Finally, two years and over 1,200 dead later: the end of the 2006 Israel/Hizbullah war.

At 9 am this morning, a long-awaited prisoner swap began between Israel and Hizbullah. After much speculation as to their condition, the Israeli soldiers that were captured in July 2006 were returned in long black boxed, along with the remains of Israeli soldiers killed on Lebanese soil during the Israeli invasion that followed the ambush. In return, Israel will return five Lebanese prisoners and the remains of 199 Palestinian and Lebanese killed in cross-border operations over the last 30 years, most famous of whom is Dalal Mughraby, a 19 year-old Palestinian woman who was killed in 1978 in the wake of a highjacking of an Israeli bus that killed 36 (for a touching recent interview with Dalal’s family, see here).

Despite the fact that the exchange of decades-old body parts and certain individuals convicted of child murders,  namely, Samir Kuntar, could ever be anything but a dismal and grotesque ordeal, the exchange taking place in south Lebanon today strikes a particularly tragic note. Engineering such a prisoner swap was Hizbullah’s initial motivation for capturing the two Israeli soldiers, Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, in 2006. Instead, the capture sparked the 2006 war and Israeli invasion, which left over 1,000 Lebanese civillians and some 160 Israeli’s mostly soldiers, dead. Essentially, scores and scores of human lives wasted in a war that acheived nothing, and the initial purpose of which is only being resolved today. If only, like has happened in the past, the prisoner swap could have occured without such bloodshed…

Out of all the various media coverage of today’s events, Al Jazeera makes one particularly inetersing point, which gets to the heart of the strength of Hizbullah as an armed resistance movement:

“The Hezbollah exchange has prompted the public in Arab countries such as Jordan and Egypt – which have both signed peace deals with Israel – to question why their governments have not been able to repatriate the bodies of their soldiers.”

Indeed, this leaves us reconsidering the effiectiveness of Hizbullah’s tactics, most importantly the use of force, in acheiving their goals when compared to superficial diplomacy. It makes us question the extent to which measured violence directed at certain targets is or can be a legitimate tool for acheiving political ends… To say which is not a call to arms, nor a condoning of indiscriminate violence against civilians, but only to say that the tactics of armed resistance should not be immediately dismissed as “terrorist” or ”extremist”. Infact, what this incident shows us is that Hizbullah’s initial ambush acheived more than those who blindly follow the path of diplomacy, while simultaneously causing significantly less damage than the responsive use of force by the Israeli government, which was deemed more legitimate because it was conducted by a nation state, an army, not some “rogue” or ”guerilla” group.

Violence has always been and remains a legitimate way of pursuing political ends; the contestation revolves around WHO uses the violence, rather than the extent of that violence. Hizbullah is continuously demonized because it is a non-government actor who uses violence to acheive its war-time goals (Hizbullah and Israel are in a defacto state of war, and have been since 2000), even though its pales in comparison to the hell-fury that has been unleashed by the Israeli’s on both the Lebanese and Palestinian peoples over the last 60 years…  

In conclusion, maybe what im about to say contradicts the non-emotive analysis that i just offered, and betrays the resolute humanist in me: today’s prisoner swap strikes me as particularly morbid purely because it is in the currency of broken, decaying human bodies that the debts of this ongoing conflict are being paid.

After all the bombs and fires and burning and screaming and bitterness and revenge, this is what it all comes down to: pieces of shattered bone, fragments of formeldahyde-soaked flesh, perhaps some mutilated organs or gangrene-infested limbs, contained in shiny, black boxes, baking in the stifling summer sun.