I wrote in my Cambridge Diarist that Hezbollah plays ghoulish games with the lives and deaths of its kidnapped Israeli soldiers. How true this is was confirmed after my speculation that Eldad Regev and Uri Goldwasser, the soldiers kidnapped on Israel's border with Lebanon two years ago, were in fact dead...and had been, well, for two years.
Imagine the deep pain and the sordid sorrows imposed on their wives and families and, for that matter, klal yisroel, the whole of Jewry: yes, they are alive, even well, and the government of Israel is delaying their return by quibbling over the terms of release of this Arab terrorist and this Arab murderer. I don't know how long such negotiations have been going on, but certainly for at least 18 months, through foreign governments as intermediaries, plus the EU, UNIFIL, Jimmy Carter (poor, bemused and deluded Jimmy Carter) and at least a handful of NGOs and other oh, so saintly and credulous institutions bursting with good-will for the wicked.
Hassan Nasrallah is ultimately responsible for these cruel deceptions. But please do not think that the culture which reared him and the culture that has now abided by a diktat to surrender to him do not in the end respect his cunning.
I know that many of my readers delight in negotiations with whomever and over whatever, negotiations being in and of themselves virtuous. This may be the great falsehood of our time, as it was when Charles Lindbergh preached it to America, when Neville Chamberlain preached it to Great Britain and when the Popular Front of communists and socialists preached it to the not-so-uncanny progressives who, like those today, believe that compromising with those who never really compromise is always preferable to a stalwart defense of one's own.