Press Room

“They called me from the hospital and asked to come. New casualties were brought, and they needed my help at the kitchen. I work as a cook at the hospital. So, once I left the house, a Katyusha fired. Shrapnel hit me on the back and in my legs.” Yakov Abdul does not stop his narration, but I can hear sirens go off on the roof. I am in Safed, ten kilometers away from the Israel-Lebanon border. The city suffered the hardest from Hezbollah’s rockets. I’m talking to Yakov on the balcony of the city hospital.
“To the shelter, quickly! Yakov, come on!” Silvia Walters, an elderly US emigrant who works as a secretary at the hospital, shouted. “First, step away from the windows. The bomb shelter’s downstairs, on the ground-floor.”

I’m helping Yakov to stand up. He is shell-shocked and does not seem to hear the sirens. We are walking to the elevator slowly.

Yakov was unlucky two times. The day after he had been taken to hospital, another rocket struck into the hospital, exploding on the roof. No one was killed, but all glass panes in the hospital were shattered and a few doctors were slightly wounded. Yakov was in his ward at that moment and the strike got him falling off the bed. He carries on quietly:

“I was a tanker when I fought in Egypt in 1973, but I still can’t forget that strike. I see it every night.”

“Who is to blame for what’s going on now?”

“All of them: Syrians, Hezbollah, Hamas and Iran. I’d cut off their heads and display them for everyone to see.”

There are already a lot of people in the shelter. These are mostly kids as the children’s ward is the nearest one. Some of them are crying. Cristina Marconi, an Italian journalist from Associated Press, is sitting on the floor by the wall. I met her when I was entering the hospital. She looks scared and seems to be crying as well.

Ron, my guide, takes out his pager. He is a reservist as all Israelis and works in the army’s press service. He has the latest reports of the army news coming to his pager.

“Air-raid warnings were announced in Safed and Haifa,” he says. “Thirty rockets have already been fired against Israel today. Two soldiers of ours have been killed. Hezbollah claims that one military man was kidnapped. Another civilian has been killed not far from here, in Nahariya. He was running to the bomb shelter. It was the direct strike.

I can hear a doctor standing next to me talking Russian on the phone.

“Are you in the shelter? Yeah, we are too. All right, daughter, give me a call later.”

I come up to the woman. Her name is Olga. She comes from Essentuki. She has lived in Israel for ten years already as a pediatrician at the hospital.

“I’m tired of all this,” Olga says smiling. “I’ve had to run down here five times today.”

“Are you scared? Why don’t they evacuate you? Why don’t you leave on your own?”.

“How can we leave the kids? I’m on duty today, doing a twenty-four-hour shift. But Safed is already empty. Nearly everyone has moved to the south. Yeah, it’s scary but I don’t live in Safed. I’m from Golan Heights. There are fewer strikes there.”

Olga gives me a smile.

“How are you going to get out from here?” she asks me with care. “You’d better leave before it gets dark because it gets really frightful at nights here.”

We can hear a few explosions, one after another.

“Come on, I’ll show you the place where the rocket hit,” Olga suggests. “It happened at ten o’clock in the evening. The head of our ward was in his office over there. He was sitting with his back to the window. The shattered glass crashed onto him.”

Indeed, the room is littered with fragments of broken glass.

“How is he now?”

“Good. He’s doing well. He’s back at work today. Organized a lecture in medicine for us to try and distract us from all these things.”

I need to leave now. A young woman with a baby on her hands is running to me as I stand waiting for an elevator. He is wearing an orthodox Jewish dress.

“My name is Karen. Listen to me, please,” she shouts in amazing English.

“That’s okay, Karen. I’m listening to you.”

“I’m sick of everything they show on TV. CNN broadcasts from Beirut round the clock counting casualties in Lebanon. I’m American. Why do they talk about Arabs but don’t care about us?”

“Well, maybe they show it because there’s much more destruction in Beirut. Or, probably, because there are more casualties in Lebanon. Around 300 people died there last week. It’s ten times as much as in Israel.

“But they’re terrorists!”

“Well, most of the killed in Lebanon are civilians.”

