A couple of belated thoughts on Israel’s approval of a prisoner swap with Hezbollah, to add to Eric and Emanuele’s posts:

1. The Israeli cabinet agreed to trade live prisoners for two Israelis whose status as alive or dead is known to Hezbollah, but has not been revealed to Israel. In other words, the Israeli negotiators did not make the disclosure of the status of Regev and Goldwasser a prerequisite for the prisoner swap. This has created a precedent that will give Israel’s enemies every incentive to kill abductees: If the Israeli government will agree to a prisoner swap without insisting on verifying whether Israeli captives are alive or dead, why should Hezbollah bother keeping its prisoners alive?

2. The awful reality is that Regev and Goldwasser are almost certainly dead. Yet the Israeli cabinet chose to swap numerous live prisoners for what is expected to be two corpses. Once again, the government has removed the disincentive for groups like Hamas and Hezbollah to keep Israeli captives alive. One sympathizes profoundly with the families of the abducted, and one can only shudder at the thought of the unspeakable horrors that must have been visited on the captives. But the cabinet’s vote removes the central reason why a terror organization would keep abducted Israelis alive: Israel’s insistence on trading the living for the living.

3. The prisoner deal is terrible for the Lebanese government. In the years since the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, and accelerating in the wake of the events in Lebanon of May 2008, Hezbollah has experienced a significant weakening of its popularity in Lebanon, especially among non-Shia. Having waged a short-duration war against Lebanon — something Nasrallah promised the “resistance” would never, ever do — Hezbollah is increasingly being viewed not just as an Iranian militia antagonistic to Lebanon’s interests, but one which threatens to drag the country back to civil war. The recent talk of handing the Shaba Farms to the Lebanese government was met with hysterics by Hezbollah, which feared that its last remaining excuse for keeping its arms was being removed (which was exactly the point).

By making a deal with Nasrallah, Israel threw a lifeline to Hezbollah; allowed Nasrallah to claim once again the salience of his militia; and, in agreeing to the inclusion of Palestinians, allowed Nasrallah to once again position Hezbollah across the Shia-Sunni divide, which, of course, is a primary Iranian objective (the Iranians do this on their own, for example, by sponsoring Hamas and Islamic Jihad).

Of course, Israel should not make prisoner-swap decisions largely on the basis of how such swaps affect the internal politics of neighboring states. But given the other serious problems with the deal, the aid and comfort it gives to Nasrallah should have been given more consideration.

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 30th, 2008 at 6:16 PM and is filed under Contentions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.