Re: [Marxism] The exchange of the prisoners

["Linda Jansen" <jansen.l12@xxxxxxxxx>]

*Hezbollah wins?*
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9697.shtml

A significant aspect of the upcoming prisoner-swap is Hizballah's ability to
> appropriate for itself the moral standard (which Israel has long proclaimed
> when making asymmetrical prisoner exchanges with Arab resistance groups) of
> acting in accordance with "human value and dignity." Nasrallah alluded to
> this in his 2 July speech when he defended the movement's image as
> "civilized and humanitarian" owing to its "respect for man and for man's
> value and dignity," and scorned the British government's portrayal of the
> resistance a "terrorist" organization. As professed by Fneish: "We have
> returned respect for the value of humanity -- a respect stripped away by the
> formal Arab order."
>
> The party's memorialization of its dead fighters, the longstanding
> campaigns it has waged to retrieve its prisoners and the military actions
> and diplomatic initiatives it has taken to retrieve them, have underscored
> how valuable its living and dead fighters are to it -- and begun to pay real
> political dividends. In this too, Hizballah has seized the initiative from
> Israel, whose last military operation to retrieve its prisoners was as long
> ago as 1994, when it abducted Mustafa Dirani in exchange for information on
> Ron Arad. Nasrallah's allegation that Israel did not even raise the issue of
> the remains of its ten soldiers killed in the 2006 war until Hizbollah
> offered to hand them over only reinforces this view. In the past, Israel's
> readiness to engage in lopsided prisoner-exchanges was once perceived as
> stemming from a religious-moral commitment that both rendered it vulnerable
> yet earned it the image of cultural and moral superiority vis-a-vis Arabs
> whose "price" was far lower; today, however, that same willingness is now
> construed as strategic weakness.
>
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