Ron Arad (or his image at least) was featured today in a trailer promo on Lebanese TV for an upcoming program. What the program will be about has not been made clear (at least to us Israelis), but I suspect it will be about how the Hezbollah and other groups over the years have hurt the Zionists and captured soldiers.

The image and footage used in the promo was supposedly footage and images os Ron that have never before been made public or seen by anybody (outside of those who created the images). They have not yet been dated, but it is clear they are from a later time than previously released images of him. We just do not know yet if they are recent pictures or from a number of years ago. It is clear that somebody there knows of his fate and his location.

I suspect that Iran and Syria via Hezbollah and Lebanon are playing psychological warfare with us by bringing up Ron Arad. They are letting us know what can happen to the abducted soldiers if we are not forthcoming in the current negotiations (or lack thereof, depending which of the conflicting reports you believe.

Regardless, I had an idea it would come to this. Immediately after the capture of Gilad Shalit from the Gaza border by Hamas terrorists, there were debates whether to neghotiate for his release, along with conflicting reports whether such negotiations were taking place. Different government ministers weighed in whether they support negotiations or not.

On July 6th I wrote a post entitled "Negotiate a Deal". In this post I "predicted" (despite my being against negotiations - which was an issue I was misunderstood on and subsequently criticized about) that it would clearly come to a situation where we would be negotiating for Shalit's release with the potential release of hundreds and thousands of prisoners.

We have now arrived at the point where we are negotiating for the release of our soldiers. Yet we are playing our weak hand. We went to war with the stated goal of releasing the soldiers. We stopped the war without having achieved their release. We agreed to a ceasefire which does not gaurantee their release. All we have are statements made by Ehud Olmert every so often that he gaurantees they will be freed. All this is a weak hand.

We are now relegated to the fact that the only way we will achieve the release of the soldiers is via negotiations. And now the Lebanese are waving Ron Arad in our face. Is he alive? I do not know. Is he being held somewhere so we can negotiate for him? I don't know.

But if instead of going to a war the politicians were not willing to fight whole-heartedly and then having to negotiate anyway we would have taken the strong hand from the start (for example using the negotiation points I suggested), Hezbollah would not be able to play these mind games with us. And I think the situation would have already been resolved.