What is the value of a life?

A prisoner exchange with Lebanon's Hizbullah organization that promises to bring home an abducted businessman in exchange for some 400 Arab prisoners is dividing Israel and posing some harrowing moral dilemmas.

The swap, brokered by Germany was approved in the cabinet last week, 12 to 11, after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon mustered heavy pressure in favor of it. It will also bring back the bodies of three soldiers believed to have been killed by Hizbullah, a Lebanese guerrilla organization, three years ago. But it will not include any information on Israel's most famous prisoner, Ron Arad, a navigator downed over Lebanon in 1986.

"This particular swap brings out issues of how loyal are we, as a state, going to be to soldiers and citizens taken by the enemy, and what is the price we are willing to pay to get them back," says Yoram Yovell, a psychiatrist and author. "The people who oppose this do it for the same reasons as the people who support it, namely the sacredness of human life."

Mr. Sharon argued that it was necessary to back the deal to save the businessman, Elhanan Tannenbaum, despite the fact that it meant freeing a former Lebanese militia official, Mustafa Dirani, who was abducted in 1994 as a bargaining chip for Mr. Arad. "We need to save a living Israeli citizen. Leaving him there means leaving him to die," he said.

The vote puts to rest, at least for now, an ugly battle between families that divided the country just as it split the cabinet. One key question appears to be whose life, or at least whose remains, is worth more: that of Arad, a member of the country's most elite institution, the air force, who possibly, although not certainly, died in captivity? Or that of Mr. Tannenbaum, who was abducted by Hizbullah while on a murky business trip that Israeli press reports, denied by his family, say may have involved drug trafficking?

Beyond that, the decision, at least for the public, involves choices between colliding national and religious values such as the army's never leaving a soldier behind, as Arad's supporters argue is being done, and a centuries-old Jewish tradition of redeeming prisoners like Tannenbaum. Another cherished Jewish value, that of bringing the dead to burial in Israel, also factors into the equation, scholars add.

"There are dilemmas upon dilemmas here," says Avi Ravitzky, a professor of Jewish thought at the Hebrew University. Professor Ravitzky believes that Israel's willingness to release so many prisoners, including Mr. Dirani, shows that the ethic of redeeming prisoners lives on.

But he stresses that when Jews were held for ransom in Medieval Europe, the communities trying to rescue them weighed whether paying enormous sums would invite further abductions. And, he adds, in this instance, the ethic of bringing the corpses of soldiers to burial would have to take second place to the well-being of the living, according to Jewish law. To decide, he says, it must be gauged whether the Arab prisoners being freed are potentially dangerous.

Some 20 reservist airmen who knew Arad protested as the cabinet met, accusing Sharon of "abandoning a soldier in the field." A recent Defense Ministry report concluded that Israel should act on the assumption that Arad is still alive, even though there has been no trace of him since the late 1980s, when he was believed to have been transferred to Iranian custody.

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