Jonathan Cook

On Tuesday, the BBC’s Katya Adler reported from the northern community of Kiryat Shmona, which has taken the heaviest pounding from Hizbullah rockets and from which many of the local residents have fled over the past month. As she stood on a central street describing the difficult conditions under which the remaining families were living, she had to shout over the rythmic bark of what sounded like an Israeli tank close by firing into Lebanon. She made no mention of what was doing the firing — and given the censorship laws, my assumption is she cannot. But it does raise the question of how much of a civilian target Kiryat Shmona really is.

If there were any remaining illusions about the purpose of Israel’s war against Lebanon, the draft United Nations Security Council resolution calling for a “cessation of major hostilities” published at the weekend should finally dispel them. This entirely one-sided document was drafted, noted the Hebrew-language media, with close Israeli involvement. The top adviser to the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, talked through the resolution with the US and French teams, while the Israeli Foreign Ministry had its man alongside John Bolton at the UN building in New York. In a cynical ploy familiar from previous negotiating processes, Israel submitted to the US a list of requests for amendments to the resolution.

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’.” You probably did not read far before realising that I have switched “Israel” for “Hizbullah” and “Ehud Olmert” for “Hassan Nasrallah”.

The crowds in Beirut last year demanding a Cedar Revolution, “the first shoots of democracy” supposedly planted by the United States, are a distant memory. Yesterday we saw in their place the fury of Lebanon directed against the capital’s United Nations building — an early “birth pang” in Condoleeza Rice’s new Middle East If Israel wanted to widen its war, it could not have chosen a better way to achieve it than by sending its war planes back to the mixed Muslim and Christian village of Qana in south Lebanon to massacre civilians there, as if marking a morbid anniversary. A decade ago, Israeli shelling on the village killed more than 100 Lebanese civilians sheltering in a local UN post.

When journalists use the word “apparently”, or another favourite, “reportedly”, they are usually distancing themselves from an event or an interpretation in the supposed interests of balance. But I think we should read the “apparently” contained in a statement from the head of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, relating to the killing this week of four unarmed UN monitors by the Israeli army in its other sense. When Annan says that those four deaths were “apparently deliberate”, I take him to mean that the evidence shows that the killings were deliberate. And who can disagree with him?

This week I had the pleasure to appear on American radio, on the Laura Ingraham show. I was pitted against David Horowitz, a “Semite supremacist” who most recently made his name under the banner of Campus Watch, leading McCarthyite witch-hunts against American professors who have the impertinence to suggest that maybe, just maybe, Arabs have minds and feelings like the rest of us. It was a revealing experience, at least for a British journalist rarely exposed to the depths of ignorance and prejudice in the United States on Middle East matters — well, apart from the regular whackos who fill my email in-tray.

The general surprise that Lebanese civilians are taking the brunt of Israel’s onslaught — and the unwillingness in some quarters of the media to report the fact — reflects a poor understanding of Israel’s historical use of violence. Since its birth six decades ago, Israel has always been officially “going after the terrorists”, but its actions have invariably harmed civilians in an indiscriminate manner. The true reasons are concealed from credulous observers by Israel’s use of Orwellian language. When it says it is destroying the “infrastructure of terror”, Israel means it is crushing all Arab resistance to its territorial ambitions in the region.

On Tuesday, when at least 35 Lebanese were killed, we had the BBC’s Ben Brown in Beirut giving a blow-by-blow account of every facet of the evacuation of foreign nationals in general and British nationals in particular. If anyone doubted the racism of our Western media, here it was proudly on display. The BBC apparently considers their Beirut reporter’s first duty to find out what meals HMS Gloucester’s chef will be preparing for the evacuees. Lebanese and Palestinian civilians die unnoticed by the Western media while we learn of onboard sleeping arrangements on the ship bound for Cyprus.

Nazareth hit the international headlines for the first time in this vicious war being waged by Israel mostly on Lebanese civilians. Reporter Matthew Price, corsetted in a blue flak jacket in Haifa, told BBC viewers that for the first time Hizbullah had targetted Nazareth late on Sunday. “Nazareth is a mostly Christian town”, he added. Before the strike close to Nazareth late on Sunday night, several Arab villages in the north had been hit by Hizbullah rockets trying to reach these factories. The BBC saw the need to mention these attacks nor the fact that “mostly Muslim” villages had been hit. So why did the strike against Nazareth — and its mistaken Christian status — became part of the story for the BBC?

Here we go again — another “serious escalation” has begun in the Middle East, or so BBC World was telling audiences throughout Sunday. 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 from at least 2,000 sorties by Israeli war planes that are making the country’s south a disaster zone and turning Beirut into a crumbling ghost town. Those dead, most civilians and many of them women and children, hardly get a mention, their lives apparently empty of meaning or significance in this confrontation.