How
America Swallows the Israelis' Lies
| Israeli injustice against the people of Lebanon MUST stop.
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Israel is losing its military
struggle against Hizbollah guerrillas in southern Lebanon
but winning its propaganda war on the conflict in the
outside world.
Although its aircraft bombed three Lebanese power
stations last week after guerrillas killed six occupation
soldiers, Western press and television reports almost
unanimously portrayed the latest violence in Lebanon as a
war by Israel in defence of its civilians on the other side
of the frontier. In fact, no Israeli civilians were
attacked, let alone hurt, and all the Israeli soldiers who
died were inside their occupation zone in Lebanon.
Journalists based in the Middle East say Israeli
diplomats have mounted a letter-writing campaign to their
editors especially in the United States in an
attempt to explain away the latest war as a response to
"terrorism" while failing to mention that the
Israeli casualties occurred in Lebanon, not in Israel. On
the BBC, Moshe Fogel, Israel's official spokesman, tried to
justify the Israeli raids on Lebanon's power stations a
clear breach of the April 1996 ceasefire agreement on
the basis that "Hizbollah terrorists are attacking our
soldiers and civilians".
But no Israeli civilians had been attacked in the
violence leading to the air raids and Mr Fogel failed to
mention that the soldiers to whom he referred had been
killed in their military positions inside southern Lebanon.
The only civilians to be wounded were Lebanese, 17 of whom
were hurt in the Israeli bombings. But subsequent BBC World
Service news reports frequently referred to "the
killing of six Israeli soldiers" without mentioning
they had died in Lebanon.
Typical of the coverage was a report in The Washington
Post whose Jerusalem correspondent referred in an
article to what he called "Israel's two-decade old
intervention in Lebanon". Far from being an
"intervention" ironically, this was the very
word the Soviet Union used when it invaded Afghanistan in
1980 Israel has twice invaded Lebanon and has occupied
part of it in violation of United Nations Security Council
Resolution 425 for 23 years. In The Independent's
"Right of Reply" column last Friday, the Israeli
ambassador to Britain, Dror Zeigerman, also attempted to
justify the Israeli raids on the basis of "terrorist
activities against Israel across the border" and failed
to mention that the six Israeli soldiers were killed in
Lebanon. He said that the Hizbollah attacks were launched
from "civilian villages" and were "a flagrant
violation of previous understandings".
In reality, several of the Israeli dead were killed by
roadside bombs primed and exploded inside Israel's own
occupation zone. And on Friday, Timur Goksel, the special
adviser to the United Nations force commander in southern
Lebanon, stated publicly that the Hizbollah "has not
really violated the April [1996] accords".
According to the UN, the Hizbollah has carried out 300
attacks on Israeli occupation troops in December, 250 in
January and at least 60 so far this month. Since 1996, the
Hizbollah has fired Katyusha rockets across the
Lebanese-Israeli border but almost always in retaliation
for the Israeli wounding of Lebanese civilians. The 1996
ceasefire accord states that the guerrillas and Israeli
troops may assault each other's forces inside Lebanon but
must not attack civilian targets or use civilians as cover.
In all the reporting of last week's violence in southern
Lebanon, no mention was made of the 1,000-strong force
Israel keeps in the occupied zone or of the notorious Khiam
jail there in which as Amnesty International and other
human-rights groups have protested men and women
prisoners are routinely tortured with electricity. When the
United States Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, was
asked to comment on the war, she contented herself with a
reference to the Hizbollah as "enemies of peace".
Only in Israel, it seems, are there journalists brave
enough to tell the truth about southern Lebanon. Among the
most eloquent is the novelist David Grossman who wrote in Yedioth
Aharonoth newspaper that Israel should "evacuate
the outposts, bring the soldiers home" and redeploy
across the border. "Go. Learn to live with the insult,
swallow the empty pride, stop feeding the fire of our
lingering, pitiful arrogance with more and more of our young
soldiers. We have lost. It's OK to say it aloud, no one dies
from saying it... "
You would not have found an American reporter daring to
say that last week.
Robert
Fisk
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