Israel's Reality

Nobody talks about the refugees in Israel...

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.