This past Wednesday, in a rare public appearance, Hezbollah's leader Sayyed Hassan Nassrallah greeted the five Lebanese freed from captivity in Israel after his organization returned the bodies of two captured Israeli soldiers.
"The period of defeat is over and the time of victory has arrived," said a beaming Nassrallah to a jubilant mass waving Hezbollah and Lebanese flags in Beirut.
In contrast, a grim mood prevailed in Israel, where the prisoner swap was widely seen as a painful sacrifice. Israel returned five prisoners, among them Samir Kantar, the nation's most despised prisoner for his part in a 1979 Palestinian guerrilla attack, and the remains of close to 200 Palestinian and Lebanese fighters in exchange for the corpses of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev: a painful reminder of Israel's futile efforts to force their release in the 2006 war.
Hezbollah had carefully kept the fate of the two missing Israeli soldiers a secret for two years, and even though the Israeli government had cautioned that the two men were almost certainly dead, it was not until television stations broadcast pictures of two black coffins being unloaded from a truck at the Israeli-Lebanese border that the country became certain of their fate. Meanwhile, criticism of embattled Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's performance intensified immediately after the exchange. Many Israeli analysts believe that this blunder has finally sealed Olmert's fate and destroyed his legacy.
There is no doubt that with this lopsided deal that Hassan Nassrallah has emerged as the victor. Even the New York Times has called the "Prisoners' Homecoming a Triumph for Hezbollah." The question remains: against whom?
On the surface, his victory is seen as against Israel and in particular against his nemesis Ehud Olmert. However, Hassan Nassrallah needed this swap deal to restore Hezbollah's image as a resistance movement dedicated to the fight against Israel after its standing was tarnished by its use of force against other Lebanese factions in May of this year.
Although a deal was brokered between Hezbollah and its rivals in Lebanon, resulting in the formation of a new government of national unity in which Hezbollah and its allies have veto power over important decisions, many of its rivals remained bitter over what many have considered as a mini coup orchestrated against them by Nassrallah.
For the time being, this triumph over Israel and Olmert appears to have united all conflicting parties in Lebanon. Yet not everyone in the Arab world has forgiven Nassrallah, and certainly not the Saudis, who tried to downplay his most recent triumph by publishing in the Saudi-financed London-based newspaper al-Sharq al-Awsat that the deal "cost Lebanon over $7 billion, more than 1,200 dead and 4,500 wounded Lebanese citizens."
As they say in the Middle East, "victory is in the eye of the beholder."
Jamal Dajani produces the Mosaic Intelligence Report on Link TV