Joy and Delight - Sorrow and Grief

What becomes a people more than their collective recognition of morality? It cannot be a relative thing, a moveable feast. What is moral and just is writ in stone. People of good conscience recognize justness and abhor what is unfair and unjust and inhumane. There is, in fact, an almost universal recognition that equates humane behaviour with compassion for the other. In some societies, though, it's clear from the ongoing record that a collective retardation or corruption has taken place from the original.

Marked by those nations whose tribal affiliations trump all other human and humane considerations. Who cannot, collectively much less individually, see others as a reflection of themselves. Who, in fact, emphatically disavow the very possibility that others' aspirations reflect their own, and are as deserving of empathy as are their own. People frozen in emotional time harking back to the grim reality of life in a Bedouin environment of harsh emptiness where the struggle to survive related to the disentitlement of the other tribe.

Accommodation and conciliation is only possible if one of the claimants to a desired territory has been defeated, its defenders bloodied and emasculated, its presence tolerated as a nuisance and a hindrance to complete survival. We see this scenario played out time and time again in the Middle East, in Africa, where the struggle for survival may have been largely won, but the inherited memories and tendencies to claim ascendancy and ownership to the detriment of others obdurately remain.

Take, as the most recent example, the return by Israel to Lebanon of terrorists and the bodies of hundreds of soldiers defeated in battle, to Hezbollah. In exchange for two meagre, but dearly beloved yet very dead Jewish soldiers. Israel prizes its people beyond the understanding of even many civilized countries. Nations in the Middle East for whom life is cheap and death is casually inevitable are confounded by Israel's willingness to exchange in such an uneven balance. To them, it is an indelible mark of weakness.

Returning the most despicable of murderers to a joyful nation happy to overlook the macabre reality of a man bashing a child's brains out through the sheer force of a burning hatred. To a nationally respected cleric representing a terrorist group, whose single purpose is to encourage followers in the Party of God to pledge themselves to the finality of death-dealing. This god's wishes, intercepted by Hassan Nasrallah, evidently knows nothing of accommodation between peoples, and a celebration of peace, not death.

Sultan Aboul Einein, a veteran guerrilla, explains that some 150 of the Palestinian dead delivered in this lop-sided agreement represented former Fatah fighters who would have seen bliss and the fulfilment of martyrdom in randomly murdering as many Israelis as possible. "They represent an historic, essential stage in our struggle. They all fought for Palestine and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state", according to this battle-weathered expert on hate and war.

But of course, he's not quite there, in his summation. Since the historical fact is that the Palestinians turned down the original offer of an independent Palestinian state when the United Nations offered partition; one portion for Israel, the other for the Palestinians. It was clear then that the Palestinians were not open to accepting a state of their own - something that had eluded them up until that time, and still does today - and that what they insisted on was the entire geography.

Something they still aspire to. This is the agenda not seen by outside observers who take declarations of intent on trust because this is what honourable people do; believe what others attest to as their intent. The great triumph of Lebanon now appears to be that Hezbollah has been successful in violently intimidating the country into agreeing to give it greater credibility and control. And there, at Beirut airport, at the Hezbollah celebration welcoming the new heroes were Prime Minister Fouad Siniora and President Michel Suleiman, among others.

This is the civilized flavour of a country where Shia, Sunni, Christian and Druze political and religious leaders stumble over one another in their anxiety to be first in line to embrace and kiss the former captives. Syria and Iran doubtless are inordinately pleased. The notorious Samir Kuntar, murderer extraordinaire, addressed the adoring crowd that greeted his release, vowing to return to terrorism, for it is "Islamic resistance". "I have just returned from Palestine - in order to go back there again in victory!"

In releasing this jihadist Israel has made it possible for him to plan additional atrocities upon her people. His release made it possible for the country to reclaim its two dead soldiers. Two soldiers who were attacked and abducted inside Israel by Hezbollah, and which event was the causative of a military clash between the army of Israel and that of Hezbollah and Lebanon. During which prosecution over a thousand Lebanese died. The murderous political-military ambition of Hezbollah which resulted in these Lebanese deaths is handily overlooked, outbalanced by the hatred for Israel.

How viciously inhumane Hezbollah and its religious leader are can be realized by their deliberate tactic in tantalizing the families of the abducted soldiers into believing the possibility of clasping their loved ones, live, to their aching hearts. Knowing that the need of the family to believe their loved ones were still alive would trump the Israeli government's warning that the two soldiers were likelier not to have survived the results of the attack, abduction and subsequent treatment at the hands of Hezbollah.

Another man of god, the chief rabbi of the town one of the Israeli soldiers came from, spoke from his heart: "I would not wish this on even my worst enemy. It is a tragic end to an agonizing sequence of events." Weighing those words against the sentiments of the Palestinians is sufficiently obvious evidence of the humanitarian separation between the Jews and the Arabs. Not that there isn't some cross-over, where some Jews would bitterly reflect the attitude of their adversaries, and some Palestinians would desperately wish for peace.

In the aggregate, however, that clearly defined separation of thought and sentiment marks one population out as civilized, moral, humanitarian - and the other clearly not. Consider this also, that when Israel determined it would pull out of Gaza making the difficult decision to haul the vociferously reluctant Israeli settlers out of the Strip, taking them forcefully away from their successful agrarian lifestyles there, it was in the belief that this would be accepted as a goodwill gesture for the future, by the Palestinians.

The-then Deputy Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, claimed in a 2005 speech that this bold new initiative would usher in a new era of peace, at long last. The government's hard decision to vacate Gaza would inform the Palestinians that Israel meant to live with its neighbour in peace; that it abandoned intentions of its citizens occupying that portion of land - with the West Bank to follow - to hand over a palpable message of accommodation to reality.

"We are confident that this disengagement will be successful and that it will then lead to the beginning of a new pattern of relations between us and the Palestinian Authority" he said to a rapt audience. So much for the best-laid plans of reasonable people. Who appear to have realized some difficulty in getting their message across. It somehow became distorted, when the audience it was meant for interpreted it as a sign of weakness.

That is the unfortunate reality that Israel was incapable of anticipating.