“We’re civilians, too. Why do we have to stay here because Israel does everything that America wants? My child is sick and I have to live at hospital. I have nowhere to go.”

Silvia nearly pushes me into the elevator.

“Don’t listen to her. She’s just come from America and doesn’t understand anything. I come from Philadelphia and I’ve been living in Safed for over forty years. I know that America has nothing to do with this. This is a religious war. Fanatics are waging this war.”

Fighters

“Everyone gives different names to what’s going on the Lebanese border now,” says Gilad Alid, director general of the Israeli Channel 10. “For instance, on Channel 1 all news is headlined ‘Back to Lebanon’. Most newspapers simply call it ‘war’. We still prefer to say ‘clashes on the north’.”

Channel 10 is one of Israel’s two main private TV channels. Gilad says that their audience rating has skyrocketed since the start of the hostilities. The country is keeping a close eye on the news. However, the channel is swamped with letters from indignant viewers.

“A lot of people think that we are overly critical. Some accuse us of being unpatriotic. Many viewers believe that the people must rally together with the government and give it total support because we wage the war. They think that it’s not the right time to ask difficult questions. However, our journalists still ask the military: ‘What for? Why? What’s next?’ The military don’t like it. But our job is not in helping the military but in giving accurate information and asking them questions, even difficult ones.”

Gilad, however, accuses European journalists of being too critical.

“How can they act in this way? We didn’t start this war but European journalists describe it as if we were aggressors. We’re just defending ourselves.”

“Gilad, a lot of European journalists just think that Israel’s reaction was too violent. You surely remember Dan Haluz, chief of Israel’s general staff saying at the start of the operation: ‘We’ll take Lebanon 20 years back.’”

“Well, it’s not my business to comment his words. Let the Israeli Foreign Minister explain the official position of the government. A journalist’s business is to report facts.”

I am meeting Gideon Meier, Israeli Foreign Ministry’s spokesperson, in the evening. We are sitting in a Yemenite restaurant in Tel Aviv. The diplomat is sipping his beer mixed with Sprite and patiently answers my questions.

“Gideon, everyone knows that the Lebanese government does not control the country’s south. This territory is under Hezbollah’s control. However, Israeli Prime Minister Olmert said after two Israeli soldiers were kidnapped that the Lebanese government would pay for it. Strikes are now targeted on the whole country, not only on Hezbollah.”

“The thing is that the Lebanese government did not comply with the UN resolution to gain control over southern territories after Israel withdrew its troops from the region in 2000. Beirut was to send troops to southern Lebanon, but the Lebanese authorities did not do it, and Hezbollah occupied the land.”

“Will this operation help the Lebanese troops to occupy the country’s south?”

“Sure, it will. They must drive away Hezbollah; otherwise, we’ll do it. Sheikh Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, was astounded. He didn’t expect Israel to react to their attack in this way. He thought that the new government are a cabinet of losers because it’s the first time in our history that civilians hold all key positions: prime minister, foreign minister and defense minister. Nasrallah thought he would get away with it. No, he won’t.”

“Perhaps, that’s the reason why Israel responded in such a severe way to Hezbollah’s attack and the kidnapping of the two soldiers. As you’ve said, the Israeli government is headed by civilians for the first time. Maybe, they are trying to prove that they are strong, too, no worse than previous governments and just as decisive and brave. By the way, the government’s approval rating has gone up since the start of the hostilities, hasn’t it?”

“No, it’s the other way round. If they’d wanted to show their brutality, they would have had a large-scale military operation from the very start, right after the kidnapping of Corporal Gilad Shalit. A number of ministers asked the prime minister to do this, but he decided to refrain from actions. We are a democratic country, you see. We don’t give up democratic principles in such difficult situations as this one, and we have to pay dearly for this. We give maximum freedom to journalists but they say whatever they wish. So, our opponents, Palestinians and Hezbollah, end up with two voices: their own mass media and our left-wing ones. Israeli left press criticizes every step the government takes.

Gideon Meier is exaggerating. Even left newspapers support the military operation despite their traditional critical stance.