Posted on July 17, 2008 by Steve Pollak
Most of the collective grief yesterday rightfully centered around the families of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev. But HaAretz commentator Bradley Burston remembered another group of mourners — the families of the victims of Samir Kuntar.
Kuntar, who was freed Wednesday as part of the Israel-Hizbollah exchange, is a Palestinian Liberation Front terrorist who had been part of a cell that conducted a deadly raid on Nahariya in 1979. The terrorists killed a policeman, a civilian and a 4-year-old girl. The raid also caused a mother to suffocate her 2-year-old child as they hid from the terrorists.
I'll let Bradley tell the rest of this horrifying story in which he also explains the ultimate value of a prisoner exchange:
Consider Smadar Haran, a survivor of the 1979 attack
led by [Samir] Kuntar. Kuntar burst into Haran's apartment building in the dead
of night, seizing Smadar Haran's husband Danny and their daughter
Einat, 4 years old.
Desperate to save their two-year-old girl Yael, Smadar Haran
huddled with her in a crawl space in the attic. "I will never forget
the joy and the hatred in the voices [of Kuntar and his men] as they
swaggered about hunting for us, firing their guns and throwing
grenades," she later recalled in the Washington Post.
"I knew that if Yael cried out, the terrorists would toss a grenade
into the crawl space and we would be killed," she wrote in 2003. "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."
Smadar Haran's personal torture had only begun. She would later
learn that Kuntar had dragged her husband Danny and older daughter to
the beach nearby, where he shot Danny execution style, making sure that
her father's death would be the last sight her little girl would ever
see.
Kuntar then took the butt of his assault rifle and brought in down on Einat's head, crushing it against a rock.
Smadar Haran would later recall, "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."
Two weeks ago, in an act of heroism that is beyond imagination,
Smadar Haran spoke publicly of coming to terms with the impending
release of the monster who turned her life into a waking nightmare.
"Samir Kuntar isn't, nor has he ever been, my private prisoner," she
told a news conference. "His fate must be decided now according to
Israel's needs and ethical interests."
There will be those who note that Israelis have been responsible
for acts as inhuman as those of Kuntar. They have. But that neither
excuses Kuntar nor legitimizes his elevation to the status of hero and
martyr to the Palestinian struggle or the Lebanese resistance.
For Israelis, even after all these years, the release of Kuntar is
a form of self-inflicted torture. So heinous, so unpardonable were his
crimes, that American Jewish author and journalist Jeffrey Goldberg,
himself a veteran of the IDF, wrote on The Atlantic Monthly's Website
last week, "As unbelievable as this sounds, Israel is actually thinking
of swapping Samir Kuntar in a prisoner exchange with Hezbollah. Kuntar
is perhaps the most terrible person held in an Israeli prison, a man
who crushed the skull of a Jewish child against a rock. Sometimes,
these prisoner exchanges don't seem worth it."
What are they for, these prisoner exchanges? Perhaps only for this:
that when sending their troops into battle, Israeli commanders can
continue to look them in the eye and say with candor and in good faith
that if they are taken prisoner, Israel will spare no effort to bring
them back.
It may be all we have left to endure this torture. But it may also be the essence of what we are.
Of course, today will be a horrible day also. We still have two funerals to get through.