Israel,
Not Hizbullah, Is Putting Civilians In Danger On
Both Sides Of The Border
By Jonathan Cook
in Nazareth
03 August, 2006
Countercurrents.org
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 have 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 probably 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 available evidence and 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 the reporting of 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 army 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 a 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 represent, 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. 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 of 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. His book, “Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish
and Democratic State” is published by Pluto Press. His website
is www.jkcook.net