Israel is Paying for Its Defeat
It was two years ago this month that Israel and Hizbullah went to war.
On July 12, 2006, Hizbullah, an Iranian-sponsored and Syrian-backed political and terrorist organization, staged an unprovoked raid across the Lebanon-Israel border, killing three Israelis and kidnapping two others, Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser. The war that ensued - a war for which Hizbullah had openly prepared for six years, constructing fortified bunkers and amassing thousands of Katyusha artillery rockets along the border - was a disaster for Israel. The fighting lasted for 33 bloody days, during which Israel achieved none of its key objectives: it didn’t destroy Hizbullah, it didn’t stop the barrage of rockets slamming into its northern cities, and it didn’t rescue its kidnapped soldiers.
Never before had Israel’s deterrent capability and its reputation for military indomitableness suffered such a blow. For the first time in its history, Israel had faced an Arab army in battle and failed to defeat it. When the hostilities ended with the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, Hizbullah was still on its feet, bloodied but decidedly unbowed.
Two years on, Israel is still paying for its defeat.
In a humiliating capitulation last week, the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert agreed to free five Hizbullah and Palestinian terrorists, plus a still-undetermined number of other security prisoners, in exchange for the corpses of Regev and Goldwasser. Among those to be turned loose is the notorious Palestinian murderer Samir Kuntar, who in 1979 savagely killed four-year-old Einat Haran by smashing her skull against a rock with his rifle butt, having first shot her father in the back and then drowned him in the sea. Kuntar, who also killed two policemen and was responsible for the death of Einat’s two-year-old sister, is today being hailed as a hero by Israel’s enemies. The Palestinian Authority calls him a “brave warrior,” and Beirut is festooned with his picture.
This is not the first time Israel has negotiated with terrorists for the release of Israeli hostages (or their remains), nor the first time it has agreed to free brutal murderers. In so doing, it has almost certainly guaranteed the abduction of more of its citizens or soldiers in the future and ensured the murder of other innocents in days to come.
With every such deal, Jerusalem erodes what little remains of its once-legendary reputation for avenging the deaths of Israelis killed by terrorists. The Israel that in 1976 flew a team of commandos 2,000 miles to rescue Jewish hostages being held in Uganda’s Entebbe airport inspired respect and fear in its enemies. Israel today inspires their scorn. Hizbullah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has said that despite Israel’s nuclear power and military prowess, it “is weaker than a spider’s web.” Last week’s agreement to the swap of live terrorists for dead soldiers can only have reinforced that opinion.
For months after Hizbullah’s war with Israel ended, there were those who minimized the significance of its victory. Thomas Friedman argued in the New York Times, for example, that Hizbullah had “diminished its capability and Syria’s and Iran’s” and had failed to achieve “a single strategic gain.” Under Resolution 1701, a UN peacekeeping force, known as UNIFIL, was to patrol southern Lebanon and prevent Hizbullah from rearming or threatening Israel - “a huge strategic loss for Hizbullah,” in Friedman’s words.
But UNIFIL has prevented nothing and 1701 is more or less a dead letter. Far from preventing the flow of new weapons to Hizbullah, the UN peacekeepers have routinely looked the other way as Iran has massively resupplied its Lebanese proxy. Hizbullah is now far better armed than it was in July 2006, with an estimated 40,000 rockets deployed north of the border and the ability to strike 97 percent of Israel’s population. Israeli military intelligence reports that some 2,500 Hizbullah terrorists are in southern Lebanon, and have built a series of elaborate underground bunkers equipped with rocket launchers and mortar guns that can be fired by remote control.
Most alarming of all is Hizbullah’s effective takeover of Lebanon’s government, which it intimidated into submission through violent rampages in Beirut in May. Hizbullah extorted the right to name 11 cabinet ministers, giving it veto power over every government decision. Which means that Hizbullah is no longer a state-sponsored terrorist organization. Now it is something far more dangerous: a terrorist organization with a state of its own.
This article originally appeared in the Boston Globe on Wednesday, July 2, 2008.
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July 8th, 2008 at 4:03 am
The Murder of Jewish Toddlers What Hezbollah is ALL ABOUT!!!!
By Bradley Burston
Samir Kuntar is a monster. He may never have deserved a life. It’s time we let him out of prison. Not for his sake. For ours. Advertisement
For the sake of three families. In ways that cannot be counted, most of which went unnoticed by the media and the world, the one institution that got Israel through the war was the family. The family may be the one thing Israel has ever gotten right. It is surely the one thing that saves Israel from itself. It may be the only thing that matters. It was families that gave shelter, food, and support to thousands of Israelis in the north routed from their homes by Katyusha rockets. It was families that gave their soldier children, soldier spouses, soldier brothers and sisters, soldier fathers and even grandfathers, the strength to keep on, despite their betrayal by the befuddlement of their government and their generals. Before the war began, young men from three of these families were patrolling Israel’s borders, Israel’s pre-1967 war borders, on Israeli soil, when gunmen from Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, invaded and took them hostage. We owe it to their families to get them back. We owe it to their brothers in arms, as well, to do everything it takes to get them back. Soldiers and their families have to know that their leaders will risk their very political careers, if need be, to pay the price to get them back. The price will be awful. The price to families will be awful. In the case of Gilad Shalit, kidnapped on June 25, the price may be 1,000 or more Palestinian prisoners, some guilty of having tried to murder Israelis, some perhaps guilty of having succeeded. The families of Israeli victims of terrorism will fall victim to a new phase of torture. In the case of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, abducted by Hezbollah on July 12, the price will be even worse. It will include the release of Samir Kuntar. In 1979, Kuntar led a group of gunmen on an attack in Nahariya, during which broke into an apartment and took hostage Danny Haran, 28, and his four-year-old daughter, Einat. “I will never forget the joy and the hatred in their voices as they swaggered about hunting for us, firing their guns and throwing grenades,” Danny’s wife, Smadar, wrote three years ago in an account in the Washington Post, describing in part how she hid from the terrorists with her other daughter, Yael, just two. “I knew that if Yael cried out, the terrorists would toss a grenade into the crawl space and we would be killed. So I kept my hand over her mouth, hoping she could breathe. As I lay there, I remembered my mother telling me how she had hidden from the Nazis during the Holocaust. “This is just like what happened to my mother,” I thought. “As police began to arrive, the terrorists took Danny and Einat down to the beach. There, according to eyewitnesses, one of them shot Danny in front of Einat so that his death would be the last sight she would ever see. Then he smashed my little girl’s skull in against a rock with his rifle butt. That terrorist was Samir Kuntar. “By the time we were rescued from the crawl space, hours later, Yael, too, was dead. In trying to save all our lives, I had smothered her.” Samir Kuntar is our hostage. His release will do great injury to all those who loved and love Danny and Einat Haran. But it’s time that he be released. It’s a moral issue pitting families against families. But we cannot ignore the families of the living, and of the living themselves. Last week, in response to the direct appeals of the families of Gilad, Ehud, and Eldad, Israelis by the tens of thousands flooded the heart of Tel Aviv to appeal to the Ehud Olmert to do everything he could to secure their release. There had never been a demonstration like it. The rally brought together the activist right and left, the solid center, the secular hip, the settler religious, the haredi, the elderly, the newborn in a sling, the Shenkenite, the professor, the frecha, the arss. In the end, it will be pressure from families, from Palestinian families, from Lebanese families, from Syrian families, from Israelis families, that will turn the tide in favor of peace in this region. This is our fate, our curse, and, perhaps, our only hope: The structures of Israel, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Authority may bear the trappings of modern government, but they remain fundamentally tribal societies. In the West, allegiance to the concept of the nation is the bedrock on which society is built. But for Israelis, for Palestinians, and for Lebanese as well - even for the nouveau hippies among them , the family is the cornerstone of society. It is the strength and primary allegiance of all segments of the population, to an extent that cannot be comprehended in the West. Anchor of the young and buoy of the old, the family is the primary forge of political orientation. The family itself is the court of public opinion. The influence of the family is such that it can dehumanize the other side, demonize it into caricature, enshrine revenge into sacred responsibility. But it can also serve as a bridge, suggesting that there are mothers on both sides who deserve to see their children live out their lives in peace. Leaders will only end war if they are convinced that their constituents demand it. They will only make peace if they are convinced that families of the living care more about the living than they do about exacting pain on the other side. Of all the issues in the Mideast thicket, normalization of relations, determination of borders, sovereignty of holy sites, freezing of settlements, the element that receives the least world attention is that of prisoners. Yet the issue is of paramount importance to large numbers of Palestinians and Lebanese, whose families love their imprisoned sons, daughters, and fathers no less than we do ours. The issue must be of paramount importance for us as well. Samir Kuntar is a monster. He may never have deserved a life. But Gilad Shalit, Ehud Goldwasser, and Eldad Regev do. So do their families. Free the monster. Let them live.
http://SamirKuntar.net
After drowning Danny in the sea in front of little Einat, Kuntar, the brave Lebanese freedom fighter, then turned his attention towards the frightened little 4-year old. He took his rifle and then swung it across the little toddler’s head, knocking her to the ground. As little Einat was knocked to the ground, she was screaming and crying hysterically “mommy daddy help me,” while thrashing her little legs around in the sand. But unfortunately Einat was alone, and no one was there to save her. Kuntar then dragged the little toddler a couple of feet to the closest rock he could find, this was while she was begging him not to hurt her. Kuntar, then laid her head down on a rock, with the intention of crushing it with the butt of his rifle. Einat, instinctively covered her head with her little arms, Kuntar struggled with the little toddler until he finally managed to clear her arms out of the way so that he could aim for her head. Once her arms were out of the way, Kuntar proceeded on beating her on the head over and over with the butt of his rifle, and repeatedly stomping on her little body as hard as he could as well, until blood rushed out of her ears and mouth, and her little cries faded away as she was knocked into unconsciousness. Then, to ensure she was dead, Kuntar continued on beating her over the head, as hard as he could, several more times until her skull was crushed and she was dead.