Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Blame, Blame, Blame

'Chutzpah' is one of the good and guttural words that the Yiddish language has bequeathed to English. A history teacher at my high school once explained the meaning of chutzpah, in contrast to the more pedestrian 'cheek', thus; cheek is when a little boy stands on your flower pot to piss through your letter box. Chutzpah is when he knocks on the door and asks how far it went. In justifying their attempt to set Lebanon back twenty years, Israeli spokespeople have displayed a level of chutzpah that would be admirable if it were not in the service of such savagery.

Those of you who have been following this dreadful business are probably still reeling from the news of around 60 civilian deaths in an Israeli attack on the village of Qana. More than half of the victims were children. Aware that we had watched the bodies incontrovertibly being pulled from the rubble, Israeli spokespeople were on hand with the same boilerplate response. The words of the Israeli Ambassador to the UN encapsulate the lachrymose brutality characteristic of Israeli "hasbara";

'Those people, including women and children, who were killed in this horrible tragic incident may have been killed by Israeli fire but they are the victims of the Hizbullah. They are the victims of terror. If there were no Hizbullah this would never have happened.'

The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs does not record whether any of the audience objected that if Israel had not invaded and occupied Southern Lebanon for twenty years there would indeed be no Hizbullah. But no matter, when historical fact becomes part of the terrorist infrastructure, it must also be dispensed with. What is on display here is chutzpah of the most startling kind - not only must we condemn Hizbullah for killing Israeli civilians, we now must condemn Hizbullah when Israel kills Lebanese civilians. The argument is faulty in fact, logic and ethics.

First, IDF assurances are not worth the journalists they are leaked to. According to Mitch Prothero's article in Slate, Hizbullah figthers stay well away from civilian areas to avoid potential informants. That might be Prothero's impression alone - but one certainly cannot fire a rocket from inside a house. Yet YNet, (Yediot Aharanot's online news) reports a General Eshel as saying the targets were 'meticulously sifted' - including, then, the houses of the 30 odd children killed by Israel's precision bomb. Israel, then did not bomb the house by mistake and no Israeli spokesperson has said so.

A further reason to doubt the IDF reports is the cracking form that organization has in killing people and then covering it up. Ten years ago the unfortunate civilians of Qana, this time huddled in a UN Compound saw more than 100 of their number killed by Israeli artillery. At the time the IDF insisted they had accidentally hit the compound while aiming for Hizbullah rocketeers nearby - a version of events that the UN report into the incident gave extremely short shrift. Others amongst you will remember the more recent example of Huda Ghalia, whose family were blown to pieces by Israeli fire on a beach in Gaza in June. The IDF said that they had stopped shelling at the point when the family was killed and that the explosion was probably due to a buried Hamas mine. The Guardian and Human Rights Watch, based on the direction of the injuries and the timing of the hospital records, have demonstrated that this is the purest tosh. Now it seems the IDF are trying the same grotesque trick with Qana, suggesting that the dead families had been hiding Hizbullah explosives in their cellar. I leave to the reader the judgement of how base one must be to bomb civilians and then make unverifiable accusations that one's dead child victims cannot refute. Those who find the exercise too distasteful may recall instead the bombing of the UN observation post at Khiam that killed 4 UN personnel. Israeli spokespeople sputtered with outrage - not that they had killed 4 UN observers but at the suggestion this was no accident. Yet the attack lasted six hours during which time the UN post told the Israelis ten times to stop the bombing.

In a new front, best described as The War on Logic, Israeli spokespeople have justified their attacks by dropping leaflets telling the civilian population to flee. Where will they go? Israel is bombing the roads and the cities too. Since Hizbullah is composed of the residents of South Lebanon, Israel may well be right that the guerillas operate from areas in and around villages - although Mitch Prothero disagrees. We know that Hizbullah is bombing the civilians of Haifa - no Israeli, British or American would accept the argument that because Haifa is a major naval base and all Israeli Jews are conscripted into the IDF, the citizens of that town are fair game. Yet this is precisely what we are expected to take when the IDF tells us it has attacked 'logistical sites' full of Lebanese children. This is not just chutzpah. This is dreck.