Israel has opened “windows” for the foreign powers to evacuate their terrified nationals from Lebanon. Obligingly, the foreign media have turned these “windows” into an opportunity to avert their gaze further from the death and destruction in Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank. On BBC World, for example, we have been following the progress of one 12-year-old British boy fleeing Beirut. When he observed that he was worried for the Lebanese family members he was leaving behind, reporter Clive Myrie noted his was a “very mature attitude”. If only the BBC was demonstrating such maturity. I have to keep reminding myself that this is BBC World, not its domestic news service. You would hardly know it watching the coverage of the past couple of days.

Reporter Matthew Price told BBC viewers that for the first time Hezbollah had targeted Nazareth late on Sunday. “Nazareth is a mostly Christian town,” he added, managing to cram into a single sentence of a few words two factual mistakes and a disturbing hint of incitement.

Here we go again – another “serious escalation” has begun in the Middle East, or so BBC World was telling audiences. So what prompted the BBC’s judgment that the crisis was escalating once more? You can be sure it had nothing to do with the more than 130 Lebanese dead after five days of savage aerial bombardment.

The parallels between Israel’s military assaults on Lebanon and Gaza are striking. It is not so much the unconvincing claim by Israel that both attacks were triggered by the capture of its soldiers. It is that Israel has preferred “shock and awe” tactics in Gaza and Lebanon familiar from the US assault on Iraq.

One early and easy victory for Israel in Gaza has been in its battle to manage the news. Israel’s invasion is a very private war against Gaza’s population, to which only invited guests — the representatives of our major media outlets — are being given access. In the last Iraq war, America set a precedent by requiring Western reporters to “embed” with its forces before they were let near the battlefield. Israel is following suit, adopting similar measures to control the flow of bad news from Gaza. The restrictions on who can report and what they can tell us explain in part why more than a fortnight after an Israeli soldier was captured, almost every Western reporter is still referring to him as “kidnapped”; why the destruction of vital civilian infrastructure such as Gaza’s only power plant is described as “pressure” rather than what it is ……..

The same malign intent from Israel towards the Palestinians is stamped through its history like the lettering in a children’s stick of seaside rock. But despite the consistent aim of Israeli policy, generation after generation of Western politicians, diplomats and journalists has shown a repeated inability to grasp what is happening before its very eyes.
 The Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi once noted that the first goal of Israel’s founders as they prepared to establish their Jewish state on a large swath of the Palestinian homeland in 1948 was to empty Palestine’s urban heartlands of their educated elites.

One needed only to watch the interview on British television this week with Israel’s ambassador to the UK to realise that the Israeli army’s tightening of the siege on Gaza, its invasion of the northern parts of the Strip today, and the looming humanitarian crisis across the territory, have nothing to do with the recent capture of an Israeli soldier — or even the feeble home-made Qassam rockets fired, usually ineffectually, into Israel by Palestinian militants. Under questioning from presenter Jon Snow of Channel Four news on the reasons behind Israel’s bombing of Gaza’s only power station — thereby cutting off electricity to more than half of the Strip’s 1.3 million inhabitants for many months ahead, as well as threatening the water supply — Zvi Ravner denied this action amounted to collective punishment of the civilian population.

According to the Independent, Corporal Gilad Shalit was “kidnapped”. The Guardian referred to him as a “hostage”. And BBC online believed him “abducted” and “kidnapped”. It was a revealing choice of terminology. Soldiers who are seized by an enemy are usually considered to have been captured. But Britain’s liberal media preferred to use words that misleadingly suggested Cpl Shalit was a victim, an innocent whose status as a soldier was not relevant to his fate.

In a recent skirmish with leading members of the American Jewish activist community, the prize-winning Israeli novelist A B Yehoshua claimed that secular Jewish identity was meaningless outside Israel. Upsetting his audience in Washington, he argued that Jewishness in the Diaspora was impermanent: if China ever became the world’s foremost superpower, he warned, American Jews would migrate there to assimilate rather than in the US. “For me there is no alternative… I cannot keep my identity outside Israel. Israeli is my skin, not my jacket. You [Jews in the Diaspora] are changing jackets… you are changing countries like changing jackets,” he told the leaders of the American Jewish Committee. Delegates called his comments “impertinent”, “foolish”, “tasteless” and “impolite”.

The killing of two Israeli soldiers and the capture of a third from an army post close to the Gaza Strip set the scene for Israeli “reprisals” and “retaliation”, according to BBC reports. The attack by Palestinians who sneaked through tunnels under the electronic fence surrounding Gaza marked a “major escalation in cross-border tension”.

