Some parting shots by author P. David Hornick provide telling insight into the cruel dilemma facing Israel. Muslim hypocrisy lies at the root of it and the author deftly exposes this fundamental fact.
As the surviving member of the Haran family, Smadar Haran-Kaiser, said in recent interviews, Nasrallah “achieves sadistic pleasure in setting the families of terror victims against each other”; he has been waging “psychological warfare” against Israel by “cynically and cruelly manipulating the tragedies of Israelis.” Not surprisingly, she opposes the release of Kantar on any terms.
In whose name does Nasrallah act?
He is, after all, the head of a terror organization that claims to act in the name of God (Hizbullah means “Party of God”). He is hosted by the Lebanese government and directly supported by the Syrian and Iranian governments. As an Arab and a Muslim, he is directly connected to the twenty-one Arab countries that share his culture and language and to the much larger number of Muslim countries in the name of whose God he speaks. Is there shame in the Arab and Muslim world over the spectacle of sadism, of inversion of all moral principles, that Nasrallah is conducting? Is there soul-searching—a sense of confronting moral dilemmas? These are rhetorical questions in the purest sense, since the answer could not be clearer.
When Israelis, by contrast, were accused of moral irresponsibility in the case of the 1982 Sabra and Shatilla massacres in Lebanon, not only Israelis but Jews all over the world were affected, anxious to know what had really happened and whether Israel was really culpable. Even when Israeli criminals like Baruch Goldstein or the “Jewish underground” of the 1980s, acting entirely on their own, carried out acts of ideological murder against Arabs, Israelis as well as Diaspora Jews reacted with shame and horror.
Nothing similar, unfortunately, can be said about the Arab and Muslim worlds in this case. Hizbullah, under Nasrallah, has: kidnapped a civilian and subjected him to brutal tortures; kidnapped three soldiers after Israel had—as certified even by the UN—withdrawn from all Lebanese territory and murdered them in cold blood; and has now announced that Tannenbaum will die in captivity, the bodies of the three soldiers will be kept from their families, and 420 fellow Arabs and Muslims will remain (at least for a while) in Israeli jails if Samir Kantar—guilty of the murder of a 28-year-old man, a four-year-old girl, and a two-year girl—is not freed.
Whether the Kantar snag is somehow finessed and the deal goes through, or remains intractable and the deal collapses, Israel will continue to face the overarching dilemma of how to behave both prudently and morally in the face of enemies who have no moral principles and enjoy twisting moral concerns into sadistic perversions. Considering that a wide Israeli consensus now regards the Jibril deal as having been unwise and harmful, it is likely that if the current deal goes through, Israel will come to regret it for similar reasons, despite the differences in dimensions and nuances. If Israel were to gain anything from this ordeal, it would be a recognition by the outside world of the radical moral asymmetry of the conflict it is engaged in. Anyone who believes in the most basic human rights—not to be kidnapped, tortured, and murdered, the right of parents to bury their sons, the right to life of a two-year-old girl—must ask not only why Israel’s direct foe in this case, Hizbullah, is allowed to flout these rights openly and cynically on the world stage, but also why the entire Arab and Muslim world that it represents does not raise a peep of protest.
What's left to say?
