Let us set aside the Lebanese civil strife that erupted on the sidelines of the two successive Israeli incursions into the town of Nabi Chit. On one side stood supporters of Hezbollah, still chasing a “victory” that has become impossible. On the other hand, the party’s opponents seemed struck less by the Israeli landing itself than by how easily it unfolded on the hills of Lebanon’s eastern mountain range.
Yet the operation may lead us to consider something else entirely: Israel’s persistent determination to recover the remains of Israeli air navigator Ron Arad, and the almost mythological significance attached to retrieving the body of a soldier who disappeared forty years ago. The Israeli army has pursued a complex trajectory of operations and repeated attempts in this effort, exposing elite units to the risk of death while allocating budgets and building logistical and operational structures dedicated specifically to this mission.
The matter goes beyond a simple commitment to retrieving a soldier’s remains. There is something deeper at play that deserves attention. This is not typically the central concern of modern armies, or at least not one of their primary priorities. As for attributing this obsession with Arad’s body to mystical or religious motives, religions themselves tend to be less attached to mortal remains, placing greater value on the “soul” that ultimately returns to its creator.
Ron Arad’s story has been surrounded by numerous details that remain undocumented. He was captured alive and died later, moving from the custody of the Amal Movement to Hezbollah. That transfer was accompanied by rumors that his body had been taken to Iran. Negotiations over a possible prisoner exchange were themselves fraught with deadlocks, reinforcing the belief that his remains were lost within the channels of unprofessional security apparatuses. More strangely still, the story is said to end in the Al-Shukr family cemetery.
Forty years have passed, yet the story of Ron Arad has never left us. This was also the case with the Israeli agent Eli Cohen, who was executed in Damascus in 1965 and whose remains were recovered nearly a century after his birth, in 2024. Ron Arad was born in 1958, which means Israel is unlikely to abandon its attempts to locate his body even beyond the year 2058.
A man like me, or a woman my age, who witnessed with their own eyes Ron Arad descending by parachute in the area between the towns of Darb al-Sim and Maghdoushe in southern Lebanon in 1986, will most likely not be alive in 2058. In that sense, Ron Arad has become a mythology that transcends generations and outlives those who first witnessed his story.
It is striking how this obsession with corpses and bones has become a source of admiration for the Israeli army. What kind of pagan ritual is this? Even religions that emerged after the pagan era eventually abandoned the bones of their prophets. There seems to be something the army, obsessed with mortal remains, is trying to convey through its constant preoccupation with the bodies of its soldiers. The matter goes beyond loyalty to them or the desire for a final prayer before burial.
This obsession resembles that of settlers with the bones of their prophets. It takes us back to the constant excavations beneath Al-Aqsa Mosque in search of traces of a prophet or a stone belonging to a synagogue. History becomes a permanent incantation for an army built and shaped by modern technological culture, yet one that has repurposed that culture for the worship of remains. One airborne operation after another by elite paratroopers deep beyond its borders was preceded by the abduction of a member of the Al-Shukr family, and before that of Abu Ali al-Dirani. Hundreds of soldiers participated in these operations, millions of dollars were spent, and vast amounts of time were devoted to planning, thinking, and executing them.
In 1986, the Ain al-Hilweh camp in the Sidon area was subjected to near-daily air raids targeting positions of the Palestine Liberation Organization. From the balcony of our home overlooking the camp in Sidon, we would watch the attacking aircraft every day. At one point, anti-aircraft defenses managed to shoot down a plane I remember as an F-15. Before the aircraft exploded, we saw its two pilots descending by parachute east of the camp, an area that was under the control of the Amal Movement.
I recall our Palestinian neighbor in the apartment above us shouting, “We shot it down, we shot it down!” He then pulled out his machine gun and began firing into the air in celebration, much like the young men from Shiite parties did two days ago when rumors spread that an Israeli helicopter had been shot down during the operation in Nabi Chit.
At the time, the Israeli aircraft carried out what was described as a “ring of fire,” which enabled them to rescue one of the pilots, while the Amal Movement managed to capture the second. The Palestinians who had brought down the plane felt they had inadvertently handed their enemy, the Amal Movement, a prisoner they had hoped to hold themselves.
Celebratory gunfire in Sidon and celebratory gunfire in Beirut are separated by forty years of defeats and invasions, of proliferating parties, militias, uprisings, warlords, and men in turbans. Amid all these nightmares, smaller events were unfolding that shaped the desperate search for Ron Arad.
One of these episodes was Israel’s abduction of Mustafa Dirani, known as Abu Ali, from his town of Beddnayel in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley in 1994. Dirani had been the security official of the Amal Movement before breaking away to found Amal al-Mu’minah (Believing Amal), and it was said that he had “sold” Ron Arad to Hezbollah. Yet Dirani’s abduction did not reveal the fate of the Israeli soldier’s body, and Israel eventually released him in 2004.
Today, Israeli commandos are once again visiting the Al-Shukr family cemetery. They seem to want to tell us that their fallen soldier never truly dies.
It is an extraordinarily complex mission carried out by highly trained military units, searching for a soldier who disappeared forty years ago, at a moment of intense and immediate global political and military tension. There is no real explanation for this obsession except to trace it back to Israel’s own mythology.
