The Situation

Monday-Friday mid-day reports from Israel by Robert Rosenberg
Images by Silvia Rosenberg (unless otherwise noted)

Moral quandaries

Thursday, November 06, 2003

Maybe the bloody land belongs to the cows, acrylic on paper, 70x50 painting by Silvia Rosenberg

The ministers were gushing this morning on the radio about how they face the most difficult decision of their polticial careers – should they approve a decision to free some 20 Lebanese and 400 Palestinians in the deal with Hezbollah to free captured Israeli businessman Elhanan Tannenbaum and return the bodies of three dead soldiers kidnapped by Hezbollah in the late fall of 2000 as part of its effort to help the intifada.

There are two basic reasons for the quandary: first, the deal apparently does not include any new information on what happened to aviator Ron Arad, who bailed out of a malfunctioning plane over south Lebanon 17 years ago. Arad was captured by Amal, and apparently taken by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon two years alter -- and has not been heard from since. Secondly, there are those who claim that the deal rewards the Hezbollah for terrorism -- kidnapping – and that going through with the deal will escalate the tensions with the terror group. As if to prove that point, the army yesterday discovered a series of large Hezbollah bombs planted along the northern border road, apparently set to go off when an army convoy went by.

But for all the morning chatter this morning about moral dilemmas, there was something hollow in the ministers’ complaints, because at least at this point in the history of the current government, whatever Prime Minister Ariel Sharon wants, Ariel Sharon gets – and he wants this deal to go through, because he is certain that if it doesn’t, Tannenbaum will end up like Arad, missing forever – or dead.

Meanwhile, the ministers are under enormous pressure – from Arad’s family and friends who have been running a well-oiled campaign for years to keep his name in the public consciousness, and on the other side, from the families of Tannenbaum and the three soldiers (who refuse to believe their sons are dead). The Arad family and its supporters say the fact he was on a mission when he was captured makes his case more significant than the Tannenbaum case, since Tannenbaum may or may not have been kidnapped by the Iranians and Hezbollah while plotting a drug deal. In any case, the ministers are slated to be briefed on Sunday by Sharon on the state of the deal, and asked to approve the framework for it in principle.

One ironic aspect of the affair is that while much has been made of the fact that the government is going to appear to be more generous toward the Hezbollah with Palestinian prisoners than it was toward the Abu Mazin government, with which it ostensibly was trying to strike a deal for political progress, the army is now considering freeing dozens if not hundreds of Palestinians in detention – because there’s no more room in the various facilities where the detainees have been held.

There are an estimated 7,000 Palestinians in Israeli custody as ‘security prisoners,’ meaning people ranging from a few remaining aging men who murdered Israelis in the name of the PLO in the years before the Oslo accords, to thousands arrested in the last three years, and particularly since March 2002 and Operation Defensive Shield, when, in response to increasing terrorism, Israel reoccupied all the territories handed to the Palestinians as part of the Oslo process. Most of those being held do not have ‘blood on their hands,’ the Israeli euphemism for terrorists whose activity led directly to deaths of civilians or soldiers, but rather are suspected of indirect help to armed factions, whether to the civilian components of groups like Hamas, or simply as stone-throwers during demonstrations.

The issue of prisoners is on the table now with Hezbollah and most certainly will be on the table – if and when a new Palestinian government is formed. Meanwhile, Ahmed Qurei’ is not having an easy time of it, even though he still is putting on an optimistic face that he can build a government capable of restraining the armed factions through an agreement rather than a crackdown and thereby put the ball into Israel’s court.

Trouble is, it’s still the same old story on the Palestinian side – Yasser Arafat refuses to hand over security control to anyone, including his prime minister, and that stalemate has led to two developments that emerged today: Palestinian Finance Minister Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian whom the Americans consider the most credible politician in the Palestinian Authority, announced he would no longer attend meetings of the emergency government.

Fayyad knows that puts pressure on Arafat to gave into Qurei’s demand for a unified security command under the interior minister of Qurei’s choosing. Without Fayyad in a Palestinian government, the Americans will be loathe to have any dealings with the PA. Fayyad does say he will join a ‘regular’ government, if and when Qurei’ manages to put one together.

The other development is an emerging clash between the younger, local generation of Palestinian politicians and the Arafat-controlled Fatah Central Committee, which is under frontal attack now as being corrupt, ineffective, and standing in the way of progress. The central committee must approve the ministerial appointments, including that of the interior minister – and it is deadlocked on the issue, apparently because of Arafat’s refusal to give up security control.

While the prisoner exchange and the political stalemate in the PA ostensibly are the most critical issues today, it is also the day for the official state ceremonies in the Knesset to mark the eighth anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, and the questions about how it has managed to become a date that demarcates Right and Left rather than unifying the country, remains the top item on the agenda for most commentators in the press.

The voluble Likud Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin has already given notice he plans to use his speech to tell the Left to stop getting ‘hysterical’ about every exercise of free speech they don’t like and to stop charging the Right with inciting the murder, That, of course, has the Left agitated – but Rivlin is refusing to tone down the speech he’ll deliver this afternoon. If there is a consensus, once past the complaints by the Right that the Left monopolizes the date, and complaints by the Left that the Right hasn’t learned the lessons of the assassination, it is that the trauma traumatized an entire generation of youth who lost hope for their generation to live in the kind of normalcy that the peace process in Rabin’s day held out for them.

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