Israel's reality

Michael Coren, National Post
Published: Thursday, August 03, 2006

Two weeks in Israel in the middle of the war in Lebanon. Stories that should never be forgotten and scenes that I wish could be expunged from my mind. But if one aspect of this entire tragedy pounds away, it is the manner in which the reality of Israel in crisis is so dramatically different from its portrayal in the foreign media. Israelis tend to shrug their shoulders and explain how they are used to the distortion by now. That is sad. Because a lasting peace can only be achieved after a lasting truth.

From the opening days of the latest conflict, the assembled media corps in Israel dwelt on the number and plight of the refugees from Lebanon. Their suffering is generally beyond question and every Israeli I met was devastated by the civilian victims of the war.

But why, they asked, were these same reporters not broadcasting and writing about the hundreds of thousands of Israeli refugees from the north of the country who were fleeing to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem? Around half-a-million Israeli Jews and Arabs have left Haifa, Tiberias and neighbouring towns and thousands more are living each day in underground shelters.

Particularly bitter is the experience of a number of Lebanese who fled their home country six years ago when Hezbollah took over their villages and towns, torturing and raping and killing. They were given residence and often citizenship in Israel and usually live in those areas now being hit so hard by the plague of Katyusha rockets.

Lebanese people fleeing to Syria, on the other hand, receive endless media attention. This is particularly ironic as there are still Lebanese activists in Syrian prisons; and the former prime minister of Lebanon, a man who was helping to transform the nation and was courageously critical of Syrian behaviour, was murdered by a Syrian army of occupation last year.

When it comes to the game of numbers and perception, there is another screaming fallacy in the coverage of the issues. Until just a day or two ago, the foreign media announced every Lebanese fatality as a civilian death. This would mean that the Israeli military is so incompetent and so evil that it had failed to kill a single Hezbollah fighter.

The truth, of course, is that heavily armed Jihadists were being eliminated from the first day of combat. Unlike Israeli soldiers, however, they often wear no uniform and normally have no rank, papers or official status.

In one attack on a bunker in Tyre, more than 30 people were killed by an Israeli aircraft. The official line, weakly replicated by the Western press, was that all of the dead were civilian. It was later revealed that half of them were Hezbollah militia and were found with their weapons.

The question surely is whether we should blame Israel for attacking people who are firing rockets and missiles into their country or blame the people who fire those rockets and missiles and then purposely hide among civilians. If anyone doubts the authenticity of this policy they should spend some time with Lebanese Christians whose homes have been used with special glee by Hezbollah soldiers when firing on Israel.

It is vital to remember one thing about all this. Very few Lebanese people who we see interviewed on television will openly criticize Hezbollah. They know how the organization works and that even if they escape, their families might not be as fortunate. Journalists are regularly questioned about the nature of their story and the line they are taking and often intimidated and threatened.

Pressure is one thing, sheer failure to report the truth quite another. After the Israeli Arab town of Nazareth was shelled and two young boys killed, some journalists ran with the news that because this was an Arab town the Israeli government had removed it from the siren alert system. We saw footage of locals condemning Israeli discrimination and apathy.

It is true that there were no alarms sounded and that Nazareth had been removed from the national alarm grid -- because officials in Nazareth had demanded it. Being part of this system means that the sirens operate for two minutes during Independence Day and Memorial Day, to the memory of fallen soldiers. The political leaders of Nazareth insisted that they wanted no part of these Zionist ceremonies and, when warned that removal might be dangerous, laughingly said in a television interview that their brothers in Lebanon would never attack them.

Another Israeli shrug. The same again when the foreign media refuses to say that Haifa, the hardest hit of the cities in Israel, has a university that is almost 40% Arab and that in every survey that has asked them if they would prefer any Arab citizenship to Israeli citizenship, the overwhelming majority laugh, or cry, at the very idea of Arab citizenship.













Then there are the apparently unacceptable questions. Why, for example, do we see so many pictures of horribly wounded and even dying Arabs but so few of Israelis who have been smashed apart by rockets filled with ball bearings? The answer is that Israeli officials shield the wounded and vulnerable and protect them from indignity. Hezbollah and Hamas operatives, on the other hand, positively welcome often appallingly intimate shots of their wounded.

Politically unacceptable to say but still nauseatingly true. As is the fact that behind the rocket batteries in the Tyre banana plantations are civilians and that beside the Hezbollah killing machines in Beirut are innocent people. Israel pleads with the harmless to flee but still they sometimes die. Only the biased and the naive would blame Israel rather than Iran, Syria and Hezbollah for this.

Tragically, there are many of both among those who claim to be explaining the story. And another Israeli shrugs.

- Michael Coren is a writer and broadcaster. http://www.michaelcoren.com