The Remains of Dalal Mughrabi

Dalal Mughrabi was 19 years old in 1978, when she told he parents she was going to visit friends and left their Beirut apartment for the last time. Her parents, Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon, didn't know that their daughter, a young nurse with coltish looks and good grades, had a secret life. But three days later, they watched on television as an Israeli army officer -- future Prime Minister Ehud Barak -- shot bullets into Dalal's already dead body as it lay on a road in Herzilyah, Isarel.

Today, almost every Palestinian knows who Dalal was: a commando commander, the first famous female fighter, an icon of the Palestinian resistance. On that fateful mission in 1978, she led 11 other militants by boat from south Lebanon into northern Israel where they captured a bus and tried to drive it to Tel Aviv and ram it into the Israeli parliament. Trapped by an Israeli army unit led by the young Barak, Dalal declared an independent Palestinian state and fought for some dozen hours before destroying the bus and many of those inside. Dalal's attack killed some 70 Israelis -- including about 35 civilians of whom 13 were children -- and one American photographer who was taking pictures of wildlife.

Now, 30 years after her death, Dalal is the middle of the the Arab-Israeli conflict once again. Her body -- currently held by the Israeli government -- is set to be returned to Lebanon along with the bodies of other dead Palestinian and Lebanese fighters as part of a prisoner and body exchange between Israel and Hizballah, the Lebanese militant group. The problem is that the Mughrabi family -- and Palestinians in general -- want her body to remain on Palestinian soil and her grave to be a symbol of Palestinian nationalism. Which is perhaps why the Israelis want her body off their hands.

The problem of what to do with Dalal is unlikely to de-rail the Hizballah-Israeli exchange on its own. Dalal's family say they have an assurance from the German official mediating the deal to find some way of returning it, but it's more likely Hizballah and the family will have to accept it. Yet the messiness of this fight over a dead girl, like the morbid nature of an exchange of bodies, is an example of how the conflict between Arabs and Israelis is alive and raw.

For Israelis, the prisoner exchange is bound to leave a sour taste. The country wants the return of two soldiers captured by Hizballlah in July 2006. That attack sparked a massive Israeli counter-strike intended to save the prisoners and destroy Hizballah for good. The second Lebanon War, as the 33 day struggle is called in Israel, failed at both goals. Israeli intelligence officials recently declared that the two soldiers are probably dead. Many Israelis are wondering why the government is releasing live dangerous militants in exchange for dead bodies, while some Israeli politicians, including Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, are saying that the army needs to go back and finish Hizballah before it gets any stronger.

Meanwhile, Hizballah is positively glowing. It is touting the exchange as proof that it was right to capture those two Israeli soldiers in 2006, and that it was victorious in the war that ensued. But rather than resting on its laurels, the group has rearmed and refortified its positions, and after a recent political victory against the weak pro-American Lebanese government, is in a stronger poistion than ever before. Hizballah also has plenty of other grievances with Israel besides prisoners in Israeli jails. Beirut is still covered with posters of Imad Mugniyah, the Hizabllah operations chief whose assassination earlier this year Hizballah blames on Israel. One such poster of Mugniyah reads: "The account is still open and has not been settled." It also shows a missile blasting towards Israel.

But the legacy of Dalal Mughrabi should give both sides pause. Dalal's operation was the most brazen of a series of attacks against Israel staged by the PLO in the 1970's after the militant group found safe haven in Lebanon, which is home to hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees. Three days after Dalal's raid, Israel launched Operation Litani, the first big Israeli operation against the PLO in Lebanon in a series that would culminate in a full scale invasion -- the first Lebanon war -- in 1982. Though tactically successful (the Israelis drove the PLO out of Lebanon in 1982) Israeli military operations in Lebanon have been strategic failure. The Israeli occupation of Lebanon (which lasted until 2000) sparked the creation of Hizballah, the Lebanese Resistance group that is far more dangerous than the PLO ever was.

Hizballah inherited the old PLO's mission: the destruction of Israel and the creation of a Palestinian state by force. Which is itself a futile goal. Thousands of deaths, countless operations and several wars have followed in the wake of Dalal's mission in 1978, and yet the Palestinian state she declared for a few hours on the costal road is still nowhere in sight.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut