Israel has lived the past 60 years more intensively than any other country.
Its highs — the resurrection of a 2,000-year-old state in 1948, history’s most lopsided military victory in 1967 and the astonishing Entebbe hostage rescue in 1976 — have been triumphs of will and spirit that inspire the civilized world.
Its lows have been self-imposed humiliations: the unilateral retreat from Lebanon and the evacuation of Joseph’s Tomb in 2000, the retreat from Gaza in 2005, the defeat to Hezbollah in 2006, and the latest embarrassment — the corpses-for-prisoners exchange with Hezbollah last week.
An outsider can only wonder at the contrast. How can the authors of exhilarating victories bring such disgrace upon themselves, seemingly oblivious to the import of their actions?
One clue has to do with the dates. The highs took place during the state’s first three decades, the lows occurred since 2000. Something profound has happened. The strategically brilliant but economically deficient early state has been replaced by the antithesis. Yesteryear’s spy masterminds, military geniuses and political heavyweights have seemingly gone into high-tech, leaving the state in the hands of corrupt, shortsighted mental midgets.
How else can one account for the Cabinet meeting late last month, when 22 out of 25 ministers voted in favor of releasing five live Arab terrorists, including Samir Kuntar, 45, a psychopath and the most notorious prisoner in Israel’s jails, plus 200 corpses? In return, Israel got the bodies of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, two soldiers murdered by Hezbollah.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert endorsed the deal on the grounds that it brought “an end to this painful episode,” a reference to retrieving the bodies of war dead and appeasing the hostages’ families demand for closure. In themselves, both are honorable goals, but at what price? This distortion of priorities shows how a once-formidably strategic country has degenerated into a supremely sentimental country, a rudderless polity where self-absorbed egoism trumps raison d’être. Israelis, fed up with deterrence and appeasement alike, have lost their way.
Appalling as the Cabinet decision was, worse yet is that neither the Likud Party nor other leading public institutions responded with rage, but generally (with some notable exceptions) sat quietly aside. Their absence reflects a Tami Steinmetz Center poll showing that the population approved of the swap by a nearly 2-1 ratio. In short, the problem extends far beyond the official class to implicate the population at large.
On the other side, the disgraceful celebration of baby-murderer Kuntar as a national hero in Lebanon, where the government shut down to celebrate his arrival, and by the Palestinian Authority, which called him a “heroic fighter,” reveals the depths of Lebanese enmity to Israel and immorality, disturbing anyone concerned with the Arab soul.
The deal has many adverse consequences. It encourages Arab terrorists to seize more Israeli soldiers, then kill them. It boosts Hezbollah’s stature in Lebanon and legitimizes the terrorist group internationally. It emboldens Hamas and makes a deal for its Israeli hostage, Gilad Shalit, more problematic. Finally, while this incident appears small compared to the Iranian nuclear issue, the two are related.
International headlines along the lines of “Israel mourns, Hezbollah exults” confirm the widely held but erroneous Middle Eastern view of Israel as a “spider’s web” that can be destroyed. The recent exchange may give the already apocalyptic Iranian leadership further reason to brandish its weapons. Worse, as University of Haifa professor Steven Plaut notes, by equating “mass murderers of Jewish children to combat soldiers,” the exchange effectively justifies the “mass extermination of Jews in the name of Jewish racial inferiority.”
For those concerned with the welfare and security of Israel, I propose two consolations. First, Israel remains a powerful country that can afford mistakes; one estimate even predicts it would survive an exchange of nuclear weapons with Iran, while Iran would not.
Second, the Kuntar affair could have a surprise happy ending. A senior Israeli official told David Bedein, bureau chief of the Israel Resource News Agency, that Israel’s obligation to protect Kuntar, now that he’s out of jail, is terminated; on arrival in Lebanon, he became “a target for killing. Israel will get him, and he will be killed … accounts will be settled.”
Another senior official added, “We cannot let this man think that he can go unpunished for his murder of a 4-year-old girl.”
Who will laugh last, Hezbollah or Israel?
Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and a Taube fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. This piece previously appeared in the Jerusalem Post.