end of the world in order to get it back.” He added that, reading in jail, he had come to feel, by comparison, the “disregard for human beings’ value in Arab countries,” mentioning specifically Egypt’s indifferent attitude towards its own soldiers, missing in action.
I intended the paradoxical conclusion, which I invite my reader to puzzle over. Here is one terrorist who may possibly have benefited from taking stock in jail, and has at least shown a particle of real courage in mentioning something that he learned. All of Lebanon may have gone to hell, yet this one man could be worth saving.
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