Kuntar: Hero or anti-Hero?

I don't think he is either.

Let's get real. Kuntar was a minor at 16 years of age, when he was sent by the FLP on the Nahariyah operation in 1979. I do not pretend to know what his motives were or whether this was an idea implanted by adults into the impressionable mind of a sixteen year old. He is after all a Lebanese Druze and not a Palestinian whose family suffered violence and dispossession at the hands of Israel; so personal anger and rage are unlikely to have motivated him.

I wanted to stay out of this debate altogether but the way Kuntar is being treated like a celebrity has left me more than a little queasy. I am annoyed with the way many Arabs have reflexively accepted his promotion to icon of the resistance and are willing to gloss over the facts that have brought him to his iconic status.

I know for certain that many who will publicly support him, have privately the same uneasy feelings I do about this whole affair but are willing to suppress it in favor of the big picture: That the prisoner exchange was a victory over Israel. These very same people when confronted with the facts of the Nahariyah operation will, instead of responding to the accusation, remind you of Israel's long list of atrocities against civilians, including children. No objections here except that two wrongs don't make a right. Others will tell you that the child bludgeoning accusation is an Israeli fabrication, that the child died in the crossfire. I do not know the veracity of the claim but even if true, it does not get him off the hook since neither the child nor the child's parents should have been put in that situation in the first place. I, for one, cannot accept that this act perpetrated against civilians is a legitimate act of resistance. There are no buts here; we, as Arabs, undermine our legitimate grievances against Israel's many acts of barbarity if we then turn around and excuse similar acts perpetrated by one of our own. More importantly, we undermine our own integrity.

The real resistance heroes in my book are the Hizbullah fighters who fiercely and valiantly battled the Israeli army forcing its exit in 2000, or the youngsters of the intifada who battled fire with rocks and slingshots. My iconic figure of resistance is the young Palestinian fighter who in the summer of 1982 in Beirut, was standing alone on the back of pickup truck manning an antiaircraft gun. He was one of few fighters left standing on an exposed highway by the Beirut stadium (Madineh el Riyadiyeh) surrounded by death and destruction, yet he kept firing at unrelenting waves of Israeli fighter jets until he was felled by an Israeli missile. They are heroes because they fought unselfishly and with courage. Their actions were purposeful in that they confronted the immediate cause of their problems, the armed aggressors.

The point is the Nahariyah operation and other operations targeting civilians undertaken by the Palestinian resistance during that era were purposeless in that they never advanced the cause of the Palestinian resistance and I would argue that, in many instances, it set it back. Hizbullah did not liberate the South by staging operations against civilian targets in Israel; they did it by making life hell for the IDF in the South.

I do not know the histories of the other four prisoners released along with Kuntar or the stories of the nearly two hundred deceased fighters, but I bet that more than a few will have stories much more befitting a hero than that of Samir Kuntar.