There has been a certain amount of comment on the 'victory' won by Hizbollah in the exchange with Israel carried out yesterday. Israel recovered the bodies of two IDF soldiers in returning five prisoners whose release had been sought by that organization. I want to focus on a dimension of the exchange that has not perhaps received due emphasis. It is, one might say, a moral dimension and so not necessarily, or at least not always overtly, the stuff of journalistic reportage and editorial comment. But then a Guardian leader today is happy to endorse the view that the swap was a 'moral defeat' for Israel, without showing any sign of awareness of the point to which I mean to draw attention.
Whether Israel should have agreed to this deal is a debate that is now over, and I shall say nothing about that. But, in agreeing to the swap, Israel was motivated by a commitment to recovering its dead. At the same time, Hizbollah and its supporters are celebrating a man, Samir Kuntar, who beat a child to death with the butt of his rifle. A man now being welcomed home as 'the conscience of Lebanon, Palestine and the Arab nation'. In this contrast alone, I'd say there was a moral victory for Israel.
I am not so naive as to think that we live in a benign world, that all in the end is always well. It isn't. The unjust can prosper; and justice in certain matters is never done. It is, however, possible that this celebration of a brutal murder and of its perpetrator will one day return against the movement now singing his praises. Whether or not it does, I invite others who share the sentiment with me to resist the complaisant marking of a moral victory for Hizbollah; to give back its meaning to that word by giving its due to a country that would honour its dead, rather than to those whose joy is for the murderer of a defenceless child.