It has always been problematic to say that Hezbollah won the 2006 Lebanon war, notwithstanding their bragging about it. After all, Hezbollah and Lebanon suffered far more during the war than Israel did, and the UN resolution that ended it did place severe restrictions on Hezbollah, even if they knew they were going to ignore it.
Unfortunately, in one sense, Israel just handed Hezbollah its victory.
In February, 2006, months before Regev and Goldwasser were abducted, Hezbollah chief thug said at a large public rally in Lebanon, "We are working on making this year the year to free our brothers in Israeli detention. Samir Kantar and his friends, which will in turn pave way to free our Syrian and Jordanian brothers detained in Israeli prisons."
In other words, Hezbollah planned to kidnap Israeli soldiers specifically to bargain them for the disgusting child-killer Samir Kuntar months before it happened. While he later stated that he did not anticipate that Israel would go to war over the issue, this was his explicit motivation.
Now, two years later, Israel is ensuring that Nasrallah's plan worked as well as he had hoped. And from all indications, he didn't even have to keep the two brave soldiers alive in order to effect this swap.
I cannot imagine the pain that the Regev and Goldwasser families have been going through, but giving Hezbollah their stated prize - in which they give up nothing that is of any value to themselves - is doing nothing less than giving them total retroactive victory in the Lebanon war, by their own stated goals. We know by now that the UN forces in Lebanon are not enforcing their own mandate and that Hezbollah has more than recouped their losses from 2006, and now Israel is doing nothing less than conceding defeat.
The sickening piece of filth called Samir Kuntar was the only thing that stopped Hezbollah from being able to declare total victory. Now, victory is theirs.
And now we need to examine the second half of Nasrallah's remarks from 2006, that Israel's release of Kuntar will "pave the way" for more such releases. Just as the Shebaa Farms is not the end of Hezbollah's territorial claims, neither is Kuntar the end of Hezbollah's goals in gaining prisoners. Nasrallah has already shown that he can get Israel to do whatever he wants, even if not as directly as he would wish. Kadima is Nasrallah's puppet, albeit a reluctant one.
Israel's current government has just made the lives 121 soldiers and 44 civilians who were killed during the Second Lebanon War to be worthless. They died, literally, for nothing. Not only that, but Israel has just created circumstances where it is a certainty that there will be more attempted abductions and murders.
This exchange is the height of immorality, ensuring the suffering of countless future Regev and Goldwasser families. Their pain, as heartbreaking as it is, does not justify this capitulation of Israel to the demands of Nasrallah and the pigs he commands.
