WHEN ISRAEL swapped prisoners and corpses this week with the Lebanese Shi'ite movement Hezbollah, a flood of propaganda immediately followed. Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, depicted the return of five prisoners and the remains of 199 Lebanese killed in the 2006 war with Israel as a way of achieving Hezbollah's original goal when it kidnapped two Israeli soldiers - an act that ignited the war.
Hezbollah's triumphalism serves a political purpose. It enhances the group's prestige within Lebanon and across the Mideast.
In Israel, the exchange of five prisoners for the bodies of the two dead Israeli soldiers was treated as a controversial affirmation of national values. Defense Minister Ehud Barak spoke of Israel's readiness to "pay the highest price" to retrieve its captured soldiers. Intelligence chiefs warned that Israel was inviting its enemies to kidnap new hostages to be traded for more prisoners.
But beyond all tactical and political considerations, there is something morally repulsive in the hero's welcome given the most famous - or notorious - of the Lebanese prisoners released by Israel. Samir Kuntar had been sentenced to 542 years in prison for killing four people during a raid in 1979. Kuntar executed a father, Danny Haran, in front of his 4-year-old daughter. Then he killed the little girl by smashing her head against a rock with a rifle butt.
This is the creature Nasrallah hailed as a resistance hero, the figure Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh called a "huge hero who sacrificed 30 years of his life for the Palestinian issue," the celebrity that Lebanon's president and prime minister saluted as a liberated freedom fighter.
All wars are inhumane. But not all warriors lose their humanity.
