Samir Kuntar is a monster. He may never have deserved a life.
It's time we let him out of prison.
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Not for his sake. For ours.
For the sake of three families.
In ways that cannot be counted, most of which went unnoticed by the media and the world, the one institution that got Israel through the war was the family.
The family may be the one thing Israel has ever gotten right.
It is surely the one thing that saves Israel from itself.
It may be the only thing that matters.
It was families that gave shelter, food, and support to thousands of Israelis in the north routed from their homes by Katyusha rockets. It was families that gave their soldier children, soldier spouses, soldier brothers and sisters, soldier fathers and even grandfathers, the strength to keep on, despite their betrayal by the befuddlement of their government and their generals.
Before the war began, young men from three of these families were patrolling Israel's borders, Israel's pre-1967 war borders, on Israeli soil, when gunmen from Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, invaded and took them hostage.
We owe it to their families to get them back. We owe it to their brothers in arms, as well, to do everything it takes to get them back. Soldiers and their families have to know that their leaders will risk their very political careers, if need be, to pay the price to get them back.
The price will be awful. The price to families will be awful. In the case of Gilad Shalit, kidnapped on June 25, the price may be 1,000 or more Palestinian prisoners, some guilty of having tried to murder Israelis, some perhaps guilty of having succeeded. The families of Israeli victims of terrorism will fall victim to a new phase of torture.
In the case of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, abducted by Hezbollah on July 12, the price will be even worse. It will include the release of Samir Kuntar. In 1979, Kuntar led a group of gunmen on an attack in Nahariya, during which broke into an apartment and took hostage Danny Haran, 28, and his four-year-old daughter, Einat.
"I will never forget the joy and the hatred in their voices as they swaggered about hunting for us, firing their guns and throwing grenades," Danny's wife, Smadar, wrote three years ago in an account in the Washington Post, describing in part how she hid from the terrorists with her other daughter, Yael, just two.
"I knew that if Yael cried out, the terrorists would toss a grenade into the crawl space and we would be killed. So I kept my hand over her mouth, hoping she could breathe. As I lay there, I remembered my mother telling me how she had hidden from the Nazis during the Holocaust. "This is just like what happened to my mother," I thought.
"As police began to arrive, the terrorists took Danny and Einat down to the beach. There, according to eyewitnesses, one of them shot Danny in front of Einat so that his death would be the last sight she would ever see. Then he smashed my little girl's skull in against a rock with his rifle butt. That terrorist was Samir Kuntar.
"By the time we were rescued from the crawl space, hours later, Yael, too, was dead. In trying to save all our lives, I had smothered her."
Samir Kuntar is our hostage. His release will do great injury to all those who loved and love Danny and Einat Haran. But it's time that he be released.
It's a moral issue pitting families against families. But we cannot ignore the families of the living, and of the living themselves.
Last week, in response to the direct appeals of the families of Gilad, Ehud, and Eldad, Israelis by the tens of thousands flooded the heart of Tel Aviv to appeal to the Ehud Olmert to do everything he could to secure their release.
There had never been a demonstration like it. The rally brought together the activist right and left, the solid center, the secular hip, the settler religious, the haredi, the elderly, the newborn in a sling, the Shenkenite, the professor, the frecha, the arss.
In the end, it will be pressure from families, from Palestinian families, from Lebanese families, from Syrian families, from Israelis families, that will turn the tide in favor of peace in this region.
This is our fate, our curse, and, perhaps, our only hope: The structures of Israel, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Authority may bear the trappings of modern government, but they remain fundamentally tribal societies.
In the West, allegiance to the concept of the nation is the bedrock on which society is built. But for Israelis, for Palestinians, and for Lebanese as well - even for the nouveau hippies among them , the family is the cornerstone of society. It is the strength and primary allegiance of all segments of the population, to an extent that cannot be comprehended in the West.
Anchor of the young and buoy of the old, the family is the primary forge of political orientation. The family itself is the court of public opinion.
The influence of the family is such that it can dehumanize the other side, demonize it into caricature, enshrine revenge into sacred responsibility. But it can also serve as a bridge, suggesting that there are mothers on both sides who deserve to see their children live out their lives in peace.
Leaders will only end war if they are convinced that their constituents demand it. They will only make peace if they are convinced that families of the living care more about the living than they do about exacting pain on the other side.
Of all the issues in the Mideast thicket, normalization of relations, determination of borders, sovereignty of holy sites, freezing of settlements, the element that receives the least world attention is that of prisoners. Yet the issue is of paramount importance to large numbers of Palestinians and Lebanese, whose families love their imprisoned sons, daughters, and fathers no less than we do ours.
The issue must be of paramount importance for us as well.
Samir Kuntar is a monster. He may never have deserved a life.
But Gilad Shalit, Ehud Goldwasser, and Eldad Regev do. So do their families.
Haaretz.com, the online edition of Haaretz Newspaper in Israel, offers real-time breaking news, opinions and analysis from Israel and the Middle East. Haaretz.com provides extensive and in-depth coverage of Israel, the Jewish World and the Middle East, including defense, diplomacy, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the peace process, Israeli politics, Jerusalem affairs, international relations, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Israeli business world and Jewish life in Israel and the Diaspora.
