The nation that forgets it sons, is not worth fighting for

I have read a lot of tripe emanating from the Canadian blogsphere concerning the Israel-Lebanon prisoner/body exchange this week. The prevalent attitudes of most Canadian RW bloggers can be summed up succinctly in these two posts. The first from Jay Currie:

Yo, Israeli dudes…I love you guys, I really do; but this was not a “prisoner exchange”. It was two of your dead guys for four of their live ones.

What were you thinking?

‘Cause, dreadful as Israeli intelligence has been these past few years, you had to know these poor men were dead. Telling Hezbollah to piss up a rope and tossing a couple of cluster bombs in their general direction would have made sense…this, not so much.

And then there is this from Five Feet of Fury:

I understand -- as well as an outsider can, I suppose -- the Jewish reverence for the human body in general and the bodies of the dead in particular.
However, this reverence has been twisted into mere legalism and become an end in itself, untethered from God's original intent (yeah, I sound like a Christian here, eh?)

If you'll forgive me: the point of the laws was to honour life, not fetishize death.

And allowing your sons' bodies to be used as bargaining chips debases them and defies God. It also ensures that more fathers and mothers will be burying more Jewish sons and daughters, killed at the hands of cynical animals.

No, the point of the mitzvot was not to honour life. Somewhere there maybe a true rabbinical scholar with the patience of Rebbe Nachman who would be happy to teach you…until then this will have to do.

Furthermore, Judaism certainly does not fetishize death, although I suspect that mantle can be worn much more easily among Christians – as in all those Christs-on-a-Cross, Mel Gibson’s Passion etc., etc.


A few brief points I want to emphasize. The IDF had simply no concrete proof whether either soldier was alive or dead. Military intelligence’s best guess had one soldier pegged most likely dead, and the other soldier possibly alive. Until the bodies were returned they had no way of knowing if they were bargaining for live or dead captives.

Once the bodies were returned it was evident one soldier’s body had been mutilated after death, and the other soldier’s body was mutilated before death. Draw the obvious conclusions and ask yourself why no one outside of Israel is saying ‘Hezbollah’ and ‘war crime’ in the same sentence.

This week the nefarious Kuntar’s crimes have been widely recounted but what has been overlooked in most accounts was the original purpose and intent of his mission. It was designed as an act of terror to protest the anniversary signing of the Israel-Egypt Peace Agreement. Let the significance of that sink in. Blugeon a baby’s skull to spit on Sadat and show Begin who 'the man' is...

I have spent the last few days struggling to articulate a response to both points of view and so haven’t committed anything to net proper. And then late today, I visited one of my favourite Israeli bloggers, SnoopytheGoon at Simply Jews. So for all those who simply can’t get it, SnoopytheGoon puts it simply and far more eloquently than I could:

There is, though, only one compelling cause. It is the cause of an IDF soldier - the grunt that goes to (and sometimes over) the border, doing his/her job as well as possible. Many of these soldiers leave their wives and children behind to do so, without fanfares and complaints. This is how it is and, unfortunately, this is how it will be for a long time in the future.

As an ex-soldier, I can safely say in the name of most of us that our unshakable belief that IDF and, indeed, the nation, will get us back from captivity, alive or dead, makes the service bearable. Without this belief IDF will not be what it is. The army that does not take care of its POWs is not worth serving in and the nation that forgets it sons is not worth fighting for.

There are a lot of things that could be said against and about the travesty of the current government, about the way the negotiations with Hezbollah were carried out, about the dirty politics and dirty politicians. One thing, however, should not be forgotten - it is not about politics, not about national pride and even not about the grieving families. It is about the soldiers.

As for Samir Kuntar, who will become a most celebrated hero in Lebanon after crushing a Jewish baby's skull against a rock: even in the pain we all feel because of the necessity to release him, there is a silver lining. Look at the people who celebrate release of one of the most inhuman murderers and learn. Look at the sweets being handed around to the crowds in Gaza, at Lebanese president and prime minister receiving the monster, at Shiites and others lining the roads on the way to the vermin's family house, at Palestinian president Abu Mazen congratulating the "hero's" family. Look, learn and remember.

Go read the whole post. Go read, live and learn.