http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9697.shtml
The cost of [Israel's] weakness
A significant aspect of the upcoming [now accomplished] 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.
The most likely reason for Israel's decision to sign on to a prisoner-deal with such dire strategic implications is that it is eager to avoid another confrontation with Hizballah and to prevent future abductions of its troops. Israel's defeat in the war of July-August 2006, and its admission that Hizballah has grown even stronger than it was in the past, reflects a diminishing deterrence capability and its reduction of military status (one that casts doubt on its capacity to launch military offensives at this time, including against Iran). The biggest flaw of all is in the area of strategic planning: if Israel had agreed to a prisoner-exchange on or soon after 12 July 2006, it would have avoided further Hizballah provocations and spared itself the humiliation of losing a war, thus exposing its weakness to the world and forcing it to make one painful concession after another.
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