Israel, Not Hizbullah, is Putting Civilians in Danger on Both Sides of the Border
War of Media Deception
By Jonathan Cook in Nazareth
CounterPunch, August 3, 2006
Here are some interesting points raised this week by a leading
commentator and published in a respected daily newspaper: "The
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert embeds his soldiers in Israeli
communities, next to schools, beside hospitals, close to welfare
centres, ensuring that any Israeli target is also a civilian target.
This is the practice the UN's Jan Egeland had in mind when he
lambasted Israel's 'cowardly blending ... among women and children'.
It may be cowardly, but in the new warfare it also makes macabre
sense. For this is a propaganda war as much as a shooting one, and
in such a conflict to lose civilians on your own side represents a
kind of victory."
You probably did not read far before realising that I had switched
"Israel" for "Hizbullah" and "Ehud Olmert" for "Hassan Nasrallah".
The paragraph was taken from an opinion piece by Jonathan Freedland
published in Britain's Guardian newspaper on 2 August. My attempt at
deception was futile because no one seems to seriously believe that
criticisms of the kind expressed above can be levelled against
Israel.
Freedland, like most commentators in our media, assumes that
Hizbullah is using the Lebanese population as "human shields",
hiding its fighters, arsenals and rocket launchers inside civilian
areas. "Cowardly" behaviour rather than the nature of Israel's air
strikes, in his view, explains the spiralling death toll among
Lebanese civilians. This perception of Hizbullah's tactics grows
more common by the day, even though it flies in the face of the
research of independent observers in Lebanon such as Human Rights
Watch.
Explaining the findings of its latest report, HRW's executive
director, Kenneth Roth, blames Israel for targeting civilians
indiscriminately in Lebanon. "The pattern of attacks shows the
Israeli military's disturbing disregard for the lives of Lebanese
civilians. Our research shows that Israel's claim that Hezbollah
[sic] fighters are hiding among civilians does not explain, let
alone justify, Israel's indiscriminate warfare."
HRW has analysed the casualty figures from two dozen Israeli air
strikes and found that more than 40 per cent of the dead are
children: 63 out of 153 fatalities. Conservatively, HRW puts the
civilian death toll so far at over 500. Lebanese hospital records
suggest the figure is now well over 750, with potentially many more
bodies yet to be excavated from the rubble of buildings obliterated
by Israeli attacks.
Giving the lie to the "human shields" theory, HRW says its
researchers "found numerous cases in which the IDF [Israeli army]
launched artillery and air attacks with limited or dubious military
objectives but excessive civilian cost. In many cases, Israeli
forces struck an area with no apparent military target. In some
instances, Israeli forces appear to have deliberately targeted
civilians."
In fact, of the 24 incidents they document, HRW researchers could
find no evidence that Hizbullah was operating in or near the areas
that were attacked by the Israeli air force. Roth states: "The image
that Israel has promoted of such [human] shielding as the cause of
so high a civilian death toll is wrong. In the many cases of
civilian deaths examined by Human Rights Watch, the location of
Hezbollah troops and arms had nothing to do with the deaths because
there was no Hezbollah around."
The impression that Hizbullah is using civilians as human shields
has been reinforced, according to HRW, by official Israeli
statements that have "blurred the distinction between civilians and
combatants, arguing that only people associated with Hezbollah
remain in southern Lebanon, so all are legitimate targets of
attack."
Freedland makes a similar point. Echoing comments by the UN's Jan
Egeland, he says Hizbullah fighters are "cowardly blending" with
Lebanon's civilian population. It is difficult to know what to make
of this observation. If Freedland means that Hizbullah fighters come
from Lebanese towns and villages and have families living there whom
they visit and live among, he is right. But exactly the same can be
said of Israel and its soldiers, who return from the battlefront (in
this case inside Lebanon, as they are now an invading army) to live
with parents or spouses in Israeli communities. Armed and uniformed
soldiers can be seen all over Israel, sitting in trains, queuing in
banks, waiting with civilians at bus stops. Does that mean they are
"cowardly blending' with Israel's civilian population?
Egeland and Freedland's criticism seems to amount to little more
than blaming Hizbullah fighters for not standing in open fields
waiting to be picked off by Israeli tanks and war planes. That,
presumably, would be brave. But in reality no army fights in this
way, and Hizbullah can hardly be criticised for using the only
strategic defences it has: its underground bunkers and the crumbling
fortifications of Lebanese villages ruined by Israeli pounding. An
army defending itself from invasion has to make the most of whatever
protection it can find -- as long as it does not intentionally put
civilians at risk. But HRW's research shows convincingly that
Hizbullah is not doing this.
So if Israeli officials have been deceiving us about what has been
occurring inside Lebanon, have they also been misleading us about
Hizbullah's rocket attacks on Israel? Should we take at face value
government and army statements that Hizbullah's strikes into Israel
are targeting civilians indiscriminately, or do they need more
serious investigation?
Although we should not romanticise Hizbullah, equally we should not
be quick to demonise it either -- unless there is convincing
evidence suggesting it has been firing on civilian targets. The
problem is that Israel has been abusing very successfully its
military censorship rules governing both its domestic media and
visiting foreign journalists to prevent meaningful discussion of
what Hizbullah has been trying to hit inside Israel.
I live in northern Israel in the Arab city of Nazareth. A week into
the war we were hit by Hizbullah rockets that killed two young
brothers. The attack, it was widely claimed, was proof either that
Hizbullah was indiscriminately targeting civilians (so
indiscriminately, the argument went, that it was hitting fellow
Arabs) or that the Shiite militia was so committed to a fanatical
war against the Judeo-Christian world that it was happy to kill
Nazareth's Christian Arabs too. The latter claim could be easily
dismissed: it depended both on a "clash of civilisations" philosophy
not shared by Hizbullah and on the mistaken assumption that Nazareth
is a Christian city, when in fact, as is well-known to Hizbullah,
Nazareth has a convincing Muslim majority.
But to anyone living in Nazareth, it was clear the rocket attack on
the city was not indiscriminate either. It was a mistake --
something Nasrallah quickly confirmed in one of his televised
speeches. The real target of the strike was known to Nazarenes:
close by the city are a military weapons factory and a large
military camp. Hizbullah knows the locations of these military
targets because this year, as was widely reported in the Israeli
media at the time, it managed to fly an unmanned drone over the
Galilee photographing the area in detail -- employing the same
spying techniques used for many years by Israel against Lebanon.
One of Hizbullah's first rocket attacks after the outbreak of
hostilities -- after Israel went on the bombing offensive by
blitzing targets across Lebanon -- was on a kibbutz overlooking the
border with Lebanon. Some foreign correspondents noted at the time
(though given Israel's press censorship laws I cannot confirm) that
the rocket strike targeted a top-secret military traffic control
centre built into the Galilee's hills.
There are hundreds of similar military installations next to or
inside Israel's northern communities. Some distance from Nazareth,
for example, Israel has built a large weapons factory virtually on
top of an Arab town -- so close to it, in fact, that the factory's
perimeter fence is only a few metres from the main building of the
local junior school. There have been reports of rockets landing
close to that Arab community.
How these kind of attacks are being unfairly presented in the
Israeli and foreign media was highlighted recently when it was
widely reported that a Hizbullah rocket had landed "near a hospital"
in a named Israeli city, not the first time that such a claim has
been made over the past few weeks. I cannot name the city, again
because of Israel's press censorship laws and because I also want to
point out that very "near" that hospital is an army camp. The media
suggested that Hizbullah was trying to hit the hospital, but it is
also more than possible it was trying to strike -- and may have
struck -- the army camp.
Israel's military censorship laws are therefore allowing officials
to misrepresent, unchallenged, any attack by Hizbullah as an
indiscriminate strike against civilian targets.
Audiences ought to be alerted to this danger by their media. Any
reports touching on "security matters" are supposed to be submitted
to the country's military censor, but few media are pointing this
out in their reporting. Most justify this deception to themselves on
the grounds that in practice they never run their reports by the
censor as it would delay publication.
Instead, they avoid problems with the military censor either by
self-censoring their reporting on security issues or by relying on
what has already been published in the Israeli media on the
assumption that in these ways they are unlikely to contravene the
rules.
An email memo, written by a senior BBC editor and leaked more than a
week ago, discusses the growing restrictions being placed on the
organisation's reporters in Israel. It hints at some of the problems
noted above, observing that "the more general we are, the free-er
hand we have; more specific and it becomes increasingly tricky." The
editor says the channel will notify viewers of these restrictions in
"the narrative of the story". "The teams on the ground will make
clear what they can and cannot say -- and if necessary make clear
that we're operating under reporting restrictions." In practice,
however, BBC correspondents, like most of their media colleagues,
rarely alert us to the fact they are operating under censorship, and
self-censorship, or that they cannot give us the full picture of
what is happening.
Because of this, commentators like Freedland are drawing conclusions
that cannot be sustained by the available evidence. He notes in his
article that "this is a propaganda war as much as a shooting one".
He is right, but does not seem to know who is really winning the
propaganda offensive.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel.
He is the author of the forthcoming "Blood and Religion: The
Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State" published by Pluto
Press, and available in the United States from the University of
Michigan Press. His website is
www.jkcook.net