If you keep lying long enough and with enough conviction, people start to believe you – or at least doubt the evidence in front of their own eyes. And so it has been with the Israeli army’s account of how seven members of a Palestinian family were killed, and dozens of other Palestinians injured, during shelling close by a beach in Gaza.



At the best of times, Nazarenes admit to an identity crisis: they are citizens of Israel, the Jewish state, while belonging, historically at least, to the Palestinian people. But on the occasion of the World Cup, the question of where their true loyalties lie can safely be set aside: There is no Israeli or Palestinian team up for the Cup.

Imagine the following scenario. A Palestinian gunman boards a bus inside Israel and rides it to the city of Netanya. Close to the end of the line, he walks over to the driver, levels his automatic rifle against the man’s head and pumps him with bullets. He turns and empties the rest of the magazine — one of 14 in his backpack — into the passenger behind the driver and two young women sitting across the gangway. As bystanders in the street outside look on in horror, our gunman then reloads his weapon and sprays the bus with yet more fire, injuring 20 people. He approaches a woman huddled beneath a seat, trying to hide from him, lowers the gun to her head and pulls the trigger. The magazine is empty. As he tries to load a third clip, she grabs the burning barrel of the gun while other passengers rush him.

Israelis have a word for it: “hasbara”. It is often misleadingly translated as “advocacy for Israel”. But what the word signifies more deeply for Israel’s supporters is the duty, when the truth would be damaging, to dissemble or to disseminate misinformation to protect the interests of Israel as a Jewish state — that is, a state with an unassailable Jewish majority. If hasbara is expected of the lowliest members of Israel’s international fan club, it is a duty of the first order for the country’s prime minister. Which is why no one should be surprised that Ehud Olmert’s speech to the US Congress last week was an unpalatable stew of untruths, distortions and double-speak. Washington’s credulous politicians, of course, lapped it up, bobbing up and down as they gave the Israeli prime minister a series of standing ovations.

Since the Citizenship Law’s amendment, observers suspected that security was being used as cover for demographic concerns. Officials were said to be terrified that, as they closed the “borders” to the Palestinians, they would be leaving the back door open via family unification procedures.

In recently approving an effective ban on marriages between Israelis and Palestinians, Israel’s Supreme Court has shut tighter the gates of the Jewish fortress the state of Israel is rapidly becoming. The judges’ decision, in the words of the country’s normally restrained Haaretz daily, was “shameful.” By a wafer-thin majority, the highest court in the land ruled that an amendment passed in 2003 to the Nationality Law barring Palestinians from living with an Israeli spouse inside Israel – what is termed “family unification” – did not violate rights enshrined in the country’s Basic Laws.

There were some remarkable admissions in a piece by the distinguished Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling in the immediate wake of the British teaching union NATFHE’s vote yesterday to offer members moral backing if they boycott Israeli universities. British academics opposed to Israeli colleagues’ complicity in the lengthy and continuing occupation of the Palestinians are now advised to boycott them and their institutions. Today, and quite incidentally, Kimmerling wrote in the daily Ha’aretz newspaper of a decision taken by his own institution, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, to offer a special fast-track degree programme to members of the General Security Service, or the Shin Bet, which has used its fearsome intelligence gathering abilties to maintain the occupation of the Palestinians for nearly four decades.

The guiding principles of Israel’s new coalition government agreed last week to free Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to pursue his big idea: “hitkansut,” a Hebrew word embracing ideas related to “convergence”, “consolidation” and “ingathering.” In practice, it means Israel will begin shaping the final borders of the Jewish state over the next few years. For Israelis, the plan has one main, traumatic outcome: some 60,000 Jewish settlers located in the remoter, smaller settlements will be forced to leave their homes, much as Gaza’s settlers were made to depart last year. Israelis are braced for more tears, threats and pictures of flailing youths manhandled by soldiers.

With his coalition partners onboard, Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is plotting his next move: a limited withdrawal from the West Bank which he and his government will declare as the end of the occupation and therefore also any legitimate grounds for Palestinian grievance. From hereon in, Israel will portray itself as the benevolent provider of a Palestinian state — on whatever is left after most of Israel’s West Bank colonies have been saved and the Palestinian land on which they stand annexed to Israel. If the Palestinians reject this deal — an offer, we will doubtless be told, every bit as “generous” as the last one — then according to the new government’s guidelines they will be shunned by Israel and presumably also by the international community.