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The ingredients of failure

If the deal's substance is hard enough for Israel, its strategic implications are also a major cause of concern, on four grounds. First, the prisoner-exchange constitutes a tacit admission of Israel's responsibility for the July-August 2006 war, which wreaked mass destruction on Lebanon and resulted in the deaths of more than 1,200 (mainly civilian) Lebanese. Israel had rationalized its war as a response to Hizballah's abductions, while Nasrallah had insisted all along that his movement sought nothing more than a prisoner-exchange with Israel.

Israel's agreement to such a swap now, after resolutely refusing it for so long, has exposed its use of the abductions as a pretext to launch a premeditated war against Hizballah in an attempt to dismantle its military infrastructure.

...Indeed, a wider outcome of the current prisoner exchanges with Hizballah and Hamas is confirmation of the truism that Israel "only understands the logic of force." Hizballah has repeatedly made this argument in attributing the liberation of Lebanese and Palestinian territory to resistance activity, while decrying the futility of diplomacy with Israel in retrieving prisoners or land.

A senior official of the Palestinian Authority echoed it recently in reproaching Israel for "showing that force is the only language you understand every time. Hizballah fights you, kidnaps soldiers [sic] and then has all its demands met. Nasrallah brings Israel to its knees every time, and how do you respond? You bring [Palestinian Authority president] Abu Mazen to his knees."

Israel's surrender to this logic is fraught with risk. By establishing anew the links between abductions and prisoner-exchange, between armed struggle and liberation of occupied territory, Israel sets itself up for renewed confrontation with its enemies.

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By Amal Saad-Ghorayeb

Has anyone been monitoring how the mainstream media have been covering this exchange? I've been listening to the reports on CBC Radio, and consider the reporting somewhat unbalanced, with the majority of the coverage coming from the Israeli perspective, which is nevertheless how the region is usually covered.

This coverage backfired somewhat today, as CBC broadcast the words of an Israeli at the funerals of one of the captured soldiers. He described the Lebanese as the "opposite of human" (which is rather similar to how someone on babble described them a couple of days ago